Great Writers on The Great War Kipling’s War

This book takes the reader, alongside Kipling, to the training camps of Kitchener’s army in the south of England, to the lines of the French army and the villages just behind them, to sea with submarines, minesweepers and the big ships of Jutland, to the Alpine front between Italy and Austria-Hungary and alongside the Irish Guards as they fight in the first battles of the war in the summer of 1914.

Together with other leading writers, at the start of the First World War Rudyard Kipling wrote in support of Britain’s war aims. Kipling’s War is taken from four of his articles and pamphlets, ‘The New Army in Training’, ‘France at War’, ‘The War in the Mountains’ and ‘The War at Sea’, as well as from Kipling’s history of the Irish Guards, the unit in which his son was serving when he died at Loos in 1915.