Misread
From Dr T. D. M. Martin Sir: How odd of the reviewer of The Victorian Public School (December 27) to take Kipling's lines • • Then ye contented your souls With the flannelled fools at the wicket or the muddied oafs at the goals tok.. an expression of disenchantment with the ethos of the Cadet Rifle Corps and its like.
If Harriet Waugh will read 'The Islanders' she will See that in fact it expresses exactly the opposite, i.e. it is a diatribe against pre-1914 military unpreparedness, and a rebuke to the flannelled fools and muddied °ars for playing cricket and football when they .11ould, in Kipling's view, have been in a Rifle Corps earning to shoot. Moreover, if Kipling's alleged disenchantment was caused, as she implies, by the slaughter of the 1914-18 war, he must have a remarkable gift of prophecy, since this piece of verse was written in 1902.
T. D. M. Martin Hayfj Pangbourne, Berks
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