Publication history
Published in the Sunday Pictorial on January 19th, 1936. Not collected by Kipling.
Pinney notes (p. 2292) that this poem was written for publication in the 1916 Christmas number of Blighty, a magazine for servicemen, but was rejected because of its indelicacy and never published by Kipling. See Pinney for more detail on sources.
The poem
The poem expresses Kipling’s deeply felt sense at the height of the Great War that the suburban English, not prone to be militaristic, had been shocked into retaliatory and sanguinary action by German aggression. See also “Sea Constables” collected in Debits and Credits.
[J.R.]
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