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The King's Pilgrimage is the title of a poem and book about the journey made by King George V in May 1922 to visit the World War I cemeteries and memorials being constructed at the time in France and Belgium by the Imperial War Graves Commission. This journey was part of the wider pilgrimage movement that saw tens of thousands of bereaved relatives from the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth visit the battlefields of the Great War in the years that followed the Armistice.

The poem was written by the British author and poet Rudyard Kipling. Kipling, who had lost his eldest son in the war, was a member of the Imperial War Graves Commission, and was its literary advisor. The poem was first published in the New York World and in The Times of 15 May 1922. The text of the poem includes references to Nieuport (the port of Ypres), and "four Red Rivers", said to be the River Somme, the River Marne, the River Oise and the River Yser, which all run through the World War I battlefields. The poem also talks about "a carven stone" and "a stark Sword brooding on the bosom of the Cross", referring to the Stone of Remembrance and the Cross of Sacrifice, architectural motifs being used by the Commission in the cemeteries.

The poem was reprinted in a book published the same year by Hodder & Staughton. The poem prefaced the book, and in addition to this, framing lines and stanzas from the poem were interleaved with the chapters describing the King's journey. This structure has been identified as likening the journey to a chivalric quest. The book, illustrated with black-and-white photographs, sold in huge numbers.

The King and his entourage, which included Kipling and Fabian Ware, the head of the Commission, travelled by ship, car and train, visiting sites in both France and Belgium. The journey was intended to set an example of pilgrimage to other travellers, and pomp and ceremony was avoided, with the King travelling in civilian clothes. The party inspected cemeteries and memorials, some still under construction, and met local representatives, army generals, and war graves officials, carvers and gardeners. During the journey, memorial silences were held and wreaths laid. Visits were made to graves of soldiers from all the Imperial Dominions, as well as India.

The sites visited on the journey included Étaples Military Cemetery, where the King laid flowers on the grave of a soldier following a personal request that had been made by the soldier's mother to Queen Mary. At Notre Dame de Lorette, a burial place and ossuary for tens of thousands of French war dead, the King met with Marshal Ferdinand Foch and Earl Haig, the generals who had led the French and British armies during the war. Other dignitaries to meet with the King included the Bishop of Amiens. The pilgrimage culminated in a visit to Terlincthun British Cemetery on 13 May 1922, where the King gave a speech that had been composed by Kipling.

Kipling's poem describing the journey has been compared to 'The Waste Land' by T. S. Eliot, published later the same year. In her 2009 paper, Scutts considers the pilgrimage as an interpretive context for the Eliot poem, "Seen through Kipling's poetic lens, the king's exemplary pilgrimage became as much romance quest as religious ritual", and suggests that Kipling's poem blurs the line between "conservative, traditional commemoration" and the "antiestablishment modernism" represented by Eliot.

References

1. "The King's Pilgrimage", Notes on the text, from The Kipling Society
2. ^ Battlefield cemeteries, pilgrimage, and literature after the First World War: the burial of the dead, 2009, Joanna Scutts, English Literature in Transition 1880-1920

External links

• Description of the pilgrimage movement and the journey by King George V
• Text of Kipling's poem 'The King's Pilgrimage'
• Library listing of the original 1922 book

• World War I poems
• Pilgrimages
• Poetry by Rudyard Kipling
• 1922 books