The Battle of Loos, the first big battle Jack's regiment was sent to fight in, was horrifically uneven. British troops fresh out of training were sent up against better equipped and more experienced German forces. By all accounts Jack Kipling was a capable and considerate officer. He was intelligent and he was fair. But this was not a gentleman's war. Fairness and capability had little to do with outcome. It’s no secret that the plotline of "My Boy Jack" hinges on the 1915 Battle of Loos, and Jack’s disappearance during it. The ensuing search by Jack’s parents profoundly affected them. They had to take it upon themselves, and attempt all they could, to discover whether he was an amnesiac among hospital wounded somewhere, or possibly a prisoner of war, or... the worst. (I will leave the denouement for your discovery.) The battle had been so chaotic and smoky and panic-filled, even his own troops were not guaranteed to have seen everything. That this is based upon true events drives home the poignancy. These were real people who lived through these things once upon a time. It was no story.
“Do you want a story?” the Rudyard Kipling of this portrayal often asks. In good times and especially in bad, the film and the real Kipling (judging by his autobiography) relied upon imagination to see him through. He believed in its power to transcend, so mightily, that he even sought to pull a nation out of danger with his vivid speeches. By the film’s telling (and the book and play it is based upon), it never even occurred to Rudyard (or to Jack, or most others before the war) that this might be the filthiest war the 20th century world could remember. It never shadowed their footsteps at all until the troops had marched forward.
By film’s end, it’s clear the reality of chaos has set in. The stopwatch is hardly useful, as one of the world’s most famous writers goes racing again from Bateman’s to Windsor. When Jack was a child, his father’s famous poem “If” had advised him: “If you can fill the unforgiving minute / With sixty seconds' worth of distance run, / Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it, / And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!” Rudyard Kipling’s reliance upon order, his certainty that to give one’s all is all there is has been shaken by the film’s end. Filling the “unforgiving minute” as well as one can in order to win the world seems a Pyrrhic victory. Kipling retraces his prior route, half-heartedly racing through the same scenery, but the view is very different than it was.
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