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Barrack-Room Ballads

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Overview

"Kipling's Classic Tribute to the SoldierFirst collected in 1892, Kipling's Barrack-Room Ballads relive the experiences of soldiers sent around the world to defend the Empire-all for little pay and less appreciation. An immediate success, they were unlike anything the public had seen before.."

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Author Information

Bio of Rudyard Kipling

Kipling, who as a novelist dramatized the ambivalence of the British colonial experience, was born of English parents in Bombay and as a child knew Hindustani better than English. He spent an unhappy period of exile from his parents (and the Indian heat) with a harsh aunt in England, followed by the public schooling that inspired his "Stalky" stories. He returned to India at 18 to work on the staff of the Lahore Civil and Military Gazette and rapidly became a prolific writer. His mildly satirical work won him a reputation in England, and he returned there in 1889. Shortly after, his first novel, The Light That Failed (1890) was published, but it was not altogether successful. In the early 1890s, Kipling met and married Caroline Balestier and moved with her to her family's estate in Brattleboro, Vermont. While there he wrote Many Inventions (1893), The Jungle Book (1894-95), and Captains Courageous (1897). He became dissatisfied with life in America, however, and moved back to England, returning to America only when his daughter died of pneumonia. Kipling never again returned to the United States, despite his great popularity there. Short stories form the greater portion of Kipling's work and are of several distinct types. Some of his best are stories of the supernatural, the eerie and unearthly, such as "The Phantom Rickshaw," "The Brushwood Boy," and "They." His tales of gruesome horror include "The Mark of the Beast" and "The Return of Imray." "William the Conqueror" and "The Head of the District" are among his political tales of English rule in India. The "Soldiers Three" group deals with Kipling's three musketeers: an Irishman, a Cockney, and a Yorkshireman. The Anglo-Indian Tales, of social life in Simla, make up the larger part of his first four books. Kipling wrote equally well for children and adults. His best-known children's books are Just So Stories (1902), The Jungle Books (1894-95), and Kim (1901). His short stories, although their understanding of the Indian is often moving, became minor hymns to the glory of Queen Victoria's empire and the civil servants and soldiers who staffed her outposts. Kim, an Irish boy in India who becomes the companion of a Tibetan lama, at length joins the British Secret Service, without, says Wilson, any sense of the betrayal of his friend this actually meant. Nevertheless, Kipling has left a vivid panorama of the India of his day. Kipling is England's first Nobel Prize winner in literature and the only nineteenth-century English poet to win the Prize. He won not only on the basis of his short stories, which more closely mirror the ambiguities of the declining Edwardian world than has commonly been recognized, but also on the basis of his tremendous ability as a popular poet. His reputation was first made with Barrack Room Ballads (1892), and in "Recessional" he captured a side of Queen Victoria's final jubilee that no one else dared to address. 020

Bio of Andrew Lycett

Andrew Lycett studied history at Oxford University. After an early career as a foreign correspondent specializing in Africa and the Middle East, he now writes biographies. His...

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Additional Info

Imprint

Signet Classics

Filesize

909.54 KB

Number of Pages

128

eBook ISBN

9780786573943

Excerpt from: Barrack-Room Ballads by Rudyard Kipling

From the Peloponnesian War to the Gulf War, music and songs have been essential features of a soldier's world. Bugle calls, regimental marches, hymns, bawdy limericks and plaintive laments: whether in the heat of battle or the hierarchical world of the barracks, these provide simple, direct means of communication to maintain discipline, boost morale or simply let off steam -- in fact, to cope with all the stresses and strains of army life.

The British writer Rudyard Kipling recognized the powerful effect of song and incorporated its emotion, rhythm and sense of camaraderie into his Barrack-Room Ballads, the series of poems he wrote in the 1890s about the experience of military service in India and other parts of the British Empire.

Kipling was a complicated, brilliant man who wrote many things well -- not just poems, but stories, novels and journalism. Not for nothing was he awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907. He was born in Bombay (now Mumbai) in December 1865, the son of a teacher at the local art college and a spirited Irish-Scottish woman who was related to the well-known Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones.

At the age of five, Kipling was sent back to England to live with foster parents (an experience he loathed) and later to attend the United Services College, a school for officers who fought in often forgotten campaigns in all corners of the Empire.

Since young Kipling's aptitude was for literature rather than for battle, he returned to India at the age of sixteen and joined the staff of the daily newspaper, the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore, the Punjab town where his parents had moved, after his father, Lockwood, was appointed keeper of the local museum.

Kipling slowly readjusted to living in colonial India. Initially he stuck to journalism, demonstrating his sharp eye for color and detail in his reports on corruption in municipal politics in Lahore or the decadence of princely courts. As he traveled more widely, he began to satirize the manipulativeness, self-interest and crass stupidity of his fellow "Anglo-Indians" in a series of poems he called Departmental Ditties and in his stories known as Plain Tales from the Hills.

At the same time, he grew to understand the nature of Empire. Despite his general cynicism, he came genuinely to admire the self-sacrifice of doctors, engineers and other administrators who devoted their lives to bringing sanitation, roads and other benefits of Western civilization to remote areas of India. He convinced himself this was a noble cause. As was clear throughout his life, the doers of Empire became his heroes.

Another body was also essential to getting things done in imperial India: the military. Five miles east of Lahore stood the Mian Mir military cantonment, where an infantry battalion and artillery battery were always stationed. Kipling frequently rode over to Mian Mir, where he made it his business to meet not only the officers in their messes but also the enlisted men in their dusty quarters.

Greatly admiring the humor and fortitude of the ordinary soldier in often appalling conditions, he embarked on a series of stories about their life in India. These tales, as collected in Soldiers Three, featured a trio of enlisted men: the Irishman Terence Mulvaney, the Cockney Stanley Ortheris and the Yorkshire-born Jock Learoyd. No one had previously given fictional voice in this way to lowly privates such as Mulvaney, who in "With the Main Guard" asks, "Mary, Mother av Mercy, fwat the divil possist us to take an' kape this melancholious counthry Answer me that, sorr."