Have You News of my Boy Jack?
"Have you news of my boy Jack?"Not this tide.
"When d'you think that he'll come back?"Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.
"Has anyone else had word of him?"Not this tide.
For what is sunk will hardly swim,
Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.
"Oh, dear, what comfort can I find?"None this tide,
Nor any tide,
Except he did not shame his kind -
Not even with that wind blowing, and that tide.
Then hold your head up all the more,
This tide,
And every tide;
Because he was the son you bore,
And gave to that wind blowing and that tide!
Kipling's own only son John, who was killed in the Battle of Loos on 27 September 1915, aged 18. In a straggling attack on some houses beyond a small wood (Bois Hugo), at the farthest point of advance made by any British troops in this battle, called the Chalk Pit, Second Lieutenant John Kipling was shot in the mouth and laid in a shell-crater by a sergeant.
At the end of the Battle of Loos 20,000 British soldiers were lost, and the Kiplings received the feared War Office telegram to say that their boy was wounded and missing. Rudyard had little doubt about the meaning of this, but his wife Carrie continued to hope desperately. These were the years when he, full of guilt, wrote:If any ask us why we died
Tell them 'Because our fathers lied'.
He also wrote this poem: Have You News of my Boy Jack?, that became famous. After the war Kipling visited the battlefields and war graves in Flanders, but the author never saw his son's grave. The body of John seemed to be lost for ever.
Kipling died in 1936. The body of his son was eventually found in 1992. It lay in the grave of an 'unknown Irish lieutenant' on plot 7 in St. Mary's Dressing Station Cemetery the Haimes, at Lone Tree, near Loos. On the grave now stands a new headstone bearing John Kipling's name.
