Kipling, the artist, perceived with great clarity the physical and mental strains that were part and parcel of the lives of administrators carrying out the quotidian work of the Empire. In his fiction, he went some way toward addressing their difficulties by imaginatively cataloguing their apprehensions, frustrations, illnesses and fatigues. The stories in Plain Tales and the best of the tales in Life's Handicap, written whilst Kipling was in India and newly arrived in London, detail empire builders who are psychologically battered, worn down and wretched. The overall quality of the Life's Handicap collection is uneven; David Sergeant argues that Kipling's success pressured the writer into bulking out the collection with previously uncollected material to ‘release [the London stories] in volume form as soon as possible’. His characters confront an imperial landscape that is bereft of the moral values of the metropolis. In these collections Kipling is frequently damning in his appraisal of the Indian Civil Service (ICS) as an administrative body, and of the effect its oftentimes unnecessary bureaucracy had on the lives of its foot soldiers. Men sent out by the military or the Indian Office in London were reduced to anonymous disposable quotas, summed up by Private Ortheris: ‘I'm a Tommy – a bloomin’, eight-anna, dog-stealin’ Tommy, with a number instead of a decent name’ (PT, p. 215).