Kipling’s Soldiers

SOME YEARS AGO—never mind how long precisely—having little money in my wallet, I found myself in a modestly priced, thatched-roof inn that was to be my base while I pursued research on Rudyard Kipling in southern England. My assigned room was on the upper floor of the quaint old building. Before I could grasp my heavy suitcase to carry it up the stairs, the proprietor of the inn, a man of obviously advanced age, had my suitcase in hand and was starting up the steps. I insisted on carrying it myself and all but forced the bag out of his hand, but it was no use. Despite his age, he was going to carry his guest’s suitcase no matter how heavy and no matter how steep the steps. I watched him go ahead of me, tall and militarily straight. He came to my room, placing the suitcase inside. I wanted to tip him, but something told me he did not do this for tips. Instead, I looked him squarely in the eye, and said to him: “You are a better man than I am, Gunga Din.” To my surprise and delight, he gave me a faint smile and a nod, conveying to me that he recognized the reference to Kipling’s poem and that he was pleased to be linked to that noble Indian, also a carrier, a carrier of water to British soldiers in combat, as brave as any soldier and admired by each of them whom he served and often helped when they were wounded.

Encountering in the United Kingdom men like the one who carried my luggage, probably an old soldier, is not so rare. It is nothing less than a phenomenon how many of these old veterans have read Kipling, especially his military verses, and they will tell you that he had an uncanny understanding of what it means to be a soldier, especially in combat. They tend to think of the author of “Gunga Din” as one of them, one of “the band of brothers,” as Shakespeare had Henry V call them, those who fight and if necessary die for their country. But members of the British armed services, those on active duty and those now retired, are not alone in being admirers of Kipling, for they have their American counterparts. A certain American, Edward J. Erickson, now retired from a distinguished career as an officer first in the United States Army and then the Marine Corps, is a case in point. In his own words, he “carried a copy of … Kipling’s poetry to every station that the U.S. Army sent me to.” His book, the subject of this review, ends with his expressing what that author’s poetry has meant to him:

Kipling’s poetry has been an important part of my life, and I found great value in what he had to say about topics that are relevant to the profession of arms—training soldiers, deployment, combat and peacetime garrison duties, returning home, considering the virtues of both enemies and friends, and what it means to be patriotic. On balance, the important “take away” from Kipling for me is a firmer understanding of the enduring and contentious relationship between soldiers and civilians.

A Soldier’s Kipling: Poetry and the Profession of Arms is obviously a labor of love, but in Erickson’s case, love is not blind, for he is acutely aware of the precipitous decline in Kipling’s reputation from the time that he won the Noble Prize for Literature in 1907 to the present day when it is difficult to find courses in the curriculum of American colleges and universities in which the writings of Kipling are included. In the halls of academe, he is pretty much an anathema. That decline Erickson attributes to “contemporary sensibilities about discrimination and fairness,” sensibilities that react strongly and negatively to Kipling’s “belief in the superiority of Britain to other nations.” Today’s world, he...