I believe that in the future we shall come to feel that Stalin’s
foreign policy, instead of being so diabolically clever as it is claimed to be, has been
merely opportunistic and stupid.
foreign policy, instead of being so diabolically clever as it is claimed to be, has been
merely opportunistic and stupid.
Orwell
Nothing very much, because it is the kind of thing
that happens all the time in all wars. The other is different. I don’t suppose that in telling
it I can make it moving to you who read it, but I ask you to believe that it is moving to
me, as an incident characteristic of the moral atmosphere of a particular moment in time.
One of the recruits who joined us while I was at the barracks was a wild-looking boy
from the back streets of Barcelona. He was ragged and barefooted. He was also extremely
dark (Arab blood, I dare say), and made gestures you do not usually see a European
make; one in particular — the ann outstretched, the palm vertical — was a gesture
characteristic of Indians. One day a bundle of cigars, which you could still buy dirt cheap
at that time, was stolen out of my bunk. Rather foolishly I reported this to the officer, and
one of the scallywags I have already mentioned promptly came forward and said quite
untruly that twenty-five pesetas had been stolen from his bunk. For some reason the
officer instantly decided that the brown-faced boy must be the thief. They were very hard
on stealing in the militia, and in theory people could be shot for it. The wretched boy
allowed himself to be led off to the guardroom to be searched. What most struck me was
that he barely attempted to protest his innocence. In the fatalism of his attitude you could
see the desperate poverty in which he had been bred. The officer ordered him to take his
clothes off. With a humility which was horrible to me he stripped himself naked, and his
clothes were searched. Of course neither the cigars nor the money were there; in fact he
had not stolen them. What was most painful of all was that he seemed no less ashamed
after his innocence had been established. That night I took him to the pictures and gave
him brandy and chocolate. But that too was horrible — I mean the attempt to wipe out an
injury with money. For a few minutes I had half believed him to be a thief, and that could
not be wiped out.
Well, a few weeks later at the front I had trouble with one of the men in my section. By
this time I was a ‘cabo’, or corporal, in command of twelve men. It was static warfare,
horribly cold, and the chief job was getting sentries to stay awake at their posts. One day
a man suddenly refused to go to a certain post, which he said quite truly was exposed to
enemy fire. He was a feeble creature, and I seized hold of him and began to drag him
towards his post. This roused the feelings of the others against me, for Spaniards, I think,
resent being touched more than we do. Instantly I was surrounded by a ring of shouting
men:’ Fascist! Fascist! Let that man go! This isn’t a bourgeois army. Fascist! ’ etc. , etc.
As best I could in my bad Spanish I shouted back that orders had got to be obeyed, and
the row developed into one of those enormous arguments by means of which discipline is
gradually hammered out in revolutionary armies. Some said I was right, others said I was
wrong. But the point is that the one who took my side the most warmly of all was the
brown-faced boy. As soon as he saw what was happening he sprang into the ring and
began passionately defending me. With his strange, wild, Indian gesture he kept
exclaiming, ‘He’s the best corporal we’ve got! ’ (NO HAY CABO COMO EL! ) Later on
he applied for leave to exchange into my section.
Why is this incident touching to me? Because in any normal circumstances it would have
been impossible for good feelings ever to be re-established between this boy and myself.
The implied accusation of theft would not have been made any better, probably
somewhat worse, by my efforts to make amends. One of the effects of safe and civilized
life is an immense oversensitiveness which makes all the primary emotions seem
somewhat disgusting. Generosity is as painful as meanness, gratitude as hateful as
ingratitude. But in Spain in 1936 we were not living in a nonnal time. It was a time when
generous feelings and gestures were easier than they ordinarily are. I could relate a dozen
similar incidents, not really communicable but bound up in my own mind with the special
atmosphere of the time, the shabby clothes and the gay-coloured revolutionary posters,
the universal use of the word ‘comrade’, the anti-Fascist ballads printed on flimsy paper
and sold for a penny, the phrases like ‘international proletarian solidarty’, pathetically
repeated by ignorant men who believed them to mean something. Could you feel friendly
towards somebody, and stick up for him in a quarrel, after you had been ignominiously
searched in his presence for property you were supposed to have stolen from him? No,
you couldn’t; but you might if you had both been through some emotionally widening
experience. That is one of the by-products of revolution, though in this case it was only
the beginnings of a revolution, and obviously foredoomed to failure.
4
The struggle for power between the Spanish Republican parties is an unhappy, far-off
thing which I have no wish to revive at this date. I only mention it in order to say: believe
nothing, or next to nothing, of what you read about internal affairs on the Government
side. It is all, from whatever source, party propaganda — that is to say, lies. The broad
truth about the war is simple enough. The Spanish bourgeoisie saw their chance of
crushing the labour movement, and took it, aided by the Nazis and by the forces of
reaction all over the world. It is doubtful whether more than that will ever be established.
I remember saying once to Arthur Koestler, ‘History stopped in 1936’, at which he
nodded in immediate understanding. We were both thinking of totalitarianism in general,
but more particularly of the Spanish civil war. Early in life I have noticed that no event is
ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper
reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is
implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting,
and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had
fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot
fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London
retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events
that had never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what
happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines’. Yet in a
way, horrible as all this was, it was unimportant. It concerned secondary issues —
namely, the struggle for power between the Comintern and the Spanish left-wing parties,
and the efforts of the Russian Government to prevent revolution in Spain. But the broad
picture of the war which the Spanish Government presented to the world was not
untruthful. The main issues were what it said they were. But as for the Fascists and their
backers, how could they come even as near to the truth as that? How could they possibly
mention their real aims? Their version of the war was pure fantasy, and in the
circumstances it could not have been otherwise.
The only propaganda line open to the Nazis and Fascists was to represent themselves as
Christian patriots saving Spain from a Russian dictatorship. This involved pretending that
life in Government Spain was just one long massacre (VIDE the CATHOLIC HERALD
or the DAILY MAIL — but these were child’s play compared with the Continental Fascist
press), and it involved immensely exaggerating the scale of Russian intervention. Out of
the huge pyramid of lies which the Catholic and reactionary press all over the world built
up, let me take just one point — the presence in Spain of a Russian army. Devout Franco
partisans all believed in this; estimates of its strength went as high as half a million. Now,
there was no Russian army in Spain. There may have been a handful of airmen and other
technicians, a few hundred at the most, but an army there was not. Some thousands of
foreigners who fought in Spain, not to mention millions of Spaniards, were witnesses of
this. Well, their testimony made no impression at all upon the Franco propagandists, not
one of whom had set foot in Government Spain. Simultaneously these people refused
utterly to admit the fact of German or Italian intervention at the same time as the
Gennany and Italian press were openly boasting about the exploits of their’ legionaries’. I
have chosen to mention only one point, but in fact the whole of Fascist propaganda about
the war was on this level.
This kind of thing is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very
concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. After all, the chances are that those
lies, or at any rate similar lies, will pass into history. How will the history of the Spanish
war be written? If Franco remains in power his nominees will write the history books,
and (to stick to my chosen point) that Russian army which never existed will become
historical fact, and schoolchildren will leam about it generations hence. But suppose
Fascism is finally defeated and some kind of democratic government restored in Spain in
the fairly near future; even then, how is the history of the war to be written? What kind of
records will Franco have left behind him? Suppose even that the records kept on the
Government side are recoverable — even so, how is a true history of the war to be written?
For, as I have pointed out already, the Government, also dealt extensively in lies. From
the anti-Fascist angle one could write a broadly truthful history of the war, but it would
be a partisan history, unreliable on every minor point. Yet, after all, some kind of history
will be written, and after those who actually remember the war are dead, it will be
universally accepted. So for all practical purposes the lie will have become truth.
I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to
believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our
own age is the abandonment of the idea that history COULD be truthfully written. In the
past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they
struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each
case they believed that ‘facts’ existed and were more or less discoverable. And in practice
there was always a considerable body of fact which would have been agreed to by almost
everyone. If you look up the history of the last war in, for instance, the
ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA, you will find that a respectable amount of the
material is drawn from German sources. A British and a Gennan historian would disagree
deeply on many things, even on fundamentals, but there would still be that body of, as it
were, neutral fact on which neither would seriously challenge the other. It is just this
common basis of agreement, with its implication that human beings are all one species of
animal, that totalitarianism destroys. Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a
thing as ‘the truth’ exists. There is, for instance, no such thing as ‘Science’. There is only
‘German Science’, ‘Jewish Science’, etc. The implied objective of this line of thought is a
nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future
but THE PAST. If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’ — well,
it never happened. If he says that two and two are five — well, two and two are five. This
prospect frightens me much more than bombs — and after our experiences of the last few
years that is not a frivolous statement.
But is it perhaps childish or morbid to terrify oneself with visions of a totalitarian future?
Before writing off the totalitarian world as a nightmare that can’t come true, just
remember that in 1925 the world of today would have seemed a nightmare that couldn’t
come true. Against that shifting phantasmagoric world in which black may be white
tomorrow and yesterday’s weather can be changed by decree, there are in reality only two
safeguards. One is that however much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing, as it
were, behind your back, and you consequently can’t violate it in ways that impair military
efficiency. The other is that so long as some parts of the earth remain unconquered, the
liberal tradition can be kept alive. Let Fascism, or possibly even a combination of several
Fascisms, conquer the whole world, and those two conditions no longer exist. We in
England underrate the danger of this kind of thing, because our traditions and our past
security have given us a sentimental belief that it all comes right in the end and the thing
you most fear never really happens. Nourished for hundreds of years on a literature in
which Right invariably triumphs in the last chapter, we believe half-instinctively that evil
always defeats itself in the long run. Pacifism, for instance, is founded largely on this
belief. Don’t resist evil, and it will somehow destroy itself. But why should it? What
evidence is there that it does? And what instance is there of a modem industrialized state
collapsing unless conquered from the outside by military force?
Consider for instance the re-institution of slavery. Who could have imagined twenty
years ago that slavery would return to Europe? Well, slavery has been restored under our
noses. The forced-labour camps all over Europe and North Africa where Poles, Russians,
Jews and political prisoners of every race toil at road-making or swamp-draining for their
bare rations, are simple chattle slavery. The most one can say is that the buying and
selling of slaves by individuals is not yet permitted. In other ways — the breaking-up of
families, for instance — the conditions are probably worse than they were on the
American cotton plantations. There is no reason for thinking that this state of affairs will
change while any totalitarian domination endures. We don’t grasp its full implications,
because in our mystical way we feel that a regime founded on slavery MUST collapse.
But it is worth comparing the duration of the slave empires of antiquity with that of any
modem state. Civilizations founded on slavery have lasted for such periods as four
thousand years.
When I think of antiquity, the detail that frightens me is that those hundreds of millions
of slaves on whose backs civilization rested generation after generation have left behind
them no record whatever. We do not even know their names. In the whole of Greek and
Roman history, how many slaves’ names are known to you? I can think of two, or
possibly three. One is Spartacus and the other is Epictetus. Also, in the Roman room at
the British Museum there is a glass jar with the maker’s name inscribed on the bottom,
‘FELIX FECIT’. I have a mental picture of poor Felix (a Gaul with red hair and a metal
collar round his neck), but in fact he may not have been a slave; so there are only two
slaves whose names I definitely know, and probably few people can remember more. The
rest have gone down into utter silence.
5
The backbone of the resistance against Franco was the Spanish working class, especially
the urban trade union members. In the long run — it is important to remember that it is
only in the long run — the working class remains the most reliable enemy of Fascism,
simply because the working-class stands to gain most by a decent reconstruction of
society. Unlike other classes or categories, it can’t be permanently bribed.
To say this is not to idealize the working class. In the long struggle that has followed the
Russian Revolution it is the manual workers who have been defeated, and it is impossible
not to feel that it was their own fault. Time after time, in country after country, the
organized working-class movements have been crushed by open, illegal violence, and
their comrades abroad, linked to themin theoretical solidarity, have simply looked on and
done nothing; and underneath this, secret cause of many betrayals, has lain the fact that
between white and coloured workers there is not even lip-service to solidarity. Who can
believe in the class-conscious international proletariat after the events of the past ten
years? To the British working class the massacre of their comrades in Vienna, Berlin,
Madrid, or wherever it might be seemed less interesting and less important than
yesterday’s football match. Yet this does not alter the fact that the working class will go
on struggling against Fascism after the others have caved in. One feature of the Nazi
conquest of France was the astonishing defections among the intelligentsia, including
some of the left-wing political intelligentsia. The intelligentsia are the people who squeal
loudest against Fascism, and yet a respectable proportion of them collapse into defeatism
when the pinch comes. They are far-sighted enough to see the odds against them, and
moreoever they can be bribed — for it is evident that the Nazis think it worth while to
bribe intellectuals. With the working class it is the other way about. Too ignorant to see
through the trick that is being played on them, they easily swallow the promises of
Fascism, yet sooner or later they always take up the struggle again. They must do so,
because in their own bodies they always discover that the promises of Fascism cannot be
fulfilled. To win over the working class permanently, the Fascists would have to raise the
general standard of living, which they are unable and probably unwilling to do. The
struggle of the working class is like the growth of a plant. The plant is blind and stupid,
but it knows enough to keep pushing upwards towards the light, and it will do this in the
face of endless discouragements. What are the workers struggling for? Simply for the
decent life which they are more and more aware is now technically possible. Their
consciousness of this aim ebbs and flows. In Spain, for a while, people were acting
consciously, moving towards a goal which they wanted to reach and believed they could
reach. It accounted for the curiously buoyant feeling that life in Government Spain had
during the early months of the war. The common people knew in their bones that the
Republic was their friend and Franco was their enemy. They knew that they were in the
right, because they were fighting for something which the world owed them and was able
to give them.
One has to remember this to see the Spanish war in its true perspective. When one thinks
of the cruelty, squalor, and futility of War — and in this particular case of the intrigues, the
persecutions, the lies and the misunderstandings — there is always the temptation to say:
‘One side is as bad as the other. I am neutral’. In practice, however, one cannot be
neutral, and there is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who
wins. Nearly always one stands more or less for progress, the other side more or less for
reaction. The hatred which the Spanish Republic excited in millionaires, dukes, cardinals,
play-boys, Blimps, and what-not would in itself be enough to show one how the land lay.
In essence it was a class war. If it had been won, the cause of the common people
everywhere would have been strengthened. It was lost, and the dividend-drawers all over
the world rubbed their hands. That was the real issue; all else was froth on its surface.
6
The outcome of the Spanish war was settled in London, Paris, Rome, Berlin — at any rate
not in Spain. After the summer of 1937 those with eyes in their heads realized that the
Government could not win the war unless there were some profound change in the
international set-up, and in deciding to fight on Negrin and the others may have been
partly influenced by the expectation that the world war which actually broke out in 1939
was coming in 1938. The much-publicized disunity on the Government side was not a
main cause of defeat. The Government militias were hurriedly raised, ill-armed and
unimaginative in their military outlook, but they would have been the same if complete
political agreement had existed from the start. At the outbreak of war the average Spanish
factory-worker did not even know how to fire a rifle (there had never been universal
conscription in Spain), and the traditional pacifism of the Left was a great handicap. The
thousands of foreigners who served in Spain made good infantry, but there were very few
experts of any kind among them. The Trotskyist thesis that the war could have been won
if the revolution had not been sabotaged was probably false. To nationalize factories,
demolish churches, and issue revolutionary manifestoes would not have made the armies
more efficient. The Fascists won because they were the stronger; they had modem arms
and the others hadn’t. No political strategy could offset that.
The most baffling thing in the Spanish war was the behaviour of the great powers. The
war was actually won for Franco by the Germans and Italians, whose motives were
obvious enough. The motives of France and Britain are less easy to understand. In 1936 it
was clear to everyone that if Britain would only help the Spanish Government, even to
the extent of a few million pounds’ worth of arms, Franco would collapse and German
strategy would be severely dislocated. By that time one did not need to be a clairvoyant
to foresee that war between Britain and Gennany was coming; one could even foretell
within a year or two when it would come. Yet in the most mean, cowardly, hypocritical
way the British ruling class did all they could to hand Spain over to Franco and the Nazis.
Why? Because they were pro-Fascist, was the obvious answer. Undoubtedly they were,
and yet when it came to the final showdown they chose to Stand up to Gennany. It is still
very uncertain what plan they acted on in backing Franco, and they may have had no
clear plan at all. Whether the British ruling class are wicked or merely stupid is one of the
most difficult questions of our time, and at certain moments a very important question.
As to the Russians, their motives in the Spanish war are completely inscrutable. Did they,
as the pinks believed, intervene in Spain in order to defend Democracy and thwart the
Nazis? Then why did they intervene on such a niggardly scale and finally leave Spain in
the lurch? Or did they, as the Catholics maintained, intervene in order to foster revolution
in Spain? Then why did they do all in their power to crush the Spanish revolutionary
movements, defend private property and hand power to the middle class as against the
working class? Or did they, as the Trotskyists suggested, intervene simply in order to
PREVENT a Spanish revolution? Then why not have backed Franco? Indeed, their
actions are most easily explained if one assumes that they were acting on several
contradictory motives.
I believe that in the future we shall come to feel that Stalin’s
foreign policy, instead of being so diabolically clever as it is claimed to be, has been
merely opportunistic and stupid. But at any rate, the Spanish civil war demonstrated that
the Nazis knew what they were doing and their opponents did not. The war was fought at
a low technical level and its major strategy was very simple. That side which had arms
would win. The Nazis and the Italians gave arms to the Spanish Fascist friends, and the
western democracies and the Russians didn’t give arms to those who should have been
their friends. So the Spanish Republic perished, having’ gained what no republic missed’.
Whether it was right, as all left-wingers in other countries undoubtedly did, to encourage
the Spaniards to go on fighting when they could not win is a question hard to answer. I
myself think it was right, because I believe that it is better even from the point of view of
survival to fight and be conquered than to surrender without fighting. The effects on the
grand strategy of the struggle against Fascism cannot be assessed yet. The ragged,
weaponless annies of the Republic held out for two and a half years, which was
undoubtedly longer than their enemies expected. But whether that dislocated the Fascist
timetable, or whether, on the other hand, it merely postponed the major war and gave the
Nazis extra time to get their war machine into trim, is still uncertain.
7
I never think of the Spanish war without two memories coming into my mind. One is of
the hospital ward at Lerida and the rather sad voices of the wounded militiamen singing
some song with a refrain that ended —
UNA RESOLUCION,
LUCHAR HAST’ AL FIN!
Well, they fought to the end all right. For the last eighteen months of the war the
Republican armies must have been fighting almost without cigarettes, and with precious
little food. Even when I left Spain in the middle of 1937, meat and bread were scarce,
tobacco a rarity, coffee and sugar almost unobtainable.
The other memory is of the Italian militiaman who shook my hand in the guardroom, the
day I joined the militia. I wrote about this man at the beginning of my book on the
Spanish war [Homage to Catalonia! , and do not want to repeat what I said there. When I
remember — oh, how vividly! — his shabby uniform and fierce, pathetic, innocent face, the
complex side-issues of the war seem to fade away and I see clearly that there was at any
rate no doubt as to who was in the right. In spite of power politics and journalistic lying,
the central issue of the war was the attempt of people like this to win the decent life
which they knew to be their birthright. It is difficult to think of this particular man’s
probable end without several kinds of bitterness. Since I met him in the Lenin Barracks
he was probably a Trotskyist or an Anarchist, and in the peculiar conditions of our time,
when people of that sort are not killed by the Gestapo they are usually killed by the
G. P. U. But that does not affect the long-tenn issues. This man’s face, which I saw only
for a minute or two, remains with me as a sort of visual reminder of what the war was
really about. He symbolizes for me the flower of the European working class, harried by
the police of all countries, the people who fill the mass graves of the Spanish battlefields
and are now, to the tune of several millions, rotting in forced-labour camps.
When one thinks of all the people who support or have supported Fascism, one stands
amazed at their diversity. What a crew! Think of a programme which at any rate for a
while could bring Hitler, Petain, Montagu Norman, Pavelitch, William Randolph Hearst,
Streicher, Buchman, Ezra Pound, Juan March, Cocteau, Thyssen, Father Coughlin, the
Mufti of Jerusalem, Arnold Lunn, Antonescu, Spengler, Beverley Nichols, Lady
Houston, and Marinetti all into the same boat! But the clue is really very simple. They are
all people with something to lose, or people who long for a hierarchical society and dread
the prospect of a world of free and equal human beings. Behind all the ballyhoo that is
talked about ‘godless’ Russia and the ‘materialism’ of the working class lies the simple
intention of those with money or privileges to cling to them. Ditto, though it contains a
partial truth, with all the talk about the worthlessness of social reconstruction not
accompanied by a ‘change of heart’. The pious ones, from the Pope to the yogis of
California, are great on the’ change of heart’, much more reassuring from their point of
view than a change in the economic system. Petain attributes the fall of France to the
common people’s ‘love of pleasure’. One sees this in its right perspective if one stops to
wonder how much pleasure the ordinary French peasant’s or working-man’s life would
contain compared with Petain’ s own. The damned impertinence of these politicians,
priests, literary men, and what-not who lecture the working-class socialist for his
‘materialism’! All that the working man demands is what these others would consider the
indispensable minimum without which human life cannot be lived at all. Enough to eat,
freedom from the haunting terror of unemployment, the knowledge that your children
will get a fair chance, a bath once a day, clean linen reasonably often, a roof that doesn’t
leak, and short enough working hours to leave you with a little energy when the day is
done. Not one of those who preach against ‘materialism’ would consider life livable
without these things. And how easily that minimum could be attained if we chose to set
our minds to it for only twenty years! To raise the standard of living of the whole world
to that of Britain would not be a greater undertaking than the war we have just fought. I
don’t claim, and I don’t know who does, that that wouldn’t solve anything in itself. It is
merely that privation and brute labour have to be abolished before the real problems of
humanity can be tackled. The major problem of our time is the decay of the belief in
personal immortality, and it cannot be dealt with while the average human being is either
drudging like an ox or shivering in fear of the secret police. How right the working
classes are in their ‘materialism’! How right they are to realize that the belly comes
before the soul, not in the scale of values but in point of time! Understand that, and the
long horror that we are enduring becomes at least intelligible. All the considerations are
likely to make one falter — the siren voices of a Petain or of a Gandhi, the inescapable fact
that in order to fight one has to degrade oneself, the equivocal moral position of Britain,
with its democratic phrases and its coolie empire, the sinister development of Soviet
Russia, the squalid farce of left-wing politics — all this fades away and one sees only the
struggle of the gradually awakening common people against the lords of property and
their hired liars and bumsuckers. The question is very simple. Shall people like that
Italian soldier be allowed to live the decent, fully human life which is now technically
achievable, or shan’t they? Shall the common man be pushed back into the mud, or shall
he not? I myself believe, perhaps on insufficient grounds, that the common man will win
his light sooner or later, but I want it to be sooner and not later — some time within the
next hundred years, say, and not some time within the next ten thousand years. That was
the real issue of the Spanish war, and of the last war, and perhaps of other wars yet to
come.
I never saw the Italian militiaman again, nor did I ever learn his name. It can be taken as
quite certain that he is dead. Nearly two years later, when the war was visibly lost, I
wrote these verses in his memory:
The Italian soldier shook my hand
Beside the guard-room table;
The strong hand and the subtle hand
Whose palms are only able
To meet within the sound of guns,
But oh! what peace I knew then
In gazing on his battered face
Purer than any woman’s!
For the flyblown words that make me spew
Still in his ears were holy,
And he was born knowing what I had learned
Out of books and slowly.
The treacherous guns had told their tale
And we both had bought it,
But my gold brick was made of gold —
Oh! who ever would have thought it?
Good luck go with you, Italian soldier!
But luck is not for the brave;
What would the world give back to you?
Always less than you gave.
Between the shadow and the ghost,
Between the white and the red,
Between the bullet and the lie,
Where would you hide your head?
For where is Manuel Gonzalez,
And where is Pedro Aguilar,
And where is Ramon Fenellosa?
The earthworms know where they are.
Your name and your deeds were forgotten
Before your bones were dry,
And the lie that slew you is buried
Under a deeper lie;
But the thing that I saw in your face
No power can disinherit:
No bomb that ever burst
Shatters the crystal spirit.
RUDYARD KIPLING (1942)
It was a pity that Mr. Eliot should be so much on the defensive in the long essay with
which he prefaces this selection of Kipling’s poetry, but it was not to be avoided, because
before one can even speak about Kipling one has to clear away a legend that has been
created by two sets of people who have not read his works. Kipling is in the peculiar
position of having been a byword for fifty years. During live literary generations every
enlightened person has despised him, and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those
enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there. Mr. Eliot never
satisfactorily explains this fact, because in answering the shallow and familiar charge that
Kipling is a ‘Fascist’, he falls into the opposite error of defending him where he is not
defensible. It is no use pretending that Kipling’s view of life, as a whole, can be accepted
or even forgiven by any civilized person. It is no use claiming, for instance, that when
Kipling describes a British soldier beating a ‘nigger’ with a cleaning rod in order to get
money out of him, he is acting merely as a reporter and does not necessarily approve
what he describes. There is not the slightest sign anywhere in Kipling’s work that he
disapproves of that kind of conduct — on the contrary, there is a definite strain of sadism
in him, over and above the brutality which a writer of that type has to have. Kipling is a
jingo imperialist, he is morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting. It is better to start
by admitting that, and then to try to find out why it is that he survives while the refined
people who have sniggered at him seem to wear so badly.
And yet the ‘Fascist’ charge has to be answered, because the first clue to any
understanding of Kipling, morally or politically, is the fact that he was NOT a Fascist. He
was further from being one than the most humane or the most ‘progressive’ person is able
to be nowadays. An interesting instance of the way in which quotations are parroted to
and fro without any attempt to look up their context or discover their meaning is the line
from ‘Recessional’, ‘Lesser breeds without the Law’. This line is always good for a
snigger in pansy-left circles. It is assumed as a matter of course that the ‘lesser breeds’
are ‘natives’, and a mental picture is called up of some pukka sahib in a pith helmet
kicking a coolie. In its context the sense of the line is almost the exact opposite of this.
The phrase ‘lesser breeds’ refers almost certainly to the Germans, and especially the pan-
German writers, who are ‘without the Law’ in the sense of being lawless, not in the sense
of being powerless. The whole poem, conventionally thought of as an orgy of boasting, is
a denunciation of power politics, British as well as German. Two stanzas are worth
quoting (I am quoting this as politics, not as poetry):
If, drunk with sight of power, we loose Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe, Such
boastings as the Gentiles use, Or lesser breeds without the Law — Lord God of hosts, be
with us yet, Lest we forget — lest we forget!
For heathen heart that puts her trust In reeking tube and iron shard, All valiant dust that
builds on dust, And guarding, calls not Thee to guard, For frantic boast and foolish
word — Thy mercy on Thy People, Lord!
Much of Kipling’s phraseology is taken from the Bible, and no doubt in the second stanza
he had in mind the text from Psalm CXXVII: ‘Except the lord build the house, they
labour in vain that build it; except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in
vain. ’ It is not a text that makes much impression on the post-Hitler mind. No one, in our
time, believes in any sanction greater than military power; no one believes that it is
possible to overcome force except by greater force. There is no ‘Law’, there is only
power. I am not saying that that is a true belief, merely that it is the belief which all
modem men do actually hold. Those who pretend otherwise are either intellectual
cowards, or power-worshippers under a thin disguise, or have simply not caught up with
the age they are living in. Kipling’s outlook is prefascist. He still believes that pride
comes before a fall and that the gods punish HUBRIS. He does not foresee the tank, the
bombing plane, the radio and the secret police, or their psychological results.
But in saying this, does not one unsay what I said above about Kipling’s jingoism and
brutality? No, one is merely saying that the nineteenth-century imperialist outlook and
the modem gangster outlook are two different things. Kipling belongs very definitely to
the period 1885-1902. The Great War and its aftennath embittered him, but he shows
little sign of having learned anything from any event later than the Boer War. He was the
prophet of British Imperialism in its expansionist phase (even more than his poems, his
solitary novel, THE LIGHT THAT FAILED, gives you the atmosphere of that time) and
also the unofficial historian of the British Anny, the old mercenary army which began to
change its shape in 1914. All his confidence, his bouncing vulgar vitality, sprang out of
limitations which no Fascist or near-Fascist shares.
Kipling spent the later part of his life in sulking, and no doubt it was political
disappointment rather than literary vanity that account for this. Somehow history had not
gone according to plan. After the greatest victory she had ever known, Britain was a
lesser world power than before, and Kipling was quite acute enough to see this. The
virtue had gone out of the classes he idealized, the young were hedonistic or disaffected,
the desire to paint the map red had evaporated. He could not understand what was
happening, because he had never had any grasp of the economic forces underlying
imperial expansion. It is notable that Kipling does not seem to realize, any more than the
average soldier or colonial administrator, that an empire is primarily a money-making
concern. Imperialism as he sees it is a sort of forcible evangelizing. You turn a Gatling
gun on a mob of unarmed ‘natives’, and then you establish ‘the Law’, which includes
roads, railways and a court-house. He could not foresee, therefore, that the same motives
which brought the Empire into existence would end by destroying it. It was the same
motive, for example, that caused the Malayan jungles to be cleared for rubber estates, and
which now causes those estates to be handed over intact to the Japanese. The modern
totalitarians know what they are doing, and the nineteenth-century English did not know
what they were doing. Both attitudes have their advantages, but Kipling was never able to
move forward from one into the other. His outlook, allowing for the fact that after all he
was an artist, was that of the salaried bureaucrat who despises the ‘box-wallah’ and often
lives a lifetime without realizing that the ‘box-wallah’ calls the tune.
But because he identifies himself with the official class, he does possess one thing which
‘enlightened’ people seldom or never possess, and that is a sense of responsibility. The
middle-class Left hate him for this quite as much as for his cruelty and vulgarity. All left-
wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they
make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy.
They have internationalist aims, and at the same time they struggle to keep up a standard
of life with which those aims are incompatible. We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies,
and those of us who are ‘enlightened’ all maintain that those coolies ought to be set free;
but our standard of living, and hence our ‘enlightenment’, demands that the robbery shall
continue. A humanitarian is always a hypocrite, and Kipling’s understanding of this is
perhaps the central secret of his power to create telling phrases. It would be difficult to hit
off the one-eyed pacifism of the English in fewer words than in the phrase, ‘making mock
of uniforms that guard you while you sleep’. It is true that Kipling does not understand
the economic aspect of the relationship between the highbrow and the blimp. He does not
see that the map is painted red chiefly in order that the coolie may be exploited. Instead
of the coolie he sees the Indian Civil Servant; but even on that plane his grasp of
function, of who protects whom, is very sound. He sees clearly that men can only be
highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed
them.
How far does Kipling really identify himself with the administrators, soldiers and
engineers whose praises he sings? Not so completely as is sometimes assumed. He had
travelled very widely while he was still a young man, he had grown up with a brilliant
mind in mainly philistine surroundings, and some streak in him that may have been partly
neurotic led him to prefer the active man to the sensitive man. The nineteenth-century
Anglo-Indians, to name the least sympathetic of his idols, were at any rate people who
did things. It may be that all that they did was evil, but they changed the face of the earth
(it is instructive to look at a map of Asia and compare the railway system of India with
that of the surrounding countries), whereas they could have achieved nothing, could not
have maintained themselves in power for a single week, if the nonnal Anglo-Indian
outlook had been that of, say, E. M. Forster. Tawdry and shallow though it is, Kipling’s is
the only literary picture that we possess of nineteenth-century Anglo-India, and he could
only make it because he was just coarse enough to be able to exist and keep his mouth
shut in clubs and regimental messes. But he did not greatly resemble the people he
admired. I know from several private sources that many of the Anglo-Indians who were
Kipling’s contemporaries did not like or approve of him. They said, no doubt truly, that
he knew nothing about India, and on the other hand, he was from their point of view too
much of a highbrow. While in India he tended to mix with ‘the wrong’ people, and
because of his dark complexion he was wrongly suspected of having a streak of Asiatic
blood. Much in his development is traceable to his having been bom in India and having
left school early. With a slightly different background he might have been a good novelist
or a superlative writer of music-hall songs. But how true is it that he was a vulgar
flagwaver, a sort of publicity agent for Cecil Rhodes? It is true, but it is not true that he
was a yes-man or a time-server. After his early days, if then, he never courted public
opinion. Mr. Eliot says that what is held against him is that he expressed unpopular views
in a popular style. This narrows the issue by assuming that ‘unpopular’ means unpopular
with the intelligentsia, but it is a fact that Kipling’s ‘message’ was one that the big public
did not want, and, indeed, has never accepted. The mass of the people, in the nineties as
now, were anti-militarist, bored by the Empire, and only unconsciously patriotic.
Kipling’s official admirers are and were the ‘service’ middle class, the people who read
BLACKWOOD’S. In the stupid early years of this century, the blimps, having at last
discovered someone who could be called a poet and who was on their side, set Kipling on
a pedestal, and some of his more sententious poems, such as ‘If, were given almost
biblical status. But it is doubtful whether the blimps have ever read him with attention,
any more than they have read the Bible. Much of what he says they could not possibly
approve. Few people who have criticized England from the inside have said bitterer
things about her than this gutter patriot. As a rule it is the British working class that he is
attacking, but not always. That phrase about ‘the flannelled fools at the wicket and the
muddied oafs at the goal’ sticks like an arrow to this day, and it is aimed at the Eton and
Harrow match as well as the Cup-Tie Final. Some of the verses he wrote about the Boer
War have a curiously modem ring, so far as their subject-matter goes. ‘Stellenbosch’,
which must have been written about 1902, sums up what every intelligent infantry officer
was saying in 1918, or is saying now, for that matter.
Kipling’s romantic ideas about England and the Empire might not have mattered if he
could have held them without having the class-prejudices which at that time went with
them. If one examines his best and most representative work, his soldier poems,
especially BARRACK-ROOM BALLADS, one notices that what more than anything
else spoils them is an underlying air of patronage. Kipling idealizes the anny officer,
especially the junior officer, and that to an idiotic extent, but the private soldier, though
lovable and romantic, has to be a comic. He is always made to speak in a sort of stylized
Cockney, not very broad but with all the aitches and final “g’s” carefully omitted. Very
often the result is as embarrassing as the humorous recitation at a church social. And this
accounts for the curious fact that one can often improve Kipling’s poems, make them less
facetious and less blatant, by simply going through them and transplanting them from
Cockney into standard speech. This is especially true of his refrains, which often have a
truly lyrical quality. Two examples will do (one is about a funeral and the other about a
wedding):
So it’s knock out your pipes and follow me! And it’s finish up your swipes and follow
me! Oh, hark to the big drum calling, Follow me — follow me home!
and again:
Cheer for the Sergeant’s wedding — Give them one cheer more! Grey gun-horses in the
lando, And a rogue is married to a whore!
Here I have restored the aitches, etc. Kipling ought to have known better. He ought to
have seen that the two closing lines of the first of these stanzas are very beautiful lines,
and that ought to have overriden his impulse to make fun of a working-man’s accent. In
the ancient ballads the lord and the peasant speak the same language. This is impossible
to Kipling, who is looking down a distorting class-perspective, and by a piece of poetic
justice one of his best lines is spoiled — for ‘follow me ‘ome’ is much uglier than ‘follow
me home’. But even where it makes no difference musically the facetiousness of his stage
Cockney dialect is irritating. However, he is more often quoted aloud than read on the
printed page, and most people instinctively make the necessary alterations when they
quote him.
Can one imagine any private soldier, in the nineties or now, reading BARRACK-ROOM
BALLADS and feeling that here was a writer who spoke for him? It is very hard to do so.
Any soldier capable of reading a book of verse would notice at once that Kipling is
almost unconscious of the class war that goes on in an anny as much as elsewhere. It is
not only that he thinks the soldier comic, but that he thinks him patriotic, feudal, a ready
admirer of his officers and proud to be a soldier of the Queen. Of course that is partly
true, or battles could not be fought, but ‘What have I done for thee, England, my
England? ’ is essentially a middle-class query. Almost any working man would follow it
up immediately with ‘What has England done for me? ’ In so far as Kipling grasps this, he
simply sets it down to ‘the intense selfishness of the lower classes’ (his own phrase).
When he is writing not of British but of ‘loyal’ Indians he carries the ‘Salaam, sahib’
motif to sometimes disgusting lengths. Yet it remains true that he has far more interest in
the common soldier, far more anxiety that he shall get a fair deal, than most of the
‘liberals’ of his day or our own. He sees that the soldier is neglected, meanly underpaid
and hypocritically despised by the people whose incomes he safeguards. ‘I came to
realize’, he says in his posthumous memoirs, ‘the bare horrors of the private’s life, and
the unnecessary torments he endured’. He is accused of glorifying war, and perhaps he
does so, but not in the usual manner, by pretending that war is a sort of football match.
Like most people capable of writing battle poetry, Kipling had never been in battle, but
his vision of war is realistic. He knows that bullets hurt, that under fire everyone is
terrified, that the ordinary soldier never knows what the war is about or what is
happening except in his own corner of the battlefield, and that British troops, like other
troops, frequently run away:
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 stop 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!
Modernize the style of this, and it might have come out of one of the debunking war
books of the nineteen-twenties. Or again:
An’ now the hugly bullets come peckin’ through the dust, An’ no one wants to face ‘em,
but every beggar must; So, like a man in irons, which isn’t glad to go, They moves ‘em
off by companies uncommon stiff an’ slow.
Compare this with:
Forward the Light Brigade! Was there a man dismayed? No! though the soldier knew
Someone had blundered.
that happens all the time in all wars. The other is different. I don’t suppose that in telling
it I can make it moving to you who read it, but I ask you to believe that it is moving to
me, as an incident characteristic of the moral atmosphere of a particular moment in time.
One of the recruits who joined us while I was at the barracks was a wild-looking boy
from the back streets of Barcelona. He was ragged and barefooted. He was also extremely
dark (Arab blood, I dare say), and made gestures you do not usually see a European
make; one in particular — the ann outstretched, the palm vertical — was a gesture
characteristic of Indians. One day a bundle of cigars, which you could still buy dirt cheap
at that time, was stolen out of my bunk. Rather foolishly I reported this to the officer, and
one of the scallywags I have already mentioned promptly came forward and said quite
untruly that twenty-five pesetas had been stolen from his bunk. For some reason the
officer instantly decided that the brown-faced boy must be the thief. They were very hard
on stealing in the militia, and in theory people could be shot for it. The wretched boy
allowed himself to be led off to the guardroom to be searched. What most struck me was
that he barely attempted to protest his innocence. In the fatalism of his attitude you could
see the desperate poverty in which he had been bred. The officer ordered him to take his
clothes off. With a humility which was horrible to me he stripped himself naked, and his
clothes were searched. Of course neither the cigars nor the money were there; in fact he
had not stolen them. What was most painful of all was that he seemed no less ashamed
after his innocence had been established. That night I took him to the pictures and gave
him brandy and chocolate. But that too was horrible — I mean the attempt to wipe out an
injury with money. For a few minutes I had half believed him to be a thief, and that could
not be wiped out.
Well, a few weeks later at the front I had trouble with one of the men in my section. By
this time I was a ‘cabo’, or corporal, in command of twelve men. It was static warfare,
horribly cold, and the chief job was getting sentries to stay awake at their posts. One day
a man suddenly refused to go to a certain post, which he said quite truly was exposed to
enemy fire. He was a feeble creature, and I seized hold of him and began to drag him
towards his post. This roused the feelings of the others against me, for Spaniards, I think,
resent being touched more than we do. Instantly I was surrounded by a ring of shouting
men:’ Fascist! Fascist! Let that man go! This isn’t a bourgeois army. Fascist! ’ etc. , etc.
As best I could in my bad Spanish I shouted back that orders had got to be obeyed, and
the row developed into one of those enormous arguments by means of which discipline is
gradually hammered out in revolutionary armies. Some said I was right, others said I was
wrong. But the point is that the one who took my side the most warmly of all was the
brown-faced boy. As soon as he saw what was happening he sprang into the ring and
began passionately defending me. With his strange, wild, Indian gesture he kept
exclaiming, ‘He’s the best corporal we’ve got! ’ (NO HAY CABO COMO EL! ) Later on
he applied for leave to exchange into my section.
Why is this incident touching to me? Because in any normal circumstances it would have
been impossible for good feelings ever to be re-established between this boy and myself.
The implied accusation of theft would not have been made any better, probably
somewhat worse, by my efforts to make amends. One of the effects of safe and civilized
life is an immense oversensitiveness which makes all the primary emotions seem
somewhat disgusting. Generosity is as painful as meanness, gratitude as hateful as
ingratitude. But in Spain in 1936 we were not living in a nonnal time. It was a time when
generous feelings and gestures were easier than they ordinarily are. I could relate a dozen
similar incidents, not really communicable but bound up in my own mind with the special
atmosphere of the time, the shabby clothes and the gay-coloured revolutionary posters,
the universal use of the word ‘comrade’, the anti-Fascist ballads printed on flimsy paper
and sold for a penny, the phrases like ‘international proletarian solidarty’, pathetically
repeated by ignorant men who believed them to mean something. Could you feel friendly
towards somebody, and stick up for him in a quarrel, after you had been ignominiously
searched in his presence for property you were supposed to have stolen from him? No,
you couldn’t; but you might if you had both been through some emotionally widening
experience. That is one of the by-products of revolution, though in this case it was only
the beginnings of a revolution, and obviously foredoomed to failure.
4
The struggle for power between the Spanish Republican parties is an unhappy, far-off
thing which I have no wish to revive at this date. I only mention it in order to say: believe
nothing, or next to nothing, of what you read about internal affairs on the Government
side. It is all, from whatever source, party propaganda — that is to say, lies. The broad
truth about the war is simple enough. The Spanish bourgeoisie saw their chance of
crushing the labour movement, and took it, aided by the Nazis and by the forces of
reaction all over the world. It is doubtful whether more than that will ever be established.
I remember saying once to Arthur Koestler, ‘History stopped in 1936’, at which he
nodded in immediate understanding. We were both thinking of totalitarianism in general,
but more particularly of the Spanish civil war. Early in life I have noticed that no event is
ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper
reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is
implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting,
and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had
fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot
fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London
retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events
that had never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what
happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines’. Yet in a
way, horrible as all this was, it was unimportant. It concerned secondary issues —
namely, the struggle for power between the Comintern and the Spanish left-wing parties,
and the efforts of the Russian Government to prevent revolution in Spain. But the broad
picture of the war which the Spanish Government presented to the world was not
untruthful. The main issues were what it said they were. But as for the Fascists and their
backers, how could they come even as near to the truth as that? How could they possibly
mention their real aims? Their version of the war was pure fantasy, and in the
circumstances it could not have been otherwise.
The only propaganda line open to the Nazis and Fascists was to represent themselves as
Christian patriots saving Spain from a Russian dictatorship. This involved pretending that
life in Government Spain was just one long massacre (VIDE the CATHOLIC HERALD
or the DAILY MAIL — but these were child’s play compared with the Continental Fascist
press), and it involved immensely exaggerating the scale of Russian intervention. Out of
the huge pyramid of lies which the Catholic and reactionary press all over the world built
up, let me take just one point — the presence in Spain of a Russian army. Devout Franco
partisans all believed in this; estimates of its strength went as high as half a million. Now,
there was no Russian army in Spain. There may have been a handful of airmen and other
technicians, a few hundred at the most, but an army there was not. Some thousands of
foreigners who fought in Spain, not to mention millions of Spaniards, were witnesses of
this. Well, their testimony made no impression at all upon the Franco propagandists, not
one of whom had set foot in Government Spain. Simultaneously these people refused
utterly to admit the fact of German or Italian intervention at the same time as the
Gennany and Italian press were openly boasting about the exploits of their’ legionaries’. I
have chosen to mention only one point, but in fact the whole of Fascist propaganda about
the war was on this level.
This kind of thing is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very
concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. After all, the chances are that those
lies, or at any rate similar lies, will pass into history. How will the history of the Spanish
war be written? If Franco remains in power his nominees will write the history books,
and (to stick to my chosen point) that Russian army which never existed will become
historical fact, and schoolchildren will leam about it generations hence. But suppose
Fascism is finally defeated and some kind of democratic government restored in Spain in
the fairly near future; even then, how is the history of the war to be written? What kind of
records will Franco have left behind him? Suppose even that the records kept on the
Government side are recoverable — even so, how is a true history of the war to be written?
For, as I have pointed out already, the Government, also dealt extensively in lies. From
the anti-Fascist angle one could write a broadly truthful history of the war, but it would
be a partisan history, unreliable on every minor point. Yet, after all, some kind of history
will be written, and after those who actually remember the war are dead, it will be
universally accepted. So for all practical purposes the lie will have become truth.
I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to
believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our
own age is the abandonment of the idea that history COULD be truthfully written. In the
past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they
struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each
case they believed that ‘facts’ existed and were more or less discoverable. And in practice
there was always a considerable body of fact which would have been agreed to by almost
everyone. If you look up the history of the last war in, for instance, the
ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA, you will find that a respectable amount of the
material is drawn from German sources. A British and a Gennan historian would disagree
deeply on many things, even on fundamentals, but there would still be that body of, as it
were, neutral fact on which neither would seriously challenge the other. It is just this
common basis of agreement, with its implication that human beings are all one species of
animal, that totalitarianism destroys. Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a
thing as ‘the truth’ exists. There is, for instance, no such thing as ‘Science’. There is only
‘German Science’, ‘Jewish Science’, etc. The implied objective of this line of thought is a
nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future
but THE PAST. If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’ — well,
it never happened. If he says that two and two are five — well, two and two are five. This
prospect frightens me much more than bombs — and after our experiences of the last few
years that is not a frivolous statement.
But is it perhaps childish or morbid to terrify oneself with visions of a totalitarian future?
Before writing off the totalitarian world as a nightmare that can’t come true, just
remember that in 1925 the world of today would have seemed a nightmare that couldn’t
come true. Against that shifting phantasmagoric world in which black may be white
tomorrow and yesterday’s weather can be changed by decree, there are in reality only two
safeguards. One is that however much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing, as it
were, behind your back, and you consequently can’t violate it in ways that impair military
efficiency. The other is that so long as some parts of the earth remain unconquered, the
liberal tradition can be kept alive. Let Fascism, or possibly even a combination of several
Fascisms, conquer the whole world, and those two conditions no longer exist. We in
England underrate the danger of this kind of thing, because our traditions and our past
security have given us a sentimental belief that it all comes right in the end and the thing
you most fear never really happens. Nourished for hundreds of years on a literature in
which Right invariably triumphs in the last chapter, we believe half-instinctively that evil
always defeats itself in the long run. Pacifism, for instance, is founded largely on this
belief. Don’t resist evil, and it will somehow destroy itself. But why should it? What
evidence is there that it does? And what instance is there of a modem industrialized state
collapsing unless conquered from the outside by military force?
Consider for instance the re-institution of slavery. Who could have imagined twenty
years ago that slavery would return to Europe? Well, slavery has been restored under our
noses. The forced-labour camps all over Europe and North Africa where Poles, Russians,
Jews and political prisoners of every race toil at road-making or swamp-draining for their
bare rations, are simple chattle slavery. The most one can say is that the buying and
selling of slaves by individuals is not yet permitted. In other ways — the breaking-up of
families, for instance — the conditions are probably worse than they were on the
American cotton plantations. There is no reason for thinking that this state of affairs will
change while any totalitarian domination endures. We don’t grasp its full implications,
because in our mystical way we feel that a regime founded on slavery MUST collapse.
But it is worth comparing the duration of the slave empires of antiquity with that of any
modem state. Civilizations founded on slavery have lasted for such periods as four
thousand years.
When I think of antiquity, the detail that frightens me is that those hundreds of millions
of slaves on whose backs civilization rested generation after generation have left behind
them no record whatever. We do not even know their names. In the whole of Greek and
Roman history, how many slaves’ names are known to you? I can think of two, or
possibly three. One is Spartacus and the other is Epictetus. Also, in the Roman room at
the British Museum there is a glass jar with the maker’s name inscribed on the bottom,
‘FELIX FECIT’. I have a mental picture of poor Felix (a Gaul with red hair and a metal
collar round his neck), but in fact he may not have been a slave; so there are only two
slaves whose names I definitely know, and probably few people can remember more. The
rest have gone down into utter silence.
5
The backbone of the resistance against Franco was the Spanish working class, especially
the urban trade union members. In the long run — it is important to remember that it is
only in the long run — the working class remains the most reliable enemy of Fascism,
simply because the working-class stands to gain most by a decent reconstruction of
society. Unlike other classes or categories, it can’t be permanently bribed.
To say this is not to idealize the working class. In the long struggle that has followed the
Russian Revolution it is the manual workers who have been defeated, and it is impossible
not to feel that it was their own fault. Time after time, in country after country, the
organized working-class movements have been crushed by open, illegal violence, and
their comrades abroad, linked to themin theoretical solidarity, have simply looked on and
done nothing; and underneath this, secret cause of many betrayals, has lain the fact that
between white and coloured workers there is not even lip-service to solidarity. Who can
believe in the class-conscious international proletariat after the events of the past ten
years? To the British working class the massacre of their comrades in Vienna, Berlin,
Madrid, or wherever it might be seemed less interesting and less important than
yesterday’s football match. Yet this does not alter the fact that the working class will go
on struggling against Fascism after the others have caved in. One feature of the Nazi
conquest of France was the astonishing defections among the intelligentsia, including
some of the left-wing political intelligentsia. The intelligentsia are the people who squeal
loudest against Fascism, and yet a respectable proportion of them collapse into defeatism
when the pinch comes. They are far-sighted enough to see the odds against them, and
moreoever they can be bribed — for it is evident that the Nazis think it worth while to
bribe intellectuals. With the working class it is the other way about. Too ignorant to see
through the trick that is being played on them, they easily swallow the promises of
Fascism, yet sooner or later they always take up the struggle again. They must do so,
because in their own bodies they always discover that the promises of Fascism cannot be
fulfilled. To win over the working class permanently, the Fascists would have to raise the
general standard of living, which they are unable and probably unwilling to do. The
struggle of the working class is like the growth of a plant. The plant is blind and stupid,
but it knows enough to keep pushing upwards towards the light, and it will do this in the
face of endless discouragements. What are the workers struggling for? Simply for the
decent life which they are more and more aware is now technically possible. Their
consciousness of this aim ebbs and flows. In Spain, for a while, people were acting
consciously, moving towards a goal which they wanted to reach and believed they could
reach. It accounted for the curiously buoyant feeling that life in Government Spain had
during the early months of the war. The common people knew in their bones that the
Republic was their friend and Franco was their enemy. They knew that they were in the
right, because they were fighting for something which the world owed them and was able
to give them.
One has to remember this to see the Spanish war in its true perspective. When one thinks
of the cruelty, squalor, and futility of War — and in this particular case of the intrigues, the
persecutions, the lies and the misunderstandings — there is always the temptation to say:
‘One side is as bad as the other. I am neutral’. In practice, however, one cannot be
neutral, and there is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who
wins. Nearly always one stands more or less for progress, the other side more or less for
reaction. The hatred which the Spanish Republic excited in millionaires, dukes, cardinals,
play-boys, Blimps, and what-not would in itself be enough to show one how the land lay.
In essence it was a class war. If it had been won, the cause of the common people
everywhere would have been strengthened. It was lost, and the dividend-drawers all over
the world rubbed their hands. That was the real issue; all else was froth on its surface.
6
The outcome of the Spanish war was settled in London, Paris, Rome, Berlin — at any rate
not in Spain. After the summer of 1937 those with eyes in their heads realized that the
Government could not win the war unless there were some profound change in the
international set-up, and in deciding to fight on Negrin and the others may have been
partly influenced by the expectation that the world war which actually broke out in 1939
was coming in 1938. The much-publicized disunity on the Government side was not a
main cause of defeat. The Government militias were hurriedly raised, ill-armed and
unimaginative in their military outlook, but they would have been the same if complete
political agreement had existed from the start. At the outbreak of war the average Spanish
factory-worker did not even know how to fire a rifle (there had never been universal
conscription in Spain), and the traditional pacifism of the Left was a great handicap. The
thousands of foreigners who served in Spain made good infantry, but there were very few
experts of any kind among them. The Trotskyist thesis that the war could have been won
if the revolution had not been sabotaged was probably false. To nationalize factories,
demolish churches, and issue revolutionary manifestoes would not have made the armies
more efficient. The Fascists won because they were the stronger; they had modem arms
and the others hadn’t. No political strategy could offset that.
The most baffling thing in the Spanish war was the behaviour of the great powers. The
war was actually won for Franco by the Germans and Italians, whose motives were
obvious enough. The motives of France and Britain are less easy to understand. In 1936 it
was clear to everyone that if Britain would only help the Spanish Government, even to
the extent of a few million pounds’ worth of arms, Franco would collapse and German
strategy would be severely dislocated. By that time one did not need to be a clairvoyant
to foresee that war between Britain and Gennany was coming; one could even foretell
within a year or two when it would come. Yet in the most mean, cowardly, hypocritical
way the British ruling class did all they could to hand Spain over to Franco and the Nazis.
Why? Because they were pro-Fascist, was the obvious answer. Undoubtedly they were,
and yet when it came to the final showdown they chose to Stand up to Gennany. It is still
very uncertain what plan they acted on in backing Franco, and they may have had no
clear plan at all. Whether the British ruling class are wicked or merely stupid is one of the
most difficult questions of our time, and at certain moments a very important question.
As to the Russians, their motives in the Spanish war are completely inscrutable. Did they,
as the pinks believed, intervene in Spain in order to defend Democracy and thwart the
Nazis? Then why did they intervene on such a niggardly scale and finally leave Spain in
the lurch? Or did they, as the Catholics maintained, intervene in order to foster revolution
in Spain? Then why did they do all in their power to crush the Spanish revolutionary
movements, defend private property and hand power to the middle class as against the
working class? Or did they, as the Trotskyists suggested, intervene simply in order to
PREVENT a Spanish revolution? Then why not have backed Franco? Indeed, their
actions are most easily explained if one assumes that they were acting on several
contradictory motives.
I believe that in the future we shall come to feel that Stalin’s
foreign policy, instead of being so diabolically clever as it is claimed to be, has been
merely opportunistic and stupid. But at any rate, the Spanish civil war demonstrated that
the Nazis knew what they were doing and their opponents did not. The war was fought at
a low technical level and its major strategy was very simple. That side which had arms
would win. The Nazis and the Italians gave arms to the Spanish Fascist friends, and the
western democracies and the Russians didn’t give arms to those who should have been
their friends. So the Spanish Republic perished, having’ gained what no republic missed’.
Whether it was right, as all left-wingers in other countries undoubtedly did, to encourage
the Spaniards to go on fighting when they could not win is a question hard to answer. I
myself think it was right, because I believe that it is better even from the point of view of
survival to fight and be conquered than to surrender without fighting. The effects on the
grand strategy of the struggle against Fascism cannot be assessed yet. The ragged,
weaponless annies of the Republic held out for two and a half years, which was
undoubtedly longer than their enemies expected. But whether that dislocated the Fascist
timetable, or whether, on the other hand, it merely postponed the major war and gave the
Nazis extra time to get their war machine into trim, is still uncertain.
7
I never think of the Spanish war without two memories coming into my mind. One is of
the hospital ward at Lerida and the rather sad voices of the wounded militiamen singing
some song with a refrain that ended —
UNA RESOLUCION,
LUCHAR HAST’ AL FIN!
Well, they fought to the end all right. For the last eighteen months of the war the
Republican armies must have been fighting almost without cigarettes, and with precious
little food. Even when I left Spain in the middle of 1937, meat and bread were scarce,
tobacco a rarity, coffee and sugar almost unobtainable.
The other memory is of the Italian militiaman who shook my hand in the guardroom, the
day I joined the militia. I wrote about this man at the beginning of my book on the
Spanish war [Homage to Catalonia! , and do not want to repeat what I said there. When I
remember — oh, how vividly! — his shabby uniform and fierce, pathetic, innocent face, the
complex side-issues of the war seem to fade away and I see clearly that there was at any
rate no doubt as to who was in the right. In spite of power politics and journalistic lying,
the central issue of the war was the attempt of people like this to win the decent life
which they knew to be their birthright. It is difficult to think of this particular man’s
probable end without several kinds of bitterness. Since I met him in the Lenin Barracks
he was probably a Trotskyist or an Anarchist, and in the peculiar conditions of our time,
when people of that sort are not killed by the Gestapo they are usually killed by the
G. P. U. But that does not affect the long-tenn issues. This man’s face, which I saw only
for a minute or two, remains with me as a sort of visual reminder of what the war was
really about. He symbolizes for me the flower of the European working class, harried by
the police of all countries, the people who fill the mass graves of the Spanish battlefields
and are now, to the tune of several millions, rotting in forced-labour camps.
When one thinks of all the people who support or have supported Fascism, one stands
amazed at their diversity. What a crew! Think of a programme which at any rate for a
while could bring Hitler, Petain, Montagu Norman, Pavelitch, William Randolph Hearst,
Streicher, Buchman, Ezra Pound, Juan March, Cocteau, Thyssen, Father Coughlin, the
Mufti of Jerusalem, Arnold Lunn, Antonescu, Spengler, Beverley Nichols, Lady
Houston, and Marinetti all into the same boat! But the clue is really very simple. They are
all people with something to lose, or people who long for a hierarchical society and dread
the prospect of a world of free and equal human beings. Behind all the ballyhoo that is
talked about ‘godless’ Russia and the ‘materialism’ of the working class lies the simple
intention of those with money or privileges to cling to them. Ditto, though it contains a
partial truth, with all the talk about the worthlessness of social reconstruction not
accompanied by a ‘change of heart’. The pious ones, from the Pope to the yogis of
California, are great on the’ change of heart’, much more reassuring from their point of
view than a change in the economic system. Petain attributes the fall of France to the
common people’s ‘love of pleasure’. One sees this in its right perspective if one stops to
wonder how much pleasure the ordinary French peasant’s or working-man’s life would
contain compared with Petain’ s own. The damned impertinence of these politicians,
priests, literary men, and what-not who lecture the working-class socialist for his
‘materialism’! All that the working man demands is what these others would consider the
indispensable minimum without which human life cannot be lived at all. Enough to eat,
freedom from the haunting terror of unemployment, the knowledge that your children
will get a fair chance, a bath once a day, clean linen reasonably often, a roof that doesn’t
leak, and short enough working hours to leave you with a little energy when the day is
done. Not one of those who preach against ‘materialism’ would consider life livable
without these things. And how easily that minimum could be attained if we chose to set
our minds to it for only twenty years! To raise the standard of living of the whole world
to that of Britain would not be a greater undertaking than the war we have just fought. I
don’t claim, and I don’t know who does, that that wouldn’t solve anything in itself. It is
merely that privation and brute labour have to be abolished before the real problems of
humanity can be tackled. The major problem of our time is the decay of the belief in
personal immortality, and it cannot be dealt with while the average human being is either
drudging like an ox or shivering in fear of the secret police. How right the working
classes are in their ‘materialism’! How right they are to realize that the belly comes
before the soul, not in the scale of values but in point of time! Understand that, and the
long horror that we are enduring becomes at least intelligible. All the considerations are
likely to make one falter — the siren voices of a Petain or of a Gandhi, the inescapable fact
that in order to fight one has to degrade oneself, the equivocal moral position of Britain,
with its democratic phrases and its coolie empire, the sinister development of Soviet
Russia, the squalid farce of left-wing politics — all this fades away and one sees only the
struggle of the gradually awakening common people against the lords of property and
their hired liars and bumsuckers. The question is very simple. Shall people like that
Italian soldier be allowed to live the decent, fully human life which is now technically
achievable, or shan’t they? Shall the common man be pushed back into the mud, or shall
he not? I myself believe, perhaps on insufficient grounds, that the common man will win
his light sooner or later, but I want it to be sooner and not later — some time within the
next hundred years, say, and not some time within the next ten thousand years. That was
the real issue of the Spanish war, and of the last war, and perhaps of other wars yet to
come.
I never saw the Italian militiaman again, nor did I ever learn his name. It can be taken as
quite certain that he is dead. Nearly two years later, when the war was visibly lost, I
wrote these verses in his memory:
The Italian soldier shook my hand
Beside the guard-room table;
The strong hand and the subtle hand
Whose palms are only able
To meet within the sound of guns,
But oh! what peace I knew then
In gazing on his battered face
Purer than any woman’s!
For the flyblown words that make me spew
Still in his ears were holy,
And he was born knowing what I had learned
Out of books and slowly.
The treacherous guns had told their tale
And we both had bought it,
But my gold brick was made of gold —
Oh! who ever would have thought it?
Good luck go with you, Italian soldier!
But luck is not for the brave;
What would the world give back to you?
Always less than you gave.
Between the shadow and the ghost,
Between the white and the red,
Between the bullet and the lie,
Where would you hide your head?
For where is Manuel Gonzalez,
And where is Pedro Aguilar,
And where is Ramon Fenellosa?
The earthworms know where they are.
Your name and your deeds were forgotten
Before your bones were dry,
And the lie that slew you is buried
Under a deeper lie;
But the thing that I saw in your face
No power can disinherit:
No bomb that ever burst
Shatters the crystal spirit.
RUDYARD KIPLING (1942)
It was a pity that Mr. Eliot should be so much on the defensive in the long essay with
which he prefaces this selection of Kipling’s poetry, but it was not to be avoided, because
before one can even speak about Kipling one has to clear away a legend that has been
created by two sets of people who have not read his works. Kipling is in the peculiar
position of having been a byword for fifty years. During live literary generations every
enlightened person has despised him, and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those
enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there. Mr. Eliot never
satisfactorily explains this fact, because in answering the shallow and familiar charge that
Kipling is a ‘Fascist’, he falls into the opposite error of defending him where he is not
defensible. It is no use pretending that Kipling’s view of life, as a whole, can be accepted
or even forgiven by any civilized person. It is no use claiming, for instance, that when
Kipling describes a British soldier beating a ‘nigger’ with a cleaning rod in order to get
money out of him, he is acting merely as a reporter and does not necessarily approve
what he describes. There is not the slightest sign anywhere in Kipling’s work that he
disapproves of that kind of conduct — on the contrary, there is a definite strain of sadism
in him, over and above the brutality which a writer of that type has to have. Kipling is a
jingo imperialist, he is morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting. It is better to start
by admitting that, and then to try to find out why it is that he survives while the refined
people who have sniggered at him seem to wear so badly.
And yet the ‘Fascist’ charge has to be answered, because the first clue to any
understanding of Kipling, morally or politically, is the fact that he was NOT a Fascist. He
was further from being one than the most humane or the most ‘progressive’ person is able
to be nowadays. An interesting instance of the way in which quotations are parroted to
and fro without any attempt to look up their context or discover their meaning is the line
from ‘Recessional’, ‘Lesser breeds without the Law’. This line is always good for a
snigger in pansy-left circles. It is assumed as a matter of course that the ‘lesser breeds’
are ‘natives’, and a mental picture is called up of some pukka sahib in a pith helmet
kicking a coolie. In its context the sense of the line is almost the exact opposite of this.
The phrase ‘lesser breeds’ refers almost certainly to the Germans, and especially the pan-
German writers, who are ‘without the Law’ in the sense of being lawless, not in the sense
of being powerless. The whole poem, conventionally thought of as an orgy of boasting, is
a denunciation of power politics, British as well as German. Two stanzas are worth
quoting (I am quoting this as politics, not as poetry):
If, drunk with sight of power, we loose Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe, Such
boastings as the Gentiles use, Or lesser breeds without the Law — Lord God of hosts, be
with us yet, Lest we forget — lest we forget!
For heathen heart that puts her trust In reeking tube and iron shard, All valiant dust that
builds on dust, And guarding, calls not Thee to guard, For frantic boast and foolish
word — Thy mercy on Thy People, Lord!
Much of Kipling’s phraseology is taken from the Bible, and no doubt in the second stanza
he had in mind the text from Psalm CXXVII: ‘Except the lord build the house, they
labour in vain that build it; except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in
vain. ’ It is not a text that makes much impression on the post-Hitler mind. No one, in our
time, believes in any sanction greater than military power; no one believes that it is
possible to overcome force except by greater force. There is no ‘Law’, there is only
power. I am not saying that that is a true belief, merely that it is the belief which all
modem men do actually hold. Those who pretend otherwise are either intellectual
cowards, or power-worshippers under a thin disguise, or have simply not caught up with
the age they are living in. Kipling’s outlook is prefascist. He still believes that pride
comes before a fall and that the gods punish HUBRIS. He does not foresee the tank, the
bombing plane, the radio and the secret police, or their psychological results.
But in saying this, does not one unsay what I said above about Kipling’s jingoism and
brutality? No, one is merely saying that the nineteenth-century imperialist outlook and
the modem gangster outlook are two different things. Kipling belongs very definitely to
the period 1885-1902. The Great War and its aftennath embittered him, but he shows
little sign of having learned anything from any event later than the Boer War. He was the
prophet of British Imperialism in its expansionist phase (even more than his poems, his
solitary novel, THE LIGHT THAT FAILED, gives you the atmosphere of that time) and
also the unofficial historian of the British Anny, the old mercenary army which began to
change its shape in 1914. All his confidence, his bouncing vulgar vitality, sprang out of
limitations which no Fascist or near-Fascist shares.
Kipling spent the later part of his life in sulking, and no doubt it was political
disappointment rather than literary vanity that account for this. Somehow history had not
gone according to plan. After the greatest victory she had ever known, Britain was a
lesser world power than before, and Kipling was quite acute enough to see this. The
virtue had gone out of the classes he idealized, the young were hedonistic or disaffected,
the desire to paint the map red had evaporated. He could not understand what was
happening, because he had never had any grasp of the economic forces underlying
imperial expansion. It is notable that Kipling does not seem to realize, any more than the
average soldier or colonial administrator, that an empire is primarily a money-making
concern. Imperialism as he sees it is a sort of forcible evangelizing. You turn a Gatling
gun on a mob of unarmed ‘natives’, and then you establish ‘the Law’, which includes
roads, railways and a court-house. He could not foresee, therefore, that the same motives
which brought the Empire into existence would end by destroying it. It was the same
motive, for example, that caused the Malayan jungles to be cleared for rubber estates, and
which now causes those estates to be handed over intact to the Japanese. The modern
totalitarians know what they are doing, and the nineteenth-century English did not know
what they were doing. Both attitudes have their advantages, but Kipling was never able to
move forward from one into the other. His outlook, allowing for the fact that after all he
was an artist, was that of the salaried bureaucrat who despises the ‘box-wallah’ and often
lives a lifetime without realizing that the ‘box-wallah’ calls the tune.
But because he identifies himself with the official class, he does possess one thing which
‘enlightened’ people seldom or never possess, and that is a sense of responsibility. The
middle-class Left hate him for this quite as much as for his cruelty and vulgarity. All left-
wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they
make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy.
They have internationalist aims, and at the same time they struggle to keep up a standard
of life with which those aims are incompatible. We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies,
and those of us who are ‘enlightened’ all maintain that those coolies ought to be set free;
but our standard of living, and hence our ‘enlightenment’, demands that the robbery shall
continue. A humanitarian is always a hypocrite, and Kipling’s understanding of this is
perhaps the central secret of his power to create telling phrases. It would be difficult to hit
off the one-eyed pacifism of the English in fewer words than in the phrase, ‘making mock
of uniforms that guard you while you sleep’. It is true that Kipling does not understand
the economic aspect of the relationship between the highbrow and the blimp. He does not
see that the map is painted red chiefly in order that the coolie may be exploited. Instead
of the coolie he sees the Indian Civil Servant; but even on that plane his grasp of
function, of who protects whom, is very sound. He sees clearly that men can only be
highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed
them.
How far does Kipling really identify himself with the administrators, soldiers and
engineers whose praises he sings? Not so completely as is sometimes assumed. He had
travelled very widely while he was still a young man, he had grown up with a brilliant
mind in mainly philistine surroundings, and some streak in him that may have been partly
neurotic led him to prefer the active man to the sensitive man. The nineteenth-century
Anglo-Indians, to name the least sympathetic of his idols, were at any rate people who
did things. It may be that all that they did was evil, but they changed the face of the earth
(it is instructive to look at a map of Asia and compare the railway system of India with
that of the surrounding countries), whereas they could have achieved nothing, could not
have maintained themselves in power for a single week, if the nonnal Anglo-Indian
outlook had been that of, say, E. M. Forster. Tawdry and shallow though it is, Kipling’s is
the only literary picture that we possess of nineteenth-century Anglo-India, and he could
only make it because he was just coarse enough to be able to exist and keep his mouth
shut in clubs and regimental messes. But he did not greatly resemble the people he
admired. I know from several private sources that many of the Anglo-Indians who were
Kipling’s contemporaries did not like or approve of him. They said, no doubt truly, that
he knew nothing about India, and on the other hand, he was from their point of view too
much of a highbrow. While in India he tended to mix with ‘the wrong’ people, and
because of his dark complexion he was wrongly suspected of having a streak of Asiatic
blood. Much in his development is traceable to his having been bom in India and having
left school early. With a slightly different background he might have been a good novelist
or a superlative writer of music-hall songs. But how true is it that he was a vulgar
flagwaver, a sort of publicity agent for Cecil Rhodes? It is true, but it is not true that he
was a yes-man or a time-server. After his early days, if then, he never courted public
opinion. Mr. Eliot says that what is held against him is that he expressed unpopular views
in a popular style. This narrows the issue by assuming that ‘unpopular’ means unpopular
with the intelligentsia, but it is a fact that Kipling’s ‘message’ was one that the big public
did not want, and, indeed, has never accepted. The mass of the people, in the nineties as
now, were anti-militarist, bored by the Empire, and only unconsciously patriotic.
Kipling’s official admirers are and were the ‘service’ middle class, the people who read
BLACKWOOD’S. In the stupid early years of this century, the blimps, having at last
discovered someone who could be called a poet and who was on their side, set Kipling on
a pedestal, and some of his more sententious poems, such as ‘If, were given almost
biblical status. But it is doubtful whether the blimps have ever read him with attention,
any more than they have read the Bible. Much of what he says they could not possibly
approve. Few people who have criticized England from the inside have said bitterer
things about her than this gutter patriot. As a rule it is the British working class that he is
attacking, but not always. That phrase about ‘the flannelled fools at the wicket and the
muddied oafs at the goal’ sticks like an arrow to this day, and it is aimed at the Eton and
Harrow match as well as the Cup-Tie Final. Some of the verses he wrote about the Boer
War have a curiously modem ring, so far as their subject-matter goes. ‘Stellenbosch’,
which must have been written about 1902, sums up what every intelligent infantry officer
was saying in 1918, or is saying now, for that matter.
Kipling’s romantic ideas about England and the Empire might not have mattered if he
could have held them without having the class-prejudices which at that time went with
them. If one examines his best and most representative work, his soldier poems,
especially BARRACK-ROOM BALLADS, one notices that what more than anything
else spoils them is an underlying air of patronage. Kipling idealizes the anny officer,
especially the junior officer, and that to an idiotic extent, but the private soldier, though
lovable and romantic, has to be a comic. He is always made to speak in a sort of stylized
Cockney, not very broad but with all the aitches and final “g’s” carefully omitted. Very
often the result is as embarrassing as the humorous recitation at a church social. And this
accounts for the curious fact that one can often improve Kipling’s poems, make them less
facetious and less blatant, by simply going through them and transplanting them from
Cockney into standard speech. This is especially true of his refrains, which often have a
truly lyrical quality. Two examples will do (one is about a funeral and the other about a
wedding):
So it’s knock out your pipes and follow me! And it’s finish up your swipes and follow
me! Oh, hark to the big drum calling, Follow me — follow me home!
and again:
Cheer for the Sergeant’s wedding — Give them one cheer more! Grey gun-horses in the
lando, And a rogue is married to a whore!
Here I have restored the aitches, etc. Kipling ought to have known better. He ought to
have seen that the two closing lines of the first of these stanzas are very beautiful lines,
and that ought to have overriden his impulse to make fun of a working-man’s accent. In
the ancient ballads the lord and the peasant speak the same language. This is impossible
to Kipling, who is looking down a distorting class-perspective, and by a piece of poetic
justice one of his best lines is spoiled — for ‘follow me ‘ome’ is much uglier than ‘follow
me home’. But even where it makes no difference musically the facetiousness of his stage
Cockney dialect is irritating. However, he is more often quoted aloud than read on the
printed page, and most people instinctively make the necessary alterations when they
quote him.
Can one imagine any private soldier, in the nineties or now, reading BARRACK-ROOM
BALLADS and feeling that here was a writer who spoke for him? It is very hard to do so.
Any soldier capable of reading a book of verse would notice at once that Kipling is
almost unconscious of the class war that goes on in an anny as much as elsewhere. It is
not only that he thinks the soldier comic, but that he thinks him patriotic, feudal, a ready
admirer of his officers and proud to be a soldier of the Queen. Of course that is partly
true, or battles could not be fought, but ‘What have I done for thee, England, my
England? ’ is essentially a middle-class query. Almost any working man would follow it
up immediately with ‘What has England done for me? ’ In so far as Kipling grasps this, he
simply sets it down to ‘the intense selfishness of the lower classes’ (his own phrase).
When he is writing not of British but of ‘loyal’ Indians he carries the ‘Salaam, sahib’
motif to sometimes disgusting lengths. Yet it remains true that he has far more interest in
the common soldier, far more anxiety that he shall get a fair deal, than most of the
‘liberals’ of his day or our own. He sees that the soldier is neglected, meanly underpaid
and hypocritically despised by the people whose incomes he safeguards. ‘I came to
realize’, he says in his posthumous memoirs, ‘the bare horrors of the private’s life, and
the unnecessary torments he endured’. He is accused of glorifying war, and perhaps he
does so, but not in the usual manner, by pretending that war is a sort of football match.
Like most people capable of writing battle poetry, Kipling had never been in battle, but
his vision of war is realistic. He knows that bullets hurt, that under fire everyone is
terrified, that the ordinary soldier never knows what the war is about or what is
happening except in his own corner of the battlefield, and that British troops, like other
troops, frequently run away:
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 stop 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!
Modernize the style of this, and it might have come out of one of the debunking war
books of the nineteen-twenties. Or again:
An’ now the hugly bullets come peckin’ through the dust, An’ no one wants to face ‘em,
but every beggar must; So, like a man in irons, which isn’t glad to go, They moves ‘em
off by companies uncommon stiff an’ slow.
Compare this with:
Forward the Light Brigade! Was there a man dismayed? No! though the soldier knew
Someone had blundered.
