• Inclusive Verse
• Definitive Verse
• Sussex Edition vol. 33 p. 438
• Burwash Edition vol. 26

Go tell the Spartans, you who read:
We took their orders and are dead.

Manes, when living, was a slave: dead now,
Great King Darius, he’s as great as thou.

About my Greek, Monday morning Greek Testament for two terms was about the extent of it. [Letters, (Ed. Thomas Pinney) Vol. 6].

In these cases Kipling commits his work to the strict control of an ancient model - the epitaphs of the Greek Anthology - and borrows composure from it.

The 'Epitaphs' are not at all like a Dance of Death, though they record various ways - some ironical - in which life may be extinguished in war. They are strictly functional and commemorative. They suggest in turn a line cut on a headstone, or pencilled in a pocket-book, or scratched by the dead man's mates on a broken oar, upended in the sand.

The dead confirm their natures, (“The Rebel”, “The Obedient”, “The Refined Man”) or remember what they have left (“The Bridegroom”, “'Pelicans in the Wilderness”). They record with acceptance or bewilderment what has befallen them (“Ex-Clerk”, “The Sleepy Sentinel”). Their fellows set down some token remembrance of them, (“A Grave near Cairo”, “Hindu Sepoy in France”) and, from a greater distance, the parents recall the passing of their sons (“A Son”, “R.A.F. [aged 18]”).

It is when one starts to classify these tough shreds of verse that one sees how strong they are, and how much is strung on them. The tone and the verse vary; death is cited with defiance, with tenderness, and with stoical wit. The deaths commemorated are at once very near and seen in a long perspective of sacrifice.

The inscriptions that Kipling composed or selected for the Imperial War Graves Commission, and for governments and institutions throughout the world, should not be confused with his series of "Epitaphs", first published in The Years Between, and then, slightly expanded and with the more familiar title "Epitaphs of the War", in the Inclusive Edition of his poetry.

They are a work of the imagination, clearly related to the Commission inscriptions, but, as Kipling confirmed, with 'neither personal nor geographical basis':

All the epitaphs in my ‘Inclusive Verse’ to which you refer are altogether imaginary. They deal with forms of death which may very possibly have overtaken men and women in the course of the War, but have neither personal nor geographical basis.
[Letter from Rudyard Kipling to Col. C. H. Milburn, quoted in Milburn’s article on Kipling’s Epitaphs, Kipling Journal No. 39, September 1936:]

It was built into the very nature of Kipling's public role as a poet that he should be an elegist and memorialist. The deaths of famous people he had known, such as Joubert, Rhodes, Chamberlain, and Theodore Roosevelt, were marked with elegies; as were those of less celebrated personal friends like Wolcott Balestier and Perceval Landon. His intuitive sense of history, and his emotional commitment to history as a living process, often gives an elegiac, or potentially elegiac, tone to his poetry. The close connections he had formed with the army in India and South Africa, and with the Royal Navy at the turn of the century, had long accustomed him to the fragility of life in the Armed Services he had observed as far back as 1886:

The crammer's boast, the Squadron's pride
shot like a rabbit in a ride! ["Arithmetic on the Frontier"]

The "Epitaphs" are, therefore, in some important senses, a development of recurrent tendencies in Kipling's poetry. Their newness lies in the tight control and compression that characterise them, and in the comprehensive portrait of the dead they finally offer.

Each of the epitaphs invokes one specific, individual response to death. A few of them are in the third person, but usually it is the dead who comment on their own deaths, their voices that speak directly to the reader. The immediacy of this technique, which could so easily have become over-emotional, is forcefully balanced by the brevity and compression of the poetic form Kipling employs. These dead have thought carefully about their deaths: they compose the inscriptions for their own gravestones. As this is war seen from the individual's point of view, there are no acts of romanticised courage to record, no flag-waving patriotism that would make any sense. Instead, there is a strong emphasis placed on the casual, unexpected and unavoidable nature of death, as in "The Beginner":

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.)

The young soldier, newly arrived at the Front and eager to see what is going on, peers out of the trench and is shot by a sniper. In the aside, he himself compares the experience to being a child at the theatre, and standing up to see the action on the stage. Everyone in this war must expect the same kind of violent end, as "Bombed in London" makes clear:

On land and sea I strove with anxious care
To escape conscription. It was in the air!

Even "The.Coward" is subject to no overt criticism. How could it be otherwise, when the lesson he learns for himself is so terrible and so personal?:

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

Appropriately for a total war, the epitaphs cover civilians as well as servicemen, grieving parents and dead sons, imperial and British troops, women as well as men, the brave and the feckless; and action on land, at sea, and in the air. The dead are guiltless. Individually, they accept their deaths, as, of course, it is impossible for them not to, but collectively, in “Common Form”, they pronounce judgement:

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

These poems, in which the servicemen and women voice their own feelings and views, place Kipling much closer to the young combatant-poets of the War than is usually allowed, though a distance between them still remains. Kipling’s war poetry is founded on an intense, unavoidable consciousness of dual responsibility; on the one hand, guilt for causing the deaths of so many young people, and on the other, the imperative need to ensure that their deaths have not been pointless.

Combining the hexameter and pentameter of classical elegiac couplets with English rhyme, and evoking the sinuosities of Latin syntax in the delayed verb 'descended' and the inversion of 'many he found', this taut quatrain has the compressed energy of a classic Latin epigram. The archaic language with its compound adjectives 'wind-bitten and 'eye-pecking', and the ingenious allegory whereby underwater mines laid by submarines become legendary 'eggs of death spawned by invisible hulls', assimilate the steam- ships and exploding mines of modern industrialized warfare into classical elegy, so that the dead men become at once ancient warriors and modern heroes.

so many echoes of John, direct and indirect, in them. For instance, "An Only Son":

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

shows Rudyard’s sympathy with Carrie, who had lost her most treasured possession in John. "The Beginner":

On the first hour of my first day
In the front trench I fell.

reminds us that John was killed in his first action. More difficult to interpret, for no source for this incident can be found, is "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.

Everyone present was eager to see the poet, and became entranced – we all did – by the words of Rudyard who, though not on the Speech List, was called to his feet and spoke without notes briefly and movingly about the bravery of Indian soldiers fighting on European soil. His earnest words silenced the restless feet and impatient murmurings so that you could hear the proverbial pin drop till he sat down to tumultuous applause. (Quoted in Tonie and Valmai Holt p. 173)

I believe it is better to acknowledge that injustices were clearly done in some cases - even if we cannot say which - and to acknowledge that all these men were victims of war. I hope that pardoning these men will finally remove the stigma with which their families have lived for years. See this web-site.

When my spirit came back I heard her whisper in my ear, ' Whether you live or die, or are made different, I am your Mother’. I was very glad. She was glad too. Neither of us wished to lose the other. There is only the one Mother for the one son.

On April 3rd, 1924, the citizens of Saulte St. Marie, Ontario, Canada, wrote to Mr. Kipling stating that they were erecting a Monument to the 350 men of their town who died in the Great War; also saying:

We would deeply appreciate it, if you would write for us a verse or thought to go on the face of the Monument, or indicate something which you would think suitable. If you feel you could comply with our request it would be greatly appreciated by the fathers and mothers of our absent boys.

To this, Mr. Kipling replied on May 8th:

I send you a tentative inscription for the Memorial to which you refer. It is difficult to do these things at a distance, so if it does not express what you want, please say so.

To the Glory of God, the honour of the Armies of the Dominion, and in proud memory of our dead who fell in the Great War, 1914-1918 and whose names are here recorded, this monument was erected by the people of Saulte St. Marie.

From little towns in a far land, we came
To save our honour, and a world aflame;
By little towns in a far land, we sleep
And trust those things we won, to you to keep.

Sincerely yours, R K

Now, my last Epitaph collected, is one specially written, but which was not used, and it is interesting from more than one point of view. In a letter from Mr. Kipling during the correspondence I had with him in November last, (1935) he stated:

There is a further epitaph which I wrote for a Canadian Memorial that I cannot at present place. It runs:

We giving all, gained all. Neither lament us nor praise;
Only, in all things recall It is fear, not death, that slays.

I was able to tell him that he had written it for a War Memorial at Sudbury, Ontario; but unfortunately, it only arrived after the plaque, on which it was intended to be placed, had been cast. Therefore it was not used.

The accepted meaning of 'fathers' is in the general, Establishment/ Government sense of the mismanagement of the conduct of the war. If Kipling did indeed feel that he had, at the least, been economical with the truth about the seriousness of John's myopia, and thus eventually was responsible for his death, this could be a public admission of guilt.

There is no doubt that, even if Rudyard had not used his influence to get John a commission at the outbreak of the war, the boy, determined for his own sake and for his father's sake to get himself into the war, would have done so unaided.

Tell me not, sweet, I am unkind,
That from the nunnery
Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind
To war and arms I fly.

I’ve done epitaphs of sorts, for the war in my book of verse – some of which are naked cribs from the Greek anthologies. [Letters, (Ed. Thomas Pinney) Vol. 6].

Would that swift ships had never been, for so
We ne’er had wept for Sopolis.

In St. Peter's Chapel of the Collegiate Church at Stratford-on- Avon, there is a grey marble tablet, specially designed by Sir George Frampton, called " The Actors' Memorial," and there is on it, the following Epitaph:

We counterfeited once for your disport
Men's joy and sorrow; but our day has passed.
We pray you pardon all where we fell short
Seeing we were your servants to this last.

This Chapel was set apart by the erection of an oak screen and a Reredos, to the memory of the people of Stratford-on-Avon, who were killed in the War; and the Actors' Memorial in it, is opposite that to the 61st (South Midland) Division.

On November 10th, 1928, Major-General Sir Fabian Ware, Permanent Vice-Chairman of the Imperial War Graves Commission, unveiled a panel in the Hall of the Institute of Journalists, 2-4, Tudor Street, London, E.C.4. as a memorial to journalists of the British Empire who fell in the Great War. The bronze panel is let into the oak mantelpiece of the Hall, and inset in this is a wooden cross, from the grave of an unknown soldier. The usual method of disposing of these crosses, when they are replaced by headstones, is to burn them and scatter the ashes upon the graves. Exceptions to this rule are few, but the Imperial War Graves Commission considered the Institute's application for a cross could be entertained, subject to the general suitability of the design for the memorial. Mr. Rudyard Kipling was asked for a short phrase for inscription in the panel, which was only revealed at the unveiling ceremony - and nothing more appropriate could have been given than this Epitaph:

WE HAVE SERVED OUR DAY

Kipling was a member of the Imperial War Graves Commission from soon after its formation in 1917 up until his death. Fabian Ware personally invited him to become a Commissioner. Tonie and Valmai Holt (p. 143) detail the progress of their collaboration and friendship.