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anti-German. On August 31, 1905, he writes to Jules Huret, who had interviewed him for
Le Figaro.
A note by Thomas Pinney, editor of
The Letters of Rudyard Kipling
, tells us that Kipling deleted from the proofs conversational, off-the-cuff remarks that were exaggerated and indefensible:
viz
that the Germans had done nothing special in commerce, industry, or science; that he, Kipling, owed nothing to German literature (his letter says “in literature I know that I owe much to Heine”); that German troops had done nothing effective in South-West Africa.
    Clearly Kipling’s considered views weren’t just snow jobs, but more closely approximate to the truth of his views.
    After this admission to Jules Huret in August 1905 that he owed something to (the Jewish) Heine and that the German contribution to science etc. wasn’t completely negligible, Kipling went rapidly and insanely anti-German—because England was at war and because his son was killed by the Germans and because Kipling believed all reports of German atrocities (some of which were true, of course).
    Kipling sees the war aim not as victory “but a war of extermination for their race.” At first, there is a hint of defensiveness: he denies “hatred,” denies “something our friends might take for brutality, but which isn’t.”
    To Theodore Roosevelt (April 21, 1918), he recommends reprisals on the American Hun “citizens.” To Frank Doubleday (August 21, 1918) he suggests that Germans should always be referred to by the pronoun “it” in Doubleday books; he recounts how a woman went to a crashed zeppelin to savor the smell of burnt Hun. To Sir Almroth Wright (1916) he suggests that Germans exploit sexual perversion in their politics and that their sadism attracts the masochism of pacifists and conscientious objectors.
    When he hears that the Germans are melting corpses for pig feed, Kipling writes a poem in which a German woman spreads a dead, rendered German on her bread as fat. Of course, it was never printed, but it is there in a letter sent to Andrew Macphail on April 21–22, 1917.
    On January 14, 1919, he mounts a theory that the Germans have been systematically undermining his literary reputation since the Boer War. He even blames Hun prisoners of war for an outbreak of foot and mouth disease—caused, he alleges, by their throwing away scraps of infected Hun meat (December 14, 1919). He finds them a sort of “werewolf people” in fact—subhuman, animal, “the baserside of humanity.” As for a railway strike, nominally, “It is the railway men and the Trades Unions who are doing it. Actually, it is the Hun, the Bolshevik and the Jew of Poleland chiefly. In spite of their best efforts to speak and act like white men, one sees in the cruelty practised on the railway horses, the hand of the Hun.”
    In November 1919, Kipling is denouncing Einstein’s theory of relativity: “Do you notice how their insane psychology attempts to infect the Universe? There is one Einstein, nominally a Swiss, certainly a Hebrew, who…comes forward, scientifically to show that, under certain conditions Space itself is warped and the instruments that measure it are warped also…. The more I see of the Boche’s mental workings the more sure I am that he is Evil Incarnate, and, like all evil, a pathetic Beast. Einstein’s pronouncement is only another little contribution to assisting the world towards flux and disintegration.”
    What are we to make of this? On July 15, 1919, Kipling writes that “Nothing matters much really when one has lost one’s only son.” To Sir Hugh Clifford, another bereaved father, Kipling writes on November 18, 1918: “Glad you escaped the peace celebrations. I bolted home from town and had my dark hour alone.” Kipling never allowed himself public expression of his grief. His letters insist that his son’s death was a noble sacrifice. Kipling believed this. He could not believe anything else. And it drove him mad. The recurrent