In article <ddfr-2C9FD9.13584929022008@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
ddfr@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
(David Friedman) wrote:
> In article <memo.20080229110544.2612A@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
> prd@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
(Paul Dormer) wrote:
>
> > Last year, there was a film on ITV called My Son Jack, about
Rudyard
> > Kipling and his son. His son (played by Daniel Radcliffe of Harry
> > Potter fame) had very bad eyesight, but was keen to enlist when
> > the war broke out. His father pulled string to get him a
> > commission, despite he'd failed several medical exams. He died
> > the first time he led his men over the top. It broke his father,
> > who wrote an epitaph for the fallen, "If any question why we
> > died, Tell them, because our fathers lied."
>
> Kipling was a strong sup****ter of the war throughout, as I think
> you can tell from his writing. My guess is "our fathers lied"
> isn't a statement about how he got his son into the army, which
> is a possible reading of what you wrote although perhaps not the
> intended one, but about failures of British policy earlier than
> that. In both his poetry and prose of the pre-war period you can
> see arguments for much greater military preparedness.
Certainly the argument of the film was the Kipling became quite
disillusioned with the war after his son's death. The military
historian Richard Holmes did a series on WWI on the BBC a few years ago
which told the same story, and he linked that line explicitly with his
son's death.
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