8 - Kipling in the Great War: Mourning and Modernity

Summary

If any question why we died,

Tell them, because our fathers lied.

(W, 390)

Loss is the great theme of this war: not victory, not defeat, but simply loss.

Samuel Hynes

MOURNING AND TRADITION

World War 1 – or the ‘Great War’ as its survivors called it – represents a widely accepted, though not uncontested, ‘break’ with tradition that marks the beginning of ‘modern memory’, characterized by irony, discontinuity and a sense of the evacuation of traditional patriotic values and rhetoric. The literary historians Paul Fussell and Samuel Hynes have traced the way that traditional patriotic and pious language and imagery give way, even among writers not usually thought to be modernist, to a new, bleakly fragmentary response to a war whose devastation defeated traditional forms of representation. Jay Winter, conversely, has argued for the conservative continuity of English and European cultural responses of mourning, arguing that after the Great War, ‘most men and women were still able to reach back into their ‘traditional’ cultural heritage to express amazement and anger, bewilderment and compassion, in the face of war and the losses it brought in its wake.’

Characteristically enough, Kipling's contribution to the literature of mourning corresponds to both these models without quite fitting either. His principal public tributes to the dead, including his contribution to the ImperialWar Graves Commission which he joined in 1917, are traditional and formal in nature: the solemn inscriptions he proposed for thewar cemeteries; the lyrics of grief, the hymns of hate and the elegiac sequence ‘Epitaphs of the War’ – and in prose, the splendid though largely unread History of the Irish Guards in the Great War which relates the experiences of the officers and men in minute detail. In contrast to these formal public commemorations, the short stories in which Kipling explored the experience of bereavement, especially the two which focus on women, ‘Mary Postgate’ (D of C) and ‘The Gardener’ (DC), have the pared-down irony and ambiguity of modernism, and moreover implicitly question Kipling's own insistence on the virtues of iron discipline, practicality and terse self-control, representing the women who live by these values as more or less unconscious victims of repression and denial.