Kipling’s Militarism

Abstract

Rudyard Kipling is, without question, the most important writer on military matters in the Victorian period. Thackeray, his only real rival, might deal just as often with soldiers and soldiering, but Thackeray is always reflecting on a military order that belongs to the past, whereas Kipling writes of the present. There is, however, more to the issue than this, for Kipling’s works define a mood for the 1890s; the central aspect of this is his reinvention of militarism. As I have argued in previous chapters, the Victorian period saw the disappearance of the military code of the Wellington era. The army might have continued to cling on to its traditional values, but these values meant little to the country at large.¹ In the 1880s, however, militarism began to re-emerge, but in a manner that was more often strident than coherent; for example, enthusiastic support for the British soldier abroad was not matched by any great enthusiasm for the army at home, or by any great readiness to pay for an effective army. The achievement of Kipling — or, at any rate, the achievement that makes him a key figure in the history of militarism — is that he re-establishes a link between the lives and values of the military and the lives and values of the people as a whole. Indeed, Kipling puts society back at one with the army for the first time since Waterloo.