That
war is a lamentable ingredient in human experience is an idea which was
established in collective consciousness by the poets of the First
World War, and subsequently reinforced by Frederick Manning in his
extraordinary fictionalized account of his experiences in the trenches
in Her Privates We (1930). British historical writing on the
subject of war has been strongly influenced by Whig, liberal and
pacifistic ideological prejudices against war, guided by assumptions
that war interrupts what Lionel Trilling, in Britain and Her Army: A Military, Political and Social Survey (1970), calls “a “natural” condition of peace.”
However,
Rudyard Kipling's understanding of war tends to dismiss as despicably
illusory the attitudes and responses of liberal-pacifism; his writings
on war address the stark realities of power and conflict. Accordingly,
this paper looks at some of Kipling's short stories following the Great
War, written between 1915 and 1932, from two different, though related
perspectives. First, it examines some essential differences in style
between these fictional works on one hand, and, on the other, the
compilation of record and personal reminiscences that led to the
publication of The Irish Guards in the Great War (1923), a ‘history’
of mammoth proportions. This non-fictional work focuses on the
tribulations of soldiership and directly addresses the subject of war,
but the stories, while retaining war as a theme and a constant point of
reference, cast only elliptical glances at actual battle experience. The
attention shifts from the soldiers to the non-combatant bereaved, from
men in action to people reflecting on that action in tranquillity.
Secondly, the paper examines the perspectives of the women in these
stories, particularly the ambivalence experienced by women who sent
sons, husbands and lover off to war. This was an ambivalence that
Kipling understood well since he himself remained on the home front
during the war and lost his son, John, to it. The intensely drawn
portraits of women in stories such as “Swept and Garnished”, “Mary Postgate”, and “The Gardener”
suggest not only the national propaganda that was working against women
during the First World War, but also, in more psychological terms, a
private warfront-homefront dichotomy within feminine experience in a
world torn by war and governed by patriarchal codes.
Dr. Subhajit Sengupta is an Associate Professor with the Department of English and Culture Studies, University of Burdwan, India. He has an abiding interest in the works of Shakespeare and has worked on the Renaissance. He may be contacted at subhajits2000@gmail.com.