To End All Wars_ A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 - Adam Hochschild [201]
Milner retired from the cabinet in 1921. Three years later, he and his wife made a sea journey to South Africa, the scene of his imperial triumph and their falling in love. The trip was filled with nostalgic visits to Boer War battle sites, the government providing them a private train to Kimberley. While in South Africa, however, Milner was apparently bitten by a tsetse fly and infected with sleeping sickness. On his return to England, his health declined rapidly, and Violet asked that the church bells in the village next to their country home be silenced, so as not to disturb him. On May 12, 1925, he was elected to the honorary post of chancellor of Oxford University. He died the next day, at 71.
She survived him by 33 years, remaining a member of the Ladies Empire Club and continuing to befriend the powerful and influential of later generations, such as the CBS broadcaster Edward R. Murrow when he was a correspondent in London during the Second World War. After her brother, who had long edited the archconservative National Review, fell ill in 1929, it became, in the words of the bemused Kipling, a "she-edited magazine." Violet saw every issue into print and in editorials ferociously assailed such targets as the League of Nations, the possibility of Indian independence, and British military unpreparedness. "Never forget, Prime Minister," she said to Stanley Baldwin when he came to lunch one day, "our frontier is on the Rhine."
She and the Kiplings visited one another frequently, and Rudyard sometimes read his work aloud to her. Still grieving the loss of his son, he found solace in his work as a member of the Imperial War Graves Commission, writing inscriptions for monuments and visiting military cemeteries as far distant as Egypt and Jerusalem. He and his wife made a pilgrimage to Chalk Pit Wood near Loos at the time of day they estimated that John Kipling had been killed there. Fulminating against the fraying of the British Empire, he contributed to a fund for the general who had massacred the Indians at Amritsar. "I hate your generation," he once burst out to a much younger man, "because you are going to give it all away."
In this period of his life, however, Kipling wrote "The Gardener," a haunting story utterly bereft of his usual jingoism. In it, a heartbroken woman searches in France for the war grave of her "nephew," who is really her illegitimate son. At last a gentle cemetery gardener—who, unknown to her, is Christ resurrected—looks at her "with infinite compassion" and forgiveness.
"Come with me," he says, "and I will show you where your son lies."
But no one showed the Kiplings. Rudyard died in 1936 and his widow Carrie three years later, without finding out where John's body lay. British authorities continue to try to identify remains, and in 1992 thought they had finally found John's, erecting a headstone with his name. But several military historians argue convincingly that the identification is false and that John Kipling is still among the more than 400,000 British Empire dead from 1914–1918 whose resting place is not known.
One by one, other players left the stage. In John Buchan's postwar writing there were only one or two brief hints of doubt about the war; he revealed, for instance, that he could no longer bear to read Homer, because of the way the poet glorified battle. He never said more. Unlike his friend Kipling, however, at least a few of his ideas changed with the times: he placed great hope in the League of Nations as an alternative to war, and eventually accepted the concept of self-rule for India. Buchan died in 1940 while serving in the figurehead post of governor general of Canada, and a British destroyer carried his ashes home.