• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Come, leave the lure of the football field

With its fame so lightly won,

And take your place in a greater game

Where worthier deeds are done....

Come, join the ranks of our hero sons

In the wider field of fame,

Where the God of Right will watch the fight,

And referee the game.

Eagerness to fight was not the full story behind soaring recruitment figures, however. When London trolley workers went on strike, for instance, the city council simply fired all males of military age and urged them to join up. Young men working for local governments and businesses often found themselves "released" from their jobs so they could volunteer. Although a bumpy economy had thrown hundreds of thousands of people out of work and was raising food prices, the government quietly asked charities not to aid jobless men eligible to enlist. The bull-necked, immensely wealthy "King of Lancashire," Lord Derby, who owned 68,000 acres of land and employed more than 75 servants and gardeners at his manor house alone, declared that after the war he intended to hire only men who had been at the front. Hundreds of other landowners and employers followed his example—especially after Derby was appointed director general of recruiting.

Young John Kipling once again was crushed when he failed the army medical exam. But this time, making use of the new climate of national urgency, his father called upon a friend for help, the renowned Field Marshal Lord Roberts, a hero of many nineteenth-century colonial wars, whom he had first known in India. Roberts pulled the necessary strings and, to Rudyard Kipling's delight, got John a commission in the Irish Guards. Kipling proudly identified with his son, writing to a friend that "he's rather like what I was, to look at, at his age." Just turned 17, John began training with the regiment in Essex. His father, meanwhile, suggested that Oxford should close down and that all undergraduates should be sent into the military. His poetry throbbed with martial fervor:

For all we have and are,

For all our children's fate,

Stand up and take the war,

The Hun is at the gate!

But Kipling was not all blood and thunder. Trying to assuage a shaken Violet Cecil, he carefully tracked down wounded survivors of the battle where young George had last been seen, and interviewed them in their hospital beds. None knew George's fate, but Kipling was able to sketch for Violet a map of the fighting. The Germans had been surging down a forest road near the French town of Villers-Cotterêts and George's unit, near a clearing in the woods, could hear their shouts and bugle calls. A German machine gun began spraying bullets into the clearing and surrounding forest, dotted with British troops. By one account, with enough of a storybook feel to make one skeptical, George ordered his men to fix bayonets and led them in a counterattack. When a bullet hit him in the hand, he stumbled, then drew his sword and shouted, "Charge lads, and we'll do 'em in yet!" The charge, it was said, delayed the Germans and helped other British troops escape, but left dozens of Grenadier Guardsmen dead or wounded, George among them, on the forest floor.

Milner found Violet "terribly distressed and looking very ill." The War Office could offer her no further details. Desperate for information, she turned to the American ambassador, as a representative of a neutral power, but he could not help either. She then wired a cousin working in neutral Holland, asking him to check whether George could be a prisoner of the Germans. Or might some French family, she wondered, be sheltering him behind enemy lines? After all, George spoke French well. "I have every reliance on George's resourcefulness and brain," she wrote. "But he may be too ill to think."

The Germans advanced well beyond the point where George had gone missing, and for a terrifying moment it looked as if Paris itself might fall. On September 5, 1914, German troops were only 23 miles away. Shops closed, traffic vanished, hotels emptied. Thousands of Parisians who had not fled