The spirit imbuing a regiment
Juliet Townsend
THE IRISH GUARDS IN THE GREAT WAR by Rudyard Kipling, edited by George Webb Spellmount, £24.95, pp. 320 On 4 August, 1914, Carrie Kipling wrote in her diary, 'My cold possesses me', to which her husband added, 'Incidentally, Armageddon begins.' Their son, John, just short of his 17th birthday, rushed to enlist, but was turned down because of his age and poor eyesight. The personal interven- tion of Lord Roberts, Colonel-in-Chief of the Irish Guards, secured him a commis- sion in the Regiment. He was still not 17 when he reported for duty. A year later he was sent to France. His mother records:
He looked very straight and smart and young as he turned at the top of the stairs to say, `Send my love to Dad'.
Six weeks later he was posted missing at Loos, and after months of agonising false hopes his parents had to accept that he was dead. don't suppose there is much hope for my boy', Kipling wrote with grim self control to his friend Dunsterville (Stalky), however, I hear that he finished well'. John's death reinforced his father's hatred of the 'muddy-faced Hun-folk', already chillingly expressed in stories like 'Mary Postgate' and 'Swept and Garnished'. He was haunted by the fact that his son had no known grave, and this Contributed to his devoted work on the Imperial War Graves Commission, for which he chose all the official inscriptions, Including that on the headstone of every unidentified soldier, 'Known unto God'. Kipling's other tribute to his dead son was to accept, early in 1917, the commission to write the official regimental history. It was a.labour of love, accomplished, as he said ,.h.nriself, 'with agony and bloody sweat over five and a half years of meticulous and laborious toil'. Long out of print, the first volume, The Irish Guards in the Great War: The First Battalion, has been reissued, embellished by excellent contemporary by and an interesting foreword °3' George Webb. The Second Battalion is to follow in the autumn. This has certainly been a worthwhile exercise. The Observer review in 1923 said that 'Mr Kipling has accepted an unwonted servitude . . . and ennobled a type of composition which literature has scarcely hitherto made its own.' The truth is that the regimental history as a literary form, with its meticulous attention to detail, its concentration on one tiny sector of the Front Ca battalion's field is bounded by its own vision'), its chronicling of every march and counter-march and its bleakly eloquent casualty lists, was peculiarly suited to Kipling's genius. The discipline of the form and the fact that his own emotions were engaged but held under rigid control, gives this account of one regiment's war excep- tional force. Kipling's son had been in the Second Battalion, so his loss is not described here, although we catch a glimpse of the whole Regiment dining together as the 2nd Battalion made its way to Loos: There are few records of this historic meeting, for the youth and the strength that gathered by the cookers in that open sunlit field has been several times wiped out and replaced.
We learn in George Webb's introduction that John's body was discovered, identified and re-interred in 1992, too late to console his parents. Field-Marshal Templar said of this book, `What he recorded, with such infinite love and labour, was the spirit imbuing a regiment.' We see here the distinctive ethos of the Irish Guards, their heroic Catholic Chaplains, of whom only one came through the war unscathed; their often macabre sense of humour; the distinctive relationship between officers and men and their fighting qualities, 'The Irish move to the sound of the guns/ Like salmon to the sea.' Yet Kipling was ambivalent in his attitude to Ireland itself, describing it elsewhere as 'that pernicious little bitch of a country'. His stance seems to have been that the Irish fighting man was admirable — as long as he was fighting on Our Side.
Kipling's account opens with the starkly factual line:
At 5pm on Tuesday, August 4th, 1914 the 1st Battalion of the Irish Guards received orders to mobilise for war against Germany.
'Sony I'm late, I was disposing of my disposable income.' From that point we are led day by day, following the Regimental Diaries, through the 1st Battalion's war. It is a sombre account illuminated by brilliantly vivid passages, where Kipling's formidable descriptive powers are brought to bear on the recollections of the many soldiers he interviewed from 1917 onwards, reinforced by his own experiences on his visit to the Front Line. We read of the mail arriving during the retreat from Mons to be 'dis- tributed by torchlight under the apple trees in the warm night . . That night was the first they heard wounded men scream'. Or we get an odd little glimpse of the men entertaining the hospitable burghers of Ypres in 1914 by dancing jigs on the then `flawless pave' while the refugees, 'their goods in little carts drawn by dogs, wept and wailed as they struggled past'.
Of course many of the scenes described are macabre. There was a dreadful crater in a wood
filled with dead French Colonial troops browned and blackened bodies, their white skulls still carrying jaunty red caps. Our wondering patrols used to look down into it sometimes of moonlight nights.
Others, like the account of night fighting in the Ypres Salient, are brilliant descriptive tours de force. Everywhere there is the felicitous choice of words, 'trees like chewed toothpicks'; 'the splash and sparkle of bombs'; 'the stamp and vomit of a shell'; The Somme with 'the grave-like chill of its chalk trenches'; 'the clay ground cullen- dered and punched into chains of pools'; and, after the final cease-fire, 'the chatter of a machine-gun, as detached and irrele- vant as the laugh of an idiot'.
Accentuating the horror is the incongru- ous normality of life behind the Line with the relentless cycle of drill and route marches to sharpen up battle-weary men, and the unexpected social highlights of the Old Etonian 4 June dinner, or the Divisional Horse Show, chronicled as meticulously as any battle. Even in action there are echoes of home life. A sergeant warns men picking blackberries under fire on the retreat from Mons, 'There's maybe worrums in 'em', and one man catches a hare during the 1st Battle of Ypres.
The brave idealists of 1914, with their jam-pot petrol bombs, fragile bivouacs and touching reliance on 'the Battalion machine gun', were transformed by harsh experience into the battle-hardened troops who, `standing, walking, sleeping and eating mud', held the line during the German push of March 1918, and eventually heard the guns fall silent 'five miles east of Mal- plaquet', at the very spot where they had first heard their sound four years earlier. By December they were in Cologne for their fifth and last Christmas dinner:
They sat them down, twenty-two officers and six hundred and twenty-eight other ranks, and none will know till Judgment Day how many ghosts were also present.
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