What I See Before Me
Some minor Kipling
The City of the Dreadful Night, The Army of a Dream, and The Eyes of Asia by Rudyard Kipling
What value has propaganda? Quite a lot, if you’re fighting a war. Kipling wrote more about war, more about soldiering, than most. He seemed to understand certain things about it — although others like Orwell said he did not (particularly objecting, as do I, to the leaving off of a final ‘g’ and replacing it with an apostrophe, as if the reader did not know how cockneys talk and couldn’t make the adjustment themselves).
Others remarked upon Kipling’s seeming understanding of how the officers and the ranks each thought. In his own day, his approximations of demotic speech attracted praise.
The Eyes of Asia, by contrast, is a deceptive document. It purports to be eyewitness reports from Asian subjects of Britain — Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims — who came to Europe to fight in the First World War. And it is a tissue of lies, a fictional confection. Kipling, possibly under instruction from Whitehall, possibly freelancing, wanted his readers to believe that Britain was a welcoming place for Asians; that fighting in France, too, had its positive sides. And so he produced something to order — something that fit the bill. It all seems terribly tired and dishonest, at least upon looking back.
On Asia, however, Kipling was sometimes very sagacious. His long short story ‘The City of Dreadful Night’ was later published as a booklet under the above title. It is a laborious, dispiriting trudge through the hell-holes and fleshpots of Lahore. There is almost a journalistic pretence to this story — a man wanders the streets from place to place, encounters policemen who give him the low-down on what’s happening in their terrible patch. And he sees a lot and reports back what bitterness he has encountered, what of life he has been forced by circumstance to observe.
The story is pure fiction, but it seems reporterly — it almost appears a true testament of the place and time. This place of great evil; this cauldron of people engaged in their own sinful pursuits — the law a show, powerless, unable to do much if anything except arrive occasionally in force and write down a few names. This is the modern world in arms. It is hell on earth. For such a young man as Kipling then was, it’s quite an achievement.
Another achievement in a manner of speaking is the story The Army of a Dream, which was later published independently. It is pure fabrication from beginning to end. A man finds, after his own time in uniform, that there have been changes. A chance encounter with an old friend and he is being inducted into the new way society as a whole is organised — all around the armed services.
It is quite a vision. From earliest youth children are drilled and practised. They have little ersatz units in which they train; they are connected to the world of those adults (no longer a minority of all) who have themselves been called to the colours. Men in the pukka armed forces are domiciled not in bases but among the people; they are part of the people, drawing their strength from those they guard.
The units of children — think of a university OTC, or a school’s cadet corps — even complete with the adults in real-seeming exercises. They arrange themselves, command themselves, and approach positions defended by the adults. The children must use all their capacity to think in terms of logistics, in terms of sacrifice and duty. And upon approaching the positions held by those older, they must make choices — rapid choices, having planned out ahead of time a spectacular manoeuvre or two.
What an extraordinary thing, our narrator says. That such an army could be built in England. It is a miracle. It is almost beyond imagining. He sees his friend, the bearer of the news, smiling before him, holding out his hand.
And then he realises that what he has seen, what he has heard, may not be all he believed it to be — and he recalls, as if from far away and long ago, memories of his own which contradict all he has been told.