The greatest study in literature of the professional soldier--though he
is infinitely more than that--is Shakespeare's Falstaff. It will be
remembered that Falstaff, after having led his men where they were
finely peppered, also suffered from thirst; and, being an old
campaigner, he was not unprovided. The fate of Falstaff upon the
British stage for many centuries--where he has actually been played,
not as a professional soldier, but as an incompetent poltroon!--seems
to indicate that no figure is more liable to be misunderstood than the
man whose business or duty it is to fight between meals. Even Mr
Kipling, in his anxiety to emphasise that a regular soldier, apart from
any personal and heroic qualities he may happen to possess, is to be
regarded as just a skilled practitioner whose work asks for courage and
resource, fails to take soldiering with the magnificent nonchalance of
Shakespeare's soldiers. Shakespeare takes the professional view for
granted. But Mr Kipling does not quite do that. There is a
continuously implicit protest in all Mr Kipling's soldier tales that a
soldier's killing is like an editor's leader-writing or a painter's
sketching from the nude--a protest which by its frequent over-emphasis
shows that Mr Kipling, not having Shakespeare's gift of intuition into
every kind of man, has not quite succeeded in identifying himself with
the soldier's point of view. It is always present in his mind as
something novel and surprising, needing insistence and emphasis.

This is equally true of all Mr Kipling's essays in brutality. His
ferocity is as forced as his tenderness is natural. Violence and war
are clearly foreign to his unprompted imagination. Only it happens
that Mr Kipling has talked with soldiers; and, like Eustace Cleever, he
is prompted occasionally to spend a perversely riotous evening in their
company. The literary result is far from being contemptible; but it is