War Stories and Poems (The ^AWorld's Classics)

Kipling wrote confident tales of courage and adventure in wars fought on the imperial frontiers - in Afghanistan, Burma, the Sudan, and tribal territories on the North-West Frontier. But he also, in "Barrack-Room Ballads", provided wry perspectives from men in the ranks; and he did not flinch from recording shameful episodes like the panic-stricken flight of an English regiment in "The Drums of the Fore and Aft". In the Boer War he was dismayed by the inefficiency displayed at many levels throughout the Army, and his satirical exposures of incompetence foreshadow some of the protest literature of the First World War. That war, in which his only son was killed on his first day in action, dominates his later fiction, which is shot through with a sense of loss and bereavement, and of angry pride. The excitement, the blunders and the pity of war are all represented in this volume.