Mrs. Kipling and youngest daughter Elsie discuss Josephine ('Josie' to her family) as Carrie arranges the hearthside floral memorial. They ruminate upon their memories of the child's personality, and how many years have passed. "She would be twenty-two now," Elsie observes. Paterfamilias Kipling bounds into the tender scene; he's all energy. Kipling learns that his son has been denied entry to the navy. He’s apoplectic. “Wearing spectacles does not make one an invalid!” he protests. Completely failing to see - ironically - that the navy’s dismissal was prudent of his son’s safety, he urgently encourages Jack to “attack on another front”, and apply to the army. It seems imprudent to move forward on the issue, failing to heed the officers’ advice on his son’s fitness to serve in active combat. Yet suddenly Rudyard Kipling the proselytiser seems more a prophet. His prediction has come true: Britain declares war. And we learn they have an army of only 160,000 to match against Germany’s 1.5 million.

Things were suddenly more than urgent - they were absolutely dire. Carrie senses her husband’s keenness that their son fight in combat. She urges him to secure Jack a desk job at one of the many war offices. She doesn’t wish to shirk the family duty to help defend King and country. She seeks only to be the voice of reason, to halt the rush into the preconceived idea of how Jack should serve. She is merely being realistic; their son cannot be safe if he cannot see. Rather than trying to find his son a safer ‘pencil pushing’ position, though, Rudyard instead called in a favor with lifelong friend Lord Roberts, Colonel of the Irish Guards who arranged a commission for Kipling’s son Jack. Suddenly, the seventeen-year-old whose vision was so impaired as to be disabling, who had been declared unfit for combat by navy and army, was a second lieutenant. Before long, Jack and the men he led in the Irish Guards were shipped to the Western Front.

There was no concept then as we have now after the fact, of the sheer brutality of the front. It was nothing short of a meat grinder. Chemical weapons as well as artillery were employed by the Germans who had well fortified themselves in advance. The grim reality of life in the miles-long trenches is contrasted with the image those at home must have had, when Jack’s sister Elsie is seen preparing a care package for him. She is about to send him a pair of bedroom slippers. In reality the trenches were so constantly wet men lost their limbs to ‘trench foot’ and gangrene.