Kipling’s son died in the war. And he wrote a multi-volume history “The Irish Guards in The Great War”. I think he had ample opportunity to reflect on Haig as a human being. My impression, from Kipling’s postwar writing, is that he thought that the war was necessary to restrain the Germans.
And I wouldn’t be quite so quick to talk about “Kipling’s world...being torn to pieces.” It’s easy, in retrospect, to see the War as a sharp cataclysm. But it might not have looked quite so drastic at the time. The empire didn’t start shedding territory for another twenty or thirty years—and not until after another world war.
I think it’s a mistake to cast Kipling as a stuffy Colonel Blimp. He was quite interested in technology and progress. He was aware that there were other societies, that disagreed with Victorian England about many things. He wasn’t particularly a believer in the Church. He had enough detachment from his surroundings to make his perspective distinctive and interesting.
It was an enormous, game-changing shock to European mentality; the events of the 30s and 40s would’ve hardly been possible without it—in any form, Fascism or no Fascism. See e.g. The First World War by Martin Gilbert, a popular history I, personally speaking, liked a huge lot.
As for Britain, it partly wrecked and partly transformed a generation of young men, and dealt a massive psychological blow, from which stemmed the motive for Appearsement twenty years later, and the general slow acceptance that maybe the days of the globe painted red were over. It was time to hunker down, step off the stage, and with good reason; over the next few years, all of Europe began to realize that God would not stop anything man does, or anything that could be done to man.
That latter fact is exactly what Orwell writes about in the essay too, at the point where he quotes “Recessional” to illustrate how Kipling was behind the times in not learning the new age’s awful lessons.
Kipling’s son died in the war. And he wrote a multi-volume history “The Irish Guards in The Great War”. I think he had ample opportunity to reflect on Haig as a human being. My impression, from Kipling’s postwar writing, is that he thought that the war was necessary to restrain the Germans.
And I wouldn’t be quite so quick to talk about “Kipling’s world...being torn to pieces.” It’s easy, in retrospect, to see the War as a sharp cataclysm. But it might not have looked quite so drastic at the time. The empire didn’t start shedding territory for another twenty or thirty years—and not until after another world war.
I think it’s a mistake to cast Kipling as a stuffy Colonel Blimp. He was quite interested in technology and progress. He was aware that there were other societies, that disagreed with Victorian England about many things. He wasn’t particularly a believer in the Church. He had enough detachment from his surroundings to make his perspective distinctive and interesting.
It was an enormous, game-changing shock to European mentality; the events of the 30s and 40s would’ve hardly been possible without it—in any form, Fascism or no Fascism. See e.g. The First World War by Martin Gilbert, a popular history I, personally speaking, liked a huge lot.
As for Britain, it partly wrecked and partly transformed a generation of young men, and dealt a massive psychological blow, from which stemmed the motive for Appearsement twenty years later, and the general slow acceptance that maybe the days of the globe painted red were over. It was time to hunker down, step off the stage, and with good reason; over the next few years, all of Europe began to realize that God would not stop anything man does, or anything that could be done to man.
That latter fact is exactly what Orwell writes about in the essay too, at the point where he quotes “Recessional” to illustrate how Kipling was behind the times in not learning the new age’s awful lessons.