11月11日在英国是Remembrance Day，阵亡将士纪念日。对英国人来说，记忆中最惨痛的战争仍然是一战，刚进11月就有很多人配戴poppy花。
昨天电视播了舞台剧My Boy Jack的改编本。直到最近才知道Rudyard Kipling等于亲手把18岁的儿子送上了死亡之路。
[quote]It is said that every family in Britain was touched by the first world war but few could have felt its tragic sting more keenly than Rudyard Kipling. The author who entranced children with The Jungle Book and his Just So stories was also a fervent wartime propagandist whose intervention led his beloved teenage son, John, to die amid the carnage of the trenches. The decision tormented him for the rest of his life.
John Kipling’s death in France at the age of 18 was a metaphor for the blindness of a conflict in which a whole generation volunteered to fight against Germany. Chronically shortsighted, he was killed on his first day of action, unable to see a thing. In torrential rain, he could either have taken his glasses off and seen nothing, or kept them on with the same result. That day there were 7,500 casualties, rising to 50,000 by the end of the battle.
Two years later, after a futile crusade to locate his son’s body and give it a proper burial, Kipling wrote a powerful epitaph that became the universal voice of every teenager who had perished:
If any question why we died,
Tell them, because our fathers lied.
With the ear of the prime minister and of the king, Kipling had been a powerful advocate of the war and a recruiter who believed that in order to preserve the British Empire as a benign and essential force of world stability, an aggressive empire-building Germany should be stopped.
He had once proclaimed: “We must demand that every fit young man come forward to enlist and that every young man who chooses to remain at home be shunned by his community.”
His letters to John