Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (1158 page)

‘Mind how you walk! It’s rather a sharp turn there.’

The gallery came out on a naked space, and a vertical drop of hundreds of feet of striated rock tufted with heath in bloom. At the wall-foot the actual mountain, hardly less steep, began, and, far below that again, flared outward till it became more reasonable slopes, descending in shoulders and knolls to the immense and ancient plains four thousand feet below.

The mists obscured the northern views, but to the southward one traced the courses of broad rivers, the thin shadows of aqueducts, and the piled outlines of city after city whose single past was worth more than the future of all the barbarians clamouring behind the ranges that were pointed out to us through the observatory windows. The officer finished his tales of year-long battles and bombardments among them.

‘And that nick in the skyline to the right of that smooth crest under the clouds  is a mine we sprung,’ said he.

The observation shutter behind its fringe of heather-bells closed softly. They do everything without noise in this hard and silent land.

The New Italy

Setting aside the incredible labour of every phase of the Italian war, it is this hardness that impresses one at every turn - from the stripped austerity of General Cadorna’s headquarters, which might be a monastery or a laboratory, down to the wayside muleteer, white with dust, but not a bead of sweat on him, working the ladder-like mountain trails behind his animal, or the single sentry lying-out like a panther pressed against a hump of rock, and still as the stone except for his shadowed eyes. There is no pomp, parade, or gallery play anywhere, nor even, as far as can be seen, a desire to turn the best side of things to the light. ‘Here,’ everybody seems to imply, ‘is the work we do. Here are the men and the mechanisms we use. Draw your own conclusions.’ No one is hurried or over-pressed, and the ‘excitable Latin’ of the Boche legend does not appear. One finds, instead, a balanced and elastic system, served by passionate devotion, which saves and spares in the smallest details as wisely and with as broad a view as it drenches the necessary position with the blood of twenty thousand men.

Yet it is not inhuman nor oppressive, nor does it claim to be holy. It works as the Italian, or the knife, works - smoothly and quietly, up to the hilt, maybe. The natural temperateness and open-air existence of the people, their strict training in economy, and their readiness to stake life lightly on personal issues have evolved this system or, maybe, their secular instinct for administration had been reborn under the sword.

When one considers the whole massed scheme of their work one leans to the first opinion; when one looks at the faces of their generals, chiselled out by war to the very cameos of their ancestors under the Roman eagles, one inclines to the second.

Italy, too, has a larger number than most countries of men returned from money-getting in the western republics, who have settled down at home again. (They are called Americanos. They have used the new world, but love the old.) Theirs is a curiously spread influence which, working upon the national quickness of mind and art, makes, I should imagine, for invention and faculty. Add to this the consciousness of the New Italy created by its own immense efforts and necessities - a thing as impossible as dawn to express in words or to miss in the air - and one begins to understand what sort of future is opening for this oldest and youngest among the nations. With thrift, valour, temperance, and an idea, one goes far.

They are fighting now, as all civilisation fights, against the essential devildom of the Boche, which they know better than we do in England, because they were once his ally.

To that end they give, not wasting or sparing, the whole of their endevour. But they are under no illusions as to guarantees of safety necessary after the War, without which their own existence cannot be secured. They fight for these also, because, like the French, they are logical and face facts to the end.

Their difficulties, general and particular, are many. But Italy accepts these burdens and others in just the same spirit as she accepts the cave-riddled plateaux, the mountains, the unstable snows and rocks and the inconceivable toil that they impose upon her arms. They are hard, but she is harder’.

Yet, what man can set out to judge anything? In an hotel waiting for a midnight train, an officer was speaking of some of d’Annunzio’s poetry that has literally helped to move mountains in this war. He explained an allusion in it by a quotation from Dante. An old porter, waiting for our luggage, dozed crumpled up in a chair by the veranda. As he caught the long swing of the verse, his eyes opened! His chin came out of his shirt-front, till he sat like a little hawk on a perch, attentive to each line, his foot softly following its cadence.

THE GRAVES OF THE FALLEN

His only son having been killed in 1915 at the age of eighteen, Kipling was a member of the War Graves Commission, and wrote this 16 page pamphlet
The Graves of the Fallen
. Kipling was asked to compose epitaphs to accompany the instructional booklet.   Over the next few years he made several tours of the battlefields, Kipling and his wife never found the grave for their son John. 

The original illustrations are provided in this edition, along with the text of this important war document.

CONTENTS

NOTE

WHAT THE COMMISSION IS

ITS HISTORY

ITS FINANCE

THE CEMETERIES

THEIR DESIGN AND CARE

INSCRIPTIONS, REGISTERS, AND PLANNING

MEMORIALS TO THE MISSING

GRAVES OF INDIAN TROOPS

TREATMENT OF ISOLATED GRAVES

REMOVAL OF BODIES

BATTLE MEMORIALS

SUGGESTIONS FROM THE PUBLIC

THE PROGRESS OF THE WORK

Note

This Descriptive Account of the work of the Imperial War Graves Commission was written by Mr. Rudyard Kipling at the Commission s request. The Illustrations showing the cemeteries and memorials as they will appear when completed are by Mr. Douglas Macpherson.

What the Commission is

THE Commission consists of: —

The Secretary of State for War. The Secretary of State for the Colonies. The Secretary of State for India. The First Commissioner of Works.

The Hon. Sir George Perley, K.C.M.G. (appointed by the Government of Canada). The Right Hon. Andrew Fisher, P.C. (appointed by the Government of Australia). The Hon. Sir Thomas Mackenzie, K.C.M.G. (appointed by the Government of New Zealand).

The Right Hon. W. P. Schreiner, P.C., K.C., C.M.G. (appointed by the Government

of the Union of South Africa). The Hon. Sir Edgar Bowring (appointed by the Government of Newfoundland).

and the following members who (accepted the invitation to help in this work, and were appointed by Royal Warrant: —

Sir William Garstin,. G.C.M.G., G.B.E. Mr. Harry Goslings C.H., J.P. Mr. Rudyard Kipling.

General Sir C. F. N. Macready, G.C.M.G., K.C.B. General Sir Herbert C. O. Plumer, G.C.B., G.C.M.G., G.C.V.O. Admiral Sir Edmund S. Poe, G.C.V.O., K.C.B. Major-General Fabian Ware, C.B., C.M.G.

All letters should be addressed to the Secretary, Imperial War Graves Commission, Winchester House, St. James’s Square, S.W. I ; and not to any individual member of the Commission.

Its History

THE origin and development of the Imperial War Graves Commission is very simple. In the first days of the war the different armies engaged created organisations, under the direction of the War Office, to register, mark, and tend the graves of British soldiers, as well as to answer inquiries from relatives, and, where possible, to send them photographs of the graves. Later, a National Committee was constituted, which, on the suggestion of the Prince of Wales, who took a keen personal interest in the work, was expanded into an Imperial Commission, representing the Dominions, India, the Colonies, the fighting Services, Labour, the great public departments interested, and the British Red Cross, which latter had supplied, as it still does to a considerable extent, the funds for photographing and planting the graves.

Its Finance

THE finance of the Commission is Imperial. All parts of the Empire have generously and unreservedly promised to bear their share of the expenses. The Imperial War Conference, having considered the proposals of the Commission, passed the following resolution on June 17, 1918 : “The Conference desires to place on record its appreciation of the Labours of the Imperial War Graves Commission, and is in favour of the cost of carrying out the decisions of the Commission being borne by the respective Governments in proportion to the numbers of the graves of their dead.”

The Cemeteries

WITH the growth of the war the Commission’s work naturally covered every part of the world where the men of the Empire had served and died — from the vast and known cities of our dead in Flanders and France to hidden and outlying burial-grounds of a few score at the ends of the earth. These resting-places are situated on every conceivable site — on bare hills flayed by years of battle, in orchards and meadows, beside populous towns or little villages, in jungle-glades, at coast ports, in far-away islands, among |desert sands, and desolate ravines. It would be as impossible as undesirable to reduce them all to any uniformity of aspect by planting or by architecture.

In a war where the full strength of nations was used without respect of persons, no difference could be made between the graves of officers or men. Yet some sort of central idea was needed that should symbolise our common sacrifice wherever our dead might be laid ; and it was realised, above all, that each cemetery and individual grave should be made as permanent as man’s art could devise.