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Kipling was in South Africa when the Boer War began, and he stayed through it, enjoyed himself hugely. Very popular with the troops, he raised quarter of a million pounds for them from the royalties of some popular verses (The Absent-Minded Beggar). Very British about the Boers, he recalls that De Wet with 250 men, Smuts with 500, were handy fighters; "but, beyond that, got muddled." After the war he took a house for his family at Cape Town, next to Cecil Rhodes's, wintered there for seven years. Kipling's best-known poem, If,* which has been translated into 27 languages, was based on the character of Dr. Leander Starr Jameson, of Jameson Raid fame. Much of his patriotic verse (including Recessional) was given to newspapers free. "It does not much matter what people think of a man after his death, but I should not like the people whose good opinion I valued to believe that I took money for verses on Joseph Chamberlain, Rhodes, Lord Milner or any of my South African verse in The Times."
To Kipling at 70, looking back over his career, it seemed that every card in it "had been dealt me in such a manner that I had but to play it as it came." True, he had wanted to write a big novel—something "worthy to lie alongside The Cloister and the Hearth"—but that had not been vouchsafed him. On the other hand he had written some books that he knew were good: "My Daemon was with me in the Jungle Books, Kim, and both Puck books, and good care I took to walk delicately, lest he should withdraw." Friends will add to that list; critics may subtract. In Something of Myself, Kipling's Daemon was not with him; he had long vanished over the horizon. But Kipling still followed, marching as to war, helmeted with the crescent of Islam, armored in Congregationalist thunder, proudly knapsacked with the White Man's burden.
*The famed but unpublishable ballad, The Bastard King of England, generally credited to Kipling, is supposed to have cost him the post of Poet Laureate.