In their beautiful economy, their peculiarly English mixture of the mundane and the marvellous, Kipling's later stories have all the poise and intensity of the classics of his youth. His unsentimental insight into the English social structure is without parallel, and his patriotism never obscures the clarity of his observation. He renders the argot of the army and public school and the dialect of rural Sussex with extraordinary naturalism, but beneath the homely conversations of 'Friendly Brook' or 'The Wish House' the miraculous quietly stirs. Many of these stories deal with the spiritual legacy of the Great War. Among the emotional dug-outs and minefields of 'A Madonna of the Trenches' an orderly is visited by a recurrent nightmare of 'the frozen dead who creak in the frost'. Bereavement reaches into the life of a tobacconist in 'In the Interests of the Brethren'.
