The magnificent Micks
Allan Mallinson
THE IRISH GUARDS IN THE GREAT WAR (THE SECOND BATTALION) by Rudyard Kipling, edited by George Webb Spellmount, £24.95, pp. 223 Two outstanding regimental histories have been written this century. This is one of them. In her review of Spellmount's reprint of the first of Kipling's two-volume account of the Irish Guards on the Western Front (Books, 15 February 1997), Juliet Townsend explains why:
The regimental history as a literary form, with its meticulous attention to detail, its concentration on one tiny sector of the Front Ca battalion's field is bounded by its own vision'), its chronicling of every march and counter-march and its bleakly elegant casualty lists, was peculiarly suited to Kipling's genius. The discipline of the form and the fact that his own emotions were engaged but held under rigid control gives this account of one regiment's war exception- al force.
Kipling's own emotions were engaged because his son John, an 18-year-old subaltern serving with the 2nd Battalion, was reported missing at the battle of Loos on 27 September 1915 (not October, as the Foreword has it). And although we know from the War Office correspondence released this month by the Public Records Office that Kipling begged the authorities not to presume his son dead (and thus strike his name from the Army List), he held those emotions under rigid control in this volume too. This is what he writes of John's death:
Here [La Bassee Road] 2nd Lieutenant Clifford was wounded and missing — the body was found later — and 2nd Lieutenant Kipling was wounded and missing.
Nothing more.
As soon as Kipling learned that John was missing in action he and his wife sought news of him from everyone in the battalion they could question. They visited hospitals in France and made enquiries in Germany through the Swedish embassy. The Royal Flying Corps even dropped leaflets over enemy lines asking for any news of the son of 'a world-famous author'. A letter from Sgt Kinnelly in the War Office file (whose contents Kipling would surely have known) described how John was shouting, 'Come on, boys' as he led his guardsmen into the attack. Kinnelly described him as 'the bravest officer I ever saw and he would, I believe, have won the Victoria Cross'. It must have taken extraordinary restraint not to allude to it in such an account, even if he suspected exaggeration.
The book's subtitle is 'His [Kipling's] Forgotten Masterpiece', and few would argue with that now. Yet it was not that well-received at first by 'the Micks', who were expecting something rather more sedate, along the lines of Sir Frederick Ponsonby's first-world-war history of the Grenadiers. Kipling's jauntiness was cer- tainly in contrast to the sometimes overly reverential tone of other histories. For instance, of time the battalion spent out of the line the following year he wrote:
There was a roof to the Officers' mess, and some of the windows did not lack glass. They ate off tables, with newspapers for cloth, and enjoyed the luxury of chairs. The men lived more or less in trenches, but were allowed out, like well-watched poultry, at night or on misty mornings.
And, goodness, how he had an ear for the NCOs' mess: October 1916 was 'an ordi- nary month of the ordinary work demand- ed by the war conditions of the age,' he recounted, and so great were the demands of numerous specialist classes for Lewis- gunners, bombers, intelligence, gas etc, that
Company Commanders, whose men were taken from lawfully ordained parade, swore and complained . .. for the suave, unget- at-able shirker has a much better chance of evading the burdens of mere battalion routine when every one is a 'specialist' . Hence the disgraceful story of the sergeant who demanded whether 'those somethinged spe-shy-lists "could" lend him as much as three wet-nurses, just to make a show with the platoon'.
The other great regimental history is Sir Arthur Bryant's Jackets of Green (The Rifle Brigade). In it he explains the purpose of a regiment within the British system: besides the routinely administrative, it also has to evoke from its members an habitual self-mastery and capacity for com- radely selflessness and obedience which will enable them willingly to sacrifice their bodies and lives in the course of duty.
The 2nd Battalion of the Irish Guards had not long to acquire this state of self- mastery, for it was only officially formed on 15 July 1915, when it was announced that His Majesty the King had been 'graciously pleased to approve' of the formation of two additional battalions of Foot Guards. The battalion therefore had to draw strongly on the spirit which the 1st Battalion had devel- oped in the space of just over a decade since its own late formation, at the request of Queen Victoria, to commemorate the gallantry of the Irish regiments in the Boer war. But no one with experience of the reg- imental system would be surprised that it worked, for past glory still inspires today: Major-General Arthur Denaro, now Com- mandant of Sandhurst, commanded his regiment in the Gulf war and testifies to how he and his officers were strengthened in their resolve before battle by reading the history of their regiment in the Western Desert in the second world war.
The story of John Kipling ends, after painstaking research by the War Graves Commission, with the discovery in 1992 near Loos of the grave of 'an unknown lieutenant of Irish Guards', which new doc- umentary evidence showed to be his. The grave now has a headstone recording the death of a young man whose father had to sign a waiver to allow him to go on active service under-age.
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