The poem expresses Kipling’s own hatred of Germany for precipitating the war in 1914, and waging it so brutally from the outset, committing fearful atrocities in Belgium towards the civil population, dropping bombs from the air on undefended towns in England, and engaging in unrestricted submarine warfare.

As we have written in our notes on “Mary Postgate” – the linked story – the War, involving all the major countries of Europe, which Kipling had long anticipated, broke out in the early days of August 1914. Kipling’s son, just seventeen, reported for duty with the Irish Guards in September.

(...)

Harry Ricketts notes that Roger Smith, at the Victoria University of Wellington, has suggested a possible link between a German “Chant of Hate” towards England, published in August 1914, and Kipling’s war poems. Kipling’s “For All We Have and Are” was published a few weeks later, on September 2nd. We do not know whether Kipling was aware of the German poem. If so, one can perhaps see “The Beginnings” as a riposte.

In a speech at Southport in June 1915, he said: ‘However the world pretends to divide itself, there are only two divisions in the World today – human beings and Germans.’ ‘That is not’, commented Bonamy Dobrée, ‘a sadistic utterance, nor one prompted by `irrational’ hatred; it expresses the outraged feelings of a man deeply believing in the value of civilization, “the ages’ slow-bought gain” , and in the Law “by means of which life is made comely.”‘

“Mary Postgate” was published on September 1st, 1915. A month later the Kiplings heard that their son John was ‘missing’ in action.

https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/readers-guide/rg_beginnings1.htm

Mary Postgate:

Its central figure was the middle-aged, unimaginative and deeply repressed companion of a Miss Fowler. When the latter’s orphaned young nephew, Wynn, entered the household, Mary became his surrogate mother and `always his butt and his slave’. Wynn joined the Flying Corps on the outbreak of war and was soon killed on a trial flight, without having been in action. The two women decided that Mary should burn all his more personal effects in ‘the destructor’, the garden-incinerator.

Going to the village for paraffin Mary witnessed the death of the publican’s small daughter, killed by a bomb dropped by a German plane. Later, while burning Wynn’s possessions, she discovered the German airman, who – after dropping the bomb – had fallen from his plane and was now dying. Mary, tending the bonfire, watched with mounting pleasure as the German slowly died.