I watched the PBS Masterpiece drama yesterday, set at the beginning of World War I. It was flawed, but still very good. Daniel Radcliffe played the writer's son, John Kipling, so let me get the Harry Potter jokes out of the way. Why couldn't he use a shield charm, or take out the machine gun nest with Expelliarmus! In fact, I didn't think about Harry Potter more than fourteen times during the show. Radcliffe was that good.
David Haigh wrote the screenplay and played the part of Rudyard Kipling, and for both my opinion of him has risen considerably. The chief flaw in the production was that it could not quite decide what it wanted to be: a sympathetic portrait of a family tragedy or an anti-war movie. Gillian Anderson (Agent Scully on the X Files) tried to push it to the latter in the introduction, by speaking of Kipling's "rampant patriotism." And in the beginning of the film, it seemed to be going that way. Kipling, enamored of military virtue and intoxicated with the glory of the British Empire, pushes his son to military service and uses all his influence to get his son in harms way. Jack is killed on his first day of action. Rudyard is thereafter racked with guilt.
There is a lot in the film to confirm that interpretation. It is very deliberately left out that the war started when the Germans invaded Belgium. But Haigh was too good a writer and actor to let the piece descend into a screed. Kipling was, to be sure, a British patriot and saw, rightly, that war was coming despite all hopes to the contrary. He may well have pushed his son toward service, but it is quite clear (in fact and in the film) that the boy wanted desperately to serve. These days, when so many criticize those who get themselves or their children out of military service, we might not want to so quickly condemn someone who did the opposite.
The First World War, like the American Civil War, was fought with very bad doctrine. Defense so thoroughly overwhelmed offense that either side could have won easily just by not bothering to attack. But it is characteristic of modern views of the war that they leave out considering the alternatives. The truth of the matter is that Germany was determined to do what Napoleon had earlier tried to do: bring all of Europe under their dominion. Should the British, and by extension the Americans, have let the Germans get away with that? Perhaps not.
Between 1789 and 1945 Britain set herself again and again against tyranny in Europe. In 1916, America began to back her play. This is not something either people should be ashamed of. God bless all who fought, or suffered, or died in that business. I can only be grateful that I, and my children, were born in the right half of the twentieth century. That is what My Boy Jack is about, though it might come as a surprise to the producers.
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