Literature Network » Rudyard Kipling

When leaders lie, children die

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From: The Independent on Sunday
Date: 20071111
Author:

A sense of patriotic duty made Rudyard Kipling send his son to fight - and die - in the First World War. How can politicians, with no experience of battle, ask the same today, asks Geoffrey Wheatcroft

"Have you news of my boy Jack?"

Not this tide.

"When d'you think that he'll come back?"

Not with this wind blowing, and this tide...

Nothing Rudyard Kipling ever wrote was more moving than the poem that begins with these lines, and whose title, "My Boy Jack", is borrowed by the moving, glossily cast television drama shown this Remembrance Sunday evening. The tragedy of the Kipling family was a ...

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