Quoting Frederick Pollack <[log in to unmask]>:
> http://www.kipling.org.uk/poems_copybook.htm
>
I see here also one called 'Mesopotamia' (1917)
- it concerns Baghdad, war over oil, and bad western behaviour...
THEY shall not return to us, the resolute, the young,
The eager and whole-hearted whom we gave:
But the men who left them thriftily to die in their own dung,
Shall they come with years and honour to the grave?
They shall not return to us; the strong men coldly slain
In sight of help denied from day to day:
But the men who edged their agonies and chid them in their pain,
Are they too strong and wise to put away?
Our dead shall not return to us while Day and Night divide–
Never while the bars of sunset hold.
But the idle-minded overlings who quibbled while they died,
Shall they thrust for high employments as of old?
Shall we only threaten and be angry for an hour:
When the storm is ended shall we find
How softly but how swiftly they have sidled back to power
By the favour and contrivance of their kind?
Even while they soothe us, while they promise large amends,
Even while they make a show of fear,
Do they call upon their debtors, and take counsel with their friends,
To conform and re-establish each career?
Their lives cannot repay us–their death could not undo–
The shame that they have laid upon our race.
But the slothfulness that wasted and the arrogance that slew,
Shell we leave it unabated in its place?
and also, some excerpts from a paper on it by Julian Moore:
Rudyard Kipling's "Mesopotamia", collected in his The Years Between of 1919 ,
was first published on the 11th of July, 1917 simultaneously in the London
Morning Post and the New York Times. The subject of the poem is the Mesopotamia
campaign of World War I, and, specifically, the administrative bungling that led
to General Townshend's surrender of Kut in April 1916, which one historian has
called 'the most abject capitulation in British military history' [ J. Morris,
Farewell the Trumpets, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1979, p.171]
Like much of the verse in The Years Between, "Mesopotamia" is a poem of protest.
In this case, the verses seek vengeance for the deaths caused by the incompetent
leadership of a military operation that was a strategic, tactical, and
logistical disaster. In six quatrains of ballad-like rhyme and metre, Kipling
lets loose all his powers of public rhetoric to revolt against the appalling and
unnecessary suffering of the common soldier, and calls for revenge on the
politicians and generals responsible for the administration of a system
generally admitted to be 'hopelessly inadequate'. [Report of the Mesopotamia
Commission of Enquiry,(RMCE), London, HMSO, 1917, p.115]
Ann Parry, one of the most recent commentators on Kipling's verse, sees the
effect of the poem in terms of his 'tones of the biblical prophet', and puts
"Mesopotamia" alongside Wilfred Owen's scathing contempt for the politicians of
his time, and Sassoon's comic satire of military maladministration. [A. Parry,
The Poetry of Rudyard Kipling, Buckingham, OUP, 1992]
"Mesopotamia" is a poem of outraged accusation at the incompetence and self-
seeking of the figures at the head of the failed campaign. Kipling has aimed
volleys on behalf of the common soldier at:
the men who edged their agonies and chid them in their pain
and:
the idle-minded overlings who quibbled while they died.
He also voices the concerns of the general public who resented the fact that
those responsible for so much death were officially absolved from guilt, and
even encouraged to further their military and political careers. Kipling debates
the pragmatic morality of official nepotism:
Shall they thrust for high employment as of old?
and notes:
How softly but how swiftly they have sidled back to power
By the favour and contrivance of their kind
and asks:
Do they call upon their debtors, and take counsel with their friends,
To confirm and re-establish each career?
He ends by abjuring 'The shame that they have laid upon our race' in a critical
fury that is reminiscent of the hate embodied in, for instance, "Gehazi" and
"The Death Bed".
Kitchener and Churchill, War Minister and First Lord of the Admiralty, proposed
an overall plan that involved an attack on the logistically important Turkish
centre of Baghdad, along with a naval landing at Gallipoli to capture the
Dardanelles. Success in both these theatres would ensure that supply lines to
both Turkish and German forces would be cut, thus ensuring the vital oil
supplies of the Middle East for Britain and her allies.
Both proposals were to go hideously wrong for similar reasons. Administrative
incompetence, lack of adequate military planning, and a paucity of common sense
led to two monumental defeats. The problems of the Gallipoli campaign were
mirrored in the patterns of ineptitude evident in the Mesopotamia campaign,
patterns that, when brought to light, appalled even the British Army itself.
....
The army was under the command of General Sir John Eccles Nixon whose military
policy during the campaign has been dismissed by one historian as 'the priceless
product of a mind devoid of imagination' [ E.G.Keogh, The River in the Desert,
Melbourne, Wilke, 1955, p. 135]. It was Nixon whose orders, contrary to advice
from his subordinates, led to the advance up the River Tigris towards Baghdad,
and so was directly responsible for what a later report called an offensive
movement based on political and military miscalculations and attempted with
tired forces and inadequate preparation'. [RMCE, op cit, p. 111]
In fairness to Nixon, his position in the incredibly unwieldy chain of command
made effective leadership impossible. ...problems in administration and
military command were virtually insurmountable, and gave rise to Kipling's
bitter resentment of 'the idle-minded overlings who quibbled while they died'.
To make matters worse, the Indian Army was well known as a model of bureaucratic
inefficiency. The British Army was deeply suspicious of the methods and
traditions of the Indian Army, because of its connections with the commercial
management of the old East India Company, and with the disciplinary
ramifications of the Indian Mutiny.
.... The inadequacies were noted by Kipling who saw, 'the slothfulness that
wasted and the arrogance that slew' as major factors in the deaths of more than
half of the expedition, and such appalling deprivation for the rest that most
survivors 'bore for the rest of their lives the cruel stigmata of Kut'. [J.
Morris, op. cit., p. 171]
....
Despite a failed attempt by a secret mission, led by Lawrence of Arabia, to
bribe the Turks to release Kut, Townshend, faced with a force decimated by
disease, and with no medical supplies, surrendered the city at the end of April
1916. The two thousand British and six thousand Indian soldiers who had survived
the siege were sent off on a two year march through the desert to Turkish
prisoner of war camps. More than half of the troops died on the march or in the
camps, while Townshend himself lived out the remainder of the war in comparative
comfort under house arrest in a villa near Constantinople.
By early 1917, Nixon had been relieved of his command, Kut had been retaken, and
British troops had occupied Baghdad, ensuring the safety of the vitally
important oilfields. But the Kut fiasco had raised questions about the
management of the campaign and had been taken up by the British press to such an
extent that the government was forced to appoint an official enquiry into all
aspects of the administration. ....'I sometimes think that the fury with which
the British public condemns is equalled only by the rapidity with which it
forgets.' [Viscount Haldane, House of Lords debate, 13.1.17]
Kipling agreed, asking: Shall we only threaten and be angry for an hour? Kipling
was continuing his tradition of publishing his political rhetoric in verse to
stir his readers to action, a practice that Eliot later noted: 'For Kipling the
poem is something that is intended to act'. [T.S.Eliot, 'Introduction' in A
Choice of Kipling's Verse, Faber, London, 1941, p. 18.] Eliot makes much of the
'active intention' of Kipling's verse, without commenting on the actions that
the verse may have been intended to elicit.
....
Kipling was savage in his indictment of those involved and the government that
was allowing them to get away with their crimes:
Even while they soothe us, while they promise large amends,
Even while they make a show of fear,
Do they call upon their debtors, and take counsel with their friends,
To confirm and re-establish each career?
The answer to Kipling's rhetorical question was predictable. Nixon had been
exonerated, Hardinge had been promoted, Secretary of State for India.
Chamberlain resigned but was back in power within six months, Duff had been
allowed to vanish into the impenetrable fens of the Civil Service, and the
whitewash that so appalled Kipling was complete.
"Mesopotamia" contains some of the bitterest scorn of Kipling's political verse
of this period. Ann Parry has noted of the poem that:
'although it is powerful public rhetoric, throughout it can only repeat the same
circle of negative emotions and, in the end, it becomes the victim of its own
corrosive bitterness and frustration' ....
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