He retired from the British army after World War I with the rank of colonel but rejoined the military as an enlisted man by using an assumed name.
In Kipling's poem "Gentlemen-Rankers", the speaker "sings": If the home we never write to, and the oaths we never keep, And all we know most distant and most dear, Across the snoring barrack-room return to break our sleep, Can you blame us if we soak ourselves in beer?
When the drunken comrade mutters and the great guard-lantern gutters And the horror of our fall is written plain, Every secret, self-revealing on the aching whitewashed ceiling, Do you wonder that we drug ourselves from pain?
[2] In the poem, "machinely crammed" may indicate the use of a Latin "crammer" and the general method of learning by rote; a somewhat mechanical process.
James Jones's award-winning 1951 bestseller From Here to Eternity, which is about American soldiers in Hawaii before the US entered World War II, takes its title from Kipling's poem.
[citation needed] In Robert Heinlein's novel Starship Troopers (1959), the poem is sung at marching cadence by Mobile Infantry officer cadets.
That recording was also included in 2012 on the CD reissue of Peter Bellamy Sings the Barrack-Room Ballads of Rudyard Kipling.
[5] The song is spoken of in The Road to Kalamata, a memoir by soldier of fortune Mike Hoare, who led several mercenary companies during the bush wars in the Katanga and the former Belgian Congo during the 1960s.