Introduction
‘Tommy Atkins’ is the name given to the average British foot-soldier in the Great War. He is affectionately pictured as chirpy and a trifle insubordinate, always up to some lark, but brave as a lion when required. Major General Sir George Younghusband was in no doubt that Tommy was a literary fiction, but one that had become a living fact, and also that Rudyard Kipling had created him.
RUDYARD Kipling was at Shimla for brief periods of leave during the middle eighties.* We thought he was never in Shimla long enough at a time to get the intimate knowledge of the social atmosphere which his writings portrayed. And we concluded, rightly or wrongly, that he was greatly helped in this respect by his clever little sister,* who spent several seasons running at Shimla.
It was she, I think, who told us that her brother used to walk down the road to Jutogh,* where was stationed a British Battery of Mountain Artillery and a Company of British Infantry, and that on the road he used to stop and converse with the British soldiers, and thus got many of his quaint soldier expressions and turns of language. He used to do the same at Lahore,* going down to the fort to meet soldiers.
And now for a curious thing. I myself had served for many years with soldiers, but had never once heard the words or expressions that Rudyard Kipling’s soldiers used. Many a time did I ask my brother Officers whether they had ever heard them. No, never.
* Shimla (Simla) in Himachal Pradesh, India, lies at the feet of the Himalayas and about 170 miles north of Delhi. Thanks to its pleasant climate, Shimla was the summer retreat for officials in the British Raj toiling in the heat of Calcutta and New Delhi. See Google Maps.
* Alice (known as ‘Trix’) Kipling Fleming (1868-1948), who was also a writer and published poetry and fiction under the name of Beatrice. She was Rudyard’s junior by three years.
* Jutogh is a town some two miles west of Shimla. In 1903, but not when Kipling was gathering his samples of soldier-talk, it was connected to Shimla by the Kalka-Shimla narrow-gauge railway, which remains in operation today.
* Today, Lahore lies just on the far side of the border with Pakistan, roughly 260 miles northwest of Delhi and 170 miles west of Shimla. See Google Maps. In Kipling’s time, before the partition demanded (much to Ghandi’s consternation) by Muslim Indians after independence, it lay within British India. Rudyard’s father John Lockwood Kipling was curator of the Lahore Museum, founded in 1865, from 1875 to 1893.
Précis
Major-General Sir George Younghusband was an experienced soldier who had known Kipling in India, and was fairly sure the novelist had pieced together his military jargon from visits to garrisons in Shimla and Lahore. But in all his soldiering, neither the General nor his fellow officers had ever heard his men talk like the troops in Rudyard Kipling’s tales. (59 / 60 words)
Major-General Sir George Younghusband was an experienced soldier who had known Kipling in India, and was fairly sure the novelist had pieced together his military jargon from visits to garrisons in Shimla and Lahore. But in all his soldiering, neither the General nor his fellow officers had ever heard his men talk like the troops in Rudyard Kipling’s tales.
Variations: 1.increase the length of this precis to exactly 65 words. 2.reduce the length of this precis to exactly 55 words. 3.introduce one of the following words into the precis: besides, despite, if, or, otherwise, unless, until, whether.
Word Games
Jigsaws Based on this passage
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