The Departure of Mr. Kipling, leaving The Friend vigorous with the Impetus he gave it.
Rudyard Kipling left Bloemfontein for Capetown on the night of April 1st, in the same train that bore away Sir Alfred Milner, Colonel Hanbury Williams, and Colonel Girouard. The High Commissioner had been declared to be leaving a day or two later, but started at once in order to avoid giving the Boers notice to prepare mischief.
Of the happy days of boyish delight we editors spent with Mr. Kipling many brought incidents too trifling to be noted here, yet which went to fill a heaping loving cup of pleasant memories. "Heavens!" he once exclaimed, "how good it is to be with men who are doing things!" There was, for instance, the day when—as the reader may have perceived—two poems bore a note of merely suggested complaint from the sick in the hospitals. That note struck Mr. Kipling's sensibility, and he and Mr. Landon and I seized armsful of Friends and set out upon a tour of the hospitals—then far too numerous in the public and semi-public buildings of the place. Mr. Kipling went ahead and distributed the papers, and we followed and whispered who he was to the sufferers in the cots. I never shall forget the look that came in each man's eyes, or how every one of them who was able raised himself upon an elbow to stare after the poet as he passed from room to room.
"God bless him," they said; "he's the soldier's friend."
And surely a blessing proceeded from him, in response to that which he received, for, at the knowledge of his presence, a new vigour and a sense of delight, such as they had almost forgotten how to feel, came to the sufferers. He had nothing of the theatrical about him, made no speeches, conversed in hushed tones, halted nowhere, posed not even to the slightest extent—but went on with doctor or nurse through the wards, listening and looking. I think that Mr. Landon and I were more conscious of the reflection of his fame than was he from whom it proceeded.
At one stage of our adventure we determined to cross from one hospital to another, over some intervening gardens. What an unsuspected wildness lay among those walled enclosures in the confines of a nation's capital. Little hills, little rivers, marshes, precipices, walls on the edges of tiny cliffs! It proved a better feat for Italian cavalrymen than for a stout poet, a man with a game leg and arms in lint, and a third one who did not know it, but who was already poisoned with fever germs. However, we had set it for ourselves to do, and we did it—without any more serious mishap than a kick in the equatorial region which I bestowed on the poet in dropping over a wall.
Mr. Kipling had other experiences with hospitals when we were with him and when he was by himself. He was qualified to testify as he did before the Commission that looked into the manner in which the care of the sick and wounded was bestowed.
While I was in Capetown I heard a story of an adventure of his, in which the parts played by him and by the hospital people were eminently characteristic of both. To begin with, he discovered that there were no bandages in a certain hospital! The reader imagines that such a state of things must have been most extraordinary—but it was not. Why should we conceal facts or mince words if we are earnestly endeavouring to probe our own weaknesses and mend our faults? I knew of hospitals without cots, without sheets, without pillows, without measuring glasses, without thermometers. These "hospitals" must have been little more than mere surgeons and staffs, for they applied to the Red Cross people for nearly everything—except medicines—which is required in the care of the sick. Thus Peter was robbed to pay Paul, for Tommy's "comforts" were swallowed up in getting him his necessaries. This was the case in Kimberley after the relief of the town, and it was again the case in Bloemfontein. But to return to Capetown. There Mr. Kipling discovered a hospital without bandages, in desperate need of bandages, in a city containing stores of bandages on sale in many places.
Mr. Kipling mentioned to an acquaintance that he was going to supply that establishment with bandages, and this acquaintance, who was connected with the Daily Mail's "Absent Minded Beggar Fund," at once offered to pay for all that Mr. Kipling would buy and take to the hospital. A cart was quickly loaded with bandages, and then Mr. Kipling was told that under the army rules the hospital authorities could not receive supplies from a private individual. "Well," said he, "I will dump the packages on the pavement before the door, and then tell them to come out and clear up the litter. They will get them into the building that way without tearing any red tape, I hope."
He drove off with the bandages, I am told by the gentleman who footed the bill, but how the supplies were smuggled in I have never heard. I suspect that the rule against receiving supplies from civilians got a great many wrenches and fractures. But for civilians such as at least one Red Cross Commissioner of my acquaintance, Heaven only knows what these hospitals, that consisted of little else than a corps of men, would have been able to do. I asked my friend how it could be possible that an arm of the Government of Great Britain could find itself in such helpless and pitiable plights, and he replied that red tape was the root of the evil. Nobody dared to buy a measuring glass or a pillow-case or a cot for fear that his enterprise might bring him a reprimand and his bill might be repudiated. The hospitals had made demands outmeasuring the supplies, or the supplies had not come up from the Cape, or to the Cape from London. If private generosity was not appealed to circumlocution must be resorted to by means of requisitions which would be slowly forwarded to London and there passed upon. By this means the supplies would reach the front within three months after the patients were dead—provided that all should go smoothly with the circumlocution machinery.