THIS IS THE CHAPEL: HERE, MY SON

Rudyard Kipling and the Battle of Loos

Dedicated to the Memory of Patrick Neafsy of Achadh Mór,

Private 6534, 2nd Battalion Irish Guards,

killed in action, 27 September 1915

Edward Neafcy, October 2008

After 93 years, my brother David has

brought home to Mayo the story of Patrick
Neafsy and his short life as a British
soldier. He was in the 2nd Irish Guards. The
Battle of Loos was fought from the
25 September to the 8 October, 1915. It
was the biggest battle in British history up
to then. Today if people know of it at all, it
is generally because Rudyard Kipling’s
son John was lost there. He was an officer
in the Irish Guards. Patrick and John
Kipling died in the same action.

Patrick and John were among 32 Irish

Guards who died on 27 September 1915
on a flat Flanders field exposed to German
artillery, machine gun and rifle fire. Such
was the slaughter that the Germans called
it the Leichenfeld (Corpses Field) von
Loos.

Despite Remembrance Day having been so well observed in my lifetime, I had

not been motivated to think too much about the Great War with its apparent
senselessness. David’s and my trip to Loos made me wonder about the
motivations of lads such as Patrick who responded to Kitchener’s ‘Your
Country Needs You’ recruitment campaign, and the motivation of such a man as
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 Rudyard
Kipling delivers Kipling to support the war. The thoughts of the private soldiers are
a recruiting
speech - Southport,
seldom Lancashire,
recorded – particularly as personal diaries were discouraged as they
England. June 1915
might fall into enemy hands - but Kipling set down in verse and prose so many
of his thoughts and the world literally bought them. To look at what Kipling
thought therefore, should show what the country thought. What wars had he
looked to for material for his poems of battle? Why had he encouraged his son
to take such risk? How did he cope with the grief of bereavement?

My wife and I live in Sussex not far from Burwash, where Kipling’s house,
Bateman’s, is to be found. This is where John Kipling was raised. Bateman’s is
a National Trust property now, and is open to the public. With AD 1634 over the
door and standing on 33 acres, ‘... in reality the house is little ...’ wrote Kipling.
At the high point of empire, he was also at the cutting edge of technology. His
Rolls Royce could take him with ease from one historically fascinating place to
another. He did not drive himself: cars could break down, flat tyres were
frequent then, and telephones hard to find. Better to have someone to drive who
could fix things that went wrong. He harnessed ‘what they call a river’ on his
land to drive an electric generator rather than the flour mill it had driven before.
An underground cable brought a direct current to batteries in an outbuilding.
These powered carbon filament lamp bulbs, each emitting 15-20 watts - slightly
better than a candle - for a few hours each evening. No doubt a must at that time
for a man who had everything, electric lights would have been especially useful
to a writer with myopia.

David had Kipling’s ‘2nd Irish Guards’. I bought the Wordsworth Library’s ‘The
Works of Rudyard Kipling’, 1994, which has an introduction by George Orwell,
written in 1942. I also bought a biography of Kipling, ‘The Unforgiving
Minute’, by Harry Ricketts, 1999. I had often wondered where the name
‘Rudyard’ came from. It was a place name – a lake where Kipling’s parents had
got engaged. His family name was Joseph. The family tradition was to alternate
John and Joseph between the generations. Kipling’s first son would be John.
Later I read his little autobiography, ‘Something of Myself’.

If the millions who flocked to the colours for the Great War had been taught one
poem in English literature, it would have been Tennyson’s ‘The Charge of the
Light Brigade’ – ‘theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do or die’. If English,
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Scottish, Irish, French, German, Austrian, Italian, Serbian, Russian, American
and probably even Turk, who flocked to the colours in the Great War, knew just
one line of French literature, it would have been the translation into their own
language of Alexandre Dumas’ ‘Un pour Tous, Tous pour Un’. Dumas has
D’Artagnan and the Three Musketeers say this only once, but ‘One for All and
All for One’ resounded around a world so eager for this sentiment. It had an
echo in Ireland:

Now boys pull together in all sorts of weather

Don’t show the white feather wherever you go
Act each as a brother and help one another
Like true hearted men from the County Mayo.

A white feather had long been held in the British army and evidently outside it,
to be a sign of cowardice. Its origin was in cockfighting where it was supposed
that a bird with a white feather was a cross-breed and an inferior fighter. Its use
was encouraged from the beginning of the Great War - men who were slow to
respond to the nation’s call to arms were at risk of being given a white feather
by the young women they knew. It was a very effective recruiting device.

The millions of men – and the women behind them – who cheered for the Great
War, had been brought up on loyalty, duty, blind obedience, and fear of being
shamed. Kipling was born into this world and by his works he reinforced its
values. He was rewarded by unusual success very early in life.

More can be found on Patrick Neafsy than the typical soldier of the Great War
for two reasons. The individual service records of many British regiments were
destroyed by bombing in the Second World War, but we are fortunate that those
of the Irish Guards survive. We are also fortunate that as John Kipling had been
an Irish Guards officer, the regiment could ask his father to write their Great
War history. The two volumes Kipling produced contain much detail that would
be otherwise difficult to get at, if recorded at all.

The sources available for this piece are therefore Kipling’s own works; what
others wrote about Kipling, what Kipling wrote about the Irish Guards, and, as
it turned out, a work from which Kipling chose to quote.

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Kipling was the author of what is almost certainly the best known poem in the
English language – ‘If’. Then there are the perennials, ‘Jungle Book’, ‘Kim’ and
the ‘Just So’ stories. These are all aimed at children, though perhaps particularly
with ‘If’ the message is meant to go to them by way of their parents. But
Kipling also wrote for adults and without looking at what he wrote, we all have
the impression that he was an imperialist and a jingoist.

Apart from Jungle Book, which I knew from the film, the only Kipling work I
knew was the poem, ‘Gunga Din’, and that was because when I turned eighteen
and went in our local pub, a World War II veteran used to recite it. I was to find
that, like many people, I know many lines of Kipling without knowing who the
author was. I found that he was not just an average patriot; he was passionate
for the British Empire. He was therefore a vociferous opponent of anything that
challenged its integrity. Born December 30th 1865, in India but boarded out at
six - unhappily - in England, then schooled there, he returned to work at 17 in
British India. As a young travel correspondent for a British magazine in India,
he saw no military challenge from Japan and made light of the efforts Japan was
making to ‘Europeanise’ itself. On the other hand he feared China for its
potential. The Japanese were neither ‘natives’ nor sahibs. At Kobe, Japan, ‘... as
in Nagasaki, everyone smiled except the Chinaman. I do not like Chinamen.
They stand high above the crowd and they swagger, unconsciously parting the
crowd before them as an Englishman parts the crowd in a native city’. He goes
on:‘The Chinaman’s an old man when he’s young ... but the Japanese is a child
all his life’.

He makes a distinction between Chinese and Indians:

‘If we had control over as many Chinamen as we have of natives of India, and had
given them one tithe of the cosseting, the painful pushing forward, and studious, even
nervous, regard of their interests and aspirations as we have given to India, we should
long ago have been expelled from, or have reaped the rewards of, the richest land on
the face of the earth’.

In passing, the word ‘Chinaman’ has been discouraged in English long before
the term ‘politically correct’ was coined. Presumably it was considered to be
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pejorative. Yet one hears Chinese speaking amongst themselves today and they
say ‘Chinaman’.

When at 24 Kipling arrived to work in London, already having made a name for
himself, he found he disliked the city and was not impressed with the English,
living as they did in black houses and ignorant of anything beyond the Channel.
He was to become most forcefully anti-German quite early in his life. Prussian
arrogance was intimidating to all neighbouring states. Germany therefore
attracted his ire rather than the people of different colours and creeds the little
British army had to fight on the fringes of their Empire. Internally, he was
implacably opposed to the movement for Home Rule in Ireland.

He thought there should be national service to put the British Army on a more
equal footing with Germany. Instead, the England of Kipling’s day was
developing games and sports which would be the staples of leisure world-wide
in the 20th century. It meant that rather than preparing themselves to defend their
country, the English ‘ ... contented their souls With the flannelled fools at the
wicket or the muddied oafs at the goals’ (1). Events were to prove that being
muddy in goal was not incompatible with being a Great War soldier, and
football featured in both advances and truces.

Orwell’s introduction to ‘The Works of Rudyard Kipling’ makes the point that
what Kipling said was not true, but it was true occasionally. When it was true
for you, you thought of Kipling or recalled his lines without necessarily
knowing who had written them: ‘He travels the fastest who travels alone’ (2).
The same could be said of the poem, ‘If’. Nobody can measure up to all the
conditions in ‘If’, but we all make some of them some of the time. People could
therefore enjoy Kipling whilst at the same time seeing what was wrong in his
work. I can see that this is a ‘supply side’ quality. It occurs to me however that
there was a new ‘demand’ side factor at work. A newly literate working class
was emerging from school throughout the western world as a result of newly
introduced compulsory universal education and there was a publishing capacity
to match. Kipling was pre-eminent amongst authors tapping into this market.
His work was to become a staple in schools. Celebrities in the industry of music
would wait just a little longer for technology to provide a platform for
performers such as Enrico Caruso and John McCormick.
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Kipling never raised his voice, even if he had cause to, but his voice and
conversation commanded the same interest and attention as his written work. He
interviewed Mark Twain for the Indian magazine and impressed him. Before
women had got the vote, he thought equality for women was a cause already
won. It would not lead to less belligerence, because, so often, ‘The female of the
species is more deadly than the male’ (3). His attitude to tobacco ‘And since
roll, twist and leaf, Of all comforts is chief’ (4); and ‘A woman is only a
woman, but a good cigar is a smoke’ (5), finds an echo in the words of Great
War song ‘While you’ve a lucifer to light your fag, smile boys, that’s the style’.

Kipling wrote of and for the common man. He was said to be vulgar. It seems it
was not so much that he could afford to be, as that it paid him to be. He had
been born in India. His wife Caroline was a New England American and he
lived in the USA for the first years of his marriage. Gettysburg was well known
for the scale of slaughter industrialised warfare would bring and for President
Lincoln’s address there. Kipling must have known that the volume of coffins in
transit was on such a scale that the cargo had to be called ‘caskets’ so as not to
alarm the public and so the American vocabulary came to be changed. And if
that is not true, he would have known the story.

Kipling wrote a poem about the survivors of the Light Brigade whose famously
futile charge is all we remember of the Crimean War of 1854-56. He drew
attention to the shame of their poverty in their old age. A neighbour in Sussex
who became a friend was a colonel who had been an aide de camp of the
Confederate General Robert E Lee. Curiously, given that America must have
been an important market for his works, and given that American Civil War
veterans around him must have been far and away more numerous than the men
of the Light Brigade, he wrote nothing about the biggest battle that could have
been material – Gettysburg – or of veterans of that or any other Civil War battle.
Perhaps small scale action was just easier to handle.

I knew about Kipling’s patriotism for England but had not realised that he hated
the Germans. I wondered when it started. He would have been about 6 years old
when the 1870/71 Franco-Prussian War was fought and the German Empire
founded. Perhaps there was talk around him that affected him. The German
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equivalent of ‘Un pour Tous’ had perhaps been ‘Deutschland über Alles’. This
may have been innocuous when it was written, when it meant Germany above
all the little independent states that comprised Germany. After the foundation of
the Empire, neighbours felt it meant Germany above everybody else. (The
Germans don’t sing that verse any more.) Also, the Kaiser’s title was perhaps
menacing to neighbours. His grandmother, Queen Victoria, had taken the title of
Empress of India, but when Germany was declared an empire, the imperial title
was not Emperor of Germany, which would have shown on a map where the
Kaiser’s rule ended, but German Emperor. Kipling’s patriotism and his
antipathy to Germany seem to have developed at the same time. It became
apparent in 1896 when Kaiser Wilhelm II sent a telegram of support to the
Boers. Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee the following year brought forth an
outpouring of British patriotism. The Kaiser was a grandson of Queen Victoria,
but so what?

In 1898 he had spent two weeks with the Royal Navy in the Channel and said in
a letter that ‘any other breed of white men, with such a weapon in their hand,
would have been captivating the round Earth in their own interests long ago ...’
Even so, he famously pointed out the downside of overseas empire when the
USA took the Philippines from Spain in 1898: ‘Take up the White Man’s
Burden’.

In 1899 Kipling suffered a severe case of pneumonia in New York City. For the
first time in history, the health of a celebrity grabbed the attention of the world’s
media. Amongst the well-wisher letters and telegrams from around the world,
was a telegram from the Kaiser congratulating Kipling on his recovery.
Kipling’s daughter had had pneumonia as well, but for her it had proved fatal.
This was kept from Kipling until his own recovery was assured. The Kaiser’s
concern, or gaffe, does not seem to have improved Kipling’s opinion of
Germany.

Kipling wrote of nineteenth century British India. It turns out he was the only
one who did so but perhaps of small events in a big country. He was also the
only one who wrote of the tiny nineteenth century British professional army –
not much different in size from what it is today. He had sent his son into a
different league. Before John and Patrick got into battle, the British army had

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lost more men at Loos than it had lost in the entire three years of the Boer War.
Kipling has a poem about the Boer War. He says:

‘Let us admit it fairly, as a business people should,

We have had no end of a lesson: it will do us no end of good’. (6)

Small scale war had meant detailed and human scale attention. The poem ‘Piet’
recalls to mind that ‘boer’ is Dutch for ‘farmer’. I expect most of England’s
opponents in the Boer War would have been small farmers. ‘Piet’, gets a lot of
respect from Kipling:

‘The wonder wasn’t ‘ow ‘e fought, but ‘ow ‘e kep’ alive,

With nothin’ in ‘is belly, on ‘is back, or to ‘is feet,

I’ve known a lot of men be’ave a dam’ sight worse than Piet’. (7)

Kipling needed to have the human scale, and when he had it he could be
overwhelmingly sentimental about the most unlikely people.

‘Fuzzy Wuzzy’ in the ‘Soudan’ was

‘a pore benighted ‘eathen, but a first-class fightin’ man’. (8)

The water carrier in India, Gunga Din, is probably the most famous. He dies
saving the wounded soldier who says:’

‘Though I’ve belted you and flayed you,

By the living Gawd that made you,

You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din’. (9)

Still seeking to preserve a soldier’s dignity, Kipling could ring emotion out of
the most unexpected predicament:

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 ‘When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains,
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier’. (10)

Afghan knives feature in another verse as well. A soldier is fleeing from Afghan
fighters:

‘I ‘eard the knives be’ind me, but I dursn’t face my man,

Nor I don’t know where I went to, ‘cause I didn’t ‘alt to see,
Till I ‘eard a beggar squealin’ out for quarter as ‘e ran,
An’ I thought I knew the voice - an’ it was me!’ (11)

On the human scale, Kipling is so believable, but the characters he featured had
options and it was the options that made the poetry. It was Gunga Din’s conduct
under fire that made him ‘a better man than I am’. It was his commitment that
made Fuzzy Wuzzy ‘a first class fighting man’. It was Piet’s humanity that he
‘didn’t give us hell’, when he could have. Even the soldier blowing out his
brains rather than fall into the hands – or to the knives - of the Afghan women,
was still in control.

When Germany proposed in 1902 that England should join her in a naval
demonstration to collect debts from Venezuela, Kipling called her the
‘shameless Hun’. He began to use the word ‘Hun’ immediately war broke out in
1914. Both Rud and his wife, Carrie, were committed to war with Germany - ‘a
crazed and driven foe’ (12) - and committed to their son taking part in it. But it
was not just negativity to Germany: he was positive about Britain. He had done
so much work in America and may well have settled there for good, but for the
border dispute between Venezuela and British Guiana. The USA in the spirit of
the Monroe Doctrine had assumed a right to arbitrate. Kipling’s patriotism for
Britain had made life in the USA uncomfortable. His return to England was
counter-current: every passenger ship from Europe was laden with immigrants
wishing to live in America. Nevertheless, he retained an affection for America.

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Despite his comments about what ‘any other breed of white men’ would do if
they only had the British Navy, he begins to make an exception for France. The
1913 poem ‘France’ ends:

‘First to face the Truth and last to leave old Truths behind –
France, beloved of every soul that loves or serves its kind’. (13)

Kipling had wanted his son in the Royal Navy since his birth. This was and is
the senior service, but John’s myopia ruled him out. Competition for
commissions would have been tough. In 1914 Britain had the mightiest navy in
the world, but its army was tiny. Kitchener’s ‘Your Country Needs You’
advertising campaign was to bring the army up to scratch. The thousands of
volunteers would need officers. Rudyard had the connections to get his son a
commission, even though his eyesight technically made him unfit for service.

Whilst condemning the absence of national service, Kipling campaigned to

recruit volunteers for the army. By the time of his speech in Southport in 1915
(over the White Ensign of the Royal Navy! - photo, page 1), about 10% of the
men of the United Kingdom had already joined up. These included his own son
and Patrick Neafsy. Now was the time for the rest of the fit and eligible to do so.
He only stopped recruiting when conscription was introduced in 1916.

I joined David on his second trip to the Western Front in September 2007.
Before we set off for Loos we paid a visit to Bateman’s and walked around the
house and grounds. This was to get the feel of the difference between the
battlefields and trenches we were going to see and the home John Kipling had
left behind. We had two nights in France. The first was in a Logis de France -
Le Manoir de Gavrelle, because its photos on the web made it look like the kind
of place a chateau General would have chosen (– if it had been on our side of
the Front!) The second was the Campanile motel for the town of Lens, which is
on the Lens - La Bassée road, (now D947) and on the outskirts of Loos. It is as
close as can be to what the Great War made known to the world as Hill 70 –
located on the far side from where the assault had come. It was easy to drive

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and walk around the battlefield from there, though there was no reference to the
war in the motel.

In Loos museum I found a book of postcards, ‘Loos-en-Gohelle – 1870/1935’,

by Louis Hermant. Under each was a commentary. Some of the postcards were
photographs or prints of scenes in the Great War. So much of the village had
been destroyed 1915 – 1917 that these photographs are particularly important to
Loos. Instead of a line about copyright, I was touched to see ‘Cet ouvrage n’est
protégé par aucun droit d’auteurs, il constitue un outil pour toute personne
interessé.’ (This work has no protection by any authors’ rights, it is a tool for
every interested person). An article was available in several languages:‘The
Battle of Loos (A short, local history)’ by Peter Last of the Western Front
Association and Isabelle Pilarowski, ‘Association Sur les Traces de la Grande
Guerre’. It was from official British sources and evidently prepared for the 90th
anniversary of the battle. I was taken also by a print on the wall of the museum
and asked for a copy. It was from the weekly, ‘Illustrated London News’ and
featured action on 25 September. Rather than chase battle references from all
sources, for a local interest piece such as this for Glór, I decided to rely mainly
on this and the two local works for Loos. I found also, on the internet, a quote
from a survivor of Hill 70 which fitted well with the Last and Pilarowski article.

Known as ‘The Big Push’, the master plan of the Commander-in-Chief, French
General Joffre, for the Second Battle of Artois on 25 September 1915, had been
to break through the German lines on a 30 kilometre front and to press on to
victory: the Germans had no back up, the whole army being at the Front. The
French would attack south of Lens and 60,000 British would attack to the north.

Of the British, about 20,000 would cover the area we were interested in: the
southern end of their sector facing Loos itself and beyond to the section of the
north-south road to the east of Loos connecting Lens with La Bassée. They
would include eight battalions of volunteers in the 15th (Highland) Division,
including the 9th Black Watch. These Scots would capture Loos itself first to
secure the flank against possible German counter-attack from Lens. Combining
with the Territorials of the 47th (London) Division, they would then move on to
take Hill 70. This would be the break-through. Then they would head east for

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Annay, link up with the French and isolate the Germans in Lens. The Germans
would not be able to catch up and form another defensive line.

In the ‘Illustrated London News’ the artist covers a panorama of the advance.
There is a commentary with it which gives the official view of the assault. The
article is dated 9 October 1915. Loos was the first action of the Kitchener
volunteers and was the most heavily Scottish of all the Great War British battles.
Despite the kilts, there is no mention of Scots in the commentary.

“THE ADVANCE IN THE WEST: BRITISH TROOPS CHARGE OVER GERMAN TRENCHES IN
THE BATTLE OF LOOS”

“WITH BOMBERS LEADING THE WAY: BRITISH TROOPS SWARMING OVER THE GERMAN
FIRST LINE AND DASHING TOWARDS LOOS, THE “TOWER BRIDGE” AND
HILL 70

It was between 6 and 7 am on that memorable Saturday – September 25 – when the

British guns “lifted” on to the German rear, and the long looked for signal to assault

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 was given. With a roar, the men rushed from the trenches in front of “Le Rutoir,” and,
quickly covering the intervening ground, dashed upon the German first line. The
bombers in front flung their deadly missiles, and soon men were over the trench and
making for the enemy’s second line, bayoneting and bombing as they went. The
enemy in the particular part of the field shown in this drawing, demoralised by the
fearful carnage of the shells and the suddenness of the attack, did not stand, and a
wave of flying Germans spread out before the bayonets of the onrushing British
troops. Right over the second-line trenches and right through Loos they stampeded,
occasionally making a stand in little groups. British reinforcements followed up the
first advancing regiments, and the troops then assaulted the German third line at Hill
70. To quote Sir John French’s Special Order of the Day: “After the vicissitudes
attendant upon every great fight, the enemy’s second line posts were taken, the
commanding position known as Hill 70, in advance of Loos, was finally captured, and
a strong line was established and consolidated in close proximity to the German third
and last line ... Our captures amounted to over 3000 prisoners and some 25 guns,
besides many machine guns and a quantity of war material.” In the background of the
drawing is the now famous mining structure which our soldiers have nicknamed
“Tower Bridge” (or Crystal Palace) of Loos. Further to the right is Hill 70. In the
foreground, on the left, may be seen a British soldier carrying a bomb ready to throw;
while other bombers are in action ahead. On the right are two Germans holding up
their hands to surrender.” (18)

The men are carrying what appear to be goggles. They are primitive gas masks
for protection against the possible blow-back of British gas. Neither British nor
Germans are wearing steel helmets. This was too early in the War.

A postcard provides a detail of the taking of Loos village by the 9th Black
Watch. Here, in Loos itself, they are not wearing gas masks. It was a wet day
and the artist has captured that well. The Germans are not identified, but as
other card commentaries indicate that the ‘110e Régiment badois’ had occupied
Loos, I take it they are from the 110th Baden Grenadiers. The ‘110e badois’ had
been in Loos for about eleven months – longer than the Scots volunteers had
been in the army. They must have known the local terrain well.

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 “A l’aube du 25 septembre 1915, les alliés arrivent et se dirigent vers la fosse 15 ... “

“Dawn 25 September 1915, the allies arrive and head towards Fosse 15 ... ‘

The coal mine winding gear Fosse 15 was known to the British as ‘Tower Bridge’, after
Tower Bridge in London).

The Loossois themselves, northern French whom their compatriots in the

French army had begun to call the Ch’ti (pronounced Shtee – this being from
their rendering of “c’est toi” – “it’s you”), had made for their cellars at the
British bombardment which preceded the attack on the German positions.
Through the ventilation slits and small glass panes of their shelters, they saw the
arrival of ‘men in skirts’. Though the village was soon taken, isolated groups of
Germans continued to resist all day. Casualties were heavy.

Of the 750 men of the 9th Black Watch, only 9% survived the day unscathed;
31% were killed and the rest wounded. (19). Too feeble to hold the village,
Loos was taken over on the 26th by the London Irish Rifles, who were soon to
make their own advance, famously kicking their football before them. Perhaps it
was they who thought of Tower Bridge when they saw Fosse 15.
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Hill 70 was taken, as Sir John French says. He does not say that it was by the
Scots or that they had to abandon it later. Bringing in from the internet the
recollections of a survivor, Richard Hilton, a Forward Observation Officer:

The real tragedy of that battle was its nearness to complete success. Most of us who
reached the crest of Hill 70 and survived were firmly convinced that we had broken
through ... There seemed to be nothing ahead of us but an unoccupied and incomplete
trench system. ... All that we needed was more artillery ammunition to blast ... clearly
located machine-guns, and some fresh infantry to take over from the weary and depleted
'Jocks.' But, alas, neither ammunition nor reinforcements were immediately available, and
the great opportunity passed. (20)

Hilton talks of the chance to move into the suburbs of Lens. He had lost the plot
and so had the ‘Jocks’. They had suffered thousands of casualties to get to Hill
70. Now down to just a few hundred men and hardly any officers, instead of
carrying on eastwards, (or better still, it seems to me, staying put), they turned
southwards to chase the fleeing foe towards Lens. Devastating as fire from it
had been, the German front they had just broken had been lightly defended. The
Germans had never expected to be charged over open fields. Lens had a German
garrison. The Scots ran into intense machine gun and shell fire. Many were hit.
The survivors were forced back to Hill 70. They were then too few to hold it
when the Germans in Lens came out to close the breach in their defences.

Reinforcements of men and/or ammunition would have altered the course of the
war, but could reinforcements have been found? Evidently not, it seems. Sir
John French had thought it unnecessary to provide his HQ with a telephone.
Even if he had had one, we know from John Kipling’s last letter to his parents,
written 5.30pm, 25 September, that the 2nd Irish Guards were still footslogging
and still nine miles away. ‘The guns have been going deafeningly all day,
without a single stop’, he wrote, ‘They are staking a tremendous lot on this great
advancing movement as if it succeeds, the war won’t go on for long ...’ Joffre
had ordered that the men be told of the plan to break the German line: it would
be good for morale. As they trudged on to the Front in the rain, no doubt it was.
The Germans were subjected to preliminary shelling again, but when the 2nd
Irish and the Scots Guards attacked late in the afternoon of the 27th, the enemy
was reinstalled and reinforced with all his machine guns back in place.

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Had Loos succeeded, the German Empire would have had to sue for peace. The
Austro-Hungarian (Habsburg) Empire and the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire would
have followed suit, all without internal collapse. There would have been no
need for British conscription. The horrors of gas and trench warfare that Wilfred
Owen and the other Great War poets experienced over the ensuing three years
and made known to the world would not have happened. War poetry would
have continued to be Rudyard Kipling. There would have been no Sudetenland
or Polish Corridor to fall out about later, and no British Palestine. Hitler could
not have blamed the Jews for stabbing Germany in the back. There would have
been no Russian Revolution. America would not have come in. A war of 1914-
1915 would not have been a World War and may not have been called the
‘Great’ War. Patrick might have been home for a victory parade in Easter 1916
in an otherwise quiet Dublin, with a signed book of Kipling’s poems.

Kipling must already have had some of his best war poetry verses taking shape
in his mind. Loss of John Kipling’s life had been a risk both father and son had
been prepared to take for the prospect of victory. ‘Once more unto the breach
dear friends, once more, or close the wall up with our English dead’: Henry V’s
success at Honfleur gave Shakespeare the opportunity to write those stirring
words. What would there have been to say if the king’s assault had failed? Loos
failed – no poem there then. How about heroic failure? Tennyson had redeemed
the wasteful charge of the Light Brigade in the popular mind. This had been a
cavalry unit of 673 men. It suffered 40% casualties in its ‘half a league’ (1½
miles = 2.4km) charge into the ‘Valley of Death’. All eight battalions of the 15th
(Highland) Division suffered more than 50% casualties on the ‘Leichenfeld von
Loos’. They had about two and a half miles, (four kilometres) to cover, and on
foot. Then more men were thrown in, including the Guards, as David describes.
The Loos failure must have left the world’s most famous poet at a complete loss
for words.

In these days of journalists being ‘embedded’ with troops in action and

providing instant news, it is striking to see the two-week time delay between the
25 September action and the ‘Illustrated London News’ coverage. For all the
promise of the day, by the time the paper came out, everyone still alive and fit
was back in the trenches, next to nothing had been achieved and there would be
minimal further infantry action. The attack by the Scots Guards and Irish
Guards on 27 September added nothing to the paltry gains of the 25th. Loos
village was all that had been taken, and without Hill 70 it had no strategic value.
Sir John French was sacked. He later became Lord Lieutenant of Ireland.
Richard Hilton went on to become a Major General.

16
The battlefield is flatter than portrayed in the Illustrated London News and Hill
70 is less pronounced. Though the daily rate of casualties at Loos would not
exceed that at Gettysburg, the vulnerability of the men to even a small number
of machine guns is obvious. I wanted this feature of this first advance because it
showed how the Guards, including Patrick Neafsy and John Kipling, would
have attacked two days later, give or take a smoke screen. Ignoring any mention
of danger, the “boys’ comic” commentary would have been fine for a victory.
Coming out on 9 October though, casualty lists would have already been
published in the daily papers. Perhaps it would have been “boys’ comic”
anyway, but perhaps it was thought that the public would take it better if they
were left with the impression that their lads’ lives had not been lost in vain.

On 8 October the Germans counter-attacked.

Loos, battlefield. October 1915. (NL) = non localisée = not an exact location)

(N.L.) The advance by the Scots and Irish brought on a German response on a totally devastated field.
Further, on 8 October, a violent counter attack was attempted and was spearheaded at the Loos
positions. The assault was made in three very dense waves, one after the other, followed by task-forces
in columns. All of themwere terribly mown down by our rifles, machine guns and artillery.

17
 Note: battles in our region as they were represented at the time.

‘Tower Bridge’ is not in the background to this action. Neither are the ‘Double
Crassiers’ – the landmark twin spoil heaps of Loos. Wherever this unidentified
site was, it is obvious that the British were the defenders. If the action was in
front of Loos itself, it may be that the smoke plume cuts out TowerBridge.
There had been changes following the British losses. By 3 October the British
positions east of Loos had been taken over by the French IX Corps. I take it
therefore that the ‘our’ of the rifles, machine guns and artillery in the French
commentary means ‘French’ and not ‘allied’. There is a lone Indian soldier.
Indian troops as a battalion were a little further north along the front.

German records of the Loos offensive show their incredulity at the British
advance over open fields. The Germans in the end had held the line. Their
counter-attack must have been intended not simply to recover Loos, but to break
the allied front and end the war on their own terms. Nobody had planned for a
long war. The British feared their losses had fatally weakened them and that is
why the French had relieved them. Why the Germans abandoned the counter-
attack is easy to understand – their own loss of life was too great.

Though the reality of the battle was the impersonal ‘mowing down’ of men in
the mass, the artists of all three drawings show human contact: hand to hand
combat in the taking of Loos village; Germans with their hands up in surrender
at the advance on Hill 70; and Scots being bayoneted and an Indian throttled in
the German counter attack. The human scale of these incidents was perhaps
what the public and Kipling and the soldiers were expecting war to be like.

Yet despite the distance between the opposing forces, there was some
compassion in the field. German gunners ceased firing on the ‘leichenfeld’ to
allow the British to tend to their dead and wounded. Fraternisation by the
British was strictly discouraged. Two of the officers of the Indian battalion, no
doubt well bred young British officers like those in charge of the Irish,
countenanced a German Christmas Day peace initiative. Senior officers saw and
overruled, and the young officers had their leave stopped. How could artists
represent reality anyway?

18
If you were wounded and left on the Leichenfeld von Loos, who would you like
to see most – Fuzzy Wuzzy, Piet, Afghans – women or men, Gunga Din, or
stretcher bearers of the Imperial German army? Gunga Din died helping a
wounded soldier of his own side, but would he have risked his life for the
enemy? German medics did at Loos, and some got killed doing so. Kipling
records this in his ‘2nd Irish Guards in the Great War’. He records also that in
1918, after the Germans had abandoned the war and gone home that the Irish
Guards encountered resentment in Belgium as they passed through on their way
to Cologne. Local people had evidently got to know and like German soldiers
they had met.

Kipling also records a conversation between the Irish Guards and a German
prisoner, an officer of the Hanoverian Fusiliers. The man had ‘Gibraltar’
embroidered on his tunic. A former boss of mine had been a Royal Marines
officer. He told me they have ‘Gibraltar’ on their belt buckles. King George I
had told them that after the taking of Gibraltar in 1704, they need show no other
battle honour. The same George had evidently, as Elector of Hanover, told his
German soldiers the same thing. Kipling lets the opportunity to tell this story
pass by. The officer spoke of the British ‘love-hour’. This puzzled the Irish
Guards, until they realised that the man had learnt his English on tennis courts. I
suspect the Irish would have got a smile out of this, but Kipling remarks that the
man would find there was no love in a British zero-hour.

Leaving others to find consolation for the failure at Loos in the lionising of
individual acts of bravery, Kipling’s next works in 1916 were a series of
sketches and poems, ‘Fringes of the Fleet’. As usual, these were popular and a
retired Admiral got Sir Edward Elgar to do something with some of this
material. Elgar’s ‘Fringes of the Fleet’ concert tour featured four baritones and
orchestra and opened in June 1917. He conducted himself. Kipling was
unenthusiastic about this from the beginning and despite the success of Elgar’s
programme, he withdrew permission and called it to a halt six months later.

Last and Pilarowski highlight two individual acts of heroism in Loos, both by
what they describe as non-combattants. A young Loossoise, Emilienne Moreau,
and her mother had volunteered to tend British wounded in the village, where
19
survivors of the 110th Badeners were still fighting back. Emilienne was awarded
the Military Medal by Britain and the Croix de Guerre by France. She had killed
two German soldiers with a borrowed pistol. They may well have deserved it
and were certainly perceived to have deserved it at the time. The story is briefly
covered in the postcards and in more detail on the internet. Today, however,
when the soldiers at risk from deadly civilian women are those whom our
Western governments have committed to fight ‘The savage wars of peace’ (14)
in Afghanistan and Iraq, our default view of this kind of intervention is
different. Kipling’s poem shows that often the female is ‘More deadly than the
male’ for good reason.

Piper Daniel Laidlow of the 7th King’s Own Scottish

Borderers is the other hero featured. The young Kitchener
volunteers of his battalion - and no doubt the rest of the 15th
(Highland) Division - were reluctant to get their first
experience of war by leaving their cover to face machine
guns. Laidlaw walked along the parapet of the trenches
playing his bagpipes until they were all out and making for
the German lines. He followed them, still playing. Some 92%
of the 750 men were hit and of those a third were killed. Only
8% got through the day unhurt. Laidlaw himself was hit in
the leg twice but survived to be awarded the Victoria Cross
after the war. In our days, when men ‘shot at dawn’ in the Great War for
desertion or cowardice or whatever have been pardoned, what do we make of a
medal given ‘For Valour’ of this kind? Why did not they all get it?

At the time, the Battle of Loos was the largest offensive ever made by the
British Army. When the fighting stopped, 50,000 men had been hit of whom
15,800 had been killed. The bodies of the fallen now lie in the local cemeteries,
some identified, many not. Some remain undiscovered on the leichenfeld.

Patrick’s body was found and buried on the battlefield, but as often happened,
the identity of the grave was lost in subsequent action. Lack of non-perishable
‘dog-tags’ at this early stage in the war meant that when bodies were recovered
after the war to be reburied, he went to a ‘Known Unto God’ grave in Dud
Corner Cemetery. There had been a long tradition of soldiers wearing home-
20
made IDs, but the volunteers would have had only the makeshift army issue.
John’s body was not found. Correspondence at Bateman’s shows that on 19
September, he had written home with a list of requirements. Ironically, one item
requested was a replacement aluminium identity disk. He had lost his, and ‘It is
a Routine Order that we have to have them’. I take it that by ‘we’, he meant
officers. There is a drawing by John of the disk he wanted from the Store. It was
about an inch in diameter. The words he wanted on it were: ‘2ndLt . J. Kipling C
of E Irish Guards’. (C of E = Church of England). It must not have got to him
in time.

After two years of fruitless effort trying to find his son as a prisoner of war or to
find out how or where he had died, Kipling wrote a moving couplet that became
the epitaph of all youngsters lost in the war: ‘If any question why we died, Tell
them because our fathers lied’(15).

Kipling was for a long time in denial about the loss of his son, most probably in
deference to his wife’s continuing hopes. He interviewed all the survivors he
could find who might have seen what happened to John. Friends rallied round to
try and help: the Prince of Wales, whose father would have been a cousin of the
Kaiser, and the Ambassador in London of the then neutral USA. They would
have known the Kaiser had been a Kipling fan and would have gone in at the
top. Kipling himself as Germany’s highest profile critic, could not compromise
himself by accepting any human kindness from the Germans directly, at any
official level.

Another friend checked out Roman Catholic channels. It had been intimated to
Carrie during their engagement that Kipling was a covert Catholic and it broke
the engagement. She was a Methodist. He made things right, obviously
managing his beliefs so as not to upset her. At Loos, with his sensitivity to such
matters, Kipling would have seen immediately with Scots and Irish fighting
against Badeners in French countryside, that this was a predominantly Catholic
environment.

He also had Royal Flying Corps aircraft drop leaflets over the German lines
appealing for information. On the postcard showing the action on 8 October, a
biplane flies over the battlefield. The definition is poor, but its markings seem to
be more like a German cross than a British or French circle. No matter whether
21
friend or foe, at this early stage in the war, the plane seems to be harmless to the
men below and it does not attract fire from them. It would therefore have been
fairly risk-free for the RFC pilots to overfly the German lines at this time. Why
should leafleting German soldiers be more acceptable than liaising with the
Kaiser? Kipling was the poet of the common man. We have not found a copy of
the leaflet.

The cemeteries of what are now called the Commonwealth War Graves are kept
in beautiful condition to this day. They were designed to be works of art in
tribute to the fallen. The work on the monuments was done by the renowned
architect, Sir Edward Lutyens. The renowned, but plain ‘Mr’ Rudyard Kipling,
as ever, did the words. He accepted this war graves work in 1917. He had been
awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907, but he had refused a
knighthood. Lloyd-George offered him any honour that he would accept, but he
did not want any. He declined to be Poet Laureate three times. The war graves
attract a lot of visitors. We found Tyne Cot cemetery in particular to be an
immensely popular destination with a huge information building. When we
arrived, the car and coach park was almost full, as were the bike stands.

In 1917, the Irish Guards asked Kipling if he would write their history. He
agreed. It took several years. Logs and such diaries as were available were
passed over to him. He produced a book ‘The Irish Guards in the Great War’ for
each of the 1st and 2nd Irish Guards. At the back of the volume are pages listing
the fallen and the medal winners. Kipling makes no reference to these lists,
which would be unthinkable for a historian - or a journalist. The explanation
must be that they were not available to him. They would have been compiled at
the same time as he was writing his narratives. Perhaps something could be
done with these names other than just ranking them in alphabetical order and
recording date of death. Recalling the Christmas Day truces, if the days of the
week were to be put to these dates it might tell a story. One of the Christmas
Days was a Sunday. I have not looked through the whole war, but at first sight
of these casualty lists, it seems to me that Sunday was much less likely to be a
day of action than the other days. It would be good to think that the lads in the
trenches had a quiet time to look forward to at the week-end. Dying on their
first day, Patrick and John Kipling did not get even one Sunday in the trenches.
They were spared the ‘trench foot’ and lice and other discomforts which their
longer-lived colleagues would have had to face.

22
‘The Irish Guards in the Great War’ was published in 1923, at £1 per copy.
Royalties went to the widows. This was a nice gesture, but the families of single
men like Patrick would get nothing.

I remember reading many years ago a Victor Gollantz book published before
World War II. I don’t remember the author, but he made the point that the
conduct of the Great War had caused or had contributed to unrest in towns
throughout the United Kingdom in the spring of 1916. The unrest was
successfully suppressed everywhere except in Dublin, where, in someone else’s
words, ‘a poet’s dream had sparked a flame’. I have not seen that point made
anywhere else, but perhaps unsurprisingly. People were lobbying for America to
come into the war - Kipling in a 1916 poem was trying to shame her into doing
so. America would see trouble in Dublin as a move for Home Rule and would
understand it. Trouble elsewhere in Britain would have been embarrassing and
news of it would not have been allowed to get out. Probably at that time only
Victor Gollantz would have touched the story anyway. In 1917 Kipling’s verse
showed his delight that America had joined in.

I have another anecdote, which, though it relates to the Battle of the Somme, ten
months later, I would like to record here. I was amongst the guests at an
Institute of Builders’ dinner about 25 years ago and found myself sitting next to
a man who turned out to be Chairman of the Chesterfield branch of the Orange
Order. I said that I thought this order only existed in Liverpool and Glasgow,
apart from Northern Ireland. He told me there had been branches/lodges
everywhere until the Somme in 1916. The date had coincided with 12th July on
the Old Calendar. Many of the English lads therefore went ‘over the top’
wearing the family sash, which was really a family heirloom. The losses were
too much to bear for Orange Order lodges throughout the country and they
withered away.

Two other snippets from long ago now also come back. Professor C Northcote
Parkinson of ‘Parkinson’s Law’ made the point that the British budget pre-
World War One had secured for Britain a marginal superiority at sea at the
expense of an immense inferiority on land. Thinking of that now, I think it
shows the importance at the time of what was ‘proper’ – Britain ought to have
the best navy. The second snippet is a memory of Professor John Kenneth

23
Galbraith. It suggests to me something that permeated UK society at that time.
Galbraith commented that US soldiers of the Great War were paid a proper
wage for their efforts and risk, in contrast to the British who got very little.
Again, ‘While you’ve a lucifer to light your fag’. The British thought it
somehow improper that a decent wage should be paid. The war had started with
enthusiastic volunteers. It then moved to conscription. Neither called for a
proper rate for the job.

After the war, Kipling remained angry with the Germans and blamed German
propaganda for anti-French sentiment in both Britain and America. He was
angry with the Americans because the Germans had not been beaten thoroughly
enough and there would be another war. In the ensuing years, he came to see
Bolsheviks and Jews as inimical to the British Empire and added them to his list
of evils.

I find I clash with Kipling’s vehemence and I differ over America and the Great
War. My own pet theory has for years been that it was a mistake for them to
have joined in. President Wilson’s points for peace were so reasonable that the
German army just left its guns out in the weather and went home. This left
Germany defenceless and at the mercy of the Versailles peace-makers who
reneged on the points Wilson had made. The USA did not ratify the Versailles
Treaty. I have to acknowledge that the strength of feeling against Germany must
have been pervasive, and not just after the war when there were lost lives to be
angry about.

It seems to me that if America had stayed out, the Great War would have been a
draw, with all parties exhausted. Having intervened, the USA committed itself
to further interventions in the future. It also seems to me that America has not
just taken up ‘The White Man’s Burden’: she has taken up Germany’s burden.
In Britain today and in Western Europe, the media is knee-jerk anti-American.
Stand-up comedians are the same. The presumption must be that the public they
are catering for is anti-American. America is technologically and culturally
dominant in the west and over much of the rest of the world, but the British
public wants the President of the USA to be seen as ignorant and stupid and
greedy - just like Kaiser Bill. Still, the US always gives us a next time.

24
The Western Front now has battlefield scenes, museums and of course
cemeteries to offer to the visitor. The influence of Kipling and Lutyens on the
British graves is distinctive. The contrast with the French cemeteries brings out
the difference. British cemeteries have boundary walls and monumental
masonry as well as headstones all in white. The gravestones are slabs, planted
around with flowers and immaculately kept. There is a unity of style, and you
have to look at individual graves to learn anything about who is buried there.
French cemeteries are Spartan by comparison. At La Targette, the British and
French cemeteries are side by side. The French is an open field with nothing but
mown and strimmed grass around the graves. There is another difference: a
British rule is that there should be no distinction made on account of military or
civil rank, race or creed. The French by contrast, do make a distinction by race
and creed. The great majority of the French headstones are white Christian
crosses. A few – relatively - without crosses, are intermingled amongst them.
These are the graves of Jews and atheists. There are also Muslims, but they are
not mixed in with the Christians, Jews and atheists – they have their own corner
of the cemetery. I do not know why. Perhaps it is because they were Moroccans
rather than French citizens.

The Great War had its effect on civilian burials. The York City Cemetery just
outside the walls of York, England, opened in 1837. I went on a guided tour
some years ago. There are some war graves there. The headstones are similar to
those in France but smaller. They may be seen in churchyards all over the
country. I expect they were of men who died of wounds after reaching home – I
forget what the guide said. I do remember that many of the civilian headstones
for the Great War period are bigger and much more ornate than before or after –
big angels and such. The explanation was that people had become much more
sentimental as death threatened almost all families. Candles reappeared in
Protestant churches, as the scale of grief caused by the war suppressed the old
puritanical attitude towards such ostentatious piety.

Coming back to my original theme of the motivation of the Kitchener

volunteers and men such as Kipling, what Kipling was able to sell and what the
world wanted to buy was all about sentiment, loyalty, duty and commitment.
Pursuit of these qualities required carelessness for life which we no longer have
today. Loyalties could clash of course. Irish veterans of the Great War could not
be sure of a welcome at home, because they had been fighting for the country
25
whose rule their compatriots back home resented and had in the meantime
thrown off.

Kipling was far too complex a character for anyone to put a label on him. The
society of which he was part was too complex to be labelled as well. He started
out as a journalist, editor, newspaper seller. Perhaps that is what he remained. It
is as if he were in charge of a stable of virtual newspapers – from the quality
journal to the sensationalist daily to the local weekly. Serious columnist;
lobbyist for political causes, fundraiser for the families of Boer War veterans,
advocate for fairer pensions for old soldiers, carer for the habitat for bees,
assessor of breaking strain for bridges; obituary writer, weatherman, roving Asia
reporter; applauder of all kinds of things including French road numbers; and
not least, storyteller, he could have written every column inch in every paper –
and made it rhyme. He could have been Rudyard, Lord Kipling had he wanted
to be. The Establishment was desperate to please him. It seems clear to me that
Kipling himself had much at stake at Loos. An early end to the war would have
enhanced his own career still further, irrespective of the fate of his son. As
things are, he gets only grudging admiration today.

From his early days of writing in India, he had always poked fun at peoples’
machinations to get political or hierarchical advancement. After Loos he was
critical of both political and military leadership but it seems the fun had gone
out of it. He let Elgar down, another patriot.

Perhaps Kipling was right about Germany all along, though as his popularity
peaked in Britain between the Boer War and the Great War, he became
immensely popular in Germany and he was even more of a success in France. It
is a thought that he could have used his international celebrity status to urge all
parties that the arms race be set aside. But if he had been such an advocate, he
would never have become popular in the first place. Genius as he was, he was a
man of his time and they all thought they should win. He lived until 18 January
1936, long enough to see the rise of the Nazi party – his nightmare taking shape
again. It seems to me now that Winston Churchill emerged to pick up his baton.
This time there was a personal adjustment to be made for German assertiveness.
Up to this time, Kipling’s emblem on covers of his books had reflected his past
in India. There was a circle containing a swastika – a Hindu good luck symbol –
26
and a side view of the head of an elephant, holding a lotus flower in its trunk.
Kipling removed the swastika when Hitler adopted it

At the level he operated at, I think Kipling knew what was going on at Loos. He
knew Joffre’s plan. He certainly knew that officers were particularly at risk. He
knew the 15th (Highland) Division were going to suffer, but not to the degree
that they were. He expected his son’s battalion to be marching through the
breach the Scots had made on the 25th, where they would find the Germans
broken. As it was, the 2nd Irish Guards lost 32 men on the 27 September - only a
scratch compared to the losses of the 7th Cameron Highlanders, the 9th Black
Watch, the 7th King’s Own Scottish Borderers and the other five battalions of the
15th Division on the 25 September. After John’s death, Kipling was trapped in
his own framework. He could not grieve. He had to go on with his campaigning.
However, he became furious with military incompetence. He did not say too
much about Loos, but in 1917 he wrote the verse:

‘They shall not return to us, the strong men coldly slain
In sight of help denied from day to day:
But the men who edged their agonies and chid them in their pain,
Are they too strong and wise to put away?’(16)

In all of this, I was looking for a last message that Kipling may have made to his
lost son. The poem, ‘My Boy Jack’ is often taken to be a tribute to John, though
it is about a sailor and though Kipling’s affectionate term for his son in
correspondence was ‘Old Boy’ rather than ‘Jack’. There is also the couplet
beginning, ‘My son died laughing at some jest’. John obviously did not die
laughing so I wonder whether this might be an example of the post bereavement
madness Ricketts talks about, or whether Kipling wrote for those who wanted to
think of their lost lads that way. Ricketts says a collection ‘Debits and Credits’
concludes with the debits and credits of John’s life and becomes a private
memorial to him.

Kipling wrote many epitaphs. The first one in the book of poems, ‘Epitaphs of
the War 1914 – 1918’, “Equality of Sacrifice” might have been written for John
and Patrick:
27
 A. “I was a Have.”
B. “I was a ‘have-not.’”
(Together.) “What hast thou given which I gave not?”

Kipling’s war graves work famously associated him with the Menin Gate
memorial at Ypres– the monument to 55,000 men whose bodies, like John’s,
were not found. He composed the words on that memorial and provided an
endowment for the Last Post to be sounded there every night. But I still had not
found an epitaph specifically to John from his parents. Kipling had been
overcome at the official dedication after the War of the Memorial Cemetery at
Loos. He thought his son would be buried there, if his body had been recovered
at all, but he did not know in which grave. John’s name is on the wall at Dud
Corner along with Patrick Neafsy’s and the rest of the fallen Irish Guards whose
graves are unknown.

Kipling had detailed knowledge of all the cemeteries and memorials. Visitors
found him helpful and sympathetic. He would have known St Mary’s, where
there was a grave marked AN UNKNOWN LIEUTENANT OF THE IRISH GUARDS.
He must have paused there and wondered, but he would have been told that the
coordinates indicating where the body had been found meant it could not be
John. It was only in 1992 when there was only one Irish Guards lieutenant to be
accounted for that it was noticed that if just one of the six characters of the
coordinates were different, this unknown man would be John. It was then
accepted that there must have been a clerical error and the headstone was
replaced by that we see today.

John’s name appears again of course on the war memorial in his home village of
Burwash in Sussex. Unusually, the Burwash memorial has an electric light on
the top of it in the form of a beacon flame. It is lit on anniversary dates of the
men named below. (It wrongly gives John’s date of death as 29 September
1915).

It was a chance visit to Burwash church that brought me to a fourth memorial to

John Kipling. There is a memorial plaque on the wall. Of course there would be.
And of course it has details you do not find on public monuments. I was
surprised Ricketts, Kipling’s latest biographer, had not referred to it, with all his
28
 many predecessors to read. I found his official
biographer, Carrington, published 1955, had missed it
as well, I then read Kipling’s autobiography, to find he
had not referred to John’s death at all, or to his
daughter’s death. He did not refer to Burwash by name
either. When tourists were checking out what they
might see of what he had written ‘On the Road to
Mandalay’, he was hardly likely to help the curious
find out where he lived. He famously liked to keep his private life private.
Given his endowment for Menin Gate, I would guess he made a contribution for
the lighting of the village war memorial, and would have paid for the plaque to
John in the church. However, it seems he left no leads to Burwash for his
biographers to find.

The Burwash church plaque is a complete contrast to the Loos memorials which
are white engraved on white in the broad daylight. This is black embossed on
black on a dark wall of the church. The headstones on the Loos graves are
rectangular, flat and marble. This one is circular, convex and metallic. When I
saw the Latin, I knew there would be a trail to follow. The words are under the
regimental badge of the Irish Guards. In colour the badge stands out more than
it does on the white marble of Loos, certainly when caught in the flash of the
camera. I would say the colours are enamel.

TO THE MEMORY OF

JOHN KIPLING

LIEUTENANT SECOND BATTALION

IRISH GUARDS THE ONLY SON OF

RUDYARD AND CAROLINE KIPLING

OF BATEMAN’S WHO FELL AT

THE BATTLE OF LOOS

THE 27TH OF SEPTEMBER 1915

AGED

EIGHTEEN YEARS AND SIX WEEKS

29
 QUI ANTE DIEM PERIIT

QUI ANTE DIEM PERIIT – ‘who died before his time’. I looked this up – so easy
on the internet. In full, the Latin begins, ‘Qui procul hinc’ - Who far from here’ -
and goes on: ‘sed miles sed pro patria’. ‘but a soldier, but for his country’. It is
from a poem by Henry Newbolt called ‘Clifton Chapel’. Newbolt was almost an
exact contemporary of Kipling. Kipling had used the full Latin sentence in an
introduction to one of his own school stories, ‘Stalky and Co’, which featured
an ‘old boy’ killed in the second British-Afghan War. ‘Who died before his
time’ was equally true for Patrick – at the time, but not ‘for his country’ for
much longer. Ireland was to be on its own way before many of the war
memorials were dedicated. There was republican talk throughout the British
Dominions after the war, but, like the unrest in 1916, it only succeeded in
Ireland.

The poem sets out what all parents and families who lost sons must have been
thinking, in their own ways, and often in the church where their sons had
prayed. When I saw the first two lines I knew it had to be reproduced in full. It
is an irony that Kipling’s last message to his son is the work of another poet,
and that the only poem I quote in full in a work on Kipling should be one he had
chosen, rather than one he had written, but there it is. It is apt, because like
everybody else in grief, Kipling had to fall back on another’s words:

THIS is the Chapel: here, my son,

Your father thought the thoughts of youth,
And heard the words that one by one
The touch of Life has turn'd to truth.
Here in a day that is not far,
You too may speak with noble ghosts
Of manhood and the vows of war
You made before the Lord of Hosts.

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 To set the cause above renown,
To love the game beyond the prize,
To honour, while you strike him down,
The foe that comes with fearless eyes;
To count the life of battle good,
And dear the land that gave you birth,
And dearer yet the brotherhood
That binds the brave of all the earth.

My son, the oath is yours: the end

Is His, Who built the world of strife,
Who gave His children Pain for friend,
And Death for surest hope of life.
To-day and here the fight's begun,
Of the great fellowship you're free;
Henceforth the School and you are one,
And what You are, the race shall be.

God send you fortune: yet be sure,

Among the lights that gleam and pass,
You'll live to follow none more pure
Than that which glows on yonder brass:
'Qui procul hinc,' the legend's writ,--
The frontier-grave is far away--
'Qui ante diem periit:
Sed miles, sed pro patria.'

In his autobiography, Kipling amusingly refers to discussions with his wife as

‘The Committee of Ways and Means’. Carrie was a powerful filter on the
interflow between Bateman’s and the outside world. We may be sure that the

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use of Newbolt’s words on John’s memorial in Burwash church was approved
by the Committee of Ways and Means. It could even have been Carrie who
proposed it. Newbolt himself must have known about it of course. Given that
the majority of guests weekending at Bateman’s would be Church of England; I
think many would have gone to Burwash church. Rud and Carrie had married in
All Souls Church, Langham Place, London, a Church of England church. John
had wanted C of E on his dog-tag. Kipling had used the Latin in ‘Stalky & Co’.
One way or another I think the Kiplings’ guests would have known the context
of ‘Qui ante diem periit’ which we need our search engines to find today.

The badge itself has the words: QUIS SEPARABIT –

‘who shall separate’. I had thought this to be an ‘Un pour
tous, tous pour un’ sentiment, which it might well be, but
now I am wondering. It turns out that the Irish Guards
were created in 1901 by Lord Roberts, Kipling’s friend.
Kipling must have known all about this badge from the
beginning. The date on the badge, MDCCLXXXIII,
stands for 1783, the date of the foundation of the Order
of St. Patrick, from where the words come and whose full motto is: ‘quis nos
separabit a caritate Christi’. I would say this means: ‘Who shall separate us
from Christ’s loving care’. What better words for a band of comrades, a lost
comrade, or a lost son?

When we went to Loos hardly any of what I have written above was known to
me, but I had already looked for something in Kipling’s poems that would serve
for what had happened to Patrick and John. I had quite early on come across a
verse which caught my eye, though it was not just for the two of them. Given
what I did with it, it was something of a setback to discover later Kipling’s
attitude – though he was not alone - to the Germans. I was therefore pleased to
find that, doubtless on reflection, and in the privacy of a family memorial, he
had quoted from a poem which likewise seeks to honour the foe. I had not
planned to use the verse, but at Tyne Cot, the cemetery near Passchendaele, I
found there are German graves as well as ours. It came back to me there. It was
easy to remember, like a variant of ‘Hail Mary’. There are registers at all the
cemeteries where visitors may sign and write comments. I wrote it out in the
book:

‘Ah, Mary, pierced with sorrow,

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Remember, reach and save
The soul that comes tomorrow
Before the God that gave.
Since each was born of woman,
For each at utter need -
True comrade and true foeman
Madonna, intercede!’ (17)

Edward Neafcy(21)

END

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Kipling Poems quoted:
1. The Islanders 9. Gunga Din
2. The Winners 10. The Young British Soldier
3. The Female of the Species 11. That Day
4. Poor Honest Man 12. For All We Have and Are
5. The Betrothed 13. France
6. The Lesson 14. The White Man’s Burden
7. Piet 15. Common Form
8. Fuzzy Wuzzy 16. Mesopotamia
17. Hymn before Battle

Greenwich Mean Time

18. The time quoted was GMT. Daylight Saving Time, as it was then called, was
introduced on May 21st 1916, a few weeks after it was introduced in Germany. It was because
of the war, though it had been mooted earlier. It later became British Summer Time.

Battalion Strength

19. The Loos paper refers to a battalion as 750 men. Other sources say 1007 including 30
officers. It comprised a battalion HQ and four companies. A company comprised 227 men
commanded by a major or captain. There were four platoons to a company, each commanded
by a subaltern (lieutenant or 2nd lieutenant). Each platoon had four sections under a non-
commissioned-officer.

Hill 70 Survivor

20. (From Warner, Philip. The Battle of Loos. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions
Limited, 1976: 1-2).

Surname Spellings
21 The families my grandfather and Patrick Neafsy left behind in Achadh Mór came to
adopt the spelling ‘Kneafsey’, which is by far the most widely used spelling of our rare
surname in Ireland today. The Irish is Ó Cnáimhsighe. The spelling in English was most
inconsistent a hundred years ago, as my brother David shows. The name on our grandfather’s
gravestone in England is Neafcy, which is the spelling he passed on to his children. He is
Neafsey in the Knock baptismal book, and so I took that spelling for my book ‘Surnames of
Ireland’. In later life, I checked his birth certificate from Co. Mayo, and his marriage and
death certificates from England. Each has a different spelling. The death certificate was
Neafsy and was entered by his brother-in-law. I have also used Kneafsey as the best
transliteration of Ó Cnáimhsighe.

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