THEY each have a name: the Hundred Years War, the War of the Roses, the Civil War and the Great War - the one that was to be over by Christmas. Non Europeans often object to it being called the first World War since it was, rather, a European war, but the colonial hand of Europe reached far and wide in those days, so soldiers from all over the world fought and died in the terrible mud: Algerians, Senegalese, New Zealanders, Canadians, Gurkhas, Australians and Irish.
Out of print for 70 years, Rudyard Kipling's forgotten masterpiece, The Irish Guards In The Great War, comes out again this month, with a foreword by former diplomat and editor of the Kipling Journal, George Webb.
Kipling and Ireland had already collided: "I had a vague notion," he writes about Kim in his autobiography, "of an Irish boy, born in India and mixed up with native life. I went as far as to make him the son of a private in an Irish Battalion, and christened him Kim of the `Rishti' - short, that is, for Irish."
Kipling's own son, John, was bourn in England, in 1897. In 1914, at the age of 16, John walked into a recruitment centre, lied about his age and offered himself for officer training. Disappointed to be rejected because of his poor eyesight, he told his father he would join up anyway, as an ordinary soldier. Kipling senior, by then the most popular writer in England, had friends in high places and managed to get the boy accepted as a subaltern in the Irish Guards.
When the newly formed 2nd Battalion sailed for France in August 1915, John went with them. They were deployed in the disastrous Battle of Loos and John went missing. So great was Kipling's literary standing at the time that the Royal Flying Corps was detailed to drop leaflets over the German lines seeking news of the "Sohne des weltberuhmten Schriftstellers" - the son of the world famous author. There was no news, however, and John was presumed dead. He was 18 and Kipling's only son.
The sadness of the loss was heightened by the fact that, despite strenuous efforts, Kipling failed to locate the place of John's death or news of his last hours. When, in 1917 he was asked to write the regiments history of tile war, he accepted straight away. "It was done," he said later, "with agony and bloody sweat."
But since this was 1917, when patriotism and imperialism were riding high, when men did their duty and did not complain and since the author also had a duty to perform, John's name appears only once in the story - on the list of, those missing, presumed dead.
Kipling's main duty was to the men of the Irish Guards and in this, he had some Personal adjustments to make. A committed Unionist, he had, in the past, berated the Catholic Irish for their political activities - until the war broke out, that is and the same Catholic Irish (some of them) joined the king's army. Generosity of spirit together with the experience of losing his son won the day and the resulting chronicle is now regarded as a masterpiece in which detailed research and precise, dry reportage is leavened by a recognition of the humanity which managed somehow to survive in the trenches despite the obscenity of a war in which men - especially young, untrained men - suffered not only at the hands of the enemy but also at the hands of those who sent them, ill equipped and unsupported, into battle.
The names are all there: the ordinary soldiers Burke, Coffey, Walsh, Toomey, O'Hara. And leading them the officers: Major Lord Desmond FitzGerald, Colonel Lord Ardee, Capt MacMahon, 2nd - Lieut O'Brien. If the men ever wondered what on earth they were doing stumbling about in the icy mud of a strange country, it is not recorded, for Kipling has based his account largely on the official daily record, kept by the adjutant, in which personal thoughts or graphic descriptions had no place. The spaces between the lines, however, are filled in for us by Kipling, who recreates, in words, the cold misery of the trenches, the dejection of the soldiers, the macabre and humorous comments and the weariness of the long march, while at the same time dispensing with superfluous words.
HINT of the soldiers emotions appears, tantalisingly, only in the occasional footnote. "Adjutants were not trained to write poetically about war," George Webb told me, and Kipling himself was not the sort of chap who went in much for footnotes."
The war, at first, was all new men gazed in wonder at the night sky, seeing searchlights for the first time. They were taught how to make and throw "jam pot" bombs and how to fire their rifles at the aircraft off the "Hun". They were issued with goatskin waistcoats and new fangled American boots, which they viewed with suspicion. After tea on that first Christmas Eve, when the cards from the king and queen had been distributed and each had been issued with Christmas puddings from England, they took over the trenches previously occupied by the Gurkhas and, finding the same trenches at least two feet too short for them, wondered what sort of persons these "little dark fellas" could be. They spent Christmas night in the frosty trenches, innocent of the fact that there would be another four to go before the war would be over, by which time many of them would be dead.
There is little mention of the local people - the owners of the farms and orchards and cellars taken over by the Irish Guards - but when they do make an appearance, the advice on how to deal with them is chilling. When a group of refugees clattered past with their carts "...it was necessary to warn the Companies that the enemy might attack behind a screen of Belgian women and children - in which case the Battalion would have to fire through them".
The routine of war started to take hold: an edict went out stating that men were not to be left standing in water for more than 12 hours. Surprisingly, the German habit of singing and playing the mouth organ became tedious: "He was given to spasms of music ... which the Irish, who do not naturally burst into song, rather resented." A pecking order soon established itself. When a soldier crept out to loot a dead German, he would find his sergeant waiting to relieve him of his spoils.
Strange days brought strange happenings: when moaning was heard coming, one night, from No Man's Land, a patrol, sent out to investigate, found a man from another regiment who had been wounded six days previously, lying in an enemy trench. He had been stripped of everything - boots, cigarettes and rations - but left with a blanket.
St Patrick's Day was celebrated with a warm bath and free beer. Then the war hardened a bit further and, to counteract poison gas, they were issued with rags soaked in limed water. Weathercocks were mounted on the trenches to show when the gas was on the way over. And all the while there was the fighting, the digging and making good the trenches, the pumping out of water, the sandbagging, the shelling. The diary records, on an average day, eight men and two officers killed three officers and 28 men wounded and two men" missing.
In August, they met up with the recently arrived 2nd Battalion: Kipling writes: "There are few records of this historic meeting, for the youth and, strength that gathered by the cookers in that open sunlit field ... has been several times wiped out and replaced."
THE sunlit fields gave way to autumn mist and rain - and the beginning of the debacle which was the Battle of Loos, in which young John Kipling perished.
"Loos was particularly terrible," says George Webb, "because it was the first, huge, mass action in which infantry, unsupported by artillery, were put against an enemy which had far superior defences. And, of course, it was totally eclipsed by the Battle of the Somme."
Three or four years later, exhumation parties would try to identify the remains of the dead "by some rag of `Guards' khaki or a button". But it wasn't until 1992 that a keen researcher linked such an insignia with an incorrectly recorded grid reference and the remains of John Kipling were found. Though he was the son of the regiment's historian and of England's first Nobel prizewinner, and though he was only 18, he was still just one of thousands, for in the Great War the Irish Guards lost 2,349, with another 5,739 wounded.
