Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (1258 page)

The thing to be careful of when you are in this mood is to come out of it as soon as it lifts, and not to continue dreaming over books because they suit that mood or because they minister to your own vanity. There have been a few great dreamers in the world who have achieved great things for the world; but for every dreamer whose dreams have been good, or at least not harmful, there are thousands who have been a hindrance to themselves, an expense to their families and a nuisance to mankind. Books used intemperately to excess become most dangerous drugs, and there is a type of book — modern I regret to say, as Mr. Pecksniff did
not
say about the Sirens — which is to be avoided when one’s mind is a little off colour. One reads in a newspaper occasionally of the bold youth of ten who goes off with a knife and sevenpence halfpenny in coppers, to become a demon chauffeur or to lariat Red-Indians or shoot cowboys, and is then brought into court, weeping, by a policeman. And the magistrate says it’s the sad result of reading —
Deadwood Dick
or
The Terror of Bloody Gulch
. It’s hard to realise that there is a mass of modern stuff which is practically no more than
Deadwood Dick
and the penny dreadful disguised and flavoured to modern taste. They fill the mind, they are meant to fill the mind, with a lot of vague and windy ideas that one can start off to do miracles or benefit one’s fellow-men (which is the fashion just now), without training or equipment of any kind except a desire to astonish the world and show one’s independence — exactly like the kid with the penknife and the stolen coppers. It is not probable that you’ll come much in the way of these books, but if you do, before you read them, watch the men who discuss ‘em and recommend ‘em to you. If they strike you as the kind of men you’d like to be with in a tight place, or to go to if you were in trouble, then read them. Otherwise, as Sir Walter Raleigh said — ”Otherwise not”.

Most of you are going to enter what is called the life of action, in which you will discover that you will have to think harder, closer, and quicker than the bulk of men who take up what is so kindly called “the intellectual life”. Harder, because you will be thinking against men, not books; closer, because your thoughts will be translated, several times a day perhaps, into action that may affect the lives and interests of men; quicker, because, even if you don’t eventually make ghastly mistakes, you may have to alter your plans at a minute’s notice to meet a changed situation. Incidentally, you will have to express your thoughts, wants, and orders both in speech and writing with much more clearness than the average literary man, and under circumstances that will not exactly lend themselves to clear thinking or easy writing. It is almost worse for a C.O. not to have expressive written (not spoken) words at his command than not to have men. With luck you can always scratch a few men together out of the hospitals or the Army Service Corps; but if you send in a report that nobody can make head or tail of, because you haven’t the words to tell your case, you can lose a thousand men in half an hour. So you
must
get your words, and a working knowledge of the use of words. And words come out of literature — even if you make no other use of it.

Those of you who go into the Service will find out that, in spite of aeroplanes, you will have to guess, most of your time, at what is going on behind the next hill; and this is not only the whole business of war but of life. And those who have read the
Green Curve
, which is a splendid book, know that you will have to think what is in the mind of the man who is opposed to you. And you must do that in life as well as in the Service.

Well, half of Literature is placing fields that aren’t there, and the rest of it is recording how every conceivable kind of ball that can be bowled by the Fates or life or circumstances has, at one time or another, been bowled at some wretched or happy man; and how he has played it. Life is too short to hunt up the individual record in each case; but, over and above all the help we can get from our ordinary training, association with our betters, and our very limited experience, we can pick up from Literature a few general and fundamental ideas as to how the great game of life has been played by the best players.

Some Aspects of Travel

I MUST
begin by asking your forgiveness where I touch on matters of which you know much more than I.

I cannot claim to have travelled widely, but I have met many travellers, and I have noticed what they tell the public in print of their experiences is one thing, and what they tell their friends by word of mouth is another. So I would like to try to deal with some of the more intimate and personal aspects of travel. They may be trivial or absurd, but one must remember that in a few years, most of our existing methods of transport, together with the physical and mental emotions that accompany them, will be profoundly changed. The time is near when men will receive their normal impressions of a new country suddenly and in plan, not slowly and in perspective; when the most extreme distances will be brought within the compass of one week’s — one hundred and sixtyeight hours’ — travel; when the word “inaccessible” as applied to any given spot on the surface of the globe will cease to have any meaning. I present myself to-night, then, as in some sort a recorder of experiences which are on the eve of being superseded.

Many years ago a friend of mine was engaged on a survey in a little-known part of Asia. When he came back, I asked him what he used to think about while he was at work. He told me that, as soon as his party had settled to camp-routine, his mind moved in an uneasy triangle — he traced it in the air as he spoke — between Supplies, possible Sickness, and Mileage. The figure was as real to him as one on a blackboard. It was an isosceles triangle with a narrow base, in the centre of which he felt himself to be walking, between Supplies on the one hand and Sickness on the other, always looking forward to the always retreating point M. When his work was ended, and the survey connected up, the point M, he said, “opened and let him through”. Till then he had felt himself constricted — harnessed up was his word — between these imaginary lines. I remember we discussed the matter at some length, and in our interest to discover why his thoughts had cast themselves into a triangle, we missed, I think, the main point — that the phenomenon did not show itself till the boy had been worked rather hard.

That roused my interest in what one might call the psychology of moving bodies under strain. Most of the men I was brought in contact with, knew something about the strain of travel, and I asked them — as I have asked many men since — how they realised their experiences to themselves. Few things are more doubtful than any man’s, especially any Englishman’s, evidence as to his own feelings; and in the rare cases where one meets a man who can or cares to testify, one finds that a very few days of baths, clean clothes, and mixed society blur the clearness of his record. Travellers, like sea-trout, should be caught fresh-run, with their experiences still sticking to them.

Yet it seemed to me, from what I was told, that a number of the men who work under strain and responsibility, as leaders of expeditions — survey, prospecting, exploration, or scientific — come to evolve a more or less definite image of their work within the limits of which, or with reference to which, they accomplish that work. For the sake of brevity, let us call those images pressure-lines.

I have no knowledge of any other case except the one I have given, of pressure-lines taking the form of a complete mathematical figure. One man who had led a rather trying expedition, told me that his pressure-line showed itself, after a few days’ hard marching, as a diagonally shaded bar or line a little above and a little to the right of his right eyebrow. It was a distinct mental image almost as insistent as a scratch on the glass of one’s spectacles; and he felt himself to be constantly pushing in or shouldering towards it. After a good day’s work the bar was clear and firm in outline. A bad day, with lost loads and delayed transport, broke it up into ragged curdled flecks. He carried the bar with him for the first few mornings after his return to civilisation, exactly as one carried the memory of the school-bell for the first few mornings of one’s holidays.

Many of the pressure-lines, of course, cannot be defined in words. One man has written to me: “I had the picture of my job at the back of my head all the time. For the life of me I couldn’t tell you what it was like, but it was there and it was quite real. I kept it by me, or rather it kept by me, till I had had a week’s sleep between sheets.” And another man told me that his pressure-line appeared to him as an amorphous lump — a cross between a monthly calendar and a porter’s load. That gives an idea of complicated pressure and its attendant horrors. And yet another, who suffered from malaria, compared his pressure-line to that indescribable sensation of swelling and thickening of the hands at the beginning of a bout of fever, which, as you know, is sometimes accompanied by a consciousness of indefinitely protracted parallel ruled lines in the head.

In every case, I noted that the pressure-lines did not show themselves till the man was physically tired out — and a little more. When the pressure of the work was removed and the man was fed again, the lines gradually faded, and could only be recalled by an effort of will.

And I remember, too, when I was a young man, listening to Stanley, who was talking, half to himself, of some work he had done in his early days. He had been under the necessity of covering a certain distance in a certain time, and he ended his monologue with an abrupt fore-reaching movement of his first finger, as though he were pegging down or hooking up something, and he said: “Of course, it was the mileage that worried me!” I often wondered whether that gesture of Stanley’s was characteristic, and what form his pressure-lines took.

Several men have told me that their mental idea of their day’s work, as distinguished from the responsibility of leadership, was a ribbon or tape unrolling behind them or being dropped from their hands as they marched. In one case my informant said that he thought of distance actually covered as a clear white tape; distance to the next haltingplace ran forward along the ground like a misty web or skein. These men were not leaders, but subordinates responsible for making good so many miles per diem. One can see the reason for their linear conception of progress. Expeditions, as a rule, string out in single file, and any movement of the leaders is seldom to a flank, but up and down the line.

Speaking from my own experience of the one march I ever had to make in a hurry, my impression at the time, as well as the memory that stayed with me afterwards, was that of the unrolling ribbon. Luckily I had not to worry about supplies, but my single object was to get myself and my coolies out of a certain district as soon as possible. My mind projected itself along an imaginary straight line — in this instance white against dull green. It would be interesting if any of the Polar men who work against white backgrounds would tell us how the idea of their work presents itself to them while they are engaged in it. I have heard that the dogtrain mail-runners of Alaska and Northern Canada sometimes see their winter-trails as short straight lines strung with beads — that is to say, as a diagram of the taut sleigh-traces with dogs attached.

But I think that most travellers do not cast, or do not recall that they cast, their thoughts into mathematical outlines. They retain more or less accurate pictures of incidents that have impressed them personally. I knew one man who said he could run any road that he had marched over, backward between his eyelids like a cinematograph film before he went to sleep. His companions told me that his diary and written work were quite bad; but that they always took his word for the time and place of any event that had happened on the road. Such a gift as this — and some motorists have the rudiments of it — stands at the top of a scale that ends in those disappointing men who, after months of experience, can communicate no more than a hazy recollection of the places where they got food or water or warmth or shelter.
Punch
has described this type in the man who said: “Rome — Rome. Wasn’t that the place where I bought the shocking bad cigars?” It is not at all a bad type to travel with, because it generally gives all its attention to its own duties. A man who carries too many pictures in his head is apt to forget vital things like straps and kettle-lids when the loads are being packed. On the other hand, I have been assured by competent authorities that the camp-cook, if white, ought to be of a sentimental and imaginative disposition. It makes him more generous. I seem to have read lately of a cook whose notion of a twelfth course of a dinner to some returned voyagers was ten boxes of sardines made into a pile with bacon and pastry to match. May one take it that he was imaginative?

I have, not exactly a theory, but an idea, that first-class leaders of expeditions, however definite and urgent their conception of their work, either do not visualise too much or keep their powers of visualisation under control. At least, I do not remember to have heard any men who have led men into a tight place and out again, say to me: “I could see exactly what was going to happen when the canoe swamped or the bridge broke”. They usually put it: “
When
the bridge broke or
when
the hippo charged, I did so and so, or gave such and such orders”. And there is reason for that, too. An old prospector once warned me: “As long as you’ve only got yourself to think about you can think as much as you damn-well please. When you’ve other folks’ hides to answer for you must quit thinking for your own amusement.” So I should be inclined to say that, however great the strain, responsibility does not encourage detailed imaginative excursuses on the road — or on any road — while the work is in hand. Later, when a man is boiling down his log and notes into book-form, he falls back on his store of mental pictures, but, in the actual stress of travel, the first-class man as distinguished from the very first-class second-class man — and this is an important distinction — does not, or decides not to, visualise.