Rudyard Kipling pulled strings to get his hopelessly short-sighted son into the Army – consigning him to a grisly death. The guilt haunted Britain’s favourite poet to the grave.
Rudyard Kipling’s epitaph for a generation of young men slaughtered on the battlefields of World War I – ‘If any question why we died/Tell them, because our fathers lied’ – rung literally and tragically true for the writer. Rudyard’s only son, John – known to his parents as Jack – was killed on his first day in action, only six weeks after his 18th birthday, his father having pulled strings to get him into the Army despite his appallingly bad eyesight. Stricken with grief, Rudyard would struggle with guilt and remorse for the rest of his life.
John died in September 1915 at the Battle of Loos, in France. It was billed to the troops as ‘the greatest battle in the history of the world’, one of those great pushes forward that, it was hoped at the time, must surely end the war. Instead, it became what another poet, Robert Graves, who was at the battle, would later describe as a ‘bloody balls-up’.
And into that terrible debacle stumbled Kipling’s young son, John, as good as blind without his thick spectacles. He was last seen screaming in agony after his face was shattered by a shell. In three-and-a-half hours on 26 September, the British suffered more than 8,000 casualties; the Germans – who had mown them down with their machine guns – suffered no casualties at all. John went over the top on the following day and met his death.
Now, John’s story has been commemorated in My Boy Jack, an ITV adaptation of a play written by actor David Haig – best known for his roles in Four Weddings And A Funeral and The Thin Blue Line – who also plays Rudyard, after it was pointed out to him that he bears an uncanny resemblance to the writer. His son is played by 18-year-old Daniel Radcliffe, the star of Harry Potter, who was already fascinated by the Great War that killed so many young men no older than himself.
‘He is a very shrewd and intelligent young man – and very down-to-earth,’ says Haigh of his co-star. ‘Daniel is very interested in this period of history, especially with the situtation today with young men going off to Iraq and Afghanistan.’ Haig reasons that because of his own experience of celebrity, Daniel could relate to John’s struggle to forge his own identity, independent of his father’s. ‘It’s impossible to overstate what a global superstar Rudyard was at the time,’ explains Haig. ‘He had the literary popularity of J.K. Rowling, but also incredible political clout.’
It can’t have been easy being the son of this ‘poetical pa’, and at school John became utterly fed up with his father’s poem If – written in 1895 but still the nation’s favourite today. ‘Why did you write that stuff?’ he complained to Rudyard in a letter home, having had to write it out – twice – as a punishment for some schoolboy misdemeanour. Rudyard conceded that some of his work could be ‘cruelly used against the young’. He was a kind, even a doting father, but at the same time, having always hankered after a career in the armed forces, he was almost tyrannically determined that his only son fulfil his thwarted ambitions. From an early age, John was intended for the Navy – though his eyes were always a worry. If, with its appeal to a young man’s heroic instincts – ‘You’ll be a Man, my son!’ – must have been a constant goad to the youngster.
John, however, was a very ordinary boy, likeable but not gifted; he never willingly read, not even his father’s books. ‘The most endearing thing about John,’ says Haig, ‘is that he’s not a troubled genius or a Wilfred Owen or a Siegfried Sassoon. He’s Everyman, an ordinary boy who just happens to be the son of a famous writer.’ Yet, with the outbreak of war, John became quite as determined as Rudyard – who was soon vigorously campaigning for conscription – that he should do his patriotic duty as a man. ‘I am going out if I have to dress as a drummer boy!’ he pledged.
Unfortunately, John couldn’t even read the second line on an eyechart without his glasses – and that ruled out the Navy. Even before he left school, Rudyard was urging him to wear pince-nez because, ‘They give you a distingay air’. There was relentless pressure on poor John to be his father’s kind of manly man; he was 15 when Rudyard first hauled him off for an Army medical, which he failed. He went on his own to try to enlist in the first week of the war; he was turned down. He tried again on his 17th birthday a week later. Rudyard started calling in favours. He pleaded with his friend, the frail former war hero Lord Roberts of Kandahar, to wangle his myopic son a commission in the Irish Guards. He was still too young by a year to go to France.
But the Kiplings, who also had a daughter, Elsie (their eldest child, Josephine, died when she was seven), were products of their stoical class and generation, proud to sacrifice an only son if it was required of them. Soon, it seemed that nearly every young man they knew had been killed. As his 18th birthday approached, John’s terrified mother, Carrie, wrote to her own mother, ‘You write that yhou don’t see where one finds the courage to send a boy, but there is nothing else to do. The world must be saved from the Germans… One can’t let one’s friends’ and neighbours’ sons be killed in order to save us and our son. There is no chance John will survive unless he is so maimed from a wound as to be unfit to fight. We know it and he does. But we all must give… in the shadow of a hope that our boy will be the one to escape.’
John would not be the one to escape. He was off to the Western Front and said goodbye to his mother, ‘very smart and straight and grave and young’. Rudyard, who was in France as a war reporter, missed seeing him leave. John landed on his 18th birthday, 17 August, 1915. He was killed the following month. ‘The tragedy was that it was raining throughout that first day of Loos,’ Haig explains. ‘If you get water onto spectacles you’re on a loser. Take them off and you’re blind. Keep them on and you’re blind.’ Rudyard and Carrie were devastated when, initially, John was reported missing in action. And yet Rudyard still romanticised the glory of it. ‘The boy had reached the supreme moment of his life, what would it avail him to outlive that?’ he said. His son had answered the call of duty. ‘It was a short life. I’m sorry all the years’ work ended in that one afternoon, but lots of people are in our position and it’s something to have bred a man.’
Carrie, however, bore her grief stoically. ‘We do not grudge him for a second. It would have been intolerable to have had him do otherwise.’ The Kiplings’ tragedy was no greater than anybody else’s; there was hardly a family in the country untouched. ‘Carrie supported the war as ardently as Rudyard did,’ says Haig. ‘What I suspect is that there’s a difference between support for the war and sending your son when he’s short-sighted – and he could have done a different job, such as stretcher-bearing.’
For all his passionately felt patriotism, Rudyard was wide awake to the crass incompetence of genereals – and, ironically, Haig, who comes from a military family, is distantly related to General Douglas ‘Butcher’ Haig, his grandmother’s first cousin, who was blamed for the senseless slaughter of many thousands of young men. Rudyard never forgave Haig, who underestimated the German machine guns, for the chaos and bad planning at Loos. David Haig is wary of joining in the criticism. ‘My defence of Haig is that any soldier, in that context, would have faced the same insoluble problems,’ he says. ‘But that doesn’t mean it was imaginatively, or cleverly, waged as a war.’
And, in a way, Rudyard was right. In his short life as a young officer, John had flourished – and found his way out from under his father’s overbearing shadow. His men seem to have thought highly of him. His last letter home, on the eve of battle, was touchingly proud. ‘Funny to think one will be in the thick of it tomorrow… Well, so long old dears. Dear Love, John.’
John’s body was never recovered. His parents clutched at straws. At first they clung to the hope that John was a prisoner of war, and Rudyard arranged an aerial leaflet drop behind enemy lines asking for news of his son. Rudyard toured hospitals asking wounded soldiers for scraps of information, and then poured his grief into writing a history of John’s regiment, drawing on officers’ diaries, bloodstained from the trenches.
‘And there were too many, almost children, of whom no record remains,’ he noted, poignantly. His poem My Boy Jack, written in 1916, is about a sailor, but was an agonised cri de coeur for his own boy who would never come home. As a tribute to his lost son, Rudyard also undertook tireless work for the Imperial War Graves Commission; it was he that penned the moving inscription on the graves of countless unidentified soldiers: Known Unto God.
But there is a strange codicil to John’s story. In 1992, the grave of a previously unidentified officer of the Irish Guards was belatedly declared by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission to be that of John. The headstone was duly inscribed with his name. Sadly, it wasn’t to be. Recent research by war historians Tonie and Valmai Holt has proved conclusively that the grave is not his. His name remains on the headstone. Where he lies is Known Unto God.
© Mary Greene, Daily Mail Weekend, 10 November 2007
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