Rudyard Kipling remains a favourite despite some of his war-time writings

By Medicine Hat News Opinon on April 24, 2019.

I just recently revisited the Esplanade. Just the foyer. What a great place.

Then I walked over to that bronze sculpture of the early “Germans from Russia” pioneers. It lists many of the names. Their descendants – you’ll have noticed their names in sports, businesses, ranching, farming, politics, industries, etc. – are now legion, all over southeastern Alberta, in all of Alberta and in all of Canada; not only Germans from Russia, but descendants from more recent immigrants. They have been a fact of history for a long time.

The Hessians, recruited by the British during the American Revolution, were from Hessia, a German state from before the founding of a united Germany. Many of them deserted in order to stay in what was to become known as the Land of the Free, and also proliferated all over the U.S. and Canada. We were definitely there, so to speak. And yes, of course, many other nationalities from Britain, France, the Ukraine, from all over the world, also contributed, to probably an even greater degree and greater numbers, to the success of the U.S. and Canada.

During the many revolutions during the 1840s in Prussia and other German principalities, which were brutally put down, many, by the hundreds of thousands, fled to the new :free” America and, one would guess also to the Dominion of Canada.

Then I walked a bit further. And there, on the facade of the Royal Liquor Store, is that famous quotation of Kipling’s, about The Hat having all hell for a basement.

So why, at this time, do I choose to concentrate on the Germans’ contribution, you might well ask?

Well, I relatively recently read a non-fiction book titled, if I remember correctly “Years of War: 1914-1918.” With 2018 being that war’s anniversary, naturally it caused all kinds of stories about deeds of courage and patriotism by Canadians and by the British and the misdeeds of Germans during that war, including in the Medicine Hat News. In that book Rudyard J. Kipling, my favourite author from way back when I was still a boy, was, among many other personalities and facts, featured somewhat prominently. He was quoted as having pronounced that “There are two divisions in the world, human beings and Germans” and “Where ever Germans settled, they became like a plague upon the land,” and on in this vein. That was followed by “There are no crimes, no cruelty, no abominations, that the world can conceive of that the German has not perpetrated, is not perpetrating and will not perpetrate if he is to go on,” and further of this nature. I cannot claim to have the exact words correctly, because I returned that book and have not been able to find it again.

Kipling had lost a son in that war and he and his wife had great difficulty in finding his grave; he had been pronounced as “missing.” The British war cabinet had persuaded Kipling to be a member of the propaganda ministry and perhaps that’s why he spoke thusly. On the other hand, he had been known to be very anti-German all of his life.

So did that make me very anti-Kipling? No, not at all. Anybody capable of such marvellous writings as “If,” “The Jungle Book,” “Kim,” “Gunga Din,” “Ricki-Tikki-Tavi,” “Just So Stories,” “Puck of Pook’s Hill” and all those great writings that included what he had written to win the Nobel Prize for Literature certainly could not, and should not, be blamed for sometimes showing anti-anything attitudes, especially anti-dictatorship attitudes that were to commit genocide; like the Holocaust, the Soviet caused Ukranian famine, the atrocities committed in the name of the emperor Hirohito, ISIS, chemical attacks in Iraq, Syria, and on and on.

Mark Twain and Rudyard Kipling – he was also the author of a bit of no longer exactly considered acceptable poetry titled “The White Man’s Burden” – are very much still my two favourite authors.

Ted Kohlmetz is a well read retired citizen of Medicine Hat.

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