'I Don't Know Where the Change Began'

The confluence of two events revived my interest in military and naval history and literature: the centenary of World War I and my middle son’s acceptance into the U.S. Naval Academy. The subjects were no longer strictly academic. I was of age but had missed Vietnam. How many wars later is it? Michael could be in the next one. The best history I have read was Andrew Roberts’ Elegy: The First Day on the Somme (2016). I read Edward Thomas, Ford Madox Ford, Isaac Rosenberg, Edmund Blunden and, more recently, Kipling. I knew he was a storyteller and poet of soldiering, of course, but hadn’t previously thought of him as a Great War poet. Here is “Ex-Clerk,” from the “Epitaphs of the War” sequence (The Years Between, 1919):

“Pity not! The Army gave

Freedom to a timid slave:

In which Freedom did he find

Strength of body, will, and mind:

By which strength he came to prove

Mirth, Companionship, and Love:

For which Love to Death he went:

In which Death he lies content.”

Typically, Kipling writes not about the collective but the individual soldier, and from the perspective of a trench or on a long march, not from a command post safely behind the lines. A sympathetic account of Kipling’s war poetry is found in Edward J. Erickson’s A Soldier’s Kipling: Poetry and the Profession of Arms (Pen and Sword Publishing, 2018). Erickson is a retired regular U.S. Army lieutenant colonel who served in the Persian Gulf War of 1991, in Sarajevo in 1995 and in the invasion of Iraq in 2003. In his preface he writes, “When I grew up I joined the United States Army and I brought Kipling with me to every station I went to.” At the Marine Corps Command and Staff College, Erickson taught a class called “Rudyard Kipling’s Small Wars.” To his credit he writes, “I question the idea that today’s world is more complex and more ambiguous for the people living in it than the world was for people living in past times.” Erickson doesn’t condescend to Kipling, the British Empire or the past. He looks at “The Return” (The Five Nations, 1903), including these lines from the first stanza:  

“I did no more than others did,

  I don’t know where the change began;  

I started as a average kid,  

  I finished as a thinkin’ man.”

The speaker is a veteran back in England after service in the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902). Erickson writes:

“We often think of veterans as elderly, but they begin as ‘kids’ and many return to civilian life as twenty-two year-old combat veterans. Teenage civilians finish school and move on to the profession of arms, making modern combat the province of the ‘everyman.’ Most veterans recognise that their experiences are not particularly unique but, in the end, somehow their worldview changed along the way, without them realizing what happened.”