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Unit 8: Before a Midnight Breaks in Storm by Rudyard Kipling

During the war, he wrote a booklet ‘The Fringes of the Fleet’ containing essays and poems on Notes
various nautical subjects of the war. Some of the poems were set to music by English
composer Edward Elgar.
Kipling became friends with a French soldier whose life had been saved in the First World War
when his copy of Kim, which he had in his left breast pocket, stopped a bullet. The soldier
presented Kipling with the book (with bullet still embedded) and his Croix de Guerre as a token
of gratitude. They continued to correspond, and when the soldier, Maurice Hammoneau, had a
son, Kipling insisted on returning the book and medal.
On 1 August 1918, a poem—”The Old Volunteer”—appeared under his name in The Times. The
next day he wrote to the newspaper to disclaim authorship, and a correction appeared.
Although The Times employed a private detective to investigate (and the detective appears to
have suspected Kipling himself of being the author), the identity of the hoaxer was never
established.

8.1.7 After the War

Partly in response to John’s death, Kipling joined Sir Fabian Ware’s Imperial War Graves
Commission (now the Commonwealth War Graves Commission), the group responsible for
the garden-like British war graves that can be found to this day dotted along the former Western
Front and all the other locations around the world where troops of the British Empire lie buried.
His most significant contribution to the project was his selection of the biblical phrase “Their
Name Liveth For Evermore” (Ecclesiasticus 44.14, KJV) found on the Stones of Remembrance in
larger war graves and his suggestion of the phrase “Known unto God” for the gravestones of
unidentified servicemen. He chose the inscription “The Glorious Dead” on the Cenotaph,
Whitehall, London. He also wrote a two-volume history of the Irish Guards, his son’s regiment,
which was published in 1923 and is considered to be one of the finest examples of regimental
history. Kipling’s moving short story, “The Gardener”, depicts visits to the war cemeteries, and
the poem “The King’s Pilgrimage” (1922) depicts a journey which King George V made, touring
the cemeteries and memorials under construction by the Imperial War Graves Commission.
With the increasing popularity of the automobile, Kipling became a motoring correspondent
for the British press, and wrote enthusiastically of his trips around England and abroad, even
though he was usually driven by a chauffeur.
After the war, Kipling was sceptical about the Fourteen Points and the League of Nations, but he
had great hopes that the United States would abandon isolationism and that the post-war world
would be dominated by an Anglo-French-American alliance. Kipling hoped that the United
States would take on a League of Nations mandate for Armenia as the best way of preventing
isolationism, and hoped that Theodore Roosevelt, whom Kipling admired, would once again
become President. Kipling was saddened by Roosevelt’s death in 1919, believing that his friend
was the only American politician capable of keeping the United States in the “game” of world
politics.

In 1920 Kipling co-founded the Liberty League with Ryder Haggard and Lord Sydenham. This
short-lived enterprise focused on promoting classic liberal ideals as a response to the rising
power of Communist tendencies within Great Britain, or has Kipling put it “to combat the
advance of Bolshevism”. In 1922 Kipling, who had made reference to the work of engineers in
some of his poems and writings, was asked by University of Toronto civil
engineering professor Herbert E. T. Haultain for his assistance in developing a dignified
obligation and ceremony for graduating engineering students. Kipling was enthusiastic in his
response and shortly produced both, formally entitled “The Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer”.
Today, engineering graduates all across Canada are presented with an iron ring at the ceremony
as a reminder of their obligation to society. In 1922 Kipling also became Lord Rector of

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