Rudyard Kipling Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, and the marble casket was covered by a Union Jack. Kipling was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium in northwest London, and his ashes interred at Poets' Corner, part of the South Transept of Westminster Abbey, next to the graves of Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy. In 2010, the International Astronomical Union approved that a crater on the planet Mercury would be named after Kipling—one of ten newly discovered impact craters observed by the MESSENGER spacecraft in 2008–9. In 2012, an extinct species of crocodile, "Goniopholis kiplingi", was named in his honour, "in recognition for his enthusiasm
Rudyard Kipling the British people during the war, with his major themes being glorifying the British military as "the" place for heroic men to be, German atrocities against Belgian civilians and the stories of women being brutalised by a horrific war unleashed by Germany, yet surviving and triumphing in spite of their suffering. Kipling was enraged by reports of the Rape of Belgium together with the sinking of the RMS "Lusitania" in 1915, which he saw as a deeply inhumane act, which led him to see the war as a crusade for civilisation against barbarism. In a 1915 speech, Kipling declared that