'If Kipling were with us today,' L. C. Dunsterville (Stalky's original) told the 1,600 members of the Kipling Society just after the start of the Second World War, 'he would doubtless give the nation a message of faith in our righteous cause, and courage to meet our inevitable losses and hardships leading to ultimate victory.' What Dunsterville didn't mention is that Kipling might reasonably have scrawled 'I told you so' across his message, because in the years leading up to his death in 1936 he had been as indefatigable in urging his fellow countrymen to prepare more effectively for the looming showdown with Hitler as he had been consistently critical, in the decades before the First World War, of Britain's grossly inadequate planning for that cataclysm. As the interwar years drew on, however, fewer and fewer people were willing to listen to Kipling, and having been in his pre-1918 heyday 'the most widely read and influential writer on war in the English-speaking world', he found himself all too often whistling in the wind. 'As the pacifist revulsion against the first World War intensified in the early 1930s,' Frank Field has observed, 'as the flood of autobiographies and memoirs denouncing war now poured from the presses ... the views of an unregenerate imperialist, Francophile and Germanophobe like Kipling carried little weight. Many believed that Nazism was a product of the harshness of the Versailles settlement that Kipling had denounced for its softness.'