Right now I am reading a young adult book, Kipling's Choice for review in the next couple of months. I have read Rudyard Kipling off and on through the years, and like every other kid in the America, I know all about Mowgli and crew from Walt Disney's version of The Jungle Book. (Don't hate me for being a Disney kid, it hasn't made me a serial killer.) Rudyard Kipling was a great defender of the British Empire and he longed to fight in a war but his eyesight was so poor he was unable to be a soldier. It was a bitter disappointment to him then, because even more so back in the 19th century than today, a man's sense of bravery was determined purely by his war experience. By not fighting, Kipling felt he was less of a man.
I hate that such feelings still exist in the world today. (And please, let us not deny that they are there.) (It reminds me of women bragging that they gave birth without any drugs - and this makes you braver? ooookay.)
When WWI began, Kipling pulled every string he could to make sure his son John did not suffer the same embarrassment. He was successful and at the age of 18 John went off as a Lt to fight with the Irish Guards. He also died at the age of 18 in the Battle of Loos, his body never recovered. Thousands of British soldiers died in that battle along with him, tossed as cannon fodder by generals who thought sheer numbers could overwhelm the enemy. It didn't work.
But still, Kipling's son was now a dead hero.
That is when the writer radically changed, when everything he believed to be great and true was exposed as the lies they had always been. He was devestated by his son's death, destroyed by it. And as everyone knows, it was all for nothing. WWI was even more of a pointless war than most, a bout of insanity that dragged on for years because no one seemed to know how to end it, or even why they were fighting in the first place.
Kipling's Choice is a fascinating novel, told primarily in flashbacks as John dies in the opening pages. Geert Spillebeen has done an interesting thing by allowing John's thoughts as he is dying to permeate the book, to remind the reader that it is brutally painful and lonely to be shot in the middle of a muddy field, that everyone longs for Mom and Dad and home in those last agonizing moments, that everyone begs and pleads their way to death. It is not beautiful or glorious after all.
I have read a lot of war fiction over the years. Tim O'Brien and The Things They Carried is one of my favorite books, along with James Salter's The Hunters and A Very Long Engagement by Sebastian Jaspirot. It amazes me that anyone could read these books and think that war is an answer, that it will not drag on and on, that we will not get stuck in something yet again that we can not control, we can not end and we do not understand. That we will not be standing around at some point, shaking our heads, asking how all of this came to pass.
How stupid are we?
Kipling's Choice is an outstanding book, one that has moved me immensely as I've been reading it. Every seventeen year old needs a copy - let them see how bad it can be, let them think about it. Let them understand. And please, don't think for a minute that it is only for adults or only for war buffs. (Publisher's Weekly really misses the mark on their reviews sometimes, you know?) The whole point of books like this is so that young John Kipling's everywhere will have the chance see what truth looks like and feels like and smells like from the safety of their own beds. The real John Kipling grew up in a fictional world and it got him dead. Thank heavens Geert Spillebeen is willing to show us just what a tragic story this was.
War is hell - let's stop trying to make it meaningful.
