Dud Corner Cemetery and Loos Memorial – Loos-en-Gohelle

In 1914, Rudyard Kipling, author of The Jungle Book and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907, was a strong advocate of the British Empire’s entry into the war. Faithful to the education he had received, his only son John, dedicatee in 1910 of the famous poem “If” (You will be a man my son), wanted to enlist. He was refused at first for health reasons, but his father’s influence allowed him to join the Irish Guards. He was immediately launched into the great battle of Artois, started by the Allies in September-October 1915. In the Gohelle plain, the British used chlorine gas for the first time, in response to the Germans who had already tested it at Ypres. After the initial surprise effect, a change in the wind direction pushed the gas towards the British lines and contributed to the failure of an offensive that was otherwise poorly prepared.

On September 25 alone, the British recorded 8,500 casualties. They would lose a total of 50,000 men, killed, wounded or missing. The names of 20,000 of them are inscribed in the Loos Memorial that girds the Dud Corner Cemetery in Loos-en-Gohelle. Among them is the name of Lieutenant John Kipling, who fell during his first assault on September 27, at the age of 18, and whose body could not be identified. Rudyard Kipling would never console himself for this loss. Until his death in 1936, he would search in vain for traces of his son, crisscrossing the roads of the Gohelle every summer, asking, “Have you news of my boy Jack?”

Active in the Imperial War Graves Commission, he imagined the beautiful formula engraved on the headstones of the unknown British soldiers: “Known unto God,” “Known to God alone.” And he wrote in his War Epitaphs these terrible words: “If anyone wants to know why we died / Tell him: because our fathers lied.”

John’s body will be identified in 1992, 3 km from Loos, in the Saint-Mary ADS Cemetery in Haisnes-lès-la-Bassée.