"The Hun Is at the Gate!": Historicizing Kipling's Militaristic Rhetoric, from the Imperial Periphery to the National Center (1999)

PART TWO: THE FRENCH, RUSSIAN, AND GERMAN THREATS TO GREAT BRITAIN all we have and are, all our children's fate, Stand up and take war. is at gate!(1) It was an outraged and impassioned who, in August of 1914, penned these opening lines to For All We Have and Are in an effort to rouse British into embracing war that had been initiated by German attack on Belgium, which was widely interpreted as a harbinger of long-anticipated attempt on England itself. George Orwell speculates of this poem in a 1942 essay-from vantage point of aftermath of 1940 Battle of Britain, in which Royal Air Force narrowly succeeded in thwarting attempts of Hitler's Luftwaffe to enable such an invasion-that it may have been Kipling who first let loose use of word 'Huns' for Germans; at any rate he began using it as soon as guns opened tire in 1914.(2) Orwell was, in fact, wrong on both counts. Oxford English Dictionary notes that term, typically used to signify barbarian conquerors, had been used prior to 1914 in reference to Germans, and it gives two instances that are particularly apropos. first is by Kaiser Wilhelm II, who in 1900 drew comparison with pride in a speech to German troops that was quoted by London Times: Just as Huns a thousand years ago, under leadership of Etzel (Attila) gained a reputation in virtue of which they still live in historical tradition, so may name of Germany become known in such a manner in China that no Chinaman will ever again even dare to look askance at a German.(3) other notable instance OED offers, also from Times, is from Kipling's indignant 1902 poem The Rowers, which characterizes Germans as the breed that have wronged us most and the shameless Hun.(4) Kipling' s pejorative use of term Hun appears to have been intended as a response to Kaiser Wilhelm's infamous pronouncement. It certainly signaled his shifting antipathies during early phase of Anglo-German naval race. (As did British generally, he had prior to turn of century focused his ire on traditional enemies, France and Russia.)(5) Nor did British reworking of term cease with The Rowers. As Paul Fussell observes in Great War and Modern Memory of gross dichotomizing characteristic of wartime propaganda, home-front hate was generated during World War I by British periodicals such as John Bull, which coined term Germ-huns and was fond of speculating whether enemy was human.(6) Kipling, likewise, both intensifying and radically simplifying his rhetoric during war, maintained in a 1915 account of his tour of front lines in France, there are no words to give essential simplicity of [the Allied effort]. It is rampart put up by Man against Beast;(7) he similarly averred in a speech delivered in same year, there are only two divisions in world to-day-human beings and Germans. Expanding on these distinctions in a 1917 speech, he implemented image of Germ-hun with a simile ironically anticipatory of subsequent world war' s Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda. Germans, he asserted, do evil deliberately. It is their nature. It is mark of their nationality. They are like microbes--wherever they abound; evil develops and infects everything roundabout. Civilized nations must resort to sterilizing process; they must put into force measures of international hygiene. Beware of German microbe.(8) Kipling, of course, did not invent such imagery any more than did Nazi sophists. Like language of Social Darwinism, post-Louis-Pasteur language of contagion-as nature of germs and process of infection became increasingly subject to modern scientific understanding-tended to be deployed pseudo-scientifically during this era in a variety of mutually incompatible polemical contexts. …