Kipling Sahib by Charles Allen

Author:Charles Allen [ALLEN, CHARLES]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780349142159
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2015-11-04T16:00:00+00:00

A Snider squibbed in the jungle,

Somebody laughed and fled,

And the men of the First Shikaris

Picked up their Subaltern dead,

With a big blue mark in his forehead

And the back blown out of his head.28

Further reflection led Ruddy back to his first reaction to the news of Dury’s death seven months earlier and his remark about ‘£1,800 worth of education gone to smash’, which he expanded into the six acerbic verses of ‘Arithmetic on the Frontier’. Three decades before Wilfred Owen, Kipling turns on their head his beloved Horace’s lines about how sweet and proper it is to die for one’s country. ‘A great and glorious thing it is,’ his poem opens, ‘To learn, for seven years or so, / The Lord knows what of that and this, / Ere reckoned fit to face the Foe.’ The scene shifts to India’s North-West Frontier, where the crude jezail flintlock and the curved tulwar are the weapons of choice, and the verses go on to expound on the awful ease with which the product of an expensive education can be blown away by a few grains of crude saltpetre:

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