The King's Pilgrimage
[1] This journey was part of the wider pilgrimage movement that saw tens of thousands of bereaved relatives from the United Kingdom and the Empire visit the battlefields of the Great War in the years that followed the Armistice.
[6] The text of the poem includes references to Nieuport (a coastal port down-river from Ypres), and "four Red Rivers", said to be the Somme, the Marne, the Oise and the Yser, which all flow through the World War I battlefields.
[9] Also included in the opening pages is a signed letter from the King himself, again mentioning the proposed use of the profits from the book to assist those travelling to visit graves.
[9] Later reprints of the poem included its use in the opening pages of The Silent Cities, a guide to the commission's war cemeteries and memorials in France and Flanders, published in 1929.
[10] The spirits of the mighty army of the dead seemed to marshall [...] come to receive the homage of the King, for whom they died, and to hear that in the land which they saved their names will live evermore.The King and his entourage, which included Field Marshal Earl Haig and Major-General Sir Fabian Ware, the head of the commission, travelled by ship, car and train, visiting sites in both France and Belgium.
[1] The official Royal Party, in addition to the King, Haig and Ware, included the Right Honourable Sir Frederick Ponsonby, Colonel Clive Wigram and Major R. Seymour.
After this, the route of the pilgrimage passed near or through places on the battlefields of the Somme Offensive, with many cemeteries being visited (Warlencourt, Warloy-Baillon, Forceville, Louvencourt, Picquigny, Crouy, Longpre-les-Corps Saints).
The next visit was to Meerut Indian Cemetery, meeting General Sir Alexander Cobbe the representative of the Secretary of State for India.
After visiting the graves, the King laid a chaplet at the Cross of Sacrifice, and together with a guard of honour of French soldiers saluted the dead to begin a two-minute silence.
Following this, the King, facing the Stone of Remembrance, delivered an eloquent and moving speech composed by Kipling, which made reference to the nearby column commemorating Napoleon Bonaparte.
In this story, the convict describes the ordering of the construction of the war graves and the pilgrimage undertaken six years earlier by the King (referred to as "the Padishah").
[13] And when all was done, and the People of the Graves were laid at ease and in honour, it pleased the Padishah to cross the little water between Belait [England] and Frangistan [France], and look upon them.
And where he saw his dead laid in their multitudes, there he drew rein; there he saluted; there he laid flowers upon great stones after the custom of his people [...] and the old women and the little staring children of Frangistan pressed him close, as he halted among the bricks and the ashes and the broken wood of the towns which had been killed in the War.The rest of the short story features further description of the pilgrimage, including a specific incident inspired by Kipling's own experience on the pilgrimage.
[13] This leads to the central theme of the short story, as (returning to 1928) the convict and the household servant, a devout Muslim, attempt to forecast the outcome of the King's chest condition.
[5][13] In the short story, this episode with the general and his overcoat is stated to have taken place towards the end of the pilgrimage at an Indian cemetery,[13][14] though accounts of Kipling's movements during the pilgrimage ascribe the incident that inspired the short story to a few days earlier on 11 May, a "bitterly cold" day when Kipling had been waiting for the King and Haig near Ypres.
