ohn Kipling went missing in action at the Battle of Loos, in northern France, one hundred years ago, on September 27, 1915. The eighteen-year-old lieutenant was likely the most widely searched-for soldier of the First World War. His father was, by then, England’s first Nobel laureate in literature and its foremost poet of empire.
A frantic Rudyard Kipling mobilized every resource available. The Prince of Wales, the Crown Princess of Sweden, and the American ambassador in London all tried to help. The Royal Flying Corps dropped mimeographed sheets behind enemy lines in case “der Sohn des weltberühmten Schriftstellers Rudyard Kipling” had been kidnapped or taken prisoner. To Kipling’s wife, Carrie, the threat of capture seemed as dreadful a prospect as death: her husband’s hatred for the Hun (Kipling’s term for Germans, when he was not calling them “wild beasts” or “Evil Incarnate”) had been brandished in his recruitment speeches and newspaper articles. How would the “Hun” treat their wounded son if he had him in his power?
