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- Herausgeber: Musaicum Books
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Rudyard Kipling's 'The Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated Edition)' offers readers a comprehensive collection of the author's literary works, showcasing his skillful blend of adventure, imperialism, and vivid storytelling. Kipling's prose showcases a mastery of language and a keen understanding of the cultural and political complexities of his time, making his stories both entertaining and thought-provoking. This illustrated edition enhances the reading experience by providing visuals that further immerse readers in Kipling's world. With works such as 'The Jungle Book' and 'Kim' included, readers can delve into Kipling's exploration of morality, identity, and the impact of colonialism. Kipling's ability to captivate readers with his rich narratives and dynamic characters solidifies his place as a prominent figure in English literature. Rudyard Kipling's personal experiences growing up in British India and his career as a journalist and writer in the late 19th and early 20th centuries undoubtedly influenced his literary works. Drawing on his deep connection to India and his observations of British imperialism, Kipling crafted stories that reflect the complexities and contradictions of the era. His unique perspective and writing style continue to resonate with readers today, making his works enduring classics. I highly recommend 'The Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated Edition)' to readers who appreciate engaging storytelling, historical fiction, and thought-provoking themes. Kipling's ability to weave together adventure, social commentary, and compelling characters make this collection a must-read for anyone interested in exploring the rich tapestry of English literature. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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The Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated Edition)
Table of Contents
Introduction
This Illustrated Edition gathers the breadth of Rudyard Kipling’s art in one reading experience, presenting his complete novels together with the principal story collections, poetry, reportage, travel writings, military histories, and autobiographical volumes listed herein. Organized to respect the contours of Kipling’s own book-length groupings, it allows readers to encounter his work as it first cohered in volumes rather than as isolated pieces. The visual program accompanying the texts is intended to deepen context without prescribing interpretation, illuminating landscapes, trades, ships, soldiers, and animals that populate these pages. The aim is simple: to provide an accessible, reliable, and capacious pathway through a career of uncommon variety and force.
The collection spans multiple genres and modes: novels of formation and adventure; short stories ranging from social comedy and realism to the macabre; ballads and lyrics; essays, speeches, and addresses; war correspondence and regimental history; and travel sketches and letters. It includes children’s tales and fables alongside technical narratives of ships, railways, workshops, and frontiers. Readers will also find autobiographical reflections that speak to craft and vocation. Kipling often braided prose and verse within volumes, and late collections interleave stories with poems; this edition preserves those patterns so that refrains, preludes, and codas speak across forms, showing how a single creative impulse could take many shapes.
The novels recorded here chart the reach of Kipling’s imagination across seas and continents. The Light That Failed follows an artist and war correspondent grappling with vision, vocation, and companionship. Captains Courageous: A Story of the Grand Banks sends an indulged boy overboard into a Gloucester fishing schooner’s hard school of seamanship. Kim traces an orphan’s travels with a Tibetan lama along the Grand Trunk Road and into the intricacies of intelligence work. The Naulahka: A Story of West and East—written in collaboration with Wolcott Balestier—sets a transatlantic ambition against the demands and allure of India, exploring exchanges and misunderstandings between cultures.
Kipling’s early Indian stories established his mastery of the compact tale. Plain Tales From the Hills sketches the daily theatre of cantonments and civil lines, revealing the pressures and small mercies of bureaucratic life. Soldier’s Three and its second volume turn to enlisted men, their camaraderie, resourcefulness, and wit under routine and strain. The City of Dreadful Night offers an unflinching look at urban existence under extreme heat and darkness. Under the Deodars and Wee Willie Winkie range from social satire and domestic drama to the child’s-eye view, balancing empathy with irony as they chart attachment, duty, and mischief in a colonial society.
A taste for the uncanny and the borderlands of experience runs through The Phantom ‘Rickshaw and Other Ghost Stories, where conscience, memory, and atmospheric dread shape events as much as outward circumstance. Life’s Handicap and Many Inventions widen the compass to include tales of station, workshop, frontier, and sea, attentive to craft and to moral consequence. Throughout these volumes, narrative economy meets dense specificity: technical vocabularies are handled with ease, landscapes are sharply drawn, and character is revealed in action. The premises are direct, the turns exact, and the endings—whether wry, humane, or chilling—derive their force from a disciplined sense of design.
The animal and children’s books here remain among Kipling’s most enduring creations. The Jungle Book and The Second Jungle Book gather fables of the forest and its codes, giving voice to creatures and to the human child who moves among them. Just So Stories delights in origin tales shaped by cadence and play, designed to be heard aloud as much as read. ‘Thy Servant a Dog’ extends that sympathy to a household’s canine narrator. Together these works show Kipling’s ear for oral storytelling, his feel for names and rhythms, and his capacity to make law, custom, and affection palpable through creaturely perspective without compromising narrative clarity.
Other story collections chart modernity’s engines and the weight of memory. The Day’s Work treats ships, bridges, locomotives, and artisans with the seriousness due to workmanship. Traffics and Discoveries and Actions and Reactions bring wireless, motor transport, and new tactics into view. Stalky and Co. follows a trio at school whose stratagems prefigure later tests. Puck of Pook’s Hill and Rewards and Fairies stage encounters with England’s past through a magic of place and voice. A Diversity of Creatures, Land and Sea Tales, Debits and Credits, Limits and Renewals, and Abaft the Funnel gather late and early pieces alike, many interleaving prose and verse to deepen atmosphere and theme.
Kipling’s poetry, assembled in Departmental Ditties, Ballads and Barrack-Room Ballads, The Seven Seas, An Almanac of Twelve Sports, The Five Nations, Songs From Books, The Years Between, and Other Poems, reveals a public poet attuned to work, weather, sea-lanes, and service. His lyrics and ballads often adopt speaking voices shaped by craft or rank, set to memorable rhythms that carry narrative and argument. Maritime panoramas, imperial logistics, and the textures of trade recur, as do private meditations on loss and time. The verse converses with the prose across volumes, offering commentary, counterpoint, and refrain that anchor the larger architecture of his books.
The military writings foreground reportage, instruction, witness, and commemoration. A Fleet in Being, Sea Warfare, and The New Army in Training look closely at ships, crews, training grounds, and new methods. France at War and The War in the Mountains record conditions, landscapes, and morale in theaters of conflict. The Graves of the Fallen addresses remembrance and the obligations it entails. The Irish Guards in the Great War, in two volumes, is regimental history on a large canvas, attentive to organization and action. The Eyes of Asia, cast as letters from Indian soldiers, suggests how voices from the subcontinent might narrate the experience of a European war.
Travel and observation are vital to Kipling’s method, and the travel collections trace that education. American Notes, From Sea to Sea, and Letters of Travel: 1892–1913 record journeys that sharpened his sense of continent-spanning systems and of local habit. Souvenirs of France and Brazilian Sketches: 1927 present briefings from specific places and times, alert to civic life, craft, and ceremony. How Shakespeare Came to Write the ‘Tempest’ stands as a reflective essay in this company, linking place, rumor, and literary imagination. Across these books, the traveler’s notebook becomes a workshop for tone, detail, and comparative seeing.
Two volumes of self-scrutiny and public address frame the oeuvre from within. A Book of Words collects speeches and essays, many concerned with the responsibilities of craft, citizenship, and the ties between schooling and work. Something of Myself offers an autobiographical account of the making of a writer, focusing on reading, apprenticeship, and the assembly of books rather than on private confession. Together they articulate principles that recur elsewhere: respect for labor competently done, attention to language as a tool, and a preference for stories that test character through task and trial.
Certain themes and methods unify these diverse books. Work—as practice, ethic, and fellowship—anchors many tales and poems. Initiation and belonging are examined in the ship’s fo’c’sle, the cantonment, the classroom, the workshop, and the jungle alike. The allure and strain of service, the enchantments of place, the pull of the past, and the shocks of new technology return with variation. Kipling’s style is compact, his settings vivid, his command of specialized registers sure; he moves easily between fable, report, ballad, and framed tale. Some perspectives reflect the assumptions of his time; this edition invites expansive and critical reading together.
Author Biography
Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) was a British poet, short‑story writer, and novelist whose career paralleled the high tide and afterglow of the British Empire. Raised between India and Britain, he became one of the most widely read literary figures of his age, admired for narrative drive, technical precision, and memorable rhythms. His range was exceptional, spanning children’s classics, sea tales, colonial sketches, and war writings. In 1907 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first English‑language laureate, cited for imagination and storytelling power. Celebrated and contested in equal measure for his imperial outlook, Kipling remains central to debates about art, authority, and the legacies of empire in English letters.
Kipling’s early education at the United Services College in Westward Ho! trained him in discipline, satire, and camaraderie that later surfaced in his school and soldier tales. Returning to India as a young man, he worked as a journalist in Lahore and Allahabad, learning the brisk economy of newspaper prose and the idioms of bazaar, barracks, and station life. This apprenticeship yielded rapid‑fire books: Departmental Ditties, Plain Tales From the Hills, Soldier’s Three, Soldier’s Three - Part II, The City of Dreadful Night, Under the Deodars, Wee Willie Winkie, and The Phantom ‘Rickshaw and Other Ghost Stories. These collections mapped colonial society with sharp observation, varied registers, and a strong feel for anecdote.
By the early 1890s Kipling had left India and traveled widely, experiences distilled in travel books such as American Notes and From Sea to Sea. London made him a literary sensation. His balladry—Ballads and Barrack-Room Ballads, The Seven Seas, and the sportive An Almanac of Twelve Sports—married songlike cadence to public themes. In fiction, Life’s Handicap, Many Inventions, and The Day’s Work demonstrated a command of craft, machinery, and moral stress. The metropolitan audience embraced his energy and range, while critics argued over his politics. Yet even detractors conceded the crisp engineering of his prose, its economy, and its memorable turns of phrase.
Kipling’s most familiar narratives were forged in this period of confidence and experiment. The Jungle Book and The Second Jungle Book introduced a gallery of animal fables and frontier legends that entered global childhood. Just So Stories perfected his gift for origin tales and voice. In longer fiction, The Light That Failed examined art and loss; The Naulahka: A Story of West and East, co‑written with Wolcott Balestier, probed transatlantic ambition; Captain Courageous: A Story of the Grand Banks celebrated seamanship; and Kim offered a panoramic journey across northern India. Stalky and Co. satirized schoolboy stratagems, while Puck of Pook’s Hill and Rewards and Fairies reimagined English history through folklore and play.
Kipling’s fascination with service, discipline, and technology deepened into sustained treatment of naval and military life. A Fleet in Being foreshadowed this interest; during the Great War he published France at War, The New Army in Training, Sea Warfare, The War in the Mountains, and The Graves of the Fallen, and later produced the monumental regimental chronicle The Irish Guards in the Great War I & II. His verse volumes The Five Nations and The Years Between framed imperial and wartime experience in robust, often controversial cadences. Story collections such as Traffics and Discoveries, Actions and Reactions, A Diversity of Creatures, and The Eyes of Asia explored modernity’s tools alongside moral cost.
A tireless traveler and observer, Kipling continued to interpret landscapes and peoples for a wide readership. Letters of Travel: 1892 – 1913, Souvenirs of France, Brazilian Sketches: 1927, American Notes, and From Sea to Sea trace his curiosity across continents and years. Late fiction—Debits and Credits, Limits and Renewals, Land and Sea Tales, ‘Thy Servant a Dog’, and the miscellany Abaft the Funnel—shows a seasoned artist working with parable, irony, and compressed feeling. Even as public opinion shifted, he pursued clarity of line, exact diction, and structural economy, returning to themes of duty, craft, chance, and memory that had anchored his earliest tales.
Kipling reflected on his methods and era in A Book of Words and, at the end, in his posthumous autobiography Something of Myself. He died in 1936, leaving a body of work that remains widely read, taught, and debated. Songs From Books curated his verse for new audiences, while collections like The Seven Seas continued to shape popular understanding of his poetics. His writing on commemoration, including The Graves of the Fallen, linked literature to public memory. Today his legacy is assessed with nuance: craft and storytelling weighed against ideology, his influence unmistakable in children’s literature, short fiction technique, and the language of modern English narrative.
Historical Context
Rudyard Kipling’s career spans the high noon and twilight of the British Empire, from the late Victorian decades through the Edwardian era, the First World War, and the interwar years. The works gathered here register accelerating global interconnection, the rise of new technologies, and the stresses of imperial rule, while also tracing cultural debates about nation, class, race, and modernity. Born in 1865 in Bombay, educated in England, and seasoned as a journalist in India, Kipling became an international figure, awarded the 1907 Nobel Prize in Literature. Across fiction, verse, reportage, travel writing, and autobiography, this collection reads as a layered documentary of his times.
Kipling’s earliest fiction emerged from the Anglo-Indian press milieu of Lahore and Allahabad, where the Civil and Military Gazette and the Pioneer nourished his eye for bureaucratic routine and frontier rumor. Plain Tales from the Hills, Under the Deodars, and The City of Dreadful Night anatomize late-nineteenth-century colonial society: club rooms, cantonments, and overheated cities shaped by railways, sanitation campaigns, and the codes of the Indian Civil Service. These works register the era’s ambivalences—between reform and hierarchy—at a moment when the Raj consolidated after the 1857 uprising even as early nationalist politics, including the Indian National Congress (founded 1885), began to stir.
Soldier’s Three and the later Ballads and Barrack-Room Ballads brought vernacular voices of rank-and-file soldiers to print culture enlarged by mass literacy and cheap newspapers. Their backdrop includes imperial frontiers—North-West campaigns and aftershocks of the Second Anglo-Afghan War—as well as barrack life under post-Cardwell reforms. Kipling’s interest lies less in strategy than in routine, resilience, and camaraderie, capturing dialects and music-hall rhythms familiar to metropolitan audiences. The perspective intersects with a broader late-Victorian fascination with the “Tommy,” while anticipating debates about military professionalism, empire’s costs, and the social identity of the British Army on foreign service.
Global mobility animates the travel volumes American Notes, From Sea to Sea, Letters of Travel: 1892–1913, Souvenirs of France, and Brazilian Sketches: 1927. These observe a world knitted by steamship lines, railways, and the telegraph after the Suez Canal’s opening (1869). Kipling’s itineraries cross the United States’ Gilded Age cities, East Asian ports, and European landscapes reshaped by industry and tourism. The writing participates in fin-de-siècle travel journalism—mixing brisk observation with comparison—and reflects imperial and commercial circuits that allowed an English-language periodical piece to circulate rapidly across continents, shaping readers’ sense of distant places and of Britain’s role within them.
The Light That Failed and The Naulahka: A Story of West and East belong to the 1890s’ intense transatlantic literary market and to late-Victorian debates over art, masculinity, and imperial crisis. The former, steeped in the world of correspondents and campaigns on Britain’s periphery, reflects anxieties about violence and memory associated with the Sudan and other contemporaneous theaters. The latter, co-authored with Wolcott Balestier, engages with cross-cultural encounter and the mediation of “East” and “West” under conditions of unequal power and curiosity. Together they record the decade’s mingling of romance conventions with reportage, and the reach of Anglo-American publishing networks.
The Jungle Book and The Second Jungle Book arose during a surge of interest in natural history, game laws, and colonial forestry as administrative sciences in the 1890s. Their animal polity—shaped by oral tale motifs and observation—echoes debates about law, discipline, and belonging that traveled through imperial bureaucracies. They also reflect the pedagogy of moral fable prevalent in children’s print culture. The stories grew in popularity amid illustrated gift-book markets and periodical serialization, and they later intersected with the Scouting movement, which adapted names and symbols from the books for youth training, linking empire’s outdoorsmanship to civic instruction at home.
Just So Stories embodies the Edwardian “golden age” of children’s literature, with authors crafting illustrated volumes for family reading and nursery recitation. Kipling’s art and typography align with advances in color printing that made sumptuous editions affordable for a wider middle class. The tales’ mock-etiologies participate in a broader, sometimes playful, public engagement with evolution and comparative ethnography circulating since Darwin. Their cadence and refrains reflect a culture that prized memorization and performance. The book was also shaped by domestic life; Kipling wrote tales for his children, and the volume stands at the intersection of private storytelling and the commercial book trade.
Stalky and Co. examines the English public school as a training ground for imperial administration, echoing late-Victorian discourses of muscular Christianity, gamesmanship, and character. Its timing coincides with educational reforms and the consolidation of elite networks that supplied the civil and military services. Alongside, collections like Many Inventions and The Day’s Work register industrial modernity—steamships, railroads, and mechanical craft—within a global marketplace. Their narratives frequently turn on the ethics of skilled labor and the hazards of complex systems, mirroring contemporary discussions in engineering journals and trade unions about workmanship, risk, and responsibility in an increasingly mechanized world.
Maritime imagination runs through Captains Courageous: A Story of the Grand Banks and the naval reportage A Fleet in Being. The novel situates New England fishing within the North Atlantic economy: seasonal labor, immigrant crews, and the perils of the Grand Banks before modern safety regimes. The nonfiction sketches the Royal Navy during the pre-dreadnought era, when Alfred Thayer Mahan’s theories on sea power influenced policymakers, and when steel hulls, quick-firing guns, and coaling logistics determined strategy. Together they reflect late nineteenth-century sea cultures at a moment when ocean-borne commerce, transatlantic migration, and imperial defense were tightly interwoven.
Kim, set amid railways, cantonments, and the Grand Trunk Road, distills the politics of the Great Game—the nineteenth-century strategic rivalry between Britain and Russia in Central Asia. Its attention to surveys, mapping, and intelligence work mirrors the historical roles of the Survey of India and the growth of bureaucracy in the Raj. The novel also embraces north Indian religious and linguistic diversity, filtered through orientalist frameworks that have since been questioned by scholars. Its episodic journeying exemplifies an era fascinated by classification—of peoples, terrains, and knowledge—while tracking how mobility and espionage shaped imperial security and amateur ethnography.
Edwardian fascination with technologies of speed and signal saturates Traffics and Discoveries, Actions and Reactions, and The Day’s Work: motorcars on new roads, wireless experiments, and speculative airship futures in the widely read “With the Night Mail.” These pieces engage with regulatory regimes, insurance, and professional expertise that accompanied new machines. Abaft the Funnel gathers shipboard and journalistic sketches from an earlier phase, linking the maritime world to newspaper capitalism. Land and Sea Tales later adapts endangerment and technical prowess for juvenile readers, intersecting with the Scouting movement (founded 1907), which borrowed from Kipling’s animal lore to craft ceremonies and ideals of practical citizenship.
Kipling’s ghost and uncanny tales—The Phantom ‘Rickshaw and Other Ghost Stories, Under the Deodars, Wee Willie Winkie, and Life’s Handicap among them—stand within a late-Victorian and Edwardian vogue for the supernatural, shaped by the Society for Psychical Research (founded 1882) and fin-de-siècle anxieties about science, faith, and empire. Colonial settings intensified such tensions: unfamiliar climates, epidemic disease, and cross-cultural contact became narrative sites for fear and sympathy. Print magazines prized compact shocks and moral turns, and advances in gaslight, photography, and urban design altered how “haunting” could be imagined in streets, hill stations, and boarding houses.
Poetry volumes such as Departmental Ditties, Ballads and Barrack-Room Ballads, The Seven Seas, An Almanac of Twelve Sports, The Five Nations, Songs From Books, and The Years Between track Kipling’s rise as a public poet. He fused music-hall rhythms with topical subjects, addressing bureaucracy, seafaring, imperial burdens, and, later, war-weariness. “The White Man’s Burden” (1899), included among Other Poems, entered debates about U.S. expansion in the Philippines and remains a focal point for discussions of imperial ideology. “Recessional” (1897), also outside the named volumes here, voiced caution amid Jubilee celebration. The Almanac’s collaboration with artist William Nicholson reflects turn-of-the-century print innovation.
Puck of Pook’s Hill and Rewards and Fairies stage English history through a Sussex landscape, blending antiquarian interest with patriotic pedagogy. Their tales—from Roman frontiers to Tudor exploration—arrived when archaeology, local history societies, and the National Trust (founded 1895) nurtured a heritage impulse. They align with school curricula that celebrated continuity of law and custom, even as social reform contested class privilege at home. Rewards and Fairies contains “If—,” which became a widely memorized set of maxims in the early twentieth century, reflecting stoic ideals prized in education and public life, especially amid anxieties about national efficiency before and after 1914.
The war years reoriented Kipling’s writing. France at War and The New Army in Training document early mobilization, while Sea Warfare chronicles naval actions and adaptation to submarine threat. The War in the Mountains turns to the Italian front’s terrain and logistics. The Eyes of Asia channels letter-forms of Indian soldiers serving overseas, acknowledging imperial armies’ diversity. Personal loss—his son’s death at Loos in 1915—intensified his work with remembrance. The Graves of the Fallen and later involvement with the Imperial (now Commonwealth) War Graves Commission included phrases for memorial inscriptions and advocacy of uniform commemoration, culminating in the regimental history The Irish Guards in the Great War I & II.
After 1918, Debits and Credits and Limits and Renewals address trauma, spiritual dislocation, and altered geopolitics as uprisings, mandates, and economic shocks reshaped the imperial map. Stories explore memory and ritual at a time of bereavement and veterans’ reintegration into civilian life. ‘Thy Servant a Dog’ adopts a canine perspective within interwar magazine culture that valued light satire beside darker themes. Travel pieces—Souvenirs of France and Brazilian Sketches—register diplomacy and commerce in a world of new borders and aviation. A Book of Words gathers public speeches on craft, education, and citizenship, while Something of Myself offers a posthumous, unfinished glance back at a life threaded through the print economy.
Throughout, controversies surrounding race, class, and empire are integral to the collection’s historical meaning. Kipling often endorsed imperial order and hierarchies, views contested even in his own day by anti-imperial activists, socialists, and colonized intellectuals. Later readers, influenced by decolonization and postcolonial scholarship, have interrogated the works’ assumptions while recognizing their documentary value: the textures of bureaucracy, the craft of sailors and engineers, the idioms of soldiers, and the myths of national origin. Read together, these writings map how late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britons imagined power, technology, danger, belonging, and memory across a rapidly changing world.
Synopsis (Selection)
The Light That Failed
A portrait and war correspondent struggles to balance artistic ambition with the entanglements of love and the moral costs of conflict. Kipling probes the gap between vision and reality, charting pride, vulnerability, and the toll of service on a creative life. The tone is somber and introspective, mixing scenes of action with psychological realism.
Captain Courageous: A Story of the Grand Banks
A wealthy, wayward boy is rescued by fishermen and learns seamanship, responsibility, and respect for labor on the North Atlantic. The tale blends apprenticeship and adventure with close observations of maritime life. Briny detail and disciplined camaraderie shape an ultimately humane, transformative journey.
Kim
An orphaned streetwise boy in India becomes entwined with both a spiritual pilgrimage and the shadow world of espionage. Moving through bazaars, barracks, and borderlands, he navigates questions of identity, loyalty, and belonging. The tone is vivid and picaresque, balancing humor and intrigue with a layered portrait of place.
The Naulahka: A Story of West and East
A transatlantic venture draws American protagonists into the social, spiritual, and commercial complexities of an Indian principality. Desire, duty, and a fabled treasure test cross-cultural understanding and personal resolve. The narrative juxtaposes idealism and ambition with the ambiguities of exchange between worlds.
Early Anglo-Indian Tales (Plain Tales From the Hills; Under the Deodars; Wee Willie Winkie; Soldier’s Three; Soldier’s Three - Part II; The Phantom ‘Rickshaw and Other Ghost Stories; The City of Dreadful Night)
These collections chart Anglo-Indian society from hill-station salons and regimental barracks to feverish city nights and eerie encounters. Gossip, friendship, and duty unfold beside tales of the uncanny, revealing the pressures and rituals of colonial life. The style moves easily between satire, sentiment, and stark realism, with crisp reportage and colloquial voices.
Experiment and Empire: Middle-Period Stories (Life’s Handicap; Many Inventions)
Stories range from technical feats and sea passages to uncanny twists and moral reckonings across the empire. Kipling refines his mix of jargon, ballad-cadence, and plain speech to test characters against risk, work, and fate. The tone is versatile—by turns playful, clinical, and compassionate—signaling a widening thematic repertoire.
The Jungle Books (The Jungle Book; The Second Jungle Book)
Animal fables and forest adventures explore law, leadership, and the bonds of kinship and mentorship. Mowgli and other creatures navigate belonging and responsibility in a world where survival and ethics intersect. Lyrical interludes and taut episodes create a mythic, instructive atmosphere without losing energy or wonder.
The Day’s Work
Tales of ships, engines, and labor dramatize the dignity and peril of human work amid industrial modernity. Characters are tested by weather, machinery, and moral choice, finding community through competence. The voice is technical yet compassionate, celebrating craft while acknowledging cost.
Stalky and Co.
Schoolboy stratagems at a British institution become a field for wit, discipline, and group loyalty. Practical jokes and tactical thinking reveal how cunning and camaraderie form character under pressure. The tone is sardonic and brisk, with an eye on leadership-training in miniature.
Just So Stories
Playful origin tales explain animals’ shapes and habits through rhythmic prose and comic logic. The pieces invite audience participation while smuggling in themes of ingenuity, curiosity, and consequence. Light in touch, they pair whimsy with a storyteller’s precision.
Time and Legend in England (Puck of Pook’s Hill; Rewards and Fairies)
Children encounter Puck and are led through living scenes of England’s layered past—Romans, Normans, sailors, and stewards of the land. History arrives as intimate conversation, memory, and craft rather than dates and battles. The mood is nostalgic yet alert, using ballads and tales to root identity in place and skill.
Modernity, Psychology, and Machines (Traffics and Discoveries; Actions and Reactions; A Diversity of Creatures)
These stories test nerves and nations amid wireless sets, motorcars, laboratories, and secretive services. External power meets inner weather—fear, pride, tenderness—through concise dialogue and engineered plots. The tone is taut and exploratory, mixing technical curiosity with moral ambiguity.
Maritime and Miscellany Tales (Abaft the Funnel; Land and Sea Tales)
Shipboard yarns, portside sketches, and brisk adventure pieces observe sailors, travelers, and traders at every rank. Practical knowledge and quick character studies turn workaday settings into proving grounds of nerve and wit. The mood is energetic and anecdotal, often cautionary but affectionate toward craft.
War’s Aftermath and Late Stories (Debits and Credits; Limits and Renewals)
Postwar stories and verse interludes face loss, memory, and attempts at repair in families and communities. Elliptical structures and restrained voices suggest trauma’s residues even when characters press on. The tone is grave, technical at times, but deeply humane in its search for meaning after rupture.
‘Thy Servant a Dog’
A dog narrates domestic adventures with disarming candor, mapping human habits through canine loyalties and misapprehensions. Humor and tenderness coexist with glimpses of vulnerability and change in a household. The piece showcases Kipling’s ear for voice and affection for ordinary rituals.
Early Verse of Office and Barracks (Departmental Ditties; Ballads and Barrack-Room Ballads)
Satirical office rhymes and soldiers’ ballads capture bureaucracy, courtship, risk, and rank in supple, singable forms. Dialect and refrain generate immediacy without sacrificing craft or narrative bite. The result is brisk, memorable portraiture of public service and private stakes.
Oceanic and Imperial Songs (The Seven Seas; The Five Nations)
Expansive sea-lyrics and public odes map trade routes, migrations, and the burdens of far-reaching power. The poems pair swaggering rhythms with foreboding, acknowledging cost alongside reach. Maritime imagery anchors a panoramic view of movement, duty, and desire.
Occasional and Collected Verses (An Almanac of Twelve Sports; Songs From Books)
Monthly sport pieces sketch quick dramas of skill, season, and temperament, while gathered lyrics revisit characters and scenes from prose. Variety and economy dominate, with epigrammatic turns and playful cadence. The focus is on craft-in-miniature and the pleasures of re-voicing.
War and Between-Wars Poems (The Years Between; Other Poems)
Public verse engages mobilization, sacrifice, and home-front strain, then turns toward elegy, reproach, and private grief. Tones shift from oracular to intimate, measuring ideals against experience. The sequence charts a tightening of voice as historical pressures mount and recede.
Naval Warfare Chronicles (A Fleet in Being; Sea Warfare)
These pieces survey seamanship, gunnery, and morale from maneuvers to convoy work, rendering strategy through concrete detail. Technology, weather, and command interact to test crews and institutions. The tone is factual and steady, honoring craft under sustained pressure.
The Great War: Fronts and Homefront (France at War; The New Army in Training; The War in the Mountains; The Graves of the Fallen; The Irish Guards in the Great War I & II; The Eyes of Asia)
Reports and histories move from training camps and alpine fronts to battlefields and the quiet architecture of remembrance. A regimental chronicle stands beside documentary sketches and letters attributed to Indian soldiers, broadening the war’s human chorus. The approach is commemorative and exact, attentive to organization, landscape, and voice.
Global Travels and Notes (American Notes; From Sea to Sea; Letters of Travel: 1892 – 1913)
Journalist’s notebooks span continents, collecting vignettes of cities, railways, workshops, and talkative companions. Curiosity about tools, trade, and custom fuels brisk portraits and sharp asides. The travel voice balances wonder with appraisal, recording a world in motion.
Continental Vignettes (Souvenirs of France; Brazilian Sketches: 1927)
These sketches catch national textures—street corners, speech, ceremony—through compressed scenes and traveler’s wit. France is seen with layered familiarity; Brazil with alert, provisional enthusiasm. The tone is light-footed, favoring image and anecdote over argument.
Literary-Historical Excursion (How Shakespeare Came to Write the ‘Tempest’)
A reflective essay considers how voyages, storms, and rumor might inform a playwright’s invention. It blends speculative history with a craftsman’s interest in sources and stagecraft. The mood is playful and suggestive rather than doctrinal.
Autobiographical Reflections (A Book of Words; Something of Myself)
Addresses on craft, citizenship, and responsibility sit alongside a late memoir tracing childhood, apprenticeship, and the habits of a working writer. The voice is polished and guarded yet revealing about method, influence, and the shaping force of place. Anecdote and principle meet in a defense of disciplined artistry.
The Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated Edition)
Novels:
The Light That Failed
Chapter I
"What do you think she'd do if she caught us? We oughtn't to have it, you know," said Maisie.
"Beat me, and lock you up in your bedroom," Dick answered, without hesitation. "Have you got the cartridges?"
"Yes; they're in my pocket, but they are joggling horribly. Do pin-fire cartridges go off of their own accord?"
"Don't know. Take the revolver, if you are afraid, and let me carry them."
"I'm not afraid." Maisie strode forward swiftly, a hand in her pocket and her chin in the air. Dick followed with a small pin-fire revolver.
The children had discovered that their lives would be unendurable without pistol-practice. After much forethought and self-denial, Dick had saved seven shillings and sixpence, the price of a badly constructed Belgian revolver. Maisie could only contribute half a crown to the syndicate for the purchase of a hundred cartridges. "You can save better than I can, Dick," she explained; "I like nice things to eat, and it doesn't matter to you. Besides, boys ought to do these things."
Dick grumbled a little at the arrangement, but went out and made the purchase, which the children were then on their way to test. Revolvers did not lie in the scheme of their daily life as decreed for them by the guardian who was incorrectly supposed to stand in the place of a mother to these two orphans. Dick had been under her care for six years, during which time she had made her profit of the allowances supposed to be expended on his clothes, and, partly through thoughtlessness, partly through a natural desire to pain,—she was a widow of some years anxious to marry again,—had made his days burdensome on his young shoulders.
Where he had looked for love, she gave him first aversion and then hate.
Where he growing older had sought a little sympathy, she gave him ridicule. The many hours that she could spare from the ordering of her small house she devoted to what she called the home-training of Dick Heldar. Her religion, manufactured in the main by her own intelligence and a keen study of the Scriptures, was an aid to her in this matter. At such times as she herself was not personally displeased with Dick, she left him to understand that he had a heavy account to settle with his Creator; wherefore Dick learned to loathe his God as intensely as he loathed Mrs. Jennett; and this is not a wholesome frame of mind for the young. Since she chose to regard him as a hopeless liar, when dread of pain drove him to his first untruth he naturally developed into a liar, but an economical and self-contained one, never throwing away the least unnecessary fib, and never hesitating at the blackest, were it only plausible, that might make his life a little easier. The treatment taught him at least the power of living alone,—a power that was of service to him when he went to a public school and the boys laughed at his clothes, which were poor in quality and much mended. In the holidays he returned to the teachings of Mrs. Jennett, and, that the chain of discipline might not be weakened by association with the world, was generally beaten, on one account or another, before he had been twelve hours under her roof.
The autumn of one year brought him a companion in bondage, a long-haired, gray-eyed little atom, as self-contained as himself, who moved about the house silently and for the first few weeks spoke only to the goat that was her chiefest friend on earth and lived in the back-garden. Mrs. Jennett objected to the goat on the grounds that he was un-Christian,—which he certainly was. "Then," said the atom, choosing her words very deliberately, "I shall write to my lawyer-peoples and tell them that you are a very bad woman. Amomma is mine, mine, mine!" Mrs. Jennett made a movement to the hall, where certain umbrellas and canes stood in a rack. The atom understood as clearly as Dick what this meant. "I have been beaten before," she said, still in the same passionless voice; "I have been beaten worse than you can ever beat me. If you beat me I shall write to my lawyer-peoples and tell them that you do not give me enough to eat. I am not afraid of you." Mrs. Jennett did not go into the hall, and the atom, after a pause to assure herself that all danger of war was past, went out, to weep bitterly on Amomma's neck.
Dick learned to know her as Maisie, and at first mistrusted her profoundly, for he feared that she might interfere with the small liberty of action left to him. She did not, however; and she volunteered no friendliness until Dick had taken the first steps. Long before the holidays were over, the stress of punishment shared in common drove the children together, if it were only to play into each other's hands as they prepared lies for Mrs. Jennett's use. When Dick returned to school, Maisie whispered, "Now I shall be all alone to take care of myself; but," and she nodded her head bravely, "I can do it. You promised to send Amomma a grass collar. Send it soon." A week later she asked for that collar by return of post, and was not pleased when she learned that it took time to make. When at last Dick forwarded the gift, she forgot to thank him for it.
Many holidays had come and gone since that day, and Dick had grown into a lanky hobbledehoy more than ever conscious of his bad clothes. Not for a moment had Mrs. Jennett relaxed her tender care of him, but the average canings of a public school—Dick fell under punishment about three times a month—filled him with contempt for her powers. "She doesn't hurt," he explained to Maisie, who urged him to rebellion, "and she is kinder to you after she has whacked me." Dick shambled through the days unkempt in body and savage in soul, as the smaller boys of the school learned to know, for when the spirit moved him he would hit them, cunningly and with science. The same spirit made him more than once try to tease Maisie, but the girl refused to be made unhappy. "We are both miserable as it is," said she. "What is the use of trying to make things worse? Let's find things to do, and forget things."
The pistol was the outcome of that search. It could only be used on the muddiest foreshore of the beach, far away from the bathing-machines and pierheads, below the grassy slopes of Fort Keeling. The tide ran out nearly two miles on that coast, and the many-coloured mud-banks, touched by the sun, sent up a lamentable smell of dead weed. It was late in the afternoon when Dick and Maisie arrived on their ground, Amomma trotting patiently behind them.
"Mf!" said Maisie, sniffing the air. "I wonder what makes the sea so smelly? I don'tlike it!"
"You never like anything that isn't made just for you," said Dick bluntly. "Give me the cartridges, and I'll try first shot. How far does one of these little revolvers carry?"
"Oh, half a mile," said Maisie, promptly. "At least it makes an awful noise. Be careful with the cartridges; I don't like those jagged stick-up things on the rim. Dick, do be careful."
"All right. I know how to load. I'll fire at the breakwater out there."
He fired, and Amomma ran away bleating. The bullet threw up a spurt of mud to the right of the wood-wreathed piles.
"Throws high and to the right. You try, Maisie. Mind, it's loaded all round."
Maisie took the pistol and stepped delicately to the verge of the mud, her hand firmly closed on the butt, her mouth and left eye screwed up.
Dick sat down on a tuft of bank and laughed. Amomma returned very cautiously. He was accustomed to strange experiences in his afternoon walks, and, finding the cartridge-box unguarded, made investigations with his nose. Maisie fired, but could not see where the bullet went.
"I think it hit the post," she said, shading her eyes and looking out across the sailless sea.
"I know it has gone out to the Marazion Bell-buoy," said Dick, with a chuckle. "Fire low and to the left; then perhaps you'll get it. Oh, look at Amomma!—he's eating the cartridges!"
Maisie turned, the revolver in her hand, just in time to see Amomma scampering away from the pebbles Dick threw after him. Nothing is sacred to a billy-goat. Being well fed and the adored of his mistress, Amomma had naturally swallowed two loaded pin-fire cartridges. Maisie hurried up to assure herself that Dick had not miscounted the tale.
"Yes, he's eaten two."
"Horrid little beast! Then they'll joggle about inside him and blow up, and serve him right.... Oh, Dick! have I killed you?"
Revolvers are tricky things for young hands to deal with. Maisie could not explain how it had happened, but a veil of reeking smoke separated her from Dick, and she was quite certain that the pistol had gone off in his face. Then she heard him sputter, and dropped on her knees beside him, crying, "Dick, you aren't hurt, are you? I didn't mean it."
"Of course you didn't," said Dick, coming out of the smoke and wiping his cheek. "But you nearly blinded me. That powder stuff stings awfully." A neat little splash of gray led on a stone showed where the bullet had gone. Maisie began to whimper.
"Don't," said Dick, jumping to his feet and shaking himself. "I'm not a bit hurt."
"No, but I might have killed you," protested Maisie, the corners of her mouth drooping. "What should I have done then?"
"Gone home and told Mrs. Jennett." Dick grinned at the thought; then, softening, "Please don't worry about it. Besides, we are wasting time. We've got to get back to tea. I'll take the revolver for a bit."
Maisie would have wept on the least encouragement, but Dick's indifference, albeit his hand was shaking as he picked up the pistol, restrained her. She lay panting on the beach while Dick methodically bombarded the breakwater. "Got it at last!" he exclaimed, as a lock of weed flew from the wood.
"Let me try," said Maisie, imperiously. "I'm all right now."
They fired in turns till the rickety little revolver nearly shook itself to pieces, and Amomma the outcast—because he might blow up at any moment—browsed in the background and wondered why stones were thrown at him. Then they found a balk of timber floating in a pool which was commanded by the seaward slope of Fort Keeling, and they sat down together before this new target.
"Next holidays," said Dick, as the now thoroughly fouled revolver kicked wildly in his hand, "we'll get another pistol,—central fire,—that will carry farther."
"There won't be any next holidays for me," said Maisie. "I'm going away."
"Where to?"
"I don't know. My lawyers have written to Mrs. Jennett, and I've got to be educated somewhere,—in France, perhaps,—I don'tknow where; but I shall be glad to go away."
"I shan't like it a bit. I suppose I shall be left. Look here, Maisie, is it really true you're going? Then these holidays will be the last I shall see anything of you; and I go back to school next week. I wish——"
The young blood turned his cheeks scarlet. Maisie was picking grass-tufts and throwing them down the slope at a yellow sea-poppy nodding all by itself to the illimitable levels of the mud-flats and the milk-white sea beyond.
"I wish," she said, after a pause, "that I could see you again sometime. You wish that, too?"
"Yes, but it would have been better if—if—you had—shot straight over there—down by the breakwater."
Maisie looked with large eyes for a moment. And this was the boy who only ten days before had decorated Amomma's horns with cut-paper ham-frills and turned him out, a bearded derision, among the public ways! Then she dropped her eyes: this was not the boy.
"Don't be stupid," she said reprovingly, and with swift instinct attacked the side-issue. "How selfish you are! Just think what I should have felt if that horrid thing had killed you! I'm quite miserable enough already."
"Why? Because you're going away from Mrs. Jennett?"
"No."
"From me, then?"
No answer for a long time. Dick dared not look at her. He felt, though he did not know, all that the past four years had been to him, and this the more acutely since he had no knowledge to put his feelings in words.
"I don't know," she said. "I suppose it is."
"Maisie, you must know. I'm not supposing."
"Let's go home," said Maisie, weakly.
But Dick was not minded to retreat.
"I can't say things," he pleaded, "and I'm awfully sorry for teasing you about Amomma the other day. It's all different now, Maisie, can't you see? And you might have told me that you were going, instead of leaving me to find out."
"You didn't. I did tell. Oh, Dick, what's the use of worrying?"
"There isn't any; but we've been together years and years, and I didn't know how much I cared."
"I don't believe you ever did care."
"No, I didn't; but I do,—I care awfully now, Maisie," he gulped,—"Maisie, darling, say you care too, please."
"I do, indeed I do; but it won't be any use."
"Why?"
"Because I am going away."
"Yes, but if you promise before you go. Only say—will you?" A second "darling" came to his lips more easily than the first. There were few endearments in Dick's home or school life; he had to find them by instinct. Dick caught the little hand blackened with the escaped gas of the revolver.
"I promise," she said solemnly; "but if I care there is no need for promising."
"And do you care?" For the first time in the past few minutes their eyes met and spoke for them who had no skill in speech....
"Oh, Dick, don't! Please don't! It was all right when we said good-morning; but now it's all different!" Amomma looked on from afar.
He had seen his property quarrel frequently, but he had never seen kisses exchanged before. The yellow sea-poppy was wiser, and nodded its head approvingly. Considered as a kiss, that was a failure, but since it was the first, other than those demanded by duty, in all the world that either had ever given or taken, it opened to them new worlds, and every one of them glorious, so that they were lifted above the consideration of any worlds at all, especially those in which tea is necessary, and sat still, holding each other's hands and saying not a word.
"You can't forget now," said Dick, at last. There was that on his cheek that stung more than gunpowder.
"I shouldn't have forgotten anyhow," said Maisie, and they looked at each other and saw that each was changed from the companion of an hour ago to a wonder and a mystery they could not understand. The sun began to set, and a night-wind thrashed along the bents of the foreshore.
"We shall be awfully late for tea," said Maisie. "Let's go home."
"Let's use the rest of the cartridges first," said Dick; and he helped Maisie down the slope of the fort to the sea,—a descent that she was quite capable of covering at full speed. Equally gravely Maisie took the grimy hand. Dick bent forward clumsily; Maisie drew the hand away, and Dick blushed.
"It's very pretty," he said.
"Pooh!" said Maisie, with a little laugh of gratified vanity. She stood close to Dick as he loaded the revolver for the last time and fired over the sea with a vague notion at the back of his head that he was protecting Maisie from all the evils in the world. A puddle far across the mud caught the last rays of the sun and turned into a wrathful red disc. The light held Dick's attention for a moment, and as he raised his revolver there fell upon him a renewed sense of the miraculous, in that he was standing by Maisie who had promised to care for him for an indefinite length of time till such date as——A gust of the growing wind drove the girl's long black hair across his face as she stood with her hand on his shoulder calling Amomma "a little beast," and for a moment he was in the dark,—a darkness that stung. The bullet went singing out to the empty sea.
"Spoilt my aim," said he, shaking his head. "There aren't any more cartridges; we shall have to run home." But they did not run. They walked very slowly, arm in arm. And it was a matter of indifference to them whether the neglected Amomma with two pin-fire cartridges in his inside blew up or trotted beside them; for they had come into a golden heritage and were disposing of it with all the wisdom of all their years.
"And I shall be——" quoth Dick, valiantly. Then he checked himself: "I don't know what I shall be. I don't seem to be able to pass any exams, but I can make awful caricatures of the masters. Ho! Ho!"
"Be an artist, then," said Maisie. "You're always laughing at my trying to draw; and it will do you good."
"I'll never laugh at anything you do," he answered. "I'll be an artist, and I'll do things."
"Artists always want money, don'tthey?"
"I've got a hundred and twenty pounds a year of my own. My guardians tell me I'm to have it when I come of age. That will be enough to begin with."
"Ah, I'm rich," said Maisie. "I've got three hundred a year all my own when I'm twenty-one. That's why Mrs. Jennett is kinder to me than she is to you. I wish, though, that I had somebody that belonged to me,—just a father or a mother."
"You belong to me," said Dick, "for ever and ever."
"Yes, we belong—for ever. It's very nice." She squeezed his arm. The kindly darkness hid them both, and, emboldened because he could only just see the profile of Maisie's cheek with the long lashes veiling the gray eyes, Dick at the front door delivered himself of the words he had been boggling over for the last two hours.
"And I—love you, Maisie," he said, in a whisper that seemed to him to ring across the world,—the world that he would tomorrow or the next day set out to conquer.
There was a scene, not, for the sake of discipline, to be reported, when Mrs. Jennett would have fallen upon him, first for disgraceful unpunctuality, and secondly for nearly killing himself with a forbidden weapon.
"I was playing with it, and it went off by itself," said Dick, when the powder-pocked cheek could no longer be hidden, "but if you think you're going to lick me you're wrong. You are never going to touch me again. Sit down and give me my tea. You can't cheat us out of that, anyhow."
Mrs. Jennett gasped and became livid. Maisie said nothing, but encouraged Dick with her eyes, and he behaved abominably all that evening. Mrs. Jennett prophesied an immediate judgment of Providence and a descent into Tophet later, but Dick walked in Paradise and would not hear. Only when he was going to bed Mrs. Jennett recovered and asserted herself. He had bidden Maisie good night with down-dropped eyes and from a distance.
"If you aren't a gentleman you might try to behave like one," said Mrs. Jennett, spitefully. "You've been quarrelling with Maisie again."
This meant that the usual good-night kiss had been omitted. Maisie, white to the lips, thrust her cheek forward with a fine air of indifference, and was duly pecked by Dick, who tramped out of the room red as fire. That night he dreamed a wild dream. He had won all the world and brought it to Maisie in a cartridge-box, but she turned it over with her foot, and, instead of saying "Thank you," cried—"Where is the grass collar you promised for Amomma? Oh, how selfish you are!"
Chapter II
"I'm not angry with the British public, but I wish we had a few thousand of them scattered among these rooks. They wouldn't be in such a hurry to get at their morning papers then. Can't you imagine the regulation householder—Lover of Justice, Constant Reader, Paterfamilias, and all that lot—frizzling on hot gravel?"
"With a blue veil over his head, and his clothes in strips. Has any man here a needle? I've got a piece of sugar-sack."
"I'll lend you a packing-needle for six square inches of it then. Both my knees are worn through."
"Why not six square acres, while you're about it? But lend me the needle, and I'll see what I can do with the selvage. I don't think there's enough to protect my royal body from the cold blast as it is. What are you doing with that everlasting sketch-book of yours, Dick?"
"Study of our Special Correspondent repairing his wardrobe," said Dick, gravely, as the other man kicked off a pair of sorely worn riding-breeches and began to fit a square of coarse canvas over the most obvious open space. He grunted disconsolately as the vastness of the void developed itself.
"Sugar-bags, indeed! Hi! you pilot man there! lend me all the sails for that whale-boat."
A fez-crowned head bobbed up in the stern-sheets, divided itself into exact halves with one flashing grin, and bobbed down again. The man of the tattered breeches, clad only in a Norfolk jacket and a gray flannel shirt, went on with his clumsy sewing, while Dick chuckled over the sketch.
Some twenty whale-boats were nuzzling a sand-bank which was dotted with English soldiery of half a dozen corps, bathing or washing their clothes. A heap of boat-rollers, commissariat-boxes, sugar-bags, and flour—and small-arm-ammunition-cases showed where one of the whale-boats had been compelled to unload hastily; and a regimental carpenter was swearing aloud as he tried, on a wholly insufficient allowance of white lead, to plaster up the sun-parched gaping seams of the boat herself.
"First the bloomin' rudder snaps," said he to the world in general; "then the mast goes; an' then, s' help me, when she can't do nothin' else, she opens 'erself out like a cock-eyed Chinese lotus."
"Exactly the case with my breeches, whoever you are," said the tailor, without looking up. "Dick, I wonder when I shall see a decent shop again."
There was no answer, save the incessant angry murmur of the Nile as it raced round a basalt-walled bend and foamed across a rock-ridge half a mile upstream. It was as though the brown weight of the river would drive the white men back to their own country. The indescribable scent of Nile mud in the air told that the stream was falling and the next few miles would be no light thing for the whale-boats to overpass. The desert ran down almost to the banks, where, among gray, red, and black hillocks, a camel-corps was encamped. No man dared even for a day lose touch of the slow-moving boats; there had been no fighting for weeks past, and throughout all that time the Nile had never spared them. Rapid had followed rapid, rock rock, and island-group island-group, till the rank and file had long since lost all count of direction and very nearly of time. They were moving somewhere, they did not know why, to do something, they did not know what. Before them lay the Nile, and at the other end of it was one Gordon, fighting for the dear life, in a town called Khartoum. There were columns of British troops in the desert, or in one of the many deserts; there were yet more columns waiting to embark on the river; there were fresh drafts waiting at Assioot and Assuan; there were lies and rumours running over the face of the hopeless land from Suakin to the Sixth Cataract, and men supposed generally that there must be some one in authority to direct the general scheme of the many movements. The duty of that particular river-column was to keep the whale-boats afloat in the water, to avoid trampling on the villagers' crops when the gangs "tracked" the boats with lines thrown from midstream, to get as much sleep and food as was possible, and, above all, to press on without delay in the teeth of the churning Nile.
With the soldiers sweated and toiled the correspondents of the newspapers, and they were almost as ignorant as their companions. But it was above all things necessary that England at breakfast should be amused and thrilled and interested, whether Gordon lived or died, or half the British army went to pieces in the sands. The Soudan campaign was a picturesque one, and lent itself to vivid word-painting. Now and again a "Special" managed to get slain,—which was not altogether a disadvantage to the paper that employed him,—and more often the hand-to-hand nature of the fighting allowed of miraculous escapes which were worth telegraphing home at eighteenpence the word. There were many correspondents with many corps and columns,—from the veterans who had followed on the heels of the cavalry that occupied Cairo in '82, what time Arabi Pasha called himself king, who had seen the first miserable work round Suakin when the sentries were cut up nightly and the scrub swarmed with spears, to youngsters jerked into the business at the end of a telegraph-wire to take the places of their betters killed or invalided.
Among the seniors—those who knew every shift and change in the perplexing postal arrangements, the value of the seediest, weediest Egyptian garron offered for sale in Cairo or Alexandria, who could talk a telegraph-clerk into amiability and soothe the ruffled vanity of a newly appointed staff-officer when press regulations became burdensome—was the man in the flannel shirt, the black-browed Torpenhow. He represented the Central Southern Syndicate in the campaign, as he had represented it in the Egyptian war, and elsewhere. The syndicate did not concern itself greatly with criticisms of attack and the like. It supplied the masses, and all it demanded was picturesqueness and abundance of detail; for there is more joy in England over a soldier who insubordinately steps out of square to rescue a comrade than over twenty generals slaving even to baldness at the gross details of transport and commissariat.
He had met at Suakin a young man, sitting on the edge of a recently abandoned redoubt about the size of a hat-box, sketching a clump of shell-torn bodies on the gravel plain.
"What are you for?" said Torpenhow. The greeting of the correspondent is that of the commercial traveller on the road.
"My own hand," said the young man, without looking up. "Have you any tobacco?"
Torpenhow waited till the sketch was finished, and when he had looked at it said, "What's your business here?"
"Nothing; there was a row, so I came. I'm supposed to be doing something down at the painting-slips among the boats, or else I'm in charge of the condenser on one of the water-ships. I've forgotten which."
"You've cheek enough to build a redoubt with," said Torpenhow, and took stock of the new acquaintance. "Do you always draw like that?"
