To End All Wars_ A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 - Adam Hochschild [100]
The distraught Kipling doggedly questioned a succession of Irish Guardsmen, but in vain. The War Office had listed John as "wounded and missing"; Kipling was enraged when a newspaper referred to him as "missing, believed killed." He and Carrie clung to the hope that John might be alive, in a hospital or prison camp in Germany. With survivors of the battle eager to comfort the stricken parents with any possible scrap of news or rumor, conflicting information began to pile up: that John had a leg wound, that he had been shot in the neck, that he had been seen alive after the time he was reported missing. Even though he despised governments that had remained neutral in what he saw as a titanic struggle between good and evil, Kipling turned to the American ambassador, asking that a description of his son be sent to the U.S. embassy in Berlin: "He is dark with strongly marked eyebrows, small moustache, thick brown hair (straight), dark brown eyes with long lashes. Height about 5.7½.... He is short-sighted and is most probably wearing gold spectacles."
Now it was Violet Cecil's turn to offer sympathy and compassion to her friends, as they had to her. Milner, ever the realist, wrote in his diary, "We fear he is killed." Carrie Kipling had rushed to see Violet the day after John was reported missing, and sometimes wrote to her twice a day. Violet herself interviewed one wounded Irish Guards officer in the hospital to see if she could find out anything, and, in hopes that another neutral power could help, sent a letter to the Crown Princess of Sweden. "No news," Carrie wrote to her, "—a great darkness seems to be settling down on it all. But who should know better than you."
Kipling wrote on, but on occasion now his martial voice was muted, and it almost seemed a different person speaking:
"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...
IV. 1916
13. WE REGRET NOTHING
BY THE BEGINNING of 1916, in response to recruiting drives, posters ("Don't Lag! Follow Your Flag!"), and music hall songs ("Oh, we don't want to lose you, but we think you ought to go"), an impressive two and a half million men had enlisted. One historian has called Britain's volunteer army "the greatest expression of enthusiasm for war in all history." That enthusiasm, however, was not evenly shared. Although members of the working class never opposed the war on anything like the scale Keir Hardie dreamed of, they showed less zeal than the better-off, volunteering for the army at a noticeably lower rate than professionals and white-collar workers.
War-minded Britons who worried about lingering pockets of working-class internationalism were heartened, however, in March 1916, by the birth of a new organization, which became known as the British Workers' League. The group, made up mostly of trade union officials, issued statements that sounded vaguely socialist, calling for better wages and pensions as well as for "national control of vital industries." But it was also vigorously prowar. "All-British from the core," it proclaimed itself, vowing victory over "Germans and Austrians who are now doing their best to destroy us." Unusual then, this combination—support for social welfare measures and strident nationalism—would become far more familiar as fascism rose in the 1920s and '30s. As in the fascist labor movements to come, several of the League's leaders were distinctly thuggish. Followers of one of them, Joseph Havelock Wilson of the National Sailors' and