Voices From the Graveyard: Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Epitaphs of the War’

After his only son was killed in action, grief-stricken Rudyard Kipling created poetic epitaphs for soldiers lost in the horrific battles of World War I.

Bandaged British soldiers in a battlefield trench during World War I, 1914-1918. Everett Collection/Shutterstock

During World War I, more than 880,000 men fighting for Great Britain died, deaths that constituted 6 percent of the male population and over 12 percent of those engaged. The peak of these horrendous statistics occurred during the first day of the Battle of the Somme on July 1, 1916, when the British suffered 57,000 casualties, including 19,240 dead.

One of those who fell in this bloodbath of a war was John Kipling (1897–1915), the only son of writer and poet Rudyard Kipling and his American-born wife, Caroline Balestier. After both the Army and the Navy rejected John’s attempts to enlist for reasons of shortsightedness, Kipling used his influence to place his son in the Army, where he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Irish Guards.

In 1915, just after his 18th birthday, John died  in the Battle of Loos in France. Though they conducted an extensive investigation, Kipling and his wife never located their son’s body. Later, historians identified what they now believe to be his gravesite, though this issue remains a matter of debate.

An ardent supporter of the Empire and the British military, the post-war Kipling was understandably more filled with grief than patriotism. “As a public man, he became much more angry and bitter,” noted University of Kent literary professor Jan Montefiore. “But as a writer his scope increased. The young Kipling was vigour and energy. After the war, there was much more sadness. He contributed hugely to the literature of mourning.” That brings us to “Epitaphs of the War.”

Portrait of Rudyard Kipling from the biography "Rudyard Kipling," 1895, by John Palmer. Public Domain

Tombstone Verse From a Complicated Man

During his lifetime and afterward, Rudyard Kipling’s novels, stories, and verse have attracted both garlands and brickbats from critics. Though both sides generally recognize his command of the English language, his attackers have labeled him an imperialist, a jingoist, and a racist. These tags can easily be tailored to fit the poet. “The White Man’s Burden,” with its signature line “Take up the white man’s burden” is enough evidence in the 21st century to condemn any poet to a scaffold and a noose.

Unfortunately for his detractors, Kipling and his works are a jumble of contradictions. The imperialist penned “The Man Who Would Be King,” which contains criticisms of the British Empire; the jingoist wrote “Recessional,” a rebuke to boasting and chauvinistic flag-waving; the racist composed “Gunga Din,” the poem about the Indian bhisti (water-carrier) who died a hero while saving the life of a British soldier and so won these words as his garland of honor: “You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din!”

A similar contradiction occurs with “Epitaphs of the War.” Kipling was an early and ardent supporter of the war against Germany. He helped popularize the use of “Hun” to describe the Germans in his poem “For All We Have and Are.” Yet the overall tone of “Epitaphs” is one of disillusionment and sorrow. He took as his model “The Greek Anthology,” with its own collection of epitaphs, which he’d read in translation. He copied the stark, epigrammatic style of the ancient farewells to the deceased while giving the British dead a chance to speak from the grave.

A 1915 photograph of John Kipling, from the Rudyard Kipling papers, University of Sussex Library, England. Public Domain

The Boys of War

Here, for instance, are two voices: one belonging to a parent, the other to a dead son. Whether Kipling intended these as personal reflections on John’s death will always be subject to debate. Surely the father who dearly loved his son and spent so much time trying to learn more about his final hours and the location of his body was at least thinking of John when he composed these two epitaphs:

A Son

My son was killed while laughing at some jest. I would I knew What it was, and it might serve me in a time when jests are few. 

An Only Son

I have slain none except my Mother. She (Blessing her slayer) died of grief for me.

In several of these verses, Kipling reminds readers that many of the dead, like his own son, were just steps away from childhood. In “The Beginner,” for instance, we meet a young man new to the front who looked over the lip of the trench to see the battlefield:

On the first hour of my first day In the front trench I fell. (Children in boxes at a play Stand up to watch it well.)

In “R.A.F. (Aged Eighteen),” Kipling gives voice to a young pilot:

Laughing through clouds, his milk-teeth still unshed, Cities and men he smote from overhead. His deaths delivered, he returned to play Childlike, with childish things now put away.

A file photo of a WWI-era plane. Shutterstock

Misfits

In this cemetery of sorrows, Kipling also made room for those who didn’t fit into this world of artillery, guns, and gas. These people were separated by culture or temperament from the ravenous machine of battle and death that was WWI. Here were two who lost their lives to bullets fired by their comrades:

The Coward

I could not look on death, which being known, Men led me to him, blindfold and alone.

The Sleepy Sentinel

Faithless the watch that I kept; now I have none to keep. I was slain because I slept; now I am slain I sleep. Let no man reproach me again, whatever watch is unkept— I sleep because I am slain. They slew me because I slept.

Outlanders

Other troops from the Empire fought and died in this conflict. In “Native Water Carrier (M.E.F.)”—those initials belonged to the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, which fought at Gallipoli and Salonika—we learn the fate of an auxiliary troop supporting British troops:

Prometheus brought down fire to men. This brought up water. The Gods are jealous—now, as then, Giving no quarter.

Nor did the man who had spent so many years of his early life in India forget their troops who died on the Western Front:

Hindu Sepoy in France

The man in his own country prayed we know not to what Powers. We pray Them to reward him for his bravery in ours.

A Vanishing of Differences

Class prejudices in Great Britain were still sharply practiced before the war, but as Kipling noted in “Equality of Sacrifice,” bullets and artillery rounds make no such distinctions:

A. “I was a Have.” B. “I was a ‘have-not.’” (Together.)  “What hast thou given which I gave not.”

Some British officers brought a servant from home to the Western Front, termed a “batman” from the game of cricket. Often the relationship between the two became stronger during this time of duress. In many cases, it blossomed into true appreciation and even allowed the officer to better lead the men in his command. We learn of this arrangement in “The Servant”:

We were together since the War began. He was my servant—and the better man.

Relevance

The epitaphs of these combatants remind us of the costs of war. Two other poems Kipling included point to one of the perennial reasons for these wars and the accompanying suffering. Here is Kipling giving voice to “A Dead Stateman”:

I could not dig; I dared not rob; Therefore I lied to please the mob. Now all my lies are proved untrue And I must face the men I slew. What tale shall serve me here among Mine angry and defrauded young?

One of the better-known inscriptions in this graveyard is “Common Form,” in which the poet points a finger not just at politicians but at everyone, including himself, for this horrible tragedy:

If any question why we died, Tell them, because our fathers lied.

In the excellent notes and commentary on “Epitaphs of the War” furnished by the Kipling Society, we find that one definition of common form is a “customary or established form of words.” We then read, “So Kipling means, bitingly, that this is one epitaph that could be used for every war grave.”

A cemetery employee walks between graves of American servicemen killed during WWI ahead of celebrations of the WWI centenary at the American Cemetery in Suresnes, on the outskirts of Paris, France, on Nov. 9, 2018. Vadim Ghirda/AP

Kipling published “Epitaphs of the War” in 1919. By then, the appalling casualty lists of the dead, wounded, and missing were known. Some called the Great War “the war to end all wars.” They couldn’t foresee what lay ahead: another world war, a multitude of lesser wars, and a century of communism, fascism, and the collapse of empires.

Kipling laments the personal costs of war. His “Epitaphs” should act as a warning to all those who call for bombs and bullets instead of searching out every available option for peace.

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