Kipling's Combat Zones: Training Grounds in the Mowgli Stories, Captains Courageous, and Stalky & Co.

Kipling's obsession with the mastery of rules, laws, and codes of behavior dominates his work as it did his life. He wrote a charter for his children that identified in detail their "rights" to the Dudwell River near Bateman's; he created a Jungle society with a code "as perfect as time and custom can make it" (The Second Jungle Book 125); and he knew how to manipulate the rules to hasten his son's classification into active military service in World War I. Anyone at all familiar with Kipling's childhood will readily understand these concerns. The shock of being moved at the age of five from a pampered life with his family in India to the care of a harsh foster mother in Southsea, England, must have been traumatic enough. To be rescued after five long years from this "House of Desolation" only to be sent away again in less than a year to public school, a place of strict, often physical, discipline and institutionalized bullying, reinforced Kipling's sense that the world was a dangerous and uncertain place. These early experiences shaped his vision of the world and taught him how to survive: one must understand the system of order, master its code of rules, and apply them relentlessly.

Many writers, especially writers for children, have created unforgettable imaginary realms with their own sometimes fantastic rules; the entrances to such "otherworlds" are often surprising—a mirror, a wardrobe, a rabbit hole—dramatizing the borders of these magical realms and emphasizing their distinctness from the "real" world from which the children have come. It is not surprising, considering the drastic and painful changes to which little Rudyard had been subjected, that the grown Kipling would similarly plunge his young fictional protagonists into parallel worlds with new rules and new modes of survival, and that these otherworlds would be decidedly nonutopian. To Kipling, life was brutal, and his books for young people express this clearly, too clearly perhaps for modern tastes. For just as we find it hard to understand why a proud and loving father would push a seventeen-year-old into battle long before it was necessary, we wonder at his fascination with rules and laws, and why they are associated with such a high degree of violence. We are concerned that he expresses not only casual tolerance, but even encouragement, of behavior and attitudes that we consider unnecessarily brutal and cruel, even sadistic, especially in books for young people. Kipling exalts the harshest side of the manly code, especially the enthusiastic approval of physical punishment and violence and the stalwart indifference to pain, while encouraging the suppression of softer "feminine" feelings that he thought made men vulnerable. Published within a span of five years (1894-99), each of the three works I have selected for analysis, the Mowgli stories (which I shall be treating as one work), Captains Courageous, and Stalky & Co., features a testing ground for the protagonist, a combat zone with its own set of laws, code of behavior, mode of being, and appropriate style of language.

The sense that Kipling's harsh code goes too far is not just a modern reaction. Despite his many admirers, there has always been an undercurrent of criticism, even revulsion (particularly in the period between the two World Wars) against the sentiments he expresses.¹ When Martin Seymour-Smith in 1989 describes Kipling's publicly expressed philosophy of life as "cheap, shoddy, unworthy and impractical" and his public utterances revealing of a man "grotesque, merciless and insensitive" (8), he follows in the tradition of Richard Buchanan who, in 1900, declared that Kipling was "on the side of all that is ignorant, selfish, base and brutal in the instincts of humanity" (25) and that "the vulgarity, the brutality, the savagery, reeks on every page" (31). Max Beerbohm's well-known caricatures of Kipling, which began in 1901 and continued for almost thirty years, express a similar opinion.

However, in spite of the criticism, there is no doubt that Kipling's exaltation of the ideals of warfare...