If

by Christopher Benfey

  After the war, Kipling accepted a position on the Imperial War Graves Commission, charged with honoring the memory of the war dead. In this capacity, he traveled often to France and composed the official inscription on the British graves. He also wrote, in a less official vein, the darkly moving “Epitaphs of the War,” in which he left far behind the saber-rattling jingoism of his prewar verses. “Who dies if England lives?” he had asked at the outset of the war. In his heartbreaking elegy for Jack, with its prevailing metaphor of a wreck at sea, he gave the answer.

  “Have you news of my boy Jack?”

  Not this tide.

  “When d’you think that he’ll come back?”

  Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.

  “Has any one else had word of him?”

  Not this tide.

  For what is sunk will hardly swim,

  Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.

  For two years, Jack remained officially missing, but Kipling knew differently. “The wife is standing it wonderfully tho’ she, of course, clings to the bare hope of his being a prisoner,” Kipling confided to a former classmate serving in the army. “I’ve seen what shells can do, and I don’t.” Predictably, spiritualists wrote to Kipling promising to put him in touch with his lost son. A visit from Trix, deep in her own clairvoyant fantasies, augmented his frustration. “I have seen too much evil and sorrow and wreck of good minds on the road to Endor,” he wrote in Something of Myself, alluding to a sorceress in the Book of Samuel, “to take one step along that perilous track.” He put his objections into verse in the wartime poem “En-Dor,” in which he acknowledged the temptation: “Whispers shall comfort us out of the dark—/ Hands—ah, God!—that we knew!”

  8.

  And then, unexpectedly, someone touched Kipling’s arm again, touched it not once but twice. It began with a dream.

  I dreamt that I stood, in my best clothes, which I do not wear as a rule, one in a line of similarly habited men, in some vast hall, floored with rough-jointed stone slabs. Opposite me, the width of the hall, was another line of persons and the impression of a crowd behind them. On my left some ceremony was taking place that I wanted to see, but could not unless I stepped out of my line because the fat stomach of my neighbor on my left barred my vision. At the ceremony’s close, both lines of spectators broke up and moved forward and met, and the great space filled with people. Then a man came up behind me, slipped his hand beneath my arm, and said: “I want a word with you.”

  A few weeks later, Kipling attended a ceremony at Westminster Abbey, in his official capacity as a member of the Imperial War Graves Commission. The Prince of Wales was there to dedicate a plaque in honor of the million dead in the Great War.

  We Commissioners lined up facing, across the width of the Abbey Nave, more members of the Ministry and a big body of the public behind them, all in black clothes. I could see nothing of the ceremony because the stomach of the man on my left barred my vision. Then, my eye was caught by the cracks of the stone flooring, and I said to myself: “But here is where I have been!” We broke up, both lines flowed forward and met, and the Nave filled with a crowd, through which a man came up and slipped his hand upon my arm saying: “I want a word with you, please.”

  What Kipling describes is a striking example of what the Society for Psychical Research referred to as a “predictive dream.” Mark Twain had also had such a dream when he and his brother, Henry, were training to be riverboat captains. Twain dreamed in great detail that his younger brother’s body, draped with white roses and a single red one, was placed in a casket balanced across two chairs. So vivid was the dream that when Twain awoke, he was relieved to find his brother alive and well. Three days later, Henry was killed in a steamboat explosion. Twain hurried to the scene to find his brother in a metal casket, balanced between two chairs. “A volunteer nurse stepped up to the coffin and gently laid across it a bouquet of white roses with a single red bloom in their midst.” Twain joined the Society for Psychical Research on the basis of the dream.

  Kipling was wary of such moments of apparent clairvoyance. “For the sake of the ‘weaker brethren’—and sisters—I made no use of the experience,” he wrote, alluding, it would seem, to his own sister. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe in such occult events. The point was that he did believe in their reality, and in their danger. Of his own predictive dream, he allowed himself only one comment, and he put it in the form of a question. “But how, and why, had I been shown an unreleased roll of my life-film?” It is a striking metaphor. Kipling, who was intensely interested in the new technology of motion pictures, imagines each human life as a spool of film unrolling over time. On certain occasions, and without explanation, the ordinary chronological deployment is violated, and we are given a momentary glimpse of the future or the past.

  Kipling, as it happened, was given access to both the past and the future as he stood, first in dream and then in reality, in the vast hall with the cracks in the stone floor. The ceremony at Westminster Abbey was emotionally overloaded for him. He was a commissioner of war graves, but he was also the grieving father of one of the million dead. Who exactly was the stranger in the crowd, who slipped his hand under Kipling’s arm and said, “I want a word with you, please”? Could he be anyone other than an emissary from the land of the dead? This stranger repeats the gesture of the shy daughter in “They,” who takes her grieving father by the hand. It is also the gesture of the lost son in “En-dor”: “Hands—ah, God!—that we knew!”

  The dream of Westminster Abbey was to be doubly predictive, as Kipling surely knew. For even as he was hurriedly writing Something of Myself, Kipling was certain that he himself did not have long to live, and that death would soon take him by the hand and ask to have a word with him. As the most celebrated English writer of his age, Kipling could be confident that his own last reward would be a memorial in Westminster Abbey. And so it was that when he died, just after his seventieth birthday, his ashes were buried in Poets Corner, alongside the graves of Chaucer and Tennyson. The funeral service was held amid a great crowd in the vast hall with the cracked stone floor.

  Epilogue

  AMERICAN HUSTLE

  1.

  During the Vietnam War, when it began to dawn on many Americans that what the British had experienced in India and Afghanistan might also apply to them, Kipling’s work took on new relevance. A stray phrase from a little known Kipling poem—initially quoted as “you cannot hurry the East”—wormed its way into the very highest levels of decision-making. The phrase was invoked, repeatedly, during the perilous start of the war, at a time when many options, including American withdrawal, were still in place. The making of key decisions turned on the proper interpretation of Kipling’s ambiguous phrase—indeed, on the meaning of a single word. The same phrase, at war’s end, seemed to have predicted the whole debacle from the beginning.

  But Kipling had not, in fact, used the word “hurry,” as journalists discovered when they finally took the trouble to look up the wording of the original. He had warned instead against any attempt to hustle the East.

  And the end of the fight is a tombstone white with the name of the late deceased,

  And the epitaph drear: “A Fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.”

  The poem warns against any attempt to meddle in the affairs of a distant country. It is, one might say, the antidote to “The White Man’s Burden,” another poem often invoked in discussions of Vietnam. During the Vietnam War, Kipling’s little poem about folly in the East was quoted and misquoted by saber-rattling generals and antiwar journalists alike. The question of precisely how the poem was to be interpreted resembles, in key ways, the proper historical interpretation of the war in Vietnam (and of subsequent wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria that have come to resemble it in unsettling ways).

  History may not repeat itself, at least not in any exact sense
, but it does sometimes seem to view itself in a distorting mirror. “Those who remember the past are condemned to repeat it too,” as Michael Herr wrote of Vietnam. Many participants compared the Vietnam War with the “splendid little war” (in John Hay’s phrase) that the United States fought with Spain in 1898. Some of the major decision-makers of the Vietnam War had familiar names, including Henry Cabot Lodge, grandson of the Massachusetts senator, and Kim Roosevelt, grandson of Theodore, which gives the moment of crisis during the early 1960s an eerie aura of déjà vu. The CIA operative who initiated and orchestrated American involvement in the conflict came straight from the Philippines, the ambiguous prize of the Spanish-American War, and regarded Kim as his playbook. And whether these Americans hurried or hustled the Vietnamese remains a point of contention among historians and politicians.

  2.

  Among the classic Vietnam memoirs, Philip Caputo’s A Rumor of War, recording the experience of the very first marines to see combat there, best captures this uncanny sense of historical recurrence. “It was a peculiar period in Vietnam, with something of the romantic flavor of Kipling’s colonial wars,” Caputo writes. He recalls how Lieutenant Bradley, an officer for the battalion, “perfectly expressed the atmosphere of those weeks. He called it the ‘splendid little war.’” Caputo places his reader doubly in Kipling country: in the world of late Victorian colonial outposts, in Kim or “Mandalay,” and in the Spanish-American War of 1898. For Caputo and his fellow soldiers, the romantic flavor would end soon enough, as would any splendor. “It was not so splendid for the Vietnamese,” as Caputo adds dryly.

  As the combat intensified, and the savage search-and-destroy missions in the Vietnamese jungles brought no discernible progress in the war, it was a different side of Kipling’s work that seemed more relevant: the bleak poems of the ordinary soldier’s life in the Barrack-Room Ballads. These poems detailed the daily humiliations and sudden violence among the enlisted men, while the officer class exuded arrogance and incompetence. Caputo’s soldiers know their Kipling by heart; preparing for combat, a fellow soldier recites, “I’m old and I’m nervous and cast from the service,” from Kipling’s bitter home-front ballad “Shillin’ a Day.” For Caputo, Kipling’s iconic British soldier, Tommy Atkins—hard-drinking, loyal to his mates in combat, humiliated on the home front—could just as well have been an American marine. “Most American soldiers in Vietnam—at least the ones I knew—could not be divided into good men and bad,” Caputo writes. “I saw men who behaved with great compassion toward the Vietnamese one day and then burned down a village the next. They were, as Kipling wrote of his Tommy Atkins, neither saints ‘nor blackguards too / But single men in barricks most remarkable like you.’”

  3.

  During the summer of 1963, two years before Lieutenant Caputo and his fellow marines arrived, there was still a good deal of disagreement among American decision-makers, civilian and military, about what the precise role of the United States should be in the future of Vietnam. No country named South Vietnam was recognized in the Geneva agreements that ended French occupation in 1954. But President Kennedy’s advisers were leery of potential Chinese influence in Southeast Asia, and—on the analogy of Germany and Korea—considered a divided Vietnam a better outcome than the prospect of a wholly Communist one. This early period of indecision was to be the romantic, swashbuckling phase of the conflict, as Caputo described it. It is difficult to avoid the impression that the Americans involved thought they were playing a stylish game, even a new version of the Great Game.

  Not surprisingly, it was Kipling’s Kim that served as a semiofficial code of conduct. CIA operatives were instructed to read the novel. It is not an exaggeration to say that from 1954 on, the Vietnam War was fought—at least from the covert American viewpoint—according to Kipling rules. Kim was the first modern novel of international espionage, so it is hardly surprising that real-life spies should have found it so useful, so confirming. But the status of the novel in the CIA was more specific, more precise, more exalted than mere entertainment literature. For just as Kim had inspired Lord Baden-Powell in structuring the Boy Scouts, an organization intended to prepare British youngsters for the rigors of military service, CIA chiefs combed Kipling’s novel for lessons to train another gallant brotherhood.

  The initial impetus came from Kermit Roosevelt Jr., a grandson of Theodore Roosevelt, who was nicknamed Kim at an early age. Kim Roosevelt’s father, serving with British forces in World War I before the United States entered the war, had visited Kipling at his country estate at Bateman’s, and raised his son in the Kipling ethos. Kim Roosevelt was a legendary figure in the early years of the agency, and bestowed a taste for Kim on his fellow operatives. A well-thumbed copy of Kipling’s novel was found at the bedside of Allen Dulles, an early director of the CIA, at his death.

  But the man who most firmly imposed the picaresque spirit of Kim on the mushrooming conflict in Vietnam, and who issued directives and planned missions according to the actions of Kimball O’Hara, was Edward G. Lansdale, the first architect of American strategy in the region. Lansdale was held in high regard for what he was seen to have accomplished in the Philippines, liberated (once again, after the debacle of 1899) by American troops, this time from Japanese occupation. Lansdale’s operatives had successfully undermined Communist influence in the archipelago and helped to empower a regime sympathetic to the United States. They had done so by means of military and technological aid, and through efforts to reach the “hearts and minds” of the people via a sophisticated propaganda campaign. Surely, Lansdale was the man, it was widely believed, to accomplish something comparable in Vietnam, in the wake of the French failure to wrest the country from Communist control. Lansdale, it was hoped, might at least shore up a South Vietnam friendly to American interests while weakening the Communist nationalist Ho Chi Minh’s hold on the North.

  In June 1954, Lansdale arrived in Saigon as the official head of the military mission there and, covertly, as the station chief for the CIA. For the next two years, Lansdale pursued three main initiatives. One was to organize teams to carry out secret operations in the North, sabotaging transportation hubs in Hanoi and coordinating other acts of terrorism. A second initiative was to encourage anti-communist Catholics in the North to immigrate south. And third, Lansdale scouted out the possible leaders among the competing private armies and local strongmen of Saigon and its surroundings and settled on Ngo Dinh Diem—a mandarin with close ties to American Catholics—as the right man to lead South Vietnam and work closely with the Americans.

  What united this complicated portfolio, in Lansdale’s mind, was the inspiring figure of Rudyard Kipling. “Vietnam was so filled with the arcane,” he wrote in his memoir, “that I used to advise Americans to read Kipling’s ‘Kim’ and pay heed to the description of young Kimball O’Hara’s counterintelligence training in awareness of illusions.” The scene in which Lurgan Sahib trains Kim to remember elaborate patterns of jewels had also been the starting point of Baden-Powell’s romance with the novel. Now, Lurgan’s game was used to train American operatives doing dirty tricks in North Vietnam.

  4.

  On the recommendation of Lansdale, the United States decided to bet on the Catholic President Diem. President Kennedy took over where the French had left off, helping to outfit and train Diem’s ARVN troops. The general in charge of what was euphemistically called the Military Assistance Command was General Paul D. Harkins. Harkins had served under George Patton during World War II, where he earned the nickname “Ramrod” for his determination to keep his troops moving forward. An accomplished polo player at West Point, Harkins saw Vietnam as an old-fashioned military theater, in which iron resoluteness would win the day and impress the home-front audience. Harkins looked the part and, in fact, played minor roles in war movies. He was also, like Lansdale, a Kipling enthusiast. Harkins “misquoted Kipling in a sardonic remark” directed to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, according to histori
an Stanley Karnow. “You can’t hurry the East,” Harkins insisted.

  Harkins’s warning about the dangers of undue “hurry” was leveled principally against his main rival in Saigon, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., President Kennedy’s choice as American ambassador. Nixon’s running mate in 1960 and a former United States senator from Massachusetts, Lodge was the father of George Cabot Lodge, who, as a young naval lieutenant, had accepted the surrender of the city of Ponce in Puerto Rico in 1898. A promising poet, George Cabot Lodge had died young and was elegized in a short biography by Henry Adams, a gift for his friend Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., the young poet’s father and the leading American imperialist of his time.

  Ambassador Lodge was impatient with the lack of progress on the part of the South Vietnamese government in suppressing the Communist rebels, the Vietcong. He was particularly impatient with President Diem, whom he considered insufficiently resolute, as well as divisive in his oppression of Buddhists in South Vietnam. Photographs and television footage of elderly Buddhist monks lighting themselves on fire in the streets of Saigon stunned American viewers and angered Kennedy. Lodge had had enough of Diem. When he learned of plans by a disgruntled group of Vietnamese generals to stage a coup against Diem, he was eager to throw American support—covertly, of course, through the CIA—behind the plan.

  Harkins strongly opposed the coup. On August 31, 1963, he sent a top secret telegram to General Maxwell Taylor of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in Washington, and requested that copies be shared with the secretary of state and the head of the CIA. A note on the document, made public in the Pentagon Papers, shows that President Kennedy also read it. The main point of Harkins’s telegram was that the South Vietnamese generals disagreed about the coup. “So we see,” he concluded, “we have an ‘organization de confusion’ with everyone suspicious of everyone else and none desiring to take any positive action as of right now.” Harkins then added, as though clinching the argument, “You can’t hurry the east.”