Mr Hanley's close reading of the story raises some interesting points.   I
think somebody did once suggest the dying airman might be French, but his
accent - 'Che me rends!' - 'Laty' - 'Toctor' - suggests that he is not a
native French speaker.   Better accepted is Professor Norman Page's theory
that the whole episode is a hallucination on Mary's part and there never
was an aircraft or a pilot.   Against this is the fact that Miss Fowler
also heard 'a couple of aeroplanes' at about the relevant time.   Certainly
the episode is told from Mary's point of view:  she is the one who has no
doubt of the airman's nationality, but if Mr Hanley is right, she is
mistaken.
        When I had to annotate the story some years ago it seemed important
to dissociate it from all we know about bombing raids since, and to find
out what Kipling could have known when he sat down to write it in March
1915.   Walter Raleigh's The War in the Air, vol. 1, Oxford, Clarendon
Press 1922, was a useful source both for Wynn's training and for raids on
either side.   It seems that in the autumn of 1914, the British naval
squadron carried out raids on the Zeppelin sheds at Dusseldorf and
Friedrichshafen.   Squadron Cdr Briggs was shot down at Friedrichshafen on
21 November 1914, when he was attacked by the townspeople and had to be
rescued by the German army, who took him to hospital (is this what Mary
means when she talks about a man's reaction as opposed to hers?).   Having
found the dates of German raids on England in early 1915, I checked reports
in the Times.   On 20 Jan. there was a Zeppelin raid on Yarmouth and King's
Lynn, in which a boy was killed.   A bomb was also dropped at Sheringham,
going through a room where a man, his wife and child were sleeping, but
failed to explode.   Another destroyed three cottages, killing 'a lad named
Percy Goat' and badly injuring his little sister Ethel, aged 4.   On 22
Feb. there were 8 German bombs dropped on Essex.   A bomb at Colchester
wrecked part of a baby's room, but the child remained asleep.   'A
corrugated iron shed in the back garden was practically torn to pieces, and
debris was flung in all directions'.
         According to Raleigh, the bombs of the period were 'small
hand-grenades' and the pilot would carry them in his pockets and drop them
by hand.   Slightly larger bombs would be 'slung or tied about the person'.
  The aircraft were made of canvas, wood and wire, the only heavy part
being the engine.   According to my aeronautical engineer husband, no pilot
of the period could switch his engine off in the air and hope to switch it
on again, as this required help from the ground.   But he would have to
switch it off he was going to crash to avoid fire, also jettisoning his
bombs.   All this is a far cry from the sort of thing we knew in World War
II!
        I came across two instances of the bloodthirsty imaginings of
civilians towards pilots.   During World War II, Virginia Woolf (a lifelong
pacifist who probably wouldn't have known which way up to hold a gun, let
alone shoot it) fantasised to a friend in a letter that she had shot three
German pilots, after a raid on a town near her Sussex home.   And in the
German film cycle Heimat, the village Nazi finds a wounded British airman
while walking in the woods, and quietly shoots him.   The Nazi has
previously been shown as a weird character, despised by his relations and
neighbours, who has achieved power through party membership and because his
young male rivals are all away at the war.
        My own impression, for what it may be worth, was that Kipling had
met such civilian anger (probably in a woman), as well as feeling it
himself, and was writing what his daemon told him, probably without
stopping to analyse it in the sort of detail that we do.   The latest
volume of his letters shows him as virulently anti-German;  he had met
Belgian refugees who told him horror stories.   There was also propaganda: 
John Gross, in Rudyard Kipling, the Man, his Work and his World, reproduces
a contemporary poster showing a German nurse who pours water on the ground
rather than give it to a wounded British soldier.  Kipling chose to label
'Mary Postgate'  'a tale of  '15', and added the poem 'The Beginnings: 
'When the English began to hate.'
        Why is it the horrid stories that hold such fascination?!!    But
as Angus Wilson says, it's a technical marvel - 'such a wonder to read'.   
Lisa Lewis


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