Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated)

by Rudyard Kipling

  And so much for universals. Coming now to smells of particular appeal, what would most vividly remind a Polar explorer of past experiences? I suggest that ether-like smell given off by the flame of a big spirit-lamp when it is flattened out against the heated metal cooking-plate above — an unmixed smell, simple of itself, like Falstaff’s sack. I should put the limits of this appeal roughly as from the Seventies to either pole. From the Seventies to the Sixties runs that belt of unsanctified latitudes which are the stamping-ground of the winds, the wilderness and the fringes of the restless ice, all linked together, in the minds of men who know it, by the desolate smell of the stranded berg as it piles up reeking with ooze gouged off the sea-floors. Melville, of the Jeannette, once told me that it would “send your heart into your boots — if you hadn’t eaten them already”. At the Sixties and down to Labrador, it seems to me we reach kindly timber and a suggestion of meat on the hoof. The smell of stranded ice is mixed with the clear breath of seas that are not always frozen, and the acrid tang of a raw moose-hide being passed back and forth through wood-smoke to cure it — this last as characteristic as the smell of home-made rimpje on a Dutch farm at the other side of the world. A little lower, the appeals thicken and become more complex. I suggest evergreens sweating in the sun; birchwood smoke; the oily bark itself; pinegums, resin and tallow melted together; the cleanswept smell of milky-green snow-water pouring over pebble bars; and not so far in the background, a suspicion, or a camp-shifting certainty, of skunk. Here — say 50°N. and 65°W. — we meet our friend the horse, or rather he pushes his way into the rotten-wood smudge (that is an awakening smell, too) beside us. He keeps us company west through the grass-scented prairie air till we are more conscious of him and his saddlery than any other flavour in the landscape.

  There is a heart-searching little motif of five notes — horse; old saddlery; coffee; fried bacon; and tobacco (from cut plug to maize-leaf cigarettes) — that can carry a man down from high dry camps in the Selkirks, or wet ones in Oregon, down and down over red spicy dust and dead white dust, through the scent of sage-brush and sharp peppery euphorbias, down to the torrid goat-scented South where fried beans, incense, and the abominable brassy smell of pulque will pass him on to all the forlorn brood of mangrove, foreshore and yellow-fever stinks, until he leaves his horse on the beach, and the Tropics lift up his heart with the wholesome rasp of sunbaked coral and dried fish.

  Forgive me, ladies and gentlemen! I will not go on with the catalogue, though I feel like the commercial traveller in the story, who said: “If you don’t care to look at my samples, d’you mind my having a look at ‘em. It’s so long since I’ve seen them.”

  It is probable that the future will have no place for these links with past delights and labours — that they will be forgotten like the labours themselves — as we have forgotten the smell of homemade soap or the whistle and rap of the flails on a threshing-floor. Only a little while ago a man wrote me from Northern Canada: “We have broken into a new belt of wheat 40 miles wide — and we have left the horse behind!” Even now one can charge by rail in less than a week through the exquisitely graduated and significant series of smells, that lie like iridescence on an oyster-shell, over the last 2500 miles of South Africa, and one can return with no more than a general impression of sunshine and coal-smoke. And, as people always say in the middle of a revolution: “We are only at the beginning of things”.

  Conceive for a moment a generation wholly divorced from all known smells of land and sea-travel — a generation which will climb into and drop down from the utterly odourless upper airs, unprepared in any one of its senses for the flavour, which is the spirit, of the country it descends upon! Everything that we have used till now has allowed us time for a little mental adjustment of horizons — time and contact with the changing earth and waters under us. In the future, there will be neither mental adjustment nor horizons as we have understood them: not any more of the long days that prove and prepare, nor the nights that terrify and make sane again, neither sweat nor suffering, nor the panic knowledge of isolation beyond help — none, so far as we can guess, of the checks that have hitherto conditioned all our travels.

  And hitherto our life has only taught us to love what we have suffered for or with. One loves a stray dog after one has had to sit up with him for a night or two. How much more that corner of the Earth to which we have given our very hide and health and reputation!

  And it is the same on the human side. Men like a man who has shown himself a pleasant companion through a week’s walking-tour. They worship the man, who over thousands of miles for hundreds of days, through renewed difficulties and efforts, has brought them without friction, arrogance, or dishonour, to the victory proposed, or to the higher glory of unshaken defeat. Anything like a man can bustle hounds after a sinking fox, but it takes something like a man to bring them home with their sterns up after they have lost him, or — seen him run into by another pack! It is one of the mysteries of personality that virtue should go out of certain men to uphold — literally to ennoble — their companions even while their own nerves are like live wire, and their own mouths are full of the taste of fever and fatigue. There is no headmark by which we can recognise such men before they have proved themselves. Their secret is incommunicable. One man, apparently without effort, inspans the human equivalent of “three blind ‘uns and a bolter” and makes them do miracles. Another, working hard all the time, scientifically reduces half a dozen picked men to the level of sulky, disloyal schoolboys. And everybody wonders how it happened.

  The explanations are as bewildering as the facts. A man was asked some time ago why he invariably followed a well-known man into most uncomfortable situations. He replied: “All the years I have known So-and-so, I’ve never known him to say whether he was cold or hot, wet or dry, sick or well; but I’ve never known him forget a man who was”. Here is another reply to a similar question about another leader, who was notoriously a little difficult to get nn with. One of his followers wrote: “So-and-so is all you say and more, and he grows worse as he grows older; but he will take the blame of any mistake any man of his makes, and he doesn’t care what lie he tells to save him”. And when I wrote to find out why a man whom I knew preferred not to go out with another man whom I also knew, I got this illuminating diagnosis: “So-and-so is not afraid of anything on earth except the newspapers. So I have a previous engagement.” In the face of these documents, it looks as though self-sacrifice, loyalty, and a robust view of moral obligations go far to make a leader, the capacity to live alone and inside himself being taken for granted.

  But then come the accidents for which no allowance is made — or can be made. A good man, who has held a disorganised crowd together at the expense of his own vitality, may be tried, slowly or suddenly, beyond his limit, till he breaks down, and, as Hakluyt says, is either “ignominiously reported or exceedingly condemned”. There is a limit for every man, an edge beyond which he must not go. But here at home only the doctor, the nurses, and the clergymen see what happens next — not the caravan, not the grinning coolies, and the whole naked landscape — and afterwards all the world!

  However, these things, and worse, are part of the rule of the road. They have never hindered men from leading or following. Even in these days a man has but to announce he is going to gamble against death for a few months on totally inadequate cover, and thousands of hitherto honest Englishmen will fawn and intrigue and, if necessary, lie like anyone you choose to think of — in order to be allotted one life-share in the venture.

  But what of the future? Into what terms will this world-old, foot-pound energy of travel translate itself under the new conditions? Here is our position. Up to the present we have been forced to move in two dimensions by the help of the Three Beasts of Burden and a few live coals in a pot. Now we perceive that we can move in three dimensions, and the possibilities of our new freedom distract and disturb us in all relations. This is because our minds are still hobbled and knee-haltered by
inherited memories of what were held to be immutable facts — distance, height and depth, separation, homesickness, the fear of accident and foul weather. The sea, in spite of our attacks, is still unplumbed, salt, and estranging; a mountain-range means so many days’ delay or détour; so many extra rations, sure changes of heat and cold. The desert and the wilderness have still to be approached by cautious sap and mine — depôt and cache. Where there is no water for 200 miles, we shake our head and limp round it. A little while ago we should have done so, humbly, glad to be excused. Now we step out of our path grudgingly, resentfully, resolute to come back again and take no refusal.

  Presently — very presently — we shall come back and convert 200 miles across any part of the Earth into its standardised time equivalent, precisely as we convert 5 miles with infantry in column, 10 with cavalry on the march, 12 in a Cape cart, or 50 in a car — that is to say, into two hours. And whether there be one desert or a dozen mountain-ranges in that 200 miles will not affect our time-table by five minutes.

  Month by month the Earth shrinks actually, and, what is more important, in imagination. We know it by the slide and crash of unstable material all around us. For the moment, but only for the moment, the new machines are outstripping mankind. We have cut down enormously — we shall cut down inconceivably — the world-conception of time and space, which is the big flywheel of the world’s progress. What wonder that the great world-engine, which we call Civilisation, should race and heat a little; or that the onlookers who see it take charge should be a little excited, and, therefore, inclined to scold? You could witness precisely the same flurry in any engine-room on the Atlantic this evening, where a liner happens to be pitching her propellers out of water. For the moment the machines are developing more power than has been required for their duties. But just as soon as humanity can get its breath, the machines’ load will be increased and they will settle smoothly to their load and most marvellous output.

  Frankly, one is not so much interested in the achievements of the future as in the men of the present who are already scouting and reporting along its fantastic skyline. All, or nearly all, that can be accomplished by the old means has been won and put to general account. The old mechanism is scrapped: the moods and emotions that went with it follow. Only the spirit of man carries on, unaltered and unappeasable. There will arise — they are shaping themselves even now — risks to be met as cruel as any that Hudson or Scott faced; dreams as world-wide as Columbus or Cecil Rhodes dreamed, to be made good or to die for; and decisions to be taken as splendidly terrible as that which Drake clinched by Magellan, or Oates a little farther south. There is no break in the line, no loads are missing; the men of the present have begun the discovery of the New World with the same devoutly careless passion as their predecessors completed the discovery of the Old.

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  The War and the Schools

  I HAVE been honoured by a request that I should help to dedicate this rifle range to the memory of an old Wykehamist — George Cecil, Ensign of Grenadiers, killed in action. Cecil was not very long before your time, as once time was reckoned, but since each month now equals a year he dates, so far as you are concerned, to the beginning of history. He was one of that original army in France which was sacrificed almost to a man, in order that England might gain time to create those armies which, till then, she had not thought necessary. He was killed just before the long retreat from Mons came to an end — killed leading his platoon in the woods round Villers Cotterets fifteen months ago.

  He did no more and no less than thousands have done since, and many thousands are preparing themselves to do; for it would be difficult to find a household in England to-day free from the fact or the fear of a similar loss.

  Yet in one respect he differed from some of his fellows. He was devoted by instinct to the profession of arms, and had made it his consuming interest and study, not through any child’s delight in its glitter, but because he absolutely believed in the imminence of that very war in which he fell. It was curious in a world full of wise grown men, who would not or could not understand, to listen to his unshaken conviction on this matter; and to watch the extraordinarily thorough way in which he set about fitting himself to meet it. Both at Sandhurst and during his short time in the Service, he toiled, as I know, at the details of his profession with the passion of a boy, and studied the wider aspects of it with the judgement of a man. I remember a couple of years ago the boy, for he was little more then, saying to me across an atlas: “We shall be sent to prolong the French left — here! We shall not have enough men to do it, and we shall be cut up. But with any luck I ought to be in it.” His fortune allowed him to fight with the best for the best. He is among the first of that vast company of young dead who live without change in the hearts of those who love them.

  I speak now to such of you as propose to follow him. Being who you are, you realise what your Foundation has taught its scholars from the beginning — that as Freedom is indispensable, so is Liberty impossible, to a gentleman. This is knowledge which will serve you when you go out into a world whose every landmark has been violently removed, and every distinction save one — an aristocracy of blood — emptied of all significance. Thanks to the unwisdom of your forefathers, the rescue of a wrecked civilisation has been laid upon you and those very little senior to you. Were I addressing men of my own age, I should say that this task was a heavy one. But I speak to youth which can accomplish everything, precisely because it accepts no past, obeys no present, and fears no future. For that reason, I do not doubt your future, nor as much of our future as is in your keeping. It is for your generation to make well sure that those who have defied God and man shall learn to walk humbly before both as long as fear can endure.

  The making of the new world that will rise out of these present judgements will fall to your generation also — not only to those in the field, but to those who, for any reason, are afraid that they can never take part in the great work. They need have no fear. After the brute issue of the war shall have been decided on the fronts, all men, all capacities, all attainments, will be called upon to the uttermost to establish civilisation. For then the work will begin of reconstructing, not only England and the Empire, but the whole world — on a scale which outruns imagination. Every aspect of life as we have known life hitherto will have disappeared. National boundaries and national sympathies, powers, responsibilities, and habits of thought will have shifted and been transformed. Our neighbours of yesterday will be our blood-brethren of that to-morrow, bound to us, as we throughout the Empire are bound to each other, by the most far-reaching and intimate ties of common loss and common devotion, and labouring side by side to bring order out of the appalling chaos that humanity has drawn upon itself.

  Let no one, whatever his physical disabilities, or however meanly he may think of himself, let no one dream for a moment he will not be needed, and urgently needed, in the new order of things. His duty is to prepare himself now. This is harder for him than for the combatant officer, since an officer’s work is continually tested against actual warfare. The men of the second line — the civil reserve that will take over when the sword is sheathed — have no such check, nor have they the officer’s spur of visible responsibility. Their turn comes later. Till it comes they must work on honour, that they may be ready to uphold the honour of civilisation. They have not long to wait. In a few years some of you must be working with our Allies at the administration of what may be left of Central Europe, where you will have to invent new systems to meet new conditions almost as swiftly as, during the war, new weapons were invented to meet new forms of attack. I say in a few years, because the youngest captain I know is twenty-one; the youngest I have heard of is nineteen. And so it will be on the civil side. The war has given the youth of all our world a step in age — additional seniority of three years. You may say — though your relatives are more likely to think it — that your youth has been taken from you. I prefer to put it, that your manhood has been thrust o
n you early — at the sword’s point. Fit yourself for it then, not according to the measure of your years, but to the measure of our world’s great need.

  You have seen and realised the very things which young Cecil felt would befall. As far as his short life allowed he ordered himself so that he might not be overwhelmed by them when they were upon him. He died — as many of you too will die — but he died knowing the issue for which he died. It is well to die for one’s country. But that is not enough. It is also necessary that, so long as he lives, a man should give to his country, as George Cecil gave, a mind and soul neither ignorant nor inadequate.

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  The Magic Square

  MY lecture this morning deals with the origin, development, and moral significance of Drill among mankind from the earliest ages.

  What put the idea of drill into man’s head at the beginning of things? As Shakespeare so beautifully observes, “What made man first drill upon the Square, with Sergeants running round and round?”

  And when I say man, I do not mean any sort of man that we are acquainted with, or of which we have any record. The man I ask you to imagine is a prehistoric person with a vocabulary of a few score words, who had not long given up living in trees and who moved in little family groups of small associated tribes, in or on the edge of immense primeval forests, much as gorillas and chimpanzees do to-day in the tropical African forests. I’m going to call him George Robey.1 He was a creature who still fought with his teeth and nails like the animals: but he could break off a branch, trim it, and use it as a club or a lance; he could throw stones with accuracy; scrape out holes in the ground; plait or weave branches together; swim; and climb trees. Besides this, he possessed what you and I would call a reasoning mind. He knew what he was doing, he could remember what he had done, and he could estimate the consequences of what he might do. With this equipment and an omnivorous appetite, he had to make his living or die. War wasn’t man’s business in the beginning. No animal makes a business of war except for food. Man’s business in those days was food. He had to hunt, and he had to understand the tactics of hunting.