Rudyard Kipling, author of the Junglebook and the famous poem ‘If’ amongst many poems and some short stories was reportedly the poster boy for the British empire. Thought by some to be extreme, and admired by others, he was said to have been criticised by George Orwell of Nineteen Eighty-Four fame.
He was born in Bombay, India in 1865 to Alice and John Lockwood Kipling. Colonial Britain at the time was believed to have consisted of 13 million square miles of foreign territory, subjucating an estimated 400 million people. Kipling was said to have believed in the absolute invincibility of the British empire. His son was reportedly accepted for the Irish guards at a young age. Kipling’s wife was Carrie Star Belestaire. According to a report their only son John went missing in 1915. Kipling reportedly interviewed soldiers from John’s 2nd battalion of Irish guards who said he died during the battle of Loos in France in 1915 but reportedly their stories didn’t tally. A former report believed John to have died in the Anglo-Irish war which ran concurrent to the first world war, beginning with an uprising in easter 1916. Among Kipling’s many poems there was one entitled, Epitaphs of war, with the line, If any question why he died tell them because our fathers lied.