Kipling Sahib
Page 25
Thankfully this uncritical view of the military did not extend to the lower ranks, known at that time as Common Soldiers. Since 1857 every large Station in India had had its detachment of British Army troops, usually quartered in barracks sited, like Mian Mir, far enough away from the Civil Lines to be out of sight but close enough to be on hand in an emergency. When Ruddy first came to Lahore the British Army element of the garrison at Mian Mir was made up of the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers supported by a detachment of the Royal Artillery. The former were stationed in Mian Mir cantonment from 1882 to 1887 and were afterwards affectionately regarded by Rudyard Kipling as ‘my first and best beloved Battalion’.34 Initially Ruddy’s contact with these two units was confined to their officers. Opportunities for meeting the men they commanded were few, since most of Lahore, including the Native city and the railway refreshment rooms, was out of bounds to Common Soldiers.
Before coming out to India Ruddy’s only knowledge of the ordinary soldier had derived from his contacts with USC’s ‘school sergeants’, first a ‘rich, full-flavoured Irishman’ named Kearney, then his replacement, Sergeant-Major Schofield, known to the boys as ‘Foxy’, an energetic down-to-earth cockney who had travelled the world and who made the schoolboy Gigger ‘the recipient of wonderful confidences’.35 In Lahore Ruddy’s first recorded encounter was as he was being driven home in a tikka gharri on the evening of St George’s Day 1885, when he was accosted by a drunken Fusilier wearing roses in his sun helmet. Ruddy smuggled the man back to barracks under the nose of an officer and soon afterwards requested permission to interview some of the men for his newspaper. This led to a meeting in the Sergeants’ Mess with Colour-Sergeant John Fraser, who escorted the journalist to the canteen of ‘H’ Company and hovered in the background as Ruddy questioned a number of the men: ‘By chance I found a suitable knot of men,’ wrote Fraser afterwards, ‘in the shape of 8 or 10 “boozing chums” who belonged to the musketry fatigue party, headed by Cpl MacNamara. I did my best to give them an idea of what Mr Kipling wanted, warning them not to give themselves away by misstatements and so on, and I left them.’ Further interviews with these ‘boozing chums’ followed, with Ruddy paying for the drinks, allowing Fraser to claim in later years that the garrulous, hard-bitten Irish corporal MacNamara was the original for Kipling’s ‘Mulvaney’.36
What further stimulated Ruddy’s interest in the British soldier was a book he reviewed for his paper: Nathaniel Bancroft’s From Recruit to Staff Sergeant, the autobiography of a retired British soldier living in Simla. Bancroft had fought as a boy soldier with the Bengal Horse Artillery through the Sikh Wars of the 1840s and his graphic account of the horrors of battle made a great impression on his reviewer – in particular, an incident at the battle of Ferozeshah in which his mounted battery had been torn to bits by cannon fire, afterwards recreated by Kipling in the ballad ‘Snarleyow’.37 According to Bancroft, three quarters of the soldiers serving with the Bengal Horse Artillery were Irishmen, among them one Gunner Terence O’Shaughnessy, a fount of wisdom on all things but especially women. In his autobiography Bancroft did his best to transliterate their thick spoken brogue on to the printed page, as in the sentence ‘Av ye think it’s me wud be openin’ me gob to sing in the Orderly Room and the Major in it – not to spake of ’erself – av coorse.’ To the discomfort of modern readers, Ruddy immediately took to Bancroft’s Irish rendering, first applying it in print in one of the most forgettable of his verses, ‘A Levéety in the Plains’, a view of the Queen’s Birthday Levée held at Government House on the evening of 24 May 1886, as seen by an Irish private on duty:
There was music brayin’ an’ punkahs swayin’,
An’ men displayin’ their uniform;
An’ the native ginthry [gentry] they thronged the inthry [entry];
An’ oh, by Jabers! ’twas powerful warm!38
To begin with Ruddy played the stock figures of Tommy Atkins and his Irish equivalent for light relief. However, in June 1886 the CMG reported the death from heat apoplexy of a number of British soldiers at the Mian Mir cantonment, and Ruddy took note. ‘Three soldiers died in Cantonments last night,’ he reported to the Wop of Albion in a letter he had been writing on and off since early May. ‘They have been having a funeral nearly every day for a fortnight. But Tommy is so careless. He drinks heavy beer and sleeps at once after a full flesh meal and dies naturally.’ Ruddy then went on to describe a scene he had recently witnessed while spending the evening with the subaltern commanding the guard picket on duty at Fort Lahore: ‘I’d been round before but never on a night like this. It was pitchy black, choking hot with a blinding dust storm out. Fort Lahore is wickedly hot always as I’ve learned to my cost before now. I went into the main guard at midnight (it marked 97° in the guardroom verandah) and I saw by the lamp light every man jack of the guard stripped as near be sitting up. They daren’t lie down for the lives of them in heat like that. It meant apoplexy.’ The infernal scene in the guardroom stayed with him to become the setting for ‘With the Main Guard’, one of the tales concerning the Soldiers Three: the Irishman Terence Mulvaney, the cockney Stanley Ortheris and the Yorkshireman Jack Learoyd.
This glimpse of the harsh realities of a soldier’s life in India led Ruddy to look harder at the ‘single men in barracks’ and the conditions under which they served, and the more he learned of their stultifyingly constrained lives the more serious his treatment grew. Mulvaney, Ortheris and Learoyd are first encountered fully formed in the refreshment room at Umballa Station, as they and the journalist narrator are changing trains: ‘I supplied the beer. The tale was cheap at a gallon and a half.’ The three became ‘The Three Musketeers’, published in the CMG in March 1887, the first of eighteen stories involving the three privates of ‘B’ Company of the ‘Ould’ Regiment. Four more Soldiers Three stories followed in quick succession, all lightweight by comparison with those that came later, summarised by their author as ‘how the three most cruelly treated a Member of Parliament [“The Three Musketeers”]; how Ortheris went mad for a space [“The Madness of Private Ortheris”]; how Mulvaney and some friends took the town of Lungtungpen [“The Taking of Lungtungpen”]; and how little Jhansi McKenna helped the regiment when it was smitten with cholera [“A Daughter of the Regiment”]’.39
Lightweight or not, the Soldiers Three tales had the great advantage of novelty, for no writer hitherto had thought the lives of ordinary British soldiers worth writing about. In the early tales one or other of the three comrades provides the peg upon which the actual story itself is hung, but as their author grows in authority the tales become darker, the very best of them as harsh and remorseless as any Greek tragedy. ‘The horror, the confusion, and the separation of the murderer from his comrades were all over before I came,’ begins the narrator of the opening passage of ‘Love-o’-Women’:
There remained only on the barrack-square the blood of man calling from the ground. The hot sun had dried it to a dusky goldbeater-skin film, cracked lozenge-wise by the heat; and as the wind rose, each lozenge, rising a little, curled up at the edges as if it were a dumb tongue. Then a heavier gust blew all away down wind in grains of dark coloured dust. It was too hot to stand in the sunshine before breakfast. The men were in barracks talking the matter over. A knot of soldiers’ wives stood by one of the entrances to the married quarters, while inside a woman shrieked and raved with wicked filthy words.40
In July 1886 Ruddy joined his family in Simla for his month’s leave, bringing with him a surprise gift in the form of another new publication. Once again he had taken advantage of their absence to assemble a new body of verse: eleven satires concerning the running of civil and military affairs which he termed ‘departmental ditties’, and a further fifteen verses on a variety of themes. Some had appeared in the Pioneer or the CMG over the previous six months but a significant number were hitherto unpublished, including ‘Arithmetic on the Frontier’. This time the printing had proceeded without a hitch, which was all the
more remarkable because each sheet, printed on one side of the paper only, had been trimmed into a narrow oblong folio before being bound and stitched with the other pages and then enclosed within brown paper covers so as to resemble a government-issue docket. On the cover was stamped in bold letters ‘DEPARTMENTAL DITTIES AND OTHER VERSES’, and where the address might be was handwritten in ink ‘To: all heads of Departments and all Anglo-Indians’, the sender’s address being given as ‘Rudyard Kipling Assistant Department of Public Journalism Lahore District’. Finally, each slim volume was tied up in the pink ribbon known throughout India as ‘red tape’.
The verses within were prefaced by a ‘General Summary’ suggesting that modern man was in no way different from his ape ancestors and just as self-seeking. What followed was equally sardonic, detailing the follies of the Civil and Military and their spouses, nearly all on the make in one form or another, from ‘that snowy-haired lothario Lieutenant-General Bangs’ to Jack Barrett’s wife, who arranged for her husband to be transferred to Quetta, ‘that very healthy post’, where he quickly ‘gave up the ghost’, thereby allowing her to marry her lover.
In both form and content Departmental Ditties was a brilliant wheeze, and it was received in Simla with laughter and a great deal of gossiping over the identities of those mocked in one squib or another. ‘This queer demi-official docket turned out very successfully,’ Lockwood Kipling was able to write, as he posted a copy to Margaret Burne-Jones. ‘A new edition is coming out & he [Ruddy] had the satisfaction of hearing all sorts of complimentary things. Lord Dufferin, who frequently comes into our sketching room, professed to be greatly struck by the uncommon combination of satire with grace and delicacy, also what he calls the boy’s “infallible ear” for rhythm & cadence.’41
Besides printing his own work Ruddy had also undertaken his own promotion: ‘I took reply-postcards, printed the news of the birth of the book on one side, the blank order-form on the other, and posted them up and down the Empire from Aden to Singapore and from Quetta to Colombo. The money came back in poor but honest rupees, and was transferred from the publisher, my left-hand pocket, direct to the author, my right-hand pocket.’42 What is today an extremely rare first edition of five hundred copies sold out within days. ‘There arose a demand for a new edition,’ wrote the author, ‘and this time I exchanged the pleasure of taking in money over the counter for that of seeing a real publisher’s imprint on the title page.’ Bearing the imprint of the Calcutta publishers Thacker, Spink and Co., this second edition was more conventional in appearance but it carried more poems and it sold even better, so that a third and fourth edition had to be rushed into print, each now carrying the name of the author in bold type.
One new ditty was particularly warmly received, for it touched on a raw Anglo-Indian nerve: ‘Pagett, MP’ tells of the visit to India of a British Parliamentarian who has all the answers to India’s problems and thinks the Anglo-Indian community has it easy. Finally losing his patience with his visitor, his host the narrator tricks him into staying on into the Hot Weather until Pagett finally cracks and flees. He ends:
And I laughed as I drove from the station, but the mirth died out on my lips
As I thought of the fools like Pagett who write of their ‘Eastern trips’,
And the sneers of the travelled idiots who duly misgovern the land,
And I prayed to the Lord to deliver another one into my hand.
‘Pagett, MP’ was based on the Liberal parliamentarian and temperance reformer William Sproston Caine, who had come out to India at the recommendation of Allan Octavian Hume.
The Family Square in Simla, as seen by J. L. Kipling (National Trust)
In Simla the Kiplings had taken a tiny cottage called The Dingle, so cramped that when Ruddy joined them he found himself having to share the dining table with his father as a writing desk. However, his parents were in the best of spirits. Alice was now back in the element she loved best, with Lord Dufferin among the several male admirers who regularly dropped in to enjoy her conversation. Lockwood, too, had his own circle of admirers, centred on his ‘Ladies’ Sketching Club’ which met in a studio in Barnes Court and was attended by Lady Helen Blackwood, eldest of the Dufferins’ five daughters, and the two daughters of the Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab. All doors were now opened to them, and when the Dufferins gave a fancy-dress ball at which all were required to wear costumes made of calico, Lockwood found his skills greatly in demand.
The Viceroy’s Calico Ball was the much-talked-about occasion when Trix, observed seated by herself by Lord Dufferin and asked why she was not dancing, replied: ‘Well, sir, you see I am quite young. I am only eighteen. Perhaps when I am forty I shall get some partners.’43 The Viceroy at once asked her to dance and Trix’s reputation as both an ‘ice maiden’ and a wit was established. But for Trix herself the evening was a disaster since her only dancing partners were Sir Courteney Ilbert, three other senior married men and, of course, the Viceroy, dressed as an Arab.
All this changed with the arrival in Simla of the Dufferins’ son and heir, Archibald James Leofric Temple Blackwood, Viscount Clandeboye, who in late July joined his regiment in India and proceeded very soon afterwards to Simla – at which point the published journals of Lady Dufferin become uncharacteristically vague. Despite his title, his commission in a smart cavalry regiment and his twenty-three years, young Lord Clandeboye seems to have passed through India with scarcely a ripple – except for the rumour of a romantic attachment to Miss Kipling. If Trix’s account is to be believed, he pursued her and proposed, was rejected and duly returned to his regiment, where he promptly went down with a bout of typhoid which brought his mother hurrying down from Simla to his sickbed.
Finding his style cramped at The Dingle, Ruddy very soon moved in with the Walkers at Kelvin Grove, as he had in previous summers. Here he had his own circle of friends, chiefly made up of young bloods drawn from the military, among them Captain Ian Hamilton, who had distinguished himself in the Afghan War and had been rewarded by General Sir Frederick Roberts by being taken on as his ADC. Hamilton had just got back from Burma, where he had seized the opportunity to loot a gilded Buddha statue while his chief’s back was turned. ‘At that time I was in constant touch with Rudyard Kipling,’ wrote Hamilton of the summer of 1886. ‘Every Sunday I lunched with him … and one way or another hardly a day passed when I did not see him.’
Despite his army background Hamilton wrote poetry, and his younger brother, the artist Vereker Hamilton, had contacts in London’s literary world. At Ruddy’s request he wrote to his brother about ‘a young fellow … who had a pretty talent for writing and was anxious to publish something in England’. A manuscript of a short story followed which Vereker Hamilton showed first to the poet and critic Andrew Lang and then the novelist William Sharp. Lang dismissed the work out of hand, remarking that he would ‘gladly give Ian a fiver if he had never been the means of my reading this poisonous stuff’, while Sharp’s reaction was even more negative: ‘I would strongly recommend your brother’s friend instantly to burn this detestable piece of work … I would like to hazard a guess that the writer in question is very young and that he will die mad before he has reached the age of thirty.’44 After two editors of literary magazines had also turned it down Vereker Hamilton was forced to return the manuscript unpublished.
The manuscript in question was the disturbing tale ‘The Mark of the Beast’, which tells the story of Fleete, who, like Pagett, MP, knows nothing of Indian ways, gets drunk at the Club and desecrates a Hindu temple by stubbing out his cigar on an image of the god Hanuman. The temple priest bites him, leaving a livid mark on his breast, and soon Fleete begins to behave like a wolf, howling and chewing raw meat. Only after the policeman Strickland has intervened to force the priest to remove his curse does Fleete return to normal. When eventually published in England in 1891 ‘The Mark of the Beast’45 was declared by a critic writing in the Spectator to be ‘loathsome’ and showing ‘Mr Kipling at his very
worst’. Other critics were equally hostile, but the story went on to become a great hit at the Grand Guignol theatre in Paris. As a tale of horror it outstrips Kipling’s ‘The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes’, and was probably written at that same dark period in the summer of 1884 when the author teetered on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
The two groups of military aides who attended the Commanderin-Chief and the Viceroy were natural rivals and formed opposing camps, one led by Ian Hamilton and the other by Lord Dufferin’s Military Secretary, the dashing Old Etonian Major Lord William Leslie de la Poer Beresford, VC, who was in almost every sense larger than life. ‘Lord Bill’ had served a succession of Viceroys ever since 1875 and was said to have ‘raised the office of Military Secretary to a science, and himself from an official into an institution’.46 Bolstered by a private fortune, which allowed him to keep a very comfortable salon and a string of racehorses and polo ponies, he ran Simla’s outdoor events from the front, boasting ‘a record of eight broken collar-bones, four concussions of the brain, and contusions innumerable’.47 But for all his gallantry and charm, ‘Lord Bill’ was a bachelor born and almost forty, and it was Ian Hamilton, with age and good looks on his side, who led Simla’s younger set.