Jewels
Kipling uses the imagery of jewels to express how much Michael means to Helen. For example, in the following passage, Kipling writes that "the terms at his public school and the wonderful Christmas, Easter, and Summer holidays followed each other, variegated and glorious as jewels on a string; and as jewels Helen treasured them." As such, the jewels illustrate the value that Michael's life has to Helen, emphasizing how much his death will impact her.
Warfare
The violent and horrific imagery of warfare is emphasized by Kipling, who compares the war to a "holocaust" in the following passage: "At the end of August he was on the edge of joining the first holocaust of public-school boys who threw themselves into the Line." This description of warfare reflects the vast amount of death. Later, Kipling emphasizes the terrible conditions soldiers lived in: "and the other half was breeding meningitis through living overcrowdedly in damp tents." As such, he is suggesting how dire the conditions were, and what these men were forced to endure.
The Cemetery
Kipling describes the cemetery in the following passage: "All she saw was a merciless sea of black crosses, bearing little strips of stamped tin at all angles across their faces. She could distinguish no order or arrangement in their mass; nothing but a waist-high wilderness as of weeds stricken dead, rushing at her." The description here emphasizes the joining of war, death and chaos, with the dark image of the black crosses, and the lack of order in the cemetery.
