by Ood
Such greeting as should come from those Whose fathers faced the Sepoy hordes, Or served You in the Russian snows, And, dying, left their sons their swords.
And all are bred to do Your will By land and sea — ^wherever flies The Flag to fight and follow still, And work Your Empire's destinies.
In "Only a Subaltern" Kipling gives us another Flag Incident ; it is just a glimpse. The subaltern is Bobby Wick, just gazetted sub-lieutenant of "The Tyne Side Tail Twisters." "More than once, too, he came officially into con- tact with the regimental colors, which looked like the lining of a bricklayer's hat on the end of a chewed stick. Bobby did not kneel and worship them, be- cause British subalterns are not con- structed in that manner. Indeed, he condemned them for their weight at the very moment that they were filling him with awe and other more noble senti- ments."
Peace hath her victories no less re- nowned than war; this is the Bobby who day by day in the cholera camp "played the giddy garden goat," and at night fought with Death for dirty Dormer till the grey dawn came ; a few days later to "go out" himself, dying for all that the Flag stands for, "Not only to enforce by command but to en- courage by example the energetic dis- charge of duty and the steady endur- ance of the difficulties and privations inseparable from military service." (Bengal Army Regulations.)
Kipling's dedication of Stalky & Co. to his old Head Master is among the very finest things he has written:
And we all praise famous men — Ancients of the College; For they taught us common sense — Tried to teach us common sense — Truth and God*s Own Common Sense. Which is more than knowledge.
This we learned from famous men. Knowing not its uses When they showed in daily work Man must finish off his work — Right or wrong, his daily work — And without excuses.
This we learned from famous men. Knowing not we learned it. Only, as the years went by — Lonely, as the years went by — Far from help as years went by. Plainer we discerned it.
Bless and praise we famous men — Men of little showing! For their work continueth And their work continueth,* Broad and deep continueth, Great beyond their knowing!
- The Head'* who had kindliness and
wise insight enough (**God's own com- mon sense") to know that a boy may be in mischiefs manifold, the hero of many scrapes, and remain pure, wholesome, and withal very lovable, would not be insensible to this tribute coming "after many days."
Kipling believed in public schools. In "Thrown Away" he has this to say of the "sheltered life system": "To rear a boy under what parents call the 'shel- tered life system' is, if the boy must go out into the world and fend for him- self, not wise. Unless he be one in a thousand, he has certainly to pass through many unnecessary troubles; and may, possibly, come to extreme grief simply from ignorance of the proper proportion of things. Let a puppy eat the soap in the bath-room, or chew a newly blacked boot. He chews and chuckles until by-and-by he finds out that blacking and Old Brown Windsor make him very sick; so he argues that soap and boots are not wholesome. Any old dog about the house will soon show him the unwisdom of biting a big dog's ears. Being young, he remembers, and goes abroad at six months a well mannered little beast with a chastenea appetite. If he had been kept away from boots and soap and big dogs till he came to the trinity full-grown and with developed teeth, consider how fearfully sick and thrashed he would be! Apply that notion to the 'sheltered life' and see how it works." As Kipling says, it does not sound pretty, but is it not most terribly true?
In the Jungle School did Mowgli the "man-cub" find a teacher who on Fame's bead-roll of Dominies must take a place second onlv to Froebel and Arnold and the Great of old. Listen to the words of wisdom which fall from the shaggy lips of Baloo, the brown bear, "Teacher of the La\v!!^ to the
