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The Guards continued fighting in every theatre of war
on the Western Front and at the end of the Great War had
lost 14,653 men, with 28,389 wounded. It is difficult to
pick just one story which demonstrates the awfulness of
the war and the bravery of those involved but there is
however one haunting story which involves the Irish
Guards and the son of the great writer and poet, Rudyard
Kipling. Kipling wrote a History of the Irish Guards in
the Great war and in 1918 published a poem ‘The Irish
Guards’. It commemorates this fine regiment, only
founded in 1900, and links it back to the tradition of all
army regiments…
We're not so old in the Army List,
But we're not so young at our trade,
For we had the honour at Fontenoy
Of meeting the Guards' Brigade.
What is not mentioned is that Kipling’s own son was
killed whilst serving in the Irish Guards, a loss for
which Kipling blamed himself and never recovered from.
Kipling’s only son John was 17 in 1914. He desperately
wanted to join the navy, but was refused as he had very
poor eyesight and could see little without his spectacles.
You get an idea of just how poor young Jack’s eyesight
was from the thick eye glasses he is wearing in the
photograph opposite taken by Christina Broom, Britain’s
first female press photographer. The photograph is part
of a small exhibition of Broom’s Great War photographs
that is being shown in the foyer of The Museum of
London until 28 September 2014.
Rudyard Kipling, the great patriot, was devastated that
his boy had been turned down and so contacted his friend
Lord Roberts, one of the British Field Marshals and
Colonel of the Irish Guards. Strings were pulled and
John ‘Jack’ Kipling was commissioned as a Second
Lieutenant into the 2nd Battalion of the Irish Guards.
He was a brave young man, but his poor eyesight made it
almost impossible for him to fight or lead his men ‘over the
top’ as he was often left wandering aimlessly. Without his
father’s influence Jack would never have passed his army
medical as fit to serve. The casualty rate among junior
officers in the trenches was much higher than NCOs or
other ranks and on average, a junior officer leading from
the front survived just six weeks. On the second day of the
attack at the Battle of Loos in 1915, John Jack Kipling,
just six weeks past his 18th birthday, was seen stumbling
blindly through the mud, screaming in agony after an
exploding shell had ripped his face apart. He wasn’t seen
again. The failure to find John's remains fuelled the author's
long-term obsession that his only son had survived.
But it was not to be. Kipling eventually came to accept
John's fate. And despite a grief-stricken crusade to find
them, the remains of his ‘dear old boy’ were not officially
‘discovered’ until 1992. Yet there are those who believe that
the body interned in a grave bearing his name at plot seven,
row D of St Mary's Advanced Dressing Station Cemetery,
near Loos, are not those of the author's son. Kipling did
write a poem commemorating his son’s loss, but the poem
‘My Boy Jack’ is not about a soldier serving on land, but
about the sailor serving at sea. It is full of naval references.
Without his intervention, Jack would not have been in the
trenches in the first place. Heartbroken Kipling wrote:
If any question why we died
Tell them, because our fathers lied
Kipling died in London in 1936, and has no descendants
today. The only one of his children who made it past the age
of 18, Elsie, died childless in 1970. How many other British
families petered out when their young were lost in The
Great War? One hundred years later the Guards Museum
are instrumental in remembering and marking this great
sacrifice.
Continues overleaf….
Horse Team, 4th Battalion. (Pioneers) Coldstream Guards
