Christ in Flanders?: another look at Rudyard Kipling's "The Gardener" - Critical Essay

Studies in Short Fiction, Spring, 1998 by Steven Trout

Approaching the conclusion of Kipling's story within the context of Commission procedures and policies also lends added significance to the gardener's "infinite compassion." If, as I have argued, Kipling conjoins the Christ-like with the soldierly, then the story asserts, in an oblique way, the value of wartime suffering: as one who has, presumably, likewise suffered and mourned, the gardener immediately discards the shallow conventions that Helen has torturously observed in England; hence his direct, sympathetic action. Perhaps war, with its intense comradeship and exposure of fundamentals, has stripped this man of the prejudices and pettiness that still preside in Helen's village. Such a conception of war experience (which found its most extreme expression in the writings of Ernst Junger (4)) was not unattractive to Kipling, who, as we see in "A Madonna of the Trenches," tended to romanticize the sense of Masonic brotherhood allegedly felt by veterans of the Great War. As Charles Carrington points out, "Kipling's obsession with the war dead dwelt upon his understanding that the soldiers were initiates, admitted to a higher degree of the suffering which is that law of life, and so separated from their lovers at home" (364). And perhaps--if we may momentarily indulge in some admittedly tenuous speculation--Kipling perceived this exposure to a "higher degree of suffering" in the actual cemetery gardeners whom he encountered in France and Belgium. If, as Morton Cohen suggests, Kipling drew part of his inspiration for "The Gardener" from a visit to Rouen Cemetery on 14 March 1925 (Kipling apparently began writing the story only a day or two later), then Kipling's letter to Rider Haggard on this date contains an intriguing detail: "Went off to Rouen Cemetery (11,000 graves) and collogued with the Head Gardener and the contractors" (152; emphasis added).

Near the beginning of this essay, I maintained that "The Gardener," like Balzac's "Christ in Flanders," evokes a timeless Christian myth; at the same time, however, the full implications of Kipling's story only become clear once we consider its specific cultural context in the early 1920s. Kipling did not, in my view, seize upon a gardener as the agent of Helen's release simply because this character would evoke the Gospel of John and thus signal the protagonist's literal encounter with the Son of God; rather, the gardener's symbolic association with Christ stems, first, from his participation in the Commission's gargantuan task of commemorating one million dead soldiers (an enterprise with deeply spiritual and, at times, spiritualistic overtones), and, second, from a tradition, well established during the war years, of conceptualizing servicemen and veterans as suffering martyrs. Seen in this way, Kipling's story is highly topical and dependant for much of its meaning upon values and assumptions held by few readers today. Revisiting the text within this particular milieu also reveals an implicit advocacy of war as a beneficial and cathartic experience, an advocacy that contradicts the story's dominant mood of sadness and regret. Not only has war presumably admitted the gardener "into a higher degree of suffering" and thus fostered his Christ-like capacity to understand Helen; it even has a paradoxically positive effect on the protagonist: by losing her son, Helen, in a sense, gains him for the first time. While the Commission's cemeteries symbolized, in Edmund Blunden's eyes, "the tyranny of war," the tract of grass and white markers that Helen confronts becomes not a warning, but a place of spiritual rebirth--a place where, in other words, the values that led her son, and his companions, to their graves are reaffirmed. (5)