Partly in response to John's death, Kipling joined Sir Fabian Ware's Imperial War Graves Commission (now the Commonwealth War Graves Commission), the group responsible for the garden-like British war graves that can be found to this day dotted along the former Western Front and the other places in the world where British Empire troops lie buried. His main contributions to the project were his selection of the biblical phrase, "Their Name Liveth For Evermore" (Ecclesiasticus 44.14, KJV), found on the Stones of Remembrance in larger war cemeteries, and his suggestion of the phrase "Known unto God" for the gravestones of unidentified servicemen. He also chose the inscription "The Glorious Dead" on the Cenotaph, Whitehall, London. Additionally, he wrote a two-volume history of the Irish Guards, his son's regiment, published in 1923 and seen as one of the finest examples of regimental history.[95]
Kipling's short story "The Gardener" depicts visits to the war cemeteries, and the poem "The King's Pilgrimage" (1922) a journey which King George V made, touring the cemeteries and memorials under construction by the Imperial War Graves Commission. With the increasing prevalence of the automobile, Kipling became a motoring correspondent for the British press, writing enthusiastically of trips around England and abroad, though he was usually driven by a chauffeur.
After the war, Kipling was sceptical of the Fourteen Points and the League of Nations, but had hopes that the United States would abandon isolationism and the post-war world be dominated by an Anglo-French-American alliance.[96] He hoped the United States would take on a League of Nations mandate for Armenia as the best way of preventing isolationism, and hoped that Theodore Roosevelt, whom Kipling admired, would again become president.[96] Kipling was saddened by Roosevelt's death in 1919, believing him to be the only American politician capable of keeping the United States in the "game" of world politics.[97]
Kipling was hostile towards communism, writing of the Bolshevik take-over in 1917 that one sixth of the world had "passed bodily out of civilization".[98] In a 1918 poem, Kipling wrote of Soviet Russia that everything good in Russia had been destroyed by the Bolsheviks – all that was left was "the sound of weeping and the sight of burning fire, and the shadow of a people trampled into the mire."[98]
In 1920, Kipling co-founded the Liberty League[99] with Haggard and Lord Sydenham. This short-lived enterprise focused on promoting classic liberal ideals as a response to the rising power of communist tendencies within Great Britain, or as Kipling put it, "to combat the advance of Bolshevism."[100][101]
Kipling (second from left) as rector of the University of St Andrews, Scotland, in 1923In 1922, Kipling, having referred to the work of engineers in some of his poems, such as "The Sons of Martha", "Sappers", and "McAndrew's Hymn",[102] and in other writings, including short-story anthologies such as The Day's Work,[103] was asked by a University of Toronto civil engineering professor, Herbert E. T. Haultain, for assistance in developing a dignified obligation and ceremony for graduating engineering students. Kipling was enthusiastic in his response and shortly produced both, formally titled "The Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer". Today, engineering graduates all across Canada are presented with an iron ring at a ceremony to remind them of their obligation to society.[104][105] In 1922, Kipling became Lord Rector of the University of St Andrews in Scotland, a three-year position.
Kipling, as a Francophile, argued strongly for an Anglo-French alliance to uphold the peace, calling Britain and France in 1920 the "twin fortresses of European civilization".[106] Similarly, Kipling repeatedly warned against revising the Treaty of Versailles in Germany's favour, which he predicted would lead to a new world war.[106] An admirer of Raymond Poincaré, Kipling was one of few British intellectuals who supported the French Occupation of the Ruhr in 1923, at a time when the British government and most public opinion was against the French position.[107] In contrast to the popular British view of Poincaré as a cruel bully intent on impoverishing Germany with unreasonable reparations, Kipling argued that he was rightfully trying to preserve France as a great power in the face of an unfavourable situation.[107] Kipling argued that even before 1914, Germany's larger economy and higher birth rate had made that country stronger than France; with much of France devastated by war and the French suffering heavy losses meant that its low birth rate would give it trouble, while Germany was mostly undamaged and still with a higher birth rate. So he reasoned that the future would bring German domination if Versailles were revised in Germany's favour, and it was madness for Britain to press France to do so.[107]
Kipling late in his life, portrait by Elliott & FryIn 1924, Kipling was opposed to the Labour government of Ramsay MacDonald as "Bolshevism without bullets". He believed that Labour was a communist front organisation, and "excited orders and instructions from Moscow" would expose Labour as such to the British people.[108] Kipling's views were on the right. Though he admired Benito Mussolini to some extent in the 1920s, he was against fascism, calling Oswald Mosley "a bounder and an arriviste". By 1935, he was calling Mussolini a deranged and dangerous egomaniac and in 1933 wrote, "The Hitlerites are out for blood".[109]
Despite his anti-communism, Kipling was popular with Russian readers in the interwar period. Many younger Russian poets and writers, such as Konstantin Simonov, were influenced by him.[110] Kipling's clarity of style, use of colloquial language and employment of rhythm and rhyme were seen as major innovations in poetry that appealed to many younger Russian poets.[111] Though it was obligatory for Soviet journals to begin translations of Kipling with an attack on him as a "fascist" and an "imperialist", such was Kipling's popularity with Russian readers that his works were not banned in the Soviet Union until 1939, with the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact.[110] The ban was lifted in 1941 after Operation Barbarossa, when Britain become a Soviet ally, but imposed again with the Cold War in 1946.[112]
A left-facing swastika in 1911, an Indian symbol of good luckCovers of two of Kipling's books from 1919 (l) and 1930 (r), showing the removal of the swastikaMany older editions of Rudyard Kipling's books have a swastika printed on the cover, associated with a picture of an elephant carrying a lotus flower, reflecting the influence of Indian culture. Kipling's use of the swastika was based on the Indian sun symbol conferring good luck and the Sanskrit word meaning "fortunate" or "well-being".[113] He used the swastika symbol in both right and left-facing forms, and it was in general use by others at the time.[114][115]
In a note to Edward Bok after the death of Lockwood Kipling in 1911, Rudyard said: "I am sending with this for your acceptance, as some little memory of my father to whom you were so kind, the original of one of the plaques that he used to make for me. I thought it being the Swastika would be appropriate for your Swastika. May it bring you even more good fortune."[113] Once the swastika had become widely associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, Kipling ordered that it should no longer adorn his books.[113] Less than a year before his death, Kipling gave a speech (titled "An Undefended Island") to the Royal Society of St George on 6 May 1935, warning of the danger which Nazi Germany posed to Britain.[116]
Kipling scripted the first Royal Christmas Message, delivered via the BBC's Empire Service by George V in 1932.[117][118] In 1934, he published a short story in The Strand Magazine, "Proofs of Holy Writ", postulating that William Shakespeare had helped to polish the prose of the King James Bible.[119]
