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By Root 1124 0

History of the War appeared in February 1915; within four years, with some assistance, Buchan would produce 24 best-selling volumes totaling well over a million words—by far the most widely read books about the war written while it was in progress. Like the best propagandists, he was not just a manipulator but a believer, for his sunny personality allowed him to imagine the upside of absolutely anything. The inevitable British victory, he claimed, would produce a more democratic society, and so "this war may rank as one of the happiest events in our his tory."

Rudyard Kipling also lent his skills to the war effort, and gave speeches at recruiting rallies and elsewhere. His unbounded rage at Germany overwhelmed even his fiction, as in "Swept and Garnished," a story about a well-to-do Berlin matron whose elegant home is disturbed by the ghosts of murdered Belgian children. Nonfiction flowed from his hand as well, including a series of pamphlets singing the praises of the infantry, the artillery, the navy, and other troops. And no soldiers sparked Kipling's enthusiasm more than those arriving on the Western Front from his beloved India. Like colonialists everywhere, he prided himself on knowing what the natives were thinking, which was, he assured readers, that "it is a war of our Raj—'everybody's war,' as they say in the bazaars." Nothing in his work, of course, even hinted at the degree of official anxiety over the growth of Indian nationalism. All armies censor mail coming from soldiers at the front, but the British had a special postal unit of Urdu-speakers censoring mail going to Indian soldiers, to screen out letters or pamphlets supporting independence.

Kipling had only scorn for anyone who shirked the glorious task of war. "What will be the position," he asked, "in years to come of the young man who has deliberately elected to outcast himself from this all-embracing brotherhood?" No such shame lay in wait for his son, whose battalion shipped off to the front in August 1915. John Kipling went to war, his mother wrote, looking "very straight and smart and brave and young," and sporting a small, newly grown mustache. Because John was only 17, his father had to give the army consent for his son to be sent overseas. "This is the life," John exuberantly told his parents after a destroyer had escorted his troopship across the Channel. More letters followed, one of them exulting over food given the officers: "Bread, sardines, jam Whisky & water, A-1!"

Were John's parents as cheerful as Kipling's endless stream of rousing articles and stories suggests? The novelist Rider Haggard did not think so: "Neither of them look so well as they did.... Their boy ... is an officer in the Irish Guards and one can see that they are terrified lest he should be sent to the front and killed, as has happened to nearly all the young men they know."

From 20 miles behind the lines, John reported that the Irish Guards were billeted "in a splendid little village," himself in the house of the mayor, "a topping old fellow who can't speak a word of English, but the kindest chap you ever met," with a pretty daughter. He seemed amazed to find himself, now just turned 18, censoring his men's mail and sitting as a judge in a court-martial. Then, schoolboy fashion, it was back to talk of packages from home: "The cigarettes, tobacco, chocolate, clean shirts socks etc were most acceptable." He was lucky to have an experienced commanding officer, John wrote: "What he doesn't know about the game isn't worth knowing."

Back home, volunteers still crowded recruiting offices but the euphoria of the war's opening weeks had dissipated, and a hard-edged social pressure to enlist was in the air. A London theater put on a play called The Man Who Stayed at Home. Women stood on street corners handing out white feathers, an ancient symbol of cowardice, to young men not in uniform; Fenner Brockway, editor of the Labour Leader, the newspaper Keir Hardie had started, who would soon go to jail for his antiwar convictions, joked that he had been given so many he could make