page_title: Rudyard Kipling
section_title: After the war (1918–1936)
hierarchical_section_title: Rudyard Kipling / After the war (1918–1936)
caption_attribution_description: English: Rudyard Kipling (centre) as rector of the University of St Andrews in 1923.
context_page_description: Joseph Rudyard Kipling was an English journalist, short-story writer, poet, and novelist. He was born in India, which inspired much of his work.
  Kipling's works of fiction include The Jungle Book, Kim, and many short stories, including "The Man Who Would Be King". His poems include "Mandalay", "Gunga Din", "The Gods of the Copybook Headings", "The White Man's Burden", and "If—". He is seen as an innovator in the art of the short story. His children's books are classics; one critic noted "a versatile and luminous narrative gift."
  Kipling in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was among the United Kingdom's most popular writers. Henry James said, "Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius, as distinct from fine intelligence, that I have ever known." In 1907, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, as the first English-language writer to receive the prize, and at 41, its youngest recipient to date. He was also sounded for the British Poet Laureateship and several times for a knighthood, but declined both. Following his death in 1936, his ashes were interred at Poets' Corner, part of the South Transept of Westminster Abbey.
context_section_description: Partly in response to John's death, Kipling joined Sir Fabian Ware's Imperial War Graves Commission (now the Commonwealth War Graves Commission), the group responsible for the garden-like British war graves that can be found to this day dotted along the former Western Front and the other places in the world where British Empire troops lie buried. His main contributions to the project were his selection of the biblical phrase, "Their Name Liveth For Evermore" (Ecclesiasticus 44.14, KJV), found on the Stones of Remembrance in larger war cemeteries, and his suggestion of the phrase "Known unto God" for the gravestones of unidentified servicemen. He also chose the inscription "The Glorious Dead" on the Cenotaph, Whitehall, London. Additionally, he wrote a two-volume history of the Irish Guards, his son's regiment, published in 1923 and seen as one of the finest examples of regimental history.
  Kipling's short story "The Gardener" depicts visits to the war cemeteries, and the poem "The King's Pilgrimage" (1922) a journey which King George V made, touring the cemeteries and memorials under construction by the Imperial War Graves Commission. With the increasing popularity of the automobile, Kipling became a motoring correspondent for the British press, writing enthusiastically of trips around England and abroad, though he was usually driven by a chauffeur.
  After the war, Kipling was sceptical of the Fourteen Points and the League of Nations, but had hopes that the United States would abandon isolationism and the post-war world be dominated by an Anglo-French-American alliance. He hoped the United States would take on a League of Nations mandate for Armenia as the best way of preventing isolationism, and hoped that Theodore Roosevelt, whom Kipling admired, would again become president. Kipling was saddened by Roosevelt's death in 1919, believing him to be the only American politician capable of keeping the United States in the "game" of world politics.
  Kipling was hostile towards communism, writing of the Bolshevik take-over in 1917 that one sixth of the world had "passed bodily out of civilization." In a 1918 poem, Kipling wrote of Soviet Russia that everything good in Russia had been destroyed by the Bolsheviks – all that was left was "the sound of weeping and the sight of burning fire, and the shadow of a people trampled into the mire." 
  In 1920, Kipling co-founded the Liberty League with Haggard and Lord Sydenham. This short-lived enterprise focused on promoting classic liberal ideals as a response to the rising power of communist tendencies within Great Britain, or as Kipling put it, "to combat the advance of Bolshevism." 
  In 1922, Kipling, having referred to the work of engineers in some of his poems, such as "The Sons of Martha,"  "Sappers,"  and "McAndrew's Hymn,"  and in other writings, including short-story anthologies such as The Day's Work, was asked by a University of Toronto civil engineering professor, Herbert E. T. Haultain, for assistance in developing a dignified obligation and ceremony for graduating engineering students. Kipling was enthusiastic in his response and shortly produced both, formally entitled "The Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer."  Today engineering graduates all across Canada are presented with an iron ring at a ceremony to remind them of their obligation to society. In 1922 Kipling became Lord Rector of St Andrews University in Scotland, a three-year position.
  Kipling, as a Francophile, argued strongly for an Anglo-French alliance to uphold the peace, calling Britain and France in 1920 the "twin fortresses of European civilization."  Similarly, Kipling repeatedly warned against revising the Treaty of Versailles in Germany's favour, which he predicted would lead to a new world war. An admirer of Raymond Poincaré, Kipling was one of few British intellectuals who supported the French Occupation of the Ruhr in 1923, at a time when the British government and most public opinion was against the French position. In contrast to the popular British view of Poincaré as a cruel bully intent on impover
caption: Kipling (second from left) as rector of the University of St Andrews, Scotland in 1923
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