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EARL KITCHENER OF KHARTOUM
In Field Marshal's Uniform
KITCHENER
ORGANIZER OF VICTORY

BY

HAROLD BEGBIE

WITH PORTRAITS

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
(Sge iftiber^ibe )Ste^^ CamliribBe
1915

COFVRIGHT, I9IJ, BY HAROLD BEGBIE
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Published February iqis

He came at the right hour, and he was the right man.
G. W. Stbbvbss.

CONTENTS

I. Foreword 
II. Our English Hero is born an Irish
man AND BECOMES A FRENCHMAN
in. Kitchener becomes a Frenchman, but
is Prussianized back into Perma
nent English .
IV. The Career in Brief .
V. Stories op the Career
VI. The KIitchener Legend
VII. At the War Office .
Vni. Kitchener's Battles .
IX. The Man Himself

15 19
254450 6790

ILLUSTRATIONS
Earl Kitchener of Khartoum in Field Mar
shal's Uniform . . . . . Frontispiece
From a photograph by Bassano, London.
Horatio Herbert Kitchener as a Cadet at the
Royal Military Academy, Woolwich 12
From a photograph.
Kitchener at Twenty-eight . 26
At this time (1878), Kitchener was employed by the
Palestine Exploration Fund.
From a photograph.
Lord Kitchener with his Staff, in India . . 40
From a photograph by Messrs. Wiele & Klein.
Lord Kitchener Leaving the War Office . . 60
From a photograph by the London News Agency.
Lord Kitchener as Sirdar . . . 68
(Commander-in-chief of the Egyptian Army)
From a photograph by Dittrich.
Lord Kitchener .... .... 94
From a photograph by Cribb, Southsea.
Lord Kitchener in his Academic Gown . . . 100
From a photograph.

KITCHENER CHAPTER I
pobeword
Seldom has any one man stood for a multi
tudinous and highly complex nation with so
tremendous and complete an emphasis as Lord
Kitchener stood at the beginning of the war for
the British nation.
He was not an incarnation of the people, he
did not express the total character of the nation;
but with a force hardly ever equalled in our his
tory he became the Mood of the British people,
the Uving expression of the Will of the entire
British Empire.
During the disembarkation of our troops in
France a British sergeant, talking to a newspaper
correspondent, said that the British soldier is the
most cheerful, humorous, and kind-hearted per
son in the world, "but," said he, "Tommy can
look cruel when he is roused." At that moment
a yovmg trooper, fresh-faced and smiUng, foimd
himself in trouble with a bunch of horses; in a
second he sUpped from the numnah, got a short
hold of the reins, and jagged the restive chargers
1

KITCHENER
into obedient docility. As he turned his head,
his young face was flushed, his jaws were set,
and his eyes had a glint of cruelty. The sergeant
said to the newspaper correspondent, "See that?
Well, that's what I mean."
It was this Mood of the Nation that Lord
Kitchener so completely represented and so
swiftly expressed at the beginning of the war.
He was Britain looking cruel. He was the Eng-
hshman with his blood up. He was the nation
suddenly jerked into the realization that every
thing said of Germany by even the most ex
travagant Germanophobes was entirely, shock
ingly, incredibly true. "The Day" had dawned.
Honour was pubhcly thrown aside by the Prus
sian Government. Truth was openly derided by
these apostles of Force. And, to complete the
awakening, the natural and amazed indignation
of the civilized world at broken treaties and dis
owned obligations was characterized by the Ger
mans as hypocrisy.
In a moment, the blood of the Englishman was
up. He realized his danger. He sprang to his
feet, clenching his fists, and he looked cruel. No
other man of our time could so vigorously and
ruthlessly have represented this particular mood
of the British people, this one aspect of the na
tional temperament, as Kitchener of Khartoum.
2

FOREWORD
Lord Kitchener, as the reader of this little
book will discover, is neither the Machine nor
the Ogre of popular imagination. He is perfectly
human. There is, indeed, something frank, boy
ish, and rough-humoured in his disposition. He
is shy, and he has moments when he craves for
sympathy. All the same he does not represent
the British character in any of its most amiable
qualities. He stands absolutely for the nation
just now, but he is not the highest, the best, not
even the most Ukeable of English types. Un-
roused he is the deliberate, work-loving, brusque,
quite unimaginative, and very thorough British
administrator: roused, he is the jaws of the bull
dog. When it was announced in the tense moments
at the declaration of war, that Lord Kitchener
was to take into his hands the administration of
the army, the whole British nation — it is no
exaggeration to say it — breathed again. His
instant demand for 500,000 men did not alarm
or infuriate a peace-loving nation; it spread, af
ter the first shock, a feeling of safety. His prep
aration for a war of three years did not shock the
national conscience; it sensibly relieved anxiety
and settled people's thoughts. In "K. of K."
the nation saw not only a great organizer of
victory, but its own fierce mood, its own tena-
3

KITCHENER
cious will, its own enduring strength, its own
multiplied, world-flung, and historic spirit. By
one of those mysterious intuitions of democracy,
which sweep like Ughtning through myriads of
people, and which are sometimes, not always,
more to be trusted than the nice and careful
judgments of discriminating intelligence. Kitch
ener stood in the confidence of the nation as
the one absolute unchallengeable man for the
storm which had broken with such bewildering
suddenness upon the drowsiness of its domestic
hfe. A sketch of his character, it is hoped, — al
though it be a perfectly frank and critical piece
of work, — will deepen and sustain that con
fidence through the days ahead, when the gentle
and the kind, as well as the weak and the pusil
lanimous, are perhaps tempted to cry for too
early a mercy, too hazardous a peace. Lord
Kitchener may not stand for Christianity; but
he does stand for the mills of God. He may not
represent the sweetness and grace of British
civilization; but he does represent the righteous
indignation of the British people when its path
is challenged by savage barbarism and a philo
sophical but truculent atheism. When he tells
us we may let go our grip, civilization may turn
-* from the destruction of war to the reconstruction
4

FOREWORD
of peace with the sure and certain hope that the
heirs of Nietzsche, the sons of Treitschke, the
blood-stained legions of Attila, will never more
lay upon the back of social reformation a burden
of intolerable miUtarism and never more darken
the green and pleasant fields of humanity with
the shadow of hateful war. But till Kitchener
cries "Enough!" the British Empire — so slow
to anger, so unswaggering, so peace-loving, and
so un-Prussian — must strike till the dust is red. !
When Kitchener relaxes the grip of his clenched
hands the neck of the Prussian eagle will be
broken, and only then will the great nations and
the small nations be able to advance into the
Promised Land of which Lord Kitchener perhaps
has not even permitted himseK to dream.
One sees in him, then, not only the expression
of England looking cruel, but the strength, the
determination, and the practical wisdom of those
great and glorious nations with whom it is the
honour of Great Britain to be allied. At the
same time one is not conscious of any feeUng
towards Kitchener which could be heightened
into hero-worship. He is not Civilization, but
the servant of Civilization. He is not Progress,
but the pohceman of Progress. One employs him
with admiration and rewards him with gratitude.
But one does not want to be Uke him.

CHAPTER II
DUB ENGLISH HERO IS BORN AN IBISHMAN
AND BECOMES A FBENCHMAN
In the "hungry forties," a retired cavalry
soldier from England happened to be in Dubhn
during the sale of some considerable estates in
the south of Ireland. The paltry bidding at the
auction of these lands tempted the hard-headed
EngUshman, and for a sum of £3000 he bought
a number of rather neglected acres in the two
counties of Limerick and Kerry.
This retired cavalry soldier was Lieutenant-
Colonel Henry Horatio Kitchener. He had
started life in the Foot, had seen service in India,
had exchanged into the cavalry, and now was
on the retired list, fairly well off, full of energy,
and with a keen eye for the main chance. He
was married to an Englishwoman, the daughter
of a reverend doctor of divinity in Suffolk, one
John Chevallier, an old and dignified family in
that part of the world, but of Jersey origin, and
therefore French-blooded. There was a baby
among the colonel's impedimenta when he came
to Ireland, a boy named Chevallier Kitchener.
Two years after he had settled on his Irish
6

BORN AN IRISHMAN
estates, that is to say, in the year 1850, and on
the pleasantest day of the year, to wit, Mid
summer Day, the 24th of June, which is also St.
John's Day, another son was added to the col
onel's manage, the first Irish-born of the family,
Horatio Herbert Kitchener. In due course three
other children were born in Ireland, two sons and
a daughter, forming together a cheerful and com
fortable family of five, the baby girl a delightful
comfort to Mrs. Kitchener among her court of
strapping masculinity.
Papa Kitchener was lord of that household.
He had bought his estates not for pleasure and
not for display. His master-thought, buzzing
night and day in his cold, calculating brain, was
how to turn his £3000 into a fortune. He went
about this work with a methodical thoroughness
which manifested itself in a somewhat mightier
degree and certainly on a more glorious field when
his second son took over the ancient Kingdom of
Egypt. He was up early; he spent the greater
part of the day in the saddle; he knew the quality
of every field on his estate; he hob-a-nobbed with
the farmers; he kept himseW abreast of his times
in the matter of agricultural science; he studied
to get on. He bought more land; reclaimed bog
and wilderness; set up a brickworks and a tile
factory; took into his house a couple of pupils;
7

KITCHENER
worked everybody about him from morning till
night; improved the breed of his cattle; cleaned
his fields before he sowed them; introduced new
forms of drainage and irrigation; Hved hard;
lived earnestly; lived usefully if not amiably;
and was soon in a position to sell parcels of land
at a thousand pounds apiece, and the rent of his
estate for £14,000.
It may be imagined that this vigorous hus
bandman, his eye always on the main chance,
had small time for such subsidiary considerations
as the development of his sons. Mrs. Kitchener
was left very much to shift for herself in a rather
shabby and noisy household, while the agricul
tural colonel looked over the brick walls of his
pig-styes, into his whitewashed cowsheds, into
his sheep-pens, and into his stables, every power
of his brain concentrated on the pleasant work
of improving his horses, his sheep, his cows, and
his pigs. The boys were to be improved, too, but
no doubt Nature might be trusted in that de
partment of the farm. They were his sons; they
could not have had a better father; if they went
to the wall, then, by Heaven, the wall was too
good for them.
On one occasion Herbert Kitchener was
brought up before his father as an incorrigible
idler. He was told that if he did not work at his
8

BORN AN IRISHMAN
books he should be apprenticed to a hatter —
the headgear of Papa Kitchener conveying a
suflSciently grim emphasis to this infinite con
tempt for the hat trade. That was Papa Kitch
ener's part in the business of education. To
the genius of a certain Miss Tucker the intellec
tual development of the young Kitcheners was
at first committed, and when they had grown
beyond the endurance of her nerves, they vexed
the souls of a tutor or two for a brief period, and
then were sent to a Protestant school at Kil-
flynn, kept by a friend of the family, the Rev
erend William Raymond. Those who know any
thing of the South of Ireland will not need to be
told that the Protestant clergy of that beautiful
and gentle country, whatever their other virtues,
are not stars of the first magnitude in the matter
of scholarship. One would not go to them for
historical information or for inspiration in phi
losophy. However, Herbert Kitchener certainly
went to church, and as certainly graced the bench
of a Sunday-school class. One may conjecture
that any troublesome Roman heredity derived
from dead and gone Chevalhers was very effec
tively extirpated in the Simday school of the
Reverend Wilham Raymond; whether the least
of the elements of Christianity were taught is
another matter. 9

KITCHENER
But Herbert Kitchener's chief concern in those
days was the open air and the Atlantic Ocean.
He loved the hedgerow, he loved the back of any
old horse, and he loved the sea. Latin exercises
and lectures on the popes came only as interrup
tions to long tramps over the fields, fine gallops
across the meadows, fierce joltings in a tumbril
down the country lanes, and exulting dives from
off a streaming rock into the cheerful burly of the
sea. If he did not shape hke a scholar, at any rate
he shaped like a man; and, tall as he was for his
years, almost gawky, he was nothing of a weed,
being thick-set, straight-legged, and somewhat
full of face. But for a certain dignity of brow and
a sharp, vital, challenging look in his blue eyes,
he might have passed for a farmer's son, his
future in the fields, his heaven no higher than
the hunting-saddle. There was a smell of the
gunroom and the stables about the Kitchener
boys, but nothing bucolic in their appearance.
They hung together, did not mix with the boys
of the neighbourhood, and played no practical
jokes with the surrounding farmers. The shyness
which in after life was imputed to K. of K. for
arrogance was a Kitchener characteristic. But
this shyness was of the manful, steady, and in
ward order; there was nothing shrinking and
10

BORN AN IRISHMAN
timid in its nature: its expression was neither
a blush nor a giggle. The Kitchener boys under
stood each other very well; they felt that they
did not understand other people. When other
people turned up, they looked on. When they
were alone together they let themselves go, but
not violently or foohshly. It is said that they
took no risks in their sea-bathing, to the scorn
of Irish boys in bare legs and freckles.
As a remedy for the increasing perplexities of
his domestic situation. Papa Kitchener con
ceived the idea of bundling off his sons to a for
eign country. Somehow or other he came to hear
of a Reverend J. Bennett hving at Villeneuve
in Switzerland, who took pupils and preached
the Gospel. That was enough for Colonel Kitch
ener. In 1863, K. of K. then being thirteen years
of age, the boys were despatched to the hillside
of the Lake of Geneva — good, solid, Protestant
ground. Mrs. Kitchener was left with her only
daughter. The colonel could now keep his eye
on the main chance without distraction.
Tragedy befell this household in the following
year of 1864, for Mrs. Kitchener passed away
from the gentle and familiar pleasantness of
mother earth to join the spirits of forgotten
Chevalliers in another, stranger world. The boys
worked on with their Protestant tutor, embarked
11

KITCHENER
on a few educational travels, and then returned
to the British Isles, stopping for the first time
in their lives in London, where an army crammer
waited to finish them off in Kensington Square.
This gentleman was another Protestant clergy
man, the Reverend George Frost, and his estab-
hshment was fairly well attended by young
gentlemen of the fortunate classes. Among these
hvely and rejoicing colts, Herbert Kitchener
was regarded as something of a clodhopper. He
neither shone in the classroom nor scintillated
under the midnight skies. His fellows looked
upon him as a heavy, plodding, painstaking, and
unilluminating oaf — a man without pleasant
ness or brilliance, his slow feet moving stolidly
along the fixed and formidable groove which
culminates in a club armchair and a pension.
He did not escape the usual baiting of more ir
responsible spirits. "Why don't you go for them
when they rot you.'*" he was asked by a fellow
pupil. His answer, contemptuous enough, was
this: "What do they matter?" But this baiting
never came to real ragging. Kitchener might
turn a deaf ear to chaff; he would not have
turned, perhaps, his other cheek to the smiter.
From this tutor in Kensington Square, Herbert
Kitchener passed to the Royal Military Academy
at Woolwich in 1868, twenty years after Charles
12

HORATIO HERBERT KITCHENER
As a Cadet at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich

BORN AN IRISHMAN
Gordon had entered "the shop" with his won
derful soul on fire for every kind of glory. Noth
ing in Herbert Kitchener created passionate
friendships or stirred the admiration of smaller
men among the cadets. He was remarkable for
quickness in mathematics, but in everything
else was accounted thick-headed, — a slow coach
climbing the dull hill of duty which has no dazzle
of adventure at the crest. He chose the Royal
Engineers for his arm, and settled down to the
sober and staying stride of the British sapper.
He studied his textbooks with "a long persis
tency of purpose," and attended lectures with a
solid intention to learn what he could. No cadet
ever gave less trouble to his superiors. He; was
one of those obstinate young Britons who mean
to get on, and who triumph not by the luck of
the brain-centres but by the dehberate and stead
fast exercise of will-power. He made his brain do
what his spirit wished to do, the one or two bril
liant cellsi such as the mathematical, encourag
ing the less gifted others to obey their master's
bidding. Papa Kitchener was in France, married again
and living pleasantly at Dinan. There came
young Herbert in 1870 on a holiday visit, bring
ing his textbooks along with him. Of a sudden
the straight road of his set purpose was dazzled
13

KITCHENER
by a great light — the light of adventure, the
blaze of war. Prussia and France came to grips.
The set purpose dwindled, paled, went out hke
a match. Our "Woolwich cadet found himself
looking into a light that was hke the glare of a
furnace. The marshalling of the legions of France
beat a new music in his heart. The thunder of
cannon broke in upon the conned axioms of his
textbooks like the banging of an iron fist on
the door of a sleeper. Troops went by, trundling
their guns, singing the "Marseillaise," their
standards fluttering in a ghtter of bayonets. . . .
Kitchener went off and offered his services to
the French. There he stood before them, a sohd
twenty years of hale manhood, well over six feet,
broad-shouldered, deep-chested, straight-legged,
and hard as steel, the face of him brown as sand,
his carriage resolute, his brain already versed in
war science, his body already disciplined, his
spirit clamorous for a fight. Well, they did not
think twice.

CHAPTER III
KITCHENEB BECOMES A FBENCHMAN, BUT IS PBUS-
SIANIZED BACK INTO PEEMANENT ENGLISH
Some men dnter the army for its social pleas
antness; some because the chance of a fight is
the hunger and thirst of their souls; some be
cause it has a pension at the end of it. Kitchener
went to Woolwich because his father wished him
to be a soldier, because he himself thought it
offered a field for conscious ambitions, and be
cause it had the certainty of a pension at the end.
War no more entered into his calculations at that
period than swagger. He wanted to see the world,
he wanted to do things, and he wanted to be safe
for the future. K. of K.'s master-passion, hardly
to be called a passion because it is so cold, so
bloodless, so impersonal, and so empty of self-
seeking, is ambition. As soon as he had got his
feet in youth, as soon as he perceived that life
is a struggle for existence, as soon as he knew
vitally that a man must work if he is to conquer.
Kitchener set himself to get on, and told his
brothers he meant to get on. But this desire for
success was impersonal in the sense that he did
not want to amass wealth or to win popularity
15

KITCHENER
or to live with the thought of Westminster Abbey
in his soul. He wanted success because he wanted
power. He wanted power because it was his
nature to exercise power. His will had mastered
a slow brain, forcing it to the strange and un
congenial labour of book-learning; his will was
now forcing him towards power because that was
its native direction, because without power his
life would be a frustrated life.
But here on the threshold of his hfe, our pas
sionless and dehberate young man was con
fronted by glory, and he threw everything aside
to run and embrace this temptress of youth,
flinging his textbooks aside, careless of pensions,
careless of life, longing only for the one splendid
elation of danger and the hazard of battle. It was
his first deviation from the set path, and I know
of no other in the years that followed.
He entered the French Army, and was with
the troops that pushed up towards beleaguered
Paris under General Chanzy. If his sudden de
sire for glory had been a substantial part of his
character instead of a mere ebullition of youth,
it might have been suppressed, perhaps torn up
by the roots, in the first few months of his cam
paigning. For he was surrounded on all sides
by the most valorous and passionate troops in
Europe, troops whose songs on the march tell of
16

BECOMES A FRENCHMAN
glory and immortahty, troops whose patriotism
is hke a consuming fire, and whose onslaught in
battle is like a whirlwind. The young Enghsh
volunteer serving with these fine and fervorous
troops, serving, too, under as brave and debonair
a general as ever wore the French hepi, saw little
on that march towards Paris except the cold and
merciless destruction of glory by the hand of
something called science. Vain the valour of the
French, vain the superb elan which swept them
forward: something quite cold and depressing,
something quite passionless and deadly, some
thing without patriotism and without war-songs,
waited for these children of glory and crushed
them, devastated them, wiped them out of the
ranks of life. Thus at the very dawn of his ex
istence the young Kitchener took his cold douche
at the hands of science, and never afterwards per
mitted his mind to stray from the set path lead
ing through dullness and unsparing labour to the
exercise of power.
War had made him a French soldier, but war
as the Prussians conducted it prevented him from
becoming a Frenchman. He saw that there was
no straight and certain road on the field of glory,
and went back from the ravaged battle-ground
of France to his textbooks at Woolwich, his mind
Englished once again, his ambition revived, his
17

KITCHENER
will in supreme command. They say that he came
in for a wigging at the hands of the Duke of
Cambridge for having dared to serve under the
tricolour; and the old Duke, so constant a wor
shipper at St. Anne's, Soho, was not a pleasant
person to face, particularly on a gouty afternoon,
in the gloom of the old War Office. If Kitchener
really did come in for that dressing-down, we
must think that it hurt, particularly as he re
turned from the stricken field after a sharp at
tack of pleurisy. M. Clermont Ganneau, a com
panion of his after years, says that K. of K.
stood up to the old Duke and said, "I under
stood, sir, that I should not be wanted for some
time; I don't like being idle; and I thought per
haps I might learn something." We wonder!
Whether he stood up to the Duke, and whether
he ascended in a French balloon during the war,
one thing at least is certain, that he learned a
lesson in France which was a lesson for life. He
learned the value of science, the superiority of
purpose and precision over emotion and rapture;
and, this lesson chiming with his natural disposi
tion, he returned to Woolwich in good heart for
the future and worked like a dray-horse till he
had passed his examination and become a com
missioned sapper. This was in January, 1871,
five months before he came of age.

CHAPTER IV
THE CAEEEE IN BEIEP
It has been said by an American, to whom the
present writer doffs his cap, that the method of
Lord Kitchener may be expressed in the phrase,
— "Silence and work and silence — and then
the end."
One may add that the silence is justified by
the character of the work, for the work to which
Lord Kitchener has mostly laid his powerful and
patient hand belongs to the order of labour about
which humanity is excusably incurious. Many
things have to be done in this world which are
of infinitely more service to the progress of the
human race than the work of poet and com
poser; but it is impossible to rhapsodize about
these beneficent services, hard enough to be
transiently interested in their existence. I have
often wondered what an engineer from the Sudan
or a soldier from the Khyber Pass must think of
the fluttering excitement in a London drawing-
room when some popular actor, or some noto
rious lady who has acquired "the habit of the
divorce court," makes an imposing entrance.
But one learns after painful experience that the
19

KITCHENER
actor and the lady are really and truly more
interesting than the engineer and the soldier —
worse still, one often yawns when the engineer is
talking and wishes the soldier at Tipperary be
fore he has got his second wind.
Kitchener's work has been dull. He was a
heutenant in the Royal Engineers in 1871, and
himself found the performance of those duties so
tedious that in 1874 he went surveying in Pales
tine. Here one might hope for romance, and here
indeed he was twice in peril of his hfe, but on the
whole he spent four years in drawing maps, and
you may draw the most accurate and monumen
tal maps in the world without inspiring any con
temporary poet to sing your praises to posterity.
Then Kitchener went to Egypt, and began to
organize a force of native cavalry. Dull work
again — dull, plodding, unexciting work, work
over which the world gladly draws the curtain
of silence, with no desire to peer behind the
scenes. Then he took in hand the delimitation
of some tiresome boundary, and was presently
appointed Governor-General of the Red Sea
Littoral — a title which very successfully warns
off public interest. Then he built railways, raised
armies, organized the business side of war, and
presently discharged victorious cannon at the
gates of Khartoum. 20

THE CAREER IN BRIEF
That was "the End." Silence girded up its
loins and skedaddled for its life. The world was
filled with the clamour of one man's name.
Editors tumbled over each other in their eager
ness to find out everything they could concern
ing this extraordinary person who at the age of
forty-eight had done something which reached
back in time for its historical basis to the days
when Joseph stood before Pharaoh and Moses
crowed in his cradle among the reeds of the
Nile. Here was a new Pyramid in Egypt. And
— when the editors came to ask questions — a
new Sphinx. No : silence and work and silence —
and then the end, with silence falhng once more
upon the man who by dull and wearisome work
had rendered possible the firework set-piece of
the End.
Kitchener, with Lord Cromer, enjoys the
splendid fame of standing godfather to modern
Egypt. By his measured preparations, his dogged
perseverance, and his incessant hard thinking
in a straight line he struck that sudden and shat
tering blow at Khartoum which gave to Lord
Cromer and those who came after him an Egypt
of almost infinite promise. The end is so splendid
that to regard it only in passing, as a sore-footed
tourist regards a masterpiece on the long walls of
the Pitti Palace, is to find one's self dazzled and
21

KITCHENER
blinded. Modern Egypt is one of the wonders of
the world, and Kitchener's hand is dusty and
bruised and blood-stained with the labour of that
sublime resurrection.
After a brief visit to London, where he donned
a peer's robes, swallowed a deal of turtle soup,
listened to columns of poor rhetoric, and snubbed
innumerable scintillating hon-hunters. Kitch
ener returned to his work. He wanted a Gor
don College and a Christian Cathedral at Khar
toum, and work of that kind pleased him better
than being bored by the intensely interested and
overwhelmingly admiring mondaines of London.
No young subaltern ever hurried home from
India to the sweet shady side of Pall Mall so
furiously as K. of K. turned his face to the sand
of the desert and the stars of the Arabian waste.
He finished his dull work in Egypt, and in a
year was setting people's minds at rest in Eng
land by taking over the staff of Lord Roberts in
South Africa. With Roberts and Kitchener to
take charge of that dreadful and rather sordid
war — a war consecrated only by the heroism of
the warring troops on either side, and redeemed
only by the superb act of statesmanship which
gave to the Boers not merely their freedom but
the idea of a democratic destiny — with Roberts
there to strike swiftly and with Kitchener there

THE CAREER IN BRIEF
to organize carefully, no one in England doubted
the end.
After the work in South Africa, Kitchener was
for some time almost the war-cry of a party in
the House of Commons, not by his own fault, but
much to his damage. There are people in Eng
land who would gladly hand over to Kitchener's
will the entire machinery of the British Empire.
There are others who think that his mind is so
exclusively the mind of an autocratic organizer
that he would be the ruin of any empire in which
the civil power was not absolutely paramount.
In Germany I think he would be the Chancellor,
if the Emperor's feelings towards the divine na
tures' of his position would admit a man of really
commanding genius to stand in the shadow of
the throne. In England no man doubts that
Kitchener could carry to a successful issue any
thing to which he put his hand. And so "Kitch
ener" became a war-cry, a battle-ground of
dispute, his too hurried apotheosis by one party
encouraging the opposing party to suggest the
fallibility of this otherwise very useful and ca
pable servant of the Crown.
Kitchener went to India. His dull work was
resumed, and silence fell upon him again until for
a brief moment an official altercation with the
Viceroy, Lord Curzon, — in spite of Kitchener's

KITCHENER
sincere and noble friendship for the beautiful
Lady Curzon, — set people talking to the same
tune: Kitchener, they said, ought to be recaUed
and put in sole charge of the British War Office
with an absolute discretion to do what he would
for the defence of the Empire.
From India he returned to Egypt, and from
Egypt he went to the War Office — one of the
most obstinately and obtusely conservative of
men becoming the colleague of Mr. Lloyd George
and Mr. Winston Churchill.
Here we may leave him for the moment, only
remarking to our readers, as we proceed to relate
a few stories of his career, that once again Kitch
ener takes up the burden of dull, laborious, un
exciting work, while men of quicker mind and
more heroic qualities, like Field Marshal French
and General Smith-Dorrien, cover themselves
with glory on the field of battle.
Nevertheless, it is the grim and scowhng face
of Kitchener streaming on its beam of light to
the sheet of the cinematograph — not the face
of French or Smith-Dorrien — which fills the
picture-palace with the loudest, fiercest, and most
grateful cheers.

CHAPTER V
STOEIES or THE CAEEEE
One of Lord Kitchener's cousins, a member
of the Staffordshire Education Committee, has
spoken of the field marshal's military begin
nings. He managed to scramble iato Woolwich; he was
not high in the lists; and no one thought anything
about him. After leaving Woolwich he got his com
mission in the Royal Engineers; and still no one
thought much about him. He got his first move up
in the world when he was appointed on the Palestine
Survey, and here he learnt how to manage native
soldiers, and acquired a great deal of that command
over men which to-day distinguishes him. He got
that, his first appointment, because some one was
wanted to go to Palestine and take photographs, and
it was this knowledge that gave Lord Kitchener the
lift up.
So far as I can discover this is the sole refer
ence in the documents to Kitchener as an ama
teur photographer.
M. Clermont Ganneau, an archaeologist who
served with Kitchener in the Palestine Survey,
describes him as "a good fellow in the fullest
acceptance of the word . . . capable of head
strong acts ... a frank and most outspoken
25

KITCHENER
character with recesses of winsome freshness.
His high spirits and cheeriness formed an agree
able contrast to the serious grave character of
some of his comrades." After this blow at the
popular idea, M. Ganneau proceeds: "Kitch
ener's ardour for his work astonished us. He
drew up excellent maps, but he did not confine
himseK to cartographic labours. Gradually he
began to take an interest in archseological dis
coveries, and acquired in these matters a marked
proficiency." This last sentence is useful to the student of
Kitchener's career; M. Ganneau enables us to
see that Kitchener from the first was a laborious
and pertinacious worker. He gradually took an
interest in the real object of the mission, and
acquired in this entirely new field for his energy
a proficiency which even an expert remarks.
Kitchener is said by another acquaintance of
those days to have been an ambitious young
officer who enjoyed the adventure of foreign serv
ice and "could not understand how any young
fellow in the army could settle down into the
humdrum life of a home station."
Just as he went to Woolwich a rather stupid
boy, but sticking to his books managed to pass
the rather difficult examinations, so, arriving in
Palestine as an amateur photographer in search
26

KITCHENER AT TWENTY-EIRHT

STORIES OF THE CAREER
of adventure, he discovered the interest of ar
chaeology and settled down to make himself an
efficient student. The high spirits and cheeriness
which M. Ganneau appreciated as a contrast to
the gravity of the others were by no means the
main characteristics of this tall young English
man who had come to Palestine neither to make
merry nor to meditate, but to get on.
It is extremely interesting, we think, to observe
how slowly, how quietly, and how growingly this
central passion of ambition manifested itself.
He came to Palestine with a camera; he made
some excellent maps; he became interested in his
work; he acquired influence and power over
other men; and he became in time commander
of the expedition.
A few extracts from the young officer's re
ports are worth quoting, though one may read
all he has written without discovering a sentence
of real self -revelation. The following passage is
perhaps his nearest approach to autobiogra
phy:— On the 28th I received a telegram to the effect
that war had been declared between Turkey and
Russia. I hope this sad news will not interfere with
the successful completion of the survey of Galilee.
That is how "H. H. Kitchener, Lieut. R.E.,
Commanding Palestine Survey," concludes his
27

KITCHENER
report on April 30, 1877, to the Palestine Ex
ploration Fund Committee. In the Hght of his
subsequent career, it is the most piquant pas
sage in the volume of the "Quarterly State
ments" in which it is to be found.
This volume (1877-78) is the only one which
contains many of Lieutenant Kitchener's re
ports, though he had been engaged on the work
with Lieutenant C. R. Conder, who achieved so
great a fame in Palestine exploration, since 1874.
The .first is dated from Haiffa March 6, 1877,
and describes among other interesting incidents
his first meeting with the famous Abd-el-Kader
at Damascus.
The reports are simple, straightforward bits
of writing, succinct and to the point. They con
tain very httle in the way of self-revelation.
They embody some excellent descriptions of
historic ruins and archseological discoveries, and
are, of course, full of precise and valuable in
formation on the physical geography of the
country. A feeling for scenery reveals itself here
and there in allusions to the beauty of valleys
"now carpeted with flowers and green with the
growing crops." The best views of the Sea of
Gahlee, he tells us, are from the distant heights.
"Thus seen in the evening it is particularly
lovely. Deep blue shadows seem to increase the

STORIES OF THE CAREER
size of the hills and there is always a rosy flush
in the sky and over snow-clad Hermon."
In July, 1877, we find the Committee, at their
Annual General Meeting, expressing "their high
sense of Lieutenant Kitchener's ability and
zeal." They speak of his reports as "careful and
intelligent" and note with much satisfaction
that "his monthly accounts show a due regard to
economy" — a premonition of one aspect of his
later fame in Egypt and the Sudan: "He has
hitherto managed to conduct the survey for
a monthly sum less than that which the Com
mittee gave him as a maximum." In due course,
in a letter from Jerusalem dated October 2, 1877,
we find our modest young explorer declaring
himself "very much gratified" by these com
mendations. While engaged in repairing Jacob's Well in
Nablus he was stoned by a mob of boys and sub
jected to various indignities at the hands of un
friendly officials, but apart from one or two such
incidents he seemed to have met with no unto
ward adventures. His final contribution to the
volume is a reprint of a paper read before the
Geographical Section of the British Association,
in which he givps a connected account of the
Survey and announces that the great map of
Palestine from Dan to Beersheba on the one-
29

KITCHENER
inch scale (on the model of the Ordnance Survey
of England and Ireland) has been completed and
is in the hands of the publishers. Here is a pas
sage which illustrates effectively the kind of un
looked-for obstacle that beset the surveyor's
path: —
During our triangulation we found some little
difficulty from the natives, who thought we were
magicians, with power to find hidden treasure under
the ground and that our cairns were marks to re
member the places by. It was an unfortunate idea,
as the result was that in the night-time our cairns
often disappeared and the natives groped through
any earth to the rock below, hoping to forestall us.
After making the offenders rebuild the cairns on one
or two occasions, these annoyances ceased.
Dishonest guides were another trouble and
Lieutenant Kitchener's methods with them are
worth noting.
As these people are peculiarly susceptible of sar
casm, the offenders were not happy when they were
laughed out of camp for not knowing their country
as well as we knew it.
Another incident furnishes the young soldier
with an opportimity for descriptive writing: —
One evening about eighty Bedouin Arabs with
their wives and families arrived. Their chief's son
had been ill and they had taken him three days'
journey to the tomb of the famous prophet Joshua;
this was supposed to have cured him and they were
30

STORIES OF THE CAREER
now returning joyful after their pilgrimage. I had
a goat killed in their honour which made us the best
friends, and they kept up dancing and singing round
fires in front of our tent all night. The men went
through the usual war-dance, imitating the attack
and defeat of an enemy, to the accompaniment of
clapping hands; but what was more curious was
later in the evening, when two of the prettiest women
were called by their husbands and went through a
peculiar and very graceful dance with swords; they
were unveiled and looked quite handsome by the
firelight. Having rewarded them with lumps of
sugar, I left them singing songs in our honour. Next
morning they were all gone, having left pressing in
vitations for us to visit them. Two days later the
chief came to thank me for the medicine I had given
his boy.
» A war correspondent, Mr. John Macdonald,
who was in Egypt when Kitchener went there
in 1882 to help in the making of an Egyptian
Army, has described the first encounter of the
young soldier with his material. Colonel Taylor,
of the Nineteenth Hussars, Kitchener's com
manding officer, was present on this interesting
occasion: —
I remember Kitchener's gaze at the awkward,
slipshod group as he took his position in the centre of
a circular space round which the riders were to show
their paces. "We begin with the officers," said
Taylor, turning to me: "We shall train them first,
then put them to drill the troopers. We have no
troopers just yet, though we have 440 horses ready
31

KITCHENER
for them." And now began the selection of the fellah
officers. They were to be tested in horsemanship.
The first batch of them were ordered to mount.
Round they went, Indian file. Kitchener, like a circus
master, standing in the centre. Neither audible nor
visible sign did he give of any feeling aroused in him
by a performance mostly disappointing and some
times ridiculous. His hands buried in his trousers
pockets, he quietly watched the emergence of the
least unfit. ... In half an hour or so the first native
officers of the new fellah cavalry were chosen. It was
then that Kitchener made his longest speech —
"We'll have to drive it into those fellows," he mut
tered, as if thinking aloud.
How he drove it into those fellows all the
world knows, and the Egyptian Army certainly
owes to Kitchener a considerable debt for his
devotion to its efficiency. He did not himself do
very much of the "driving," but he selected the
very best officers for that purpose and spared no
pains in keeping them up to the mark.
Another war correspondent, Mr. Wilham Max
well, has referred to this care in the selection of
officers and to Kitchener's invincible pertinac
ity:— His industry, patience, and perseverance are phe
nomenal, and earned for him on the banks of the
Nile — as I often heard ia the last Sudan campaign
— the title of "Master of the Fatigue Parties."
Nothing escaped his sleepless eye — not even the
ice-machine which the Guards tried to smuggle on
32

STORIES OP THE CAREER
the way to Omdurman. His impatience of red-tape
and official reports was shown in Egyptian days by
the fact that his office stationery consisted of a few
telegraph forms which he carried in his helmet.
Not less characteristic is his dislike of "influence"
in the selection of his officers. To every kind of
cajolery and social recommendation he presents an
adamantine front, and his success has been due in a
great measure to his wise choice of instruments. Yet
no general has ever been more independent of help.
Sir Ian Hamilton, who served as Lord Kitchener's
chief of staff in South Africa, declared that he had
nothing to do but smoke his pipe and write his brief
official despatches. Even Sir Archibald Hunter, his
sword-hand in the Sudan, confesses that he never
knew his chief's plans until the moment came for
enforcing them.
. . . "Sorry to report the loss of five men by ex
plosion of dynamite," is said to have been the anxious
message of a subaltern, to whom relief came with the
reply: "Do you want any more dynamite?"
. , . When his native standard-bearer, envious of
the battle-worn standard of General Hunter, man
aged to have Lord Kitchener's standard shot through
and torn to rags, the ruthless chief smiled grimly and
ordered a new one. I remember hearing him in India,
when some one complained of the malicious and false
reports of the habits of a great personage, say with
out a quaver: "What does it matter? Why, they say
even worse things about me."
It was after many heroic but baffled attempts
on the part of Enghsh generals to reconquer the
Sudan for Egypt, that Kitchener settled down
33

KITCHENER
to what must have seemed to him his life's work.
He determined that he would avenge Gordon
and fly the British Flag at Khartoum. Instead,
however, of picturesque excursions into the des
ert, he set himself to raise an immense army and
to carry that great army right across the desert
by means of steam power. It was during his
preparations for this great task that he became
something that at least resembles the Kitchener
legend. "His eyes," said a private soldier, "are
like the bloomin' Day of Judgment." Never a
talkative man, he became taciturn and preoc
cupied. To find men for his purpose, men who would
sacrifice everything to the business in hand,
was his initial difficulty, and to get rid of men
who were either incompetent or liable to human
weakness was his second difficulty, — easier than
the first, but not so easy as the Kitchener legend
would have us believe.
Now I venture to say that this taciturnity and
severity of Lord Kitchener were in the first in
stance the result of anxiety if not actual mis
giving. Here was a man, not a soldier in the
fighting sense, at the head of an expedition which
was to penetrate a waterless desert, conquer
hordes of fanatical Dervishes who had already
beaten army after army, and to avenge the
34

STORIES OF THE CAREER
murder of a British hero whose death had stirred
the whole civihzed world. From the year 1882,
when he went to Egypt as second in command
of Egyptian cavalry, — he was then thirty-two
years of age, — to the great and culminating year
of 1898 when he broke the Dervish power and
restored the Sudan to Egypt, what anxiety, what
fears, what misgivings must have visited his
brain. The story is told that after the victory
of Atbara, George Steevens visited the head
quarters of the army and congratulated Kitch
ener on his success. "Thank you," said Kitch
ener, shaking his hand; and then, the smile
leaving his face, he exclaimed, "My God, if I
had failed!"
We can understand, then, the hardening of the
man, and make allowance for his severity with
incompetent officers. We can understand, too,
that he would gradually acquire a terrible man
ner, and that the constant problems presenting
themselves to his laborious mind would oust the
gentler motions of the human spirit. The effect
of his presence has been well described by an
officer in Egypt as one of "extreme discomfort."
He described the unexpected emergence of "the
great man" from his tent, and the feeling that
instantly communicated itseff to those in the
vicinity : — 35

KITCHENER
I flinched, although I was doing nothing wrong;
the subaltern stopped talking to me as though caught
in a theft; a soldier who was driving in tent-pegs
dropped his tools and began to fumble at his buttons;
upon all sides there was an instant of extreme dis
comfort until the great man went in again.
A lady of quahty visited Cairo after this cam
paign and asked that Kitchener should be pre
sented to her. "Do you like Cairo.?" he asked
her, after an awkward pause, and when the lady
had talked for a considerable time of her im
pressions and adventures, he said, "I am glad
of that," and retired with a bow. The lady, re
porting this encounter, ended up with the judg
ment, "I never met so stupid a man."
In October, 1910, Lord Kitchener spoke of the
difficulties which confronted him after his con
quest in the Sudan.
He well remembered the difficulty of the problem
how best to evolve, out of the ruins left by the Der
vishes, a practical reconstruction of Khartoum on
sanitary lines. First careful consideration had to be
given to the susceptibihties of a naturally uneducated
foreign population, to whose conservative minds
most modern regulations were repugnant. No trou
ble of that kind had, however, arisen, and the na
tives had agreed to the propositions, and there was
no doubt that the reasonable regulations enforced
meant increased length of life and increased pros
perity. Those who knew Khartoum in the old days
would recognize that a revolution had been effected.
36

STORIES OF THE CAREER
The old Khartoum was an African pest-house in
which every tropical disease thrived and ran rampant.
Last year there were only eleven cases of malaria in
a population of 50,000. He did not think such re
sults had been achieved in any other British depend
ency, and they were a proof of the thorough efficiency
of the country.
... In 1899, the year after the culmination of the
Nile campaign, the revenue for the whole of the
Sudan was estimated at only £8000, which showed
a state of destitution for a country nearly as large
as Europe. When this was compared with the pres
ent revenue of over £1,000,000, the progress made
was apparent. Municipal steam tramways were
running in Khartoum from the central to outside
districts. It was anticipated that the city would;
ultimately extend to the west and to the south, and,
as this was Government land, it seemed assured that
the extensions would be made in accordance with i
the existing system of planning. A suburb might
also be built at Burri to the east of the waterworks.
In the following year, 1911, when he was
asking the public for money, the "Daily Chron
icle" pubhshed the following characteristic anec
dote: — '
Lord Kitchener's present appeal for £4000 to com
plete the Anglican Cathedral at Khartoum, on which
£24,000 has already been spent, recalls a story told
of him by Mr. G. W. Smalley in connection with
"K. of K.'s" similar appeal for £100,000 to build a
Gordon Memorial College. But it was some little
time before he could decide to issue an appeal for
such a large sum, seeing that, as he said, "I should
37

KITCHENER
not like to fail, and, if they gave me only part of the
amount, to have to return it." Large sums were
offered there and then, — at Mr. Ralli's dining-
table, — but still he hesitated. At last one of the
company said, "Well, Lord Kitchener, if you had
doubted about your campaign as you do now about
this, you would never have got to Khartoum." His
face hardened, and he replied: "Perhaps not; but
then I could depend on myself, and now I have to
depend on the British Public."
His real work in South Africa only began after
Lord Roberts had taken the Boer capital of Pre
toria. To catch the slippery De Wet and to
stamp out the last smouldering embers of rebel-
Hon was the rather dull, exasperating, and yet
most essential work which fell to his charge. He
is said to have been annoyed by the too humane
tactics of Lord Roberts, and according to some
people he would have ended the war very much
sooner if he had been in supreme command. We
only know that he did the work entrusted to him
with a slow and rather lumpish thoroughness,
"wiping up De Wet," making the way of rebels
extremely hard, and establishing the army in
South Africa in a manner which made further
rebelhon a thing not likely to tempt wise and
reflective men. It seems to me that a kind of
contempt characterized Kitchener's work in
South Africa, and that he was glad to get out of
38

STORIES OF THE CAREER
a country which had for him neither the glory
of the East nor the comfort of home.
It is said that a "Boer Delilah" who tried to
captivate Kitchener reported of him after her
experiment: "This is the most dangerous man in
Britain. I feel as if I were within the shadow of
death when I am near him. He is a man for men
to conquer. No woman can reach him to use him.
He would read me hke an open book in an hour,
and I believe he would shoot me as he would
shoot a Kaffir if he caught me red-handed. I will
try all other men, but not that living death's-
head. No wonder he conquered in Egypt. I
think he would conquer in Hades." No doubt
the temperament of the lady, which accounts for
this lurid language, also accounts for the effect
which she supposed Kitchener to have made
upon her. Her subjective Kitchener — if she
ever saw him — was not the objective Kitchener,
however alarming that gentleman may be. But
the story is interesting as a manifestation of the
growth of the Kitchener legend. It was in South
Africa that he refused to hold a conversation with
a highly explosive general over the telephone.
"He would fuse the wires," said Kitchener.
Of his work in India there is little to be said
and few stories to be told. I asked a very ener
getic and enthusiastic British officer in the In-

KITCHENER
dian Army to tell me what Kitchener had done
for the army in India, and he replied as follows: —
His presence in India was enough. A feeling per
vaded the whole army. We never knew when h^
might descend upon us. It was as if we were invaded
by an enemy. Every man worked harder simply in
case Kitchener might suddenly appear in that par
ticular district. And I will tell you how he handled
the situation. He gave an order quite careless of
whether it could be carried out, and when objection
was raised, however reasonable, he merely repeated
his order. In this way I have known things to be
done never before attempted in those localities. Men
set themselves to perform the impossible and made
it a fact. In this way throughout the whole of India
there was a new spirit, a fresh efficiency. Some of
Kitchener's reforms, such as examination tests for
promotion, seemed to me excellent; but it was not
by any of these reforms that he most benefited the
army. It was simply by his presence, the knowledge
of his severity, and the faith in his justice which most
men entertained.
One story I was told which is worth repeating.
Kitchener suddenly came to inspect a regiment
of Rajputs. The young officer commanding this
regiment was delighted by the commander-in-
chief's evident satisfaction. To the general who
accompanied him. Kitchener said: "It's a pleas
ure to inspect a regiment the faces of which are
on a level with one's own, after looking down for
weeks on the tops of British helmets." When
40

LORD KITCHENER WITH HIS STAFF, IN INDIA

STORIES OF THE CAREER
they came to inspect the new barracks. Kitch
ener asked the commanding officer whether he
had any complaints to make. "Yes, sir," re
turned the young colonel; "the windows are too
many and too big; they'll let in far too much
heat in the hot season; I've complained about
the matter, but without any effect; you know
what Engineer officers are like, sir; it's quite
imposs — " He stopped abruptly. Kitchener's
eye upon him, and remembered when it was too
late what should have been present in his mind
from the first. "Well, Colonel Dash," said
Kitchener, "in me and in General' Blank you
behold two Engineer officers who are open to
reason." And he saved an awkward situation
by a not unkindly smile.
Of his famous dispute with Lord Curzon, wid
ening into a personal quarrel, nothing more need
be said than this, that, while Kitchener stoutly
denied a wish to set the military power above the
civil, most people are disposed to think that he
did not fight his battle in a manner to convert his
critics. Kitchener declares that he only wanted
to be rid of "that worst of military faults — a
division of authority," and said that he wished
to make the Indian Army an efficient whole in
stead of "an accidental planless thing, having
no relation to any possible or imaginable emer-
41

KITCHENER
gency." But his obstinacy and his method of at
taining these ends resulted in the resignation of
Lord Curzon; and very soon after Kitchener left
India his successor. Sir O'Moore Creagh — nick
named "No More K" — did away with many
of the innovations which Lord Kitchener had
taken such elaborate pains to introduce.
Before he returned to England in 1910, after
travelling some seventy thousand miles during
his command in India, he visited China, Japan,
America, New Zealand, and Austraha. He aston
ished the Japanese by his silence, and dehghted
the Australians by his praise of their troops. On
his return to England he became the centre of a
pohtical dispute. Unionists wanted to see him
at the War Office; a Liberal Government, satis
fied with the very excellent work being done
at the War Office, offered him the post of High
Commissioner of the Mediterranean. Kitchener
accepted this appointment, but resigned it before
taking office. Tory and Radical barked at each
other over this incident for a number of rather
tiresome weeks.
In 1911 Kitchener was made British Agent in
Egypt. His work there has been to carry on the
Cromer tradition, but he has instituted several
reforms which have contributed very materially
to the prosperity of the Sudan. He has shown
42

STORIES OF THE CAREER
little sympathy to the Nationahsts of Egypt, rul
ing by the power of the Big Stick, and he is in
consequence more unpopular with Egyptian poh-
ticians than any of his predecessors. It is a pity
that lack of imagination has marred his other
wise most remarkable contribution to the pros
perity of modern Egypt.
He was in England at the time when Germany
was beginning her fateful challenge of the world.
Immediately the Unionists clamoured that he
should be appointed to the War Office, then in
charge of the Prime Minister, but the Liberals
made no move in this direction. The clamour
grew louder the more the menace of Germany
came home to men's minds. And at last the
Government yielded. Why they yielded we
shaU say in the next chapter. Lord Kitchener,
who was staying with his cousin, Mr. Mullins,
Squire of Ringwood, near Kingsdown, was ac
tually motoring to catch the steamer at Dover
when the message came which called him to the
War Office.

CHAPTER VI
THE KITCHENEB LEGEND
It was by the work of a very brilliant news
paper correspondent, the late G. W. Steevens,
that the name of Kitchener became suddenly
familiar to British democracy, and it was by the
work of the same writer that the Kitchener legend
took possession of the public mind.
In a series of very dramatic and sometimes
brilliant articles, which appeared in a popular
London newspaper, George Steevens described
the famous march to Khartoum, filhng the grey
commercial atmosphere of London with the rich
colours of the East, with the exciting adventure
of war, and with the still more exciting sensation
of anxiety. And, like a wise story-teller, Steevens
gave his readers a hero in this brave tale of ad
venture. In one brief article he thrust Kitchener
before the roused attention of the British pubhc
and made not only the title of "The Sirdar"
but the personality of this particular Sirdar a
permanent possession of the British mind.
Here was the picture of the outward man: —
He stands several inches over six feet, straight as
a lance, and looks out imperiously above most men's
44

THE KITCHENER LEGEND
heads; his motions are deliberate and strong: slender
but firmly knit, he seems built for tireless, steel-wire
endurance rather than for power or agility. . . .
Steady passionless eyes shaded by decisive brows,
brick-red rather fuU cheeks, a long mustache be
neath which you divine an immovable mouth; his
face is harsh, and neither appeals for affection nor
stirs dislike.
From this we pass to the essential fact, the man
himself, the spirit of Kitchener. "He has no
age," we read, "but the prime of life, no body
but one to carry his mind, no face but one to
keep his brain behind." His precision "is so in
humanly unerring, he is more like a machine
than a man." He is "The Man Who Has Made
Himself a Machine." And the writer concludes
that Kitchener "ought to be patented and shown
with pride at the Paris International Exhibition.
British Engine: Exhibit No. 1, hors concours, the
Sudan Machine." ^
Thus the legend of Kitchener was created.
You can imagine the delight of the Londoner as
he opened his newspaper every morning to fol
low the great march across the desert with so new,
so unexpected, and so unlike-himself a hero as
this Man Who Had Made Himself a Machine.
The average Briton is a creature of domestic hab-
1 With Kitchener to Khartoum. By G. W. Steevens (William
Blackwood & Sons). 45

KITCHENER
its, fond of his fireside, easiest in carpet slippers
and an old coat, calling the wife of his bosom
"Mother," and regarding his olive branches with
open pride and indulgent affection. To such a
man, then. Kitchener suddenly appeared as a
heaven-sent distraction. He found himself con
templating a hero who contradicted all his Brit
ish notions and yet in some strange fashion
braced the softening fibres of his soul. And as
the mighty army moved across the desert, the
Briton in his armchair smiled easily, wagged his
head knowingly, and said: "That yotmg Kitch
ener will make no mistake. The Sirdar will crush
the Dervish once and for all."
But this new hero of England was the very
antithesis of the Enghshman. He was said to
hate women. He was said to be merciless and
without pity. He would allow no officer on his
staff to get married. He broke every man who
failed to carry out his orders. He was tyrant,
despot, brute. He was everything the average
Englishman dishkes. . . .
Perhaps it was this very antithesis which at
tracted the popular imagination. England was
beginning to be made aware that she had many
enemies in the world and scarcely a friend. One of
her statesmen was to coin the phrase of "glori
ous isolation." The sudden rise of a new Caesar,
46

THE KITCHENER LEGEND
a new Napoleon, gave a sense of security to the
domesticated Englishman. War with France
might come at any moment; Russia had her eye
on India; the Balkans would presently burst into
flames; Germany would take advantage of the
death of the Emperor of Austria; — well, what
matter.? Kitchener would be there to see that no
harm came to us.
One admires in another the quality he most
lacks in himself, and admiration multiplies and
intensifies that quahty until it becomes greater
than it is. In this fashion the domesticated Eng
lishman created the Kitchener Gohath — the
inhuman, heartless, but unerring giant — The
Man Who Had Made Himself a Machine.
Everything in Kitchener's career has tended
to confirm the whole world in this first delusion.
He not only pulverized the Dervishes, but
smashed the Mahdi's tomb. He came home only
to snub lion-hunters and to hasten back to duty.
He went to South Africa and prevented Lord
Roberts from being too tender with the Boers.
He took over the army in India and not only
rendered it amazingly efficient, but humbled the
most powerful Viceroy of modem times. He
returned to Egypt and brought rebelhon to a
better mind. He installed himself at the War
Office and immediately broke the back of the
47

KITCHENER
German's advance on Paris. And now the mil
lion men drilling in Great Britain are "Kitch
ener's Army," and with that army Kitchener
will utterly destroy Prussian militarism.
So the world reads the story of this man,
starting from the first wrong premiss of G. W.
Steevens, and thinking of him not as a falhble
human creature, but as a machine that cannot
err. Now, the really fundamental and essential
characteristic of Lord Kitchener is not "unerr
ing precision," but tenacity, and this tenacity
is httle more than the obstinacy of a very slow
and laborious mind. All the qualities which go
to the making of a brilliant intelhgence are en
tirely lacking in him, so entirely lacking that he
is said by those who have studied him closely
to be unconscious of his own dullness. He is
the bulldog, and given plenty of time he is un
beatable; but the intuitions of genius never visit
his brain; he never sees truth in a flash of
inspiration, and unexpected interruption of his
plans comes to him as crisis or disaster. Further,
he is by no means bloodless. It is quite a mis
take, as we shall show presently, to regard him
as a woman-hater. He has tastes and occupa
tions entirely outside the narrow circumference
of war. He is so little like a machine that he can
48

THE KITCHENER LEGEND
enter into the trivial fun of a house-party. And
he makes mistakes.
But we may say that on the whole Kitchener's
career, as the public knows it, has justified the
delusion which began in the Sudan. He has al
ways succeeded. And he has never sought popu
larity. Always something of a mystery, he has
gone about his business in silence and never once
has he publicly betrayed his humanity or given
the nation reason to question the Kitchener
legend. What would have happened if he had
married, I do not know; and how the public
would have borne the news that he had become a
father I do not dare to speculate. As it is, the real
Kitchener has not "given away" the false Kitch
ener, even in domesticity, and so convinced is
the public of the false Kitchener being the real
Kitchener, that I feel there is no danger in the
world in telling the truth. I shall convert no one.

CHAPTER VII
at the wae office
Why did the Government yield to popular
clamour and appoint Lord Kitchener to the War
Office? For myself I regard this surrender as almost
the most decisive proof of the imaginative power
of the Prime Minister. It was necessary to pre
sent a unanimous front to the enemy; it was
necessary to give the pubhc a sense of security.
By placing Lord Kitchener at' the War Office,
Mr. Asquith satisfied the entire British nation,
and with this satisfaction a wave of enthusiasm
for the war rose in every part of the country, and
swept the whole nation forward in a settled de
termination to see the business through.
But Mr. Asquith knew, every member of the
Cabinet knew, that under the administration of
Lord Haldane preparations had been made for
the crisis which now visited the empire. All the
marvellous organization which carried our gal
lant army to France, without the loss of a man
or a bundle of hay, had been planned years be
fore by the Staff College under the administra-
50

AT THE WAR OFFICE
tion of Lord Haldane. Every perfection of that
immense machinery was an estabhshed fact.
The men were there, the commissariat was there,
the medical service was there, the transports were
there, and the railways were thoroughly pre
pared for their task. Without hitch of any kind
the most highly organized army in the world left
these shores, passed to thefighting-hne, and never
once has lacked for food or blanket. All this had
been thought out, planned for, and prepared in
every minutest detail by Lord Haldane.
One thing, however, was lacking.
In the supreme moments of a nation's history*
the personality of a man who has the confidence
of the people is a possession of almost incalcu
lable value. Mr. Asquith, who had been the
object of a pitiless partisan attack for some years,
and Lord Haldane, who was actually accused
of pro-German sympathies, could not, in spite of
their obvious merits, arouse the enthusiasm of
the entire nation. One man alone was able to do
that, and this man was a Tory of Tories, whose
views about Liberalism, of course, were very well
known to the Government. Nevertheless, Mr.
Asquith decided that Lord Kitchener should be
called to the War Office. By that decision he
relieved the tension of a very critical situation,
and made it plain to all who could understand
51

KITCHENER
that he was a statesman of imagination. Was
there ever a more telling and more ironical
stroke? The wonderful legend of Kitchener, in
a moment of the gravest danger, acted upon a
practical nation and a great empire with a force
not to be equalled by the reality of a greater
man. In this sense it may truthfully be said of Lord
Kitchener that "he came at the right hour, and
he was the right man." In the opinion of a sin
gularly able politician, Mr. Lloyd George, with
his swiftness of thought, his impatience of red-
tape, and his willingness to delegate authority,
guided by young military opinion, would have
made an incomparably better Secretary for War
than the real Lord Kitchener. But this same ob
server sees very clearly that the better adminis
tration of Mr. Lloyd George would nothing hke
so splendidly advantage the nation as the per
sonality of Lord Kitchener. It was the person
ality of Lord Kitchener, the great Kitchener
legend, which gave to the awakened and rather
startled people of Great Britain, at the outset of
Germany's challenge, that sense of confidence
and security which has since characterized the
nation's attitude through every hour of the con
flict, even the darkest and most bitter; and it is
this same personality, this same legend, which is
52

AT THE WAR OFFICE
still inspiring the optimism of a nation absolutely
convinced of victory.
If we leave out of count this psychological
value, it might almost be argued that scarcely
any soldier of importance could be less fitted in a
moment of crisis for the post of War Secretary
than the great Lord Kitchener. For Lord Kitch
ener is a man who does not easily get into a new
saddle; he takes time to look about him before he
is sure of his surroundings; and he moves slowly
until he is perfectly acquainted with the road
ahead of him. Moreover, he has spent by far the
greater part of his hfe in the East, and is not only
ignorant of European conditions, but frankly out
of sympathy with modern democracies. Few
men living, I imagine, are more completely out of
touch with the England of the present time than
this heavy and ponderous man who at a single
stroke became the national hero. Further, he is
no longer Steevens's Sirdar, " slender but firmly
knit . . . built for tireless steel-wire endurance."
He is sixty-four years of age, bulky and heavy-
shouldered, with a fatherly and benignant aspect,
wearing spectacles, his hair turning grey, his
large red face expressing something more than a
shield for his brain. In fact Lord Kitchener bears
at the present day no resemblance at all to the
legendary Kitchener. 53

KITCHENER
But if any man in England were to suggest
that General Baden-Powell should go to the War
Office he would very certainly be laughed to
scorn, and if any man were to call for Lord
Kitchener's resignation he would assuredly be
denounced as a German spy. And yet, if it had
not been for Lord Haldane's work at the War
Office, those very champions of Lord Kitchener
who are now most loud and ridiculous in his
praise might be choosing the lamp-post on which
to hang him. For Lord Kitchener, I think, could
not possibly have reorganized the War Office and
got the army safely over to France, in the time at
his disposal, without chaos and disaster.
Providentially for us, providentially as history
may say for the whole world. Kitchener came to
a War Office thoroughly reformed and perfectly
equipped for its tremendous responsibiUties.
And, providentially again, the work that fell to
his hands was just that very work at which he
excels, the work of making new armies. Instead
of finding excitement and disorder he entered
a War Office that was working with so smooth
a precision that one might have thought no
crisis had arisen. Into this calm atmosphere,
conducted by a smihng and agreeable Prime
Minister, Lord Kitchener came only to inherit
routine which could not be improved upon. But
54

AT THE WAR OFFICE
something was waiting for him to bring into
existence, something foreseen and partially pre
pared for by other men, but something to which
the magic of his fame could bring an almost ir
resistible wizardry. As I have already stated,
his first call for 500,000 men, while it took away
the nation's breath for a moment, steadied the
national mind and prepared it for a long and
laborious war. Then when we learned that this
new army, and even the splendid troops from
the Dominions, were to be well drilled before
being sent to the front, we realized that however
great the crisis there was no immediate danger,
and felt that Kitchener would see us safely
through all dangers.
Is it possible to exaggerate this psychological
value? Those who remember the early days of
the war wiU testify that the announcement of
Kitchener's appointment to the War Office was
Hke a victory after days of most dread and terri
ble anxiety. And at the present moment are we
not all living in the faith that Kitchener — the
terrible, silent, ferocious, and merciless Kitchener
— will hold on to the end and will never loose his
hold until the enemy is beaten?
So completely has the Kitchener legend taken
possession of the national mind that it is per
fectly safe to discuss the matter, even as I am
55

KITCHENER
discussing it now, with no fear in the world that
England will waver in her confidence. And one
need not be concerned with German interest in
our discussion, since the work to which Kitchener
has now set his hand, the work most fatal to
German ambition, is just the work which Kitch
ener does excellently well. The first critical
months are over — the months when swiftness
of decision and brilliance of initiative might
have hastened the end; and we can now look
round about us, talk with a degree of freedom
impossible during those first months, and gossip
more or less to our heart's content. Moreover,
it should rather increase than lessen the con
fidence of Great Britain to learn that she owes
her great achievement in Europe not to one
elderly man, but to a body of young and brilhant
staff officers, who under Lord Haldane's wise and
stimulating headship set the British War Office
in such amazing good order.
It must not be imagined, however, because
one no longer believes in the Kitchener legend,
that the real Lord Kitchener is only a figurehead
to the ship of state in its hour of dirty weather.
He is an entirely different person from the le
gendary Kitchener, and at the present day he is
no longer the real Kitchener who laid a railway
across the desert and broke the savage power of
56

AT THE WAR OFFICE
the Dervishes. But he is still an obstinate, slow-
thinking, and tenacious organizer, still a man
who knows the right person for a particular
undertaking, still a man who yields to no social
pressure in the sphere of patronage, and still a
man who is an absolute terror to the grafter and
the fool. He has set himself to raise immense
armies in England, and he is determined that
nothing shall make him despatch these new
troops to the front until they have acquired
something of the discipline and smartness which
are such distinguishing marks of the regular
British Army. A weaker man, or let us say, a
man less obstinate, might have been tempted to
send these green armies to France and to Bel
gium in the first nerve-trying months of the war.
Kitchener was hke a rock in this matter. And
he was like a rock, and remains like a rock, in
another matter, the matter of war correspond
ents. The Cabinet at one time were very nearly
of the same opinion as the newspapers, and in
their discussions of this question attempted to
bring Lord Kitchener to their way of thinking;
but he stuck obstinately to his guns, refused to
budge, and brought the Cabinet to see the rea
sonableness of his judgment.
It may be said at this point that Lord Kitch
ener's relations with the Cabinet, which might
57

KITCHENER
have been somewhat difficult, are in truth of a
quite cordial and cheerful character. One can
imagine that in any animated discussions he
would play a minor part to such quick and vig
orous thinkers as Mr. Lloyd George and Mr.
Winston Churchill, and this, indeed, is true; but
it seems that Lord Kitchener has not resented
this intellectual superiority of his colleagues.
On the contrary, he has listened to many argu
ments which must have been entirely new to
him, the early suUenness and rather grudging
acquiescence, natural in the circumstances, giv
ing gradual place to a half-humorous and as it
were tolerant acceptance of the position. For
Mr. Asquith he entertains a great and real re
spect, and it is pleasant to know that he has
introduced into the Cabinet a wise mihtary
habit, always addressing his chief as "Sir." He
is not an easy man to convince, and he has oc
cupied places of almost autocratic power too
long to be comfortably at home in a council
chamber. It says very much for his capacity, I
think, that he has been able to accommodate
himself to this unfamiliar position, and, in the
company of men inspired by principles which
must be entirely foreign to his own notions, has
adapted himself without any blunder to the cir
cumstances of the times. 58

AT THE WAR OFFICE
Many stories are told of his Cabinet experi
ences, but few are true. One story, which happens
to be true, and which very well exemplifies both
Lord Kitchener's acquiescence and his good
humour, cannot, unfortunately, be publicly told.
There is, however, a true story of his War Office
experiences which may be related in print. Mr.
Lloyd George called one day upon Lord Kitch
ener to explain to him that recruiting in Wales
would be far quicker if the men were told that
they would form a Welsh army and serve under
a Welsh general who understood their traditions
and spoke their language. "But where is your
Welsh general?" demanded Kitchener, who does
not greatly hke to be bothered with details of
nationalism. "We had better discuss that with
Colonel Owen Thomas, who has come with me,
and is now in your waiting-room." Kitchener
rang his bell and gave orders for the visitor to be
admitted. As soon as he saw him he said, "You
were in South Africa?" "Yes, sir," replied the
colonel. "Well, you're now Brigadier-General
Commanding the Welsh army; you'd better go
and get to work at once."
This swiftness of decision has not been usual
with Lord Kitchener of recent years, but on
occasion, when his mind is settled about a thing,
he makes other men move more swiftly than is
59

KITCHENER
altogether comfortable. It is said that he has
created dissatisfaction at the War Office by ruth
lessly discharging men who have not immediately
responded to commands something too peremp
tory for pleasant obedience. He is more sensi
tive to certain forms of criticism than the Kitch
ener legend would lead us to suppose, and woe
betide the official through whose mistake or
neglect the War Office comes in for public attack.
Sensational stories are told of Lord Kitch
ener's visits to France since the outbreak of war.
It is said — and for a long time I believed it — that,
after General Smith-Dorrien's brilliant rescue of
the British Army from almost certain annihila
tion. Kitchener went over to France and had
one French general shot and two French generals
thrown into prison. There was some ground for
this exciting story, but as it is told it is entirely
untrue. What Kitchener has done — and he de
serves the highest praise for it — is to secure
greater and more friendly cooperation between
the chiefs of the two armies. At the beginning
of such a war, friction between the heads of
armies in alliance is almost certain to occur, even
when the troops themselves are in the most
hearty and affectionate relation with each other.
Some such friction arose in this instance, and,
by a timely visit and very wise diplomacy, Lord
60

LORD KITCHENER LEAVING THE WAR OFFICE

AT THE WAR OFFICE
Kitchener was able not only to temove the
causes of friction, but to bring the generals in
question into quite cordial relationship. It is
not true, however, if my information is correct,
that Lord Kitchener has been to the front. I
understand that the French War Secretary,
whom he met in Paris, convinced him that it
would not be wise for him to pay that visit.
If one were asked what Kitchener has done at
the War Office to earn the gratitude of the nation,
keeping one's self entirely to the field of military
administration, it would be extremely difficult
to name even one achievement. His greatest
service has been the contribution of his legend
ary personality, for even in the field of military
administration this tremendous reputation has
had a certain effect. Tommy swears by him.
But beyond this I do not know what credit the
critical British officer would give to the new Sec
retary for War. The delay in clothing and equip-_
ping the men of what we call Kitchener's first
army has been prolonged to a point which can
not escape censure, and there are sound judges
who hold that this tiresome and irritating if not
dangerous delay might have been sensibly
abridged if Lord Kitchener, the autocrat, had
been more open to suggestions and more willing
to depute authority. He has not succeeded, so
61

KITCHENER
far as I am able to discover, in speeding up the
work of the War Office, and he has certainly
introduced no new and far-reaching changes
which a bolder, more brilliant, and less obstinate
man, in so pressing a necessity, might have ven
tured his own reputation upon for the good of
the army.
In spite of this, it remains to be seen whether
these new armies will not surprise Lord Kitch
ener's critics when they take the field. Slow and
laborious as the War Secretary's administration
may be, it is nevertheless inspired by his dogged
and unswerving passion for absolute efficiency.
Sooner or later the uniforms and boots will ap
pear, the rifles and bayonets be handed oiit, and
the troops, which at the time of writing are drill
ing in mufti with obsolete rifles, will make their
appearance as a marching army.
Not till then shall we be able to judge rightly
of Lord Kitchener's administration. And one
must certainly bear in mind that the lack of
rifles and uniforms is the fault of Kitchener's
predecessors, and take into our consideration the
undeniable fact that the War Office never con
templated the raising of so prodigious an army.
If Kitchener has not speeded up the war ma
chine as we could have wished it to be speeded
up, at least he has not fussed and fumed, and

AT THE WAR OFFICE
this, in the circumstances, must be counted to
him for a virtue. From the very first he has ex
ercised a calming authority. Never once has he
betrayed the least symptoms of hysterics. When
the German war machine unmasked itself and
the whole world stood at gaze before a mechan
ism so perfect and gigantic that to east and west
of its frontiers it could flmg out irrefragable hosts
of disciplined fighting men. Kitchener, having
despatched Great Britain's very small but very
perfect expeditionary force, calmly sat down be
hind the still unbroken shield of the British Navy
to raise an army of haff a million men. Then as
the war proceeded, shivering to atoms most of
the theories of the experts. Kitchener asked for
another 500,000 men; and now the War Office
speaks of an army exceeding 2,000,000 men.
Throughout this most trying and difficult period.
Lord Kitchener never once, by anything he said
or did, spread the feeling of panic. His very
slowness helped excitable people to keep their
heads and to see the crisis in its true proportions.
I am not at all sure whether a more brilhant and
imaginative Secretary of State for War might
not have acted unhappily on the nation's nerves.
But Kitchener's fame remains in Egypt. He
added very little to his reputation in South
Africa and has left no such monuments in India

KITCHENER
as were left by Lord Roberts along the Hima
layan frontier. And at the War Office, in this
supreme crisis of our national life, he has really
done nothing. He has really done nothing, at
tempted nothing, which by the wildest reach of
imagination could be called a master-stroke of
genius. He is nothing more at the War Office
than a gruff and most dutiful official, sparing
himself no pains, sacrificing his days and nights,
struggling with all his powers and with all his
strength to fulfil his trust, but without vision
and without inspiration.
It is said that in every discussion which has
taken place about the defence of the country, in
such instances as discovered a difference be
tween him and his colleagues, he has always
been handsomely beaten in argument. Mr. Win
ston Churchill, who is soldier and sailor, too, and
who has a brain which absorbs information and
a mind which seizes upon conclusions with singu
lar rapidity, easily bewilders, confuses, and con
verts the very much slower and wholly unorig
inal brain of the War Secretary. Lord Kitchener
lives upon his reputation, but he is still a man of
such iron tenacity that he is able to prolong this
existence with a pretty good grace. And it is
possible, for he is a modest and listening man in
the company of his equals and superiors, that
64

AT THE WAR OFFICE
his experience of a very remarkable Cabinet may
modify some of his worst prejudices and en-
hghten his mind where it is most dark.
But he will be a very indifferent historian who,
pronouncing judgment on these parlous times,
dismisses Lord Kitchener as a dry and tedious
official who did nothing for the nation in its hour
of trial. Lord Kitchener contributed his per
sonality, his reputation, and his name at the
very moment when the whole empire was hunger
ing and thirsting for a Man. This psychological
service, as we must again insist, was and in a
lesser degree continues to be of value to the
state. Kitchener was, indeed and beyond all
question, the right man who came at the right
hour; and although it is good for the nation to
learn that it does not depend upon any one man
for its safety, good for it properly to appreciate
the principles which make the system of its gov
ernment independent of the individual, still, for
the masses, a hero is always a necessity and for
the state is sometimes an advantage.
Moreover, as I hope has been made quite
clear, while Lord Kitchener is neither demigod
nor heaven-sent genius, he is by no manner of
means a bad Secretary of State for War. He
might be quicker, he might call to his side the
great organizers of commercial life, he might
65

KITCHENER
in twenty different ways delegate his authority;
but when everything has been urged against him
he still remains at his post as the quiet, imruffled,
pertinacious, and plodding administrator, who,
refusing to be hurried and refusing to be turned
from his path, keeps his eyes steadily fixed upon
one goal, and that goal the honour and the safety
of his country.
The soldier believes in him, the pubUc beheve
in him, and his immediate staff are ready to
make any sacrifice he demands of them. Such a
man may not dazzle the world, but, give him
time, and with such troops as the empire places
at his disposal, he will assuredly wear down the
enemy.

CHAPTER VIII
KITCHENEB's BATTLES
[This chapter is written by a student of war and sum
marizes as briefly as possible the chief engagements with
which Lord Kitchener has been connected. It gives, I
think, a very useful synopsis of his work in the field.]
LoBD Kitcheneb's association with Egypt
began in 1882, when he was appointed to a cav
alry command in the Egyptian Army, and in
January, 1885, in the Gordon Relief Expedition,
he accornpanied the Desert Column to the Gad-
kul Wells. He was actively employed during the
anxious period that followed the fall of Khar
toum, and in the subjection of Osman Digna in
the Eastern Sudan, of which province, towards
the close of 1886, he became Governor-General.
While still holding this office, he joined the troops
in the field, and was wounded in an unsuccessful
fight with the Dervishes outside Suakim. As
a result, he was warned that in future he should
not, while holding this appointment, take part
in such operations, but he commanded a Sudan
ese brigade in the defeat of Osman, and was then
left with a garrison of 2000 men to defend the
place. 67

KITCHENER
The great invasion planned by Wad-en-Nejumi
in the spring of 1889 brought Kitchener into new
prominence, and after the fight at Argin, when
the Dervish power seemed threatening, it be
came necessary to supplement his force. Two
Egyptian battalions, a mule battery, and some
cavalry were despatched to him in haste at the
front, and these forces, with a Sudanese bat
talion, were under his command in Sir Francis
Grenfell's victory over the Dervishes at Toski,
August 3. Handling his troops with great skill,
he made a detour with his mounted troops, and
cut off Nejumi's retreat, thus forcing the battle,
in the decision of which, with much desperate
fighting, he took a leading part. Nejumi was
killed, and Mahdism received a blow from which
it took years to recover. The brave Dervishes
had, of course, little chance, for their fanatical
courage was met by trained and disciplined troops,
British, Egyptian, and Sudanese, directed by
very skifful generalship. Kitchener rendered
great services in the subsequent fighting, as well
as in administrative work, and came to be recog
nized as the man of the future in Egypt.
In April, 1892, he succeeded Sir Francis Gren-
fell as Sirdar of the Egyptian Army, and his
influence soon inspired the policy of the Gov
ernment. There had been many evidences of
68

LORD KITCHENER AS SIRDAR
(Commander-in-Cliief of the Egyptian Army)

KITCHENER'S BATTLES
renewed Dervish activity. Kassala was threat
ened, and the Italians had been severely defeated
at Adowa. The moment seemed favourable for
an active policy, both with the object of relieving
the Italians, and of seizing a moment in which
the Dervishes were weakened by their efforts
elsewhere. The Sirdar had all ready, and about
9000 troops well organized and trained were
under his own command. An advance was also
desirable because the race between the Powers
for possession of the region of the Upper Nile
had begun. It was therefore determined to move
on Akasheh and then on Dongola, but the de
cision of the British Government was arrived at
suddenly, and the story is told that the Chief of
the Egyptian Staff was aroused by stones being
thrown at his window in the middle of the night
(March 12, 1896) to hear the intelligence, and
that no one was found bold enough to awake and
inform the Sirdar, who therefore received the
welcome news in the morning.
The river, the desert, and the wells are the
three great strategic factors in Egyptian cam
paigning, and the Sirdar soon proved himself a
master in the use of them. In the fighting at
Ferket, June 6, he despatched a river column
under command of Colonel Hunter, afterwards
General Sir Archibald Hunter, which marched
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KITCHENER
up the east bank of the Nile, with Egyptian
irregulars on the other bank to prevent any
escape of the Dervishes across the stream. At
the same time a desert column under command
of Major Burn-Murdoch was to operate on the
east, and prevent escape in that direction also.
The Dervishes, who were under command of
Emir Osman Azrak, could not avoid the action,
and the engagement developed exactly as the
Sirdar had planned. The march of the river
column was irresistible, and when the Dervishes
sought to escape eastward, the desert column,
which had been skilfully led in the darkness,
blocked the way. The Dervishes fought with
the utmost courage and resolution, but they were
utterly defeated, and the Nile Valley was cleared
of them for a distance of fifty miles, while the only
organized army of the Khalifa was destroyed.
During subsequent months the railway was
carried onward to Kosheh, the gunboats were
taken up the river and supplies were pushed for
ward. The weather was intensely hot, heavy
rainstorms swept the valley, and cholera, which
had been coming north, reached the troops and
inflicted severe losses. In addition, the Nile rose
late and the dragging of the gunboats over the
Second Cataract was delayed. But in September
the advance was resumed, and the force was so
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KITCHENER'S BATTLES
overwhelming and so well dispersed that the
Dervishes fled, and Dongola was occupied, every
Dervish flying from the pressure. It was a tri
umph of skilful administration and manage
ment and the troops were well supported in the
advance of the gunboats under Commander
Colville, R.N., afterwards Admiral the Honour
able Sir Stanley Colville.
Kitchener's policy was to advance slowly, and
to consolidate and prepare everything as he
went onward. Therefore Dongola was put in
order, the railway was pushed on towards the
place, and advanced posts were established.
Whether it would have been possible to make an
immediate move forward it is unnecessary now
to inquire. The Klalifa expected it, and im
mediately set about fortifying Omdurman. But
it was not until the next year, 1897, that the re-
conquest of the Sudan was determined upon.
England had compelled the Egyptians to aban
don that province, and it was announced on the
part of the British Government that responsibil
ities had been incurred, which must be fulfilled,
and that the crumbling away of the "baleful
rule of the Khalifa " made the time opportune
to act.
But Kitchener had come to the conclusion
that to carry forward the railway in the direction
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KITCHENER
of Khartoum was inadvisable, the country being
difficult. The Nile between Wady Haifa and
Khartoum makes a double curve hke the let
ter "S, "and the railway abandoned would have
crossed the southern curve of the "S" from Don
gola and Debbeh to reach Khartoum, whereas
the Sirdar now thought it advisable to strike
across the northern curve from Wady Haifa to
Abu Hamed. Fortunately there was at the head
of the railway service an engineer officer of first-
rate merits. Colonel Girouard, who pushed the
fine on from Wady Haifa at the rate of a mile
and a half a day. This could, no doubt, have
been done many months earlier, but the im
portance of the Dongola province made it neces
sary first to subjugate it, and in that province
were now the friendly Jaalins, who had been
exasperated by the cruelties of the Khalifa, who
had decimated them, and they were guarding
the right flank of the new advance.
So successful was all this preparation and or
ganization directed by the Sirdar, that when the
new railway had reached Abu Hamed, and that
place had been captured after a stiff fight by
Colonel Hunter, an immediate advance was
made, and Berber, which is about a hundred
miles farther up the river, fell without a blow,
on September 6. 72

KITCHENER'S BATTLES
The Dervishes were strangely inactive. If the
Emir Mahmoud, who had 10,000 men at Metam-
meh, which is about a hundred miles up-river
from Berber, had moved, the Sirdar would have
had a far more difficult task. That place was
shelled, chiefly by way of reconnaissance, by the
gunboats under Commander Keppel, afterwards
Vice-Admiral Sir Colin Keppel. The irrepressi
ble Osman Digna, who had appeared again in
force in the Eastern Sudan, also retired into
obscurity, having quarrelled with Mahmoud.
Progress was made with the railway, which very
quickly advanced to Abu Hamed and on to Ber
ber. The Atbara falls into the Nile a few miles
above Berber, and on one of its affluents, about
three hundred miles above that place, is Kassala,
on the borders of Abyssinia, which the Italians
had defended against the Dervishes. It was now
to be restored to Egypt, and the Sirdar, by this
time Major-General Sir Herbert Kitchener, went
to Suakim and Massowah to arrange the con
ditions of the transfer, and the place was oc
cupied by Egyptian troops on December 25,
1897. Early in 1898 it became known that Mahmoud,
who had now made a pact with Osman, was
intending at last, with 20,000 men, to move
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KITCHENER
against Berber. British troops were therefore
hurried up from Alexandria, and Egyptian forces
were concentrated to meet the threatened at
tack. On February 10, Mahmoud began to pass
his troops across the Nile to Shendy preparatory
to the advance, and his boats and rafts occupied
a fortnight in the operation. It seemed to many
observers that in the midst of this business of
transport Mahmoud's troops were given into
their enemy's hands. An ideal opportunity pre
sented itself of destroying one half of them before
the others could come to their aid. But nothing
was done, and the explanation given was that it
was the Sirdar's plan to get Mahmoud out of
his strong position at Metammeh and into the
open ground.
The great danger was of a frenzied Dervish
rush, which it might be difficult to stop with
existing means. Therefore "dum-dum" bullets
were served out for the Lee-Metford, while the
"dumb dumb" methods applied by the Sirdar
against the press correspondents were to some
extent withdrawn, concerning which one critic
said that the general in the field, who restricts
the press too much, lays himseK open to the
remark that, like Caesar, he prefers "to write his
own Commentaries."
Mahmoud's object was to cross the desert from
74

KITCHENER'S BATTLES
the Nile, and pass over the bed of the parched
Atbara, in order to strike at Berber from the
east. The Sirdar had now about 13,000 British
and Egyptian troops, and the main body was
concentrated at El Hudi, which place is a few
miles up the Atbara from its confiuence with the
Nile. Mahmoud was now in a difficulty. He saw
that his prepared advance on Berber was check
mated, and that a retirement on Omdurman
would be perilous. The position for the Sirdar's
forces was not easy. They were supplied by
camel transport, the heat was punishing them
severely, and dysentery and enteric fever ap
peared. It was imperative to make a move, and
on April 4 the camps were struck and the advance
begun. General Hunter, on the next day, tried
to draw the Dervishes by advancing with eight
squadron of cavalry, eight maxims, and a bat
tery of horse artillery. Large bodies of Baggara
horsemen thereupon came out, and Hunter had
to make a skiKul withdrawal.
It was on April 8, that the battle of the Atbara
was fought. The enemy was not to be caught in
the open, as the Sirdar had hoped. He was forti
fied in a zeriba formed of cut mimosa bushes,
backed with strong palisades, and behind
an encircling trench, with earthworks, cross-
trenches, and shelters. But twenty-four guns
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KITCHENER
were brought to bear, the palisades were blown
away, and a rocket battery set the Dervish shel
ter in furious conflagration. Only a few Baggai'a
horsemen appeared, and were swept away with
maxims. After the position had been pounded
for an hour and a haK with shell, the advance
began, the Sirdar watching the development of
his plans from an advantageous post nine hun
dred yards away.
The pipes of the Highlander, the bugles of the
other British regiments, and the bands of the
Egyptian battalions playing inspiriting tunes
gave a fine military spirit to the long fine which
advanced with fixed bayonets. General Gatacre
and his aide-de-camp were the first men to reach
the Dervish outer defences. The Camerons were
to have driven a way through for the other bat
talions to rush into the midst of the enemy, but
this was impossible, and the Camerons led, fol
lowed by other regiments. Then the hand-to-
hand fighting began. The Dervishes in the
trenches neither asked nor received quarter.
They were armed with Remingtons, Martinis,
fowling-pieces, and elephant-guns. The Egyp
tians, who were on the right, lost heavily, and
the British had five officers and twenty-one men
killed, and ninety -nine officers and men wounded.
The Dervishes were soon utterly routed. They
76

KITCHENER'S BATTLES
had fought bravely, but their fire was ineffec
tive, and the mounted men were with Osman
Digna and not present. It was a fine fight and
a striking success, but the Dervishes were hope
lessly outclassed by the well-trained forces op
posed to them, who were amply provided with
efficient guns and rifles. The Emir Mahmoud,
slightly wounded, was captured, and brought
before the Sirdar, where the following colloquy
is recorded to have taken place: The Sirdar:
"Why have you come into my country to burn
and kill?" Mahmoud: "As a soldier I obey the
Khalifa's orders, as you must the Khedive's."
The Emir also declared that he was not a woman
to run away!
The battle of the Atbara was the penultimate
blow at the power of the Khalifa Mustapha,
Kitchener, more than a soldier, a diplomatist
and searcher of the spirits of men, who had him
seK, disguised, speaking Arabic like a native,
walked among the Dervishes in the bazaars, had
prepared all well. Resourceful and strong-willed,
knowing what he wanted and resolved to secure
it, he would not budge an inch until he saw
whither he was going, and, like an old Roman,
he had built the roads his men should traverse,
and so, step by step, he was advancing towards
Khartoum. He had able heutenants who did the
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KITCHENER
fighting — Hunter, Gatacre, Broadwood, Max
well, Wauchope, Lyttelton, and many more.
There were risks to be run, but upon the success
of this campaign the future of Egypt hung.
Thinking of this, — it was after the Atbara, —
as a witness recorded, there was wrung from
Kitchener the exclamation, "My God! if I had
failed!" But where there is a soldier who spares neither
himseK nor those under him, and who carries
on the administration of an army as Kitchener
did, there is small likelihood of failure. It was
in May that preparations for the advance on
Khartoum began. At Fort Atbara three months'
provisions for 25,000 men were stored, ^nd at
Abadieh an arsenal and repair-shops were estab
lished for the flotillas. A second British brigade
was prepared for embarkation, and Gatacre took
command of the division thus constituted. The
total strength was 7500 British and 12,500
Egyptians. The Sirdar left for the front on August 13.
The flotilla rendered the utmost service as a
means of transport, and successive batches of
men were hurried forward. Wad Hamid was
passed, and reconnaissance showed that the
Khahfa had abandoned the forts at the Sha-
bluka Gorge, which is at the southern end of the
78

KITCHENER'S BATTLES
Sixth Cataract. The troops could have turned
them, and the Khahfa had reserved his strength
for the coming battle at Omdurman.
At that capital of the KhalKa stood the white
tomb of the Mahdi, which was first seen by the
reconnaissance party, who had pushed on to the
island of Jebel Rogan, which is about thirty-
four miles below Khartoum. It is said that Major
Staveley Gordon, General Gordon's nephew,
was the first to set eyes upon it. Intense heat
and violent storms, with terrific downpours,
marked the stages of the advance, of which El
Hajir, Wady Abid, Suruab, and Egeiga were the
stages, the last-named place being only six miles
from Omdurman. It was reached at about 1 p.m.
on September 1, and when the cavalry rode out
to the Jebel Surgham slopes, the whole army of
the Khahfa, some 50,000 strong, was discovered,
formed in five divisions, advancing to the attack.
But this advance soon stopped, and the Dervishes
were seen to be preparing their bivouacs and
camp-fires. It was bad generalship, for if they
had come on in force, before the Sirdar's troops
could deploy, the situation would have become
difficult for the latter. Meanwhile Commander
Keppel had gone forward with his flotilla, and had
landed a howitzer battery, which had opened
fire at three thousand yards and partly destroyed
79

KITCHENER
the dome over the Mahdi's tomb. The night was
one of anxiety in the Sirdar's camps, for the
Khalifa might, with much advantage on his side,
have attempted a night attack, and the men lay
fully dressed on the sand, with their arms beside
them. The total force with the Sirdar was then
about 22,000 men.
The troops stood to their arms about an hour
before sunrise on September 2, in anticipation
of an attack, but the Dervishes did not move,
and Kitchener resolved to advance. The bom
bardment from the gunboats was resumed, and
then the Dervish hosts were seen to be- in move
ment. The Sirdar's army was disposed upon a
curved front, its extremities resting on the Nile,
and the gunboats being on either fiank. The
Dervishes came on in great force and with mil
itary regularity from the left round the slopes
of Jebel Surgham, to attack the centre, while
a right attack, which was not pressed home, was
seen developing round the heights of Kerreri.
A battery of artillery and some machine-guns
inflicted great losses upon the Dervishes, but did
not stop their advancing. The British infantry
opened fire in volleys and independently, and
a rain of lead fell upon the Dervish spearmen,
who were advancing in rushes. When they came
within eight hundred yards this fire became very
80

KITCHENER'S BATTLES
deadly, and the ground was soon strewn with
the dead and wounded. Some of them ap
proached within two hundred yards, only to fall
before the pitiless fire. There were scarcely any
British casualties, until some Dervish riflemen
lodged on Jebel Surgham opened fire. Then
some of the British fell, but the enemy were soon
driven off. By 8 a.m. the Dervish attack had
slackened, and they were retiring rapidly, except
that on the right the KhalKa's son, Sheikh-ed-
Din, and Wad Helu attacked Colonel Broad-
wood in great force. There was much hand-to-
hand fighting, and the position would have been
serious K one of the gunboats had not opened
fire and driven off these brave but unequal
assailants. So ended the first stage of the battle. The sec
ond began with a cavahy mdlee on the left, in
which a lancer regiment charged a body of Der
vishes, and lost both officers and men. The enemy
were found in unexpected strength in a hollow
place, where the British mounted men were at a
disadvantage. WTiile this was in progress the
Sirdar had ordered, at 8.30 a.m., a general ad
vance on Omdurman, but it was then discovered
that the Khalifa, with about 40,000 men, was
behind the height of Jebel Surgham. Mac-
donald's brigade was attacked by some 20,000
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KITCHENER
men, preceded by Baggara horsemen com
manded by the Khahfa himseK. But the horse
men were swept away, and machine-gun and
rifle fire proved deadly to the close ranks of the
Dervishes, whose bodies soon strewed the plain.
Not a man got within three hundred yards of the
fighting-line. But now on the right other hosts were ad
vancing, and Macdonald wheeled about, re
ceiving reinforcements, and a pitiless fire was
opened, particularly by the Sudanese, under
whose hail of lead nothing could live. Mac
donald had handled his troops with masterly
skill, and had snatched victory from the jaws
of peril. The brigades of Lewis and Wauchope
were with him at this critical moment. The
slaughter among the Dervishes was fearful,
nearly 11,000 being killed, and as the troops ad
vanced and cut off the retreat of the main body
to Omdurman, the flight became a rout, and the
fugitives escaped to the south.
This was the final triumph, which the Sirdar
had won by masterly organization and prepara
tion, and by skiKuUy disposing his forces. Good
generalship, as we have seen, had also been
found in his lieutenants, to whom the actual
success in the figWng was very largely due. He
mentioned them all, and many officers, very
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KITCHENER'S BATTLES
liberally in his despatches. The Sirdar described
the result of the action as being " the practical
annihilation of the KhalKa's army, the con
sequent extinction of Mahdism in the Sudan,
and the submission of nearly the whole country
formerly ruled under Egyptian authority." The
power of modern armies had been demonstrated,
and not less of the fine administration of mili
tary means, both personal and material. The
KhalKa had failed as a general. If he had at
tacked at night, when British fire would not have
been so effective, or K he had remained within
his entrenchments and defences at Omdurman,
he would have imposed a harder task on his
assailants. The total loss in the Sirdar's army
was forty-eight killed and three hundred and
eighty-two wounded. The British killed were
two officers and twenty-five men, twenty-one of
them in the lancer charge referred to.
For these services Sir Herbert Kitchener was
created Baron Kitchener of Khartoum, and a
sum of £30,000 was awarded to him.
Omdurman was occupied, the KhalKa's Euro
pean captives were liberated, and the British
and Egyptian flags were hoisted at Khartoum.
The Khalifa had fled with the remnant of his
followers, the fighting was done, and nearly all
the British troops returned to Cairo.
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KITCHENER
Reference may now be made to the Fashoda
incident. On September 7, one of Gordon's old
steamboats, which was in the Khalifa's service,
returned to Omdurman, but to find a new flag
flying there. Her captain surrendered and re
ported that at Fashoda, on the WTiite Nile, he
had been fired on by a party of white men. This
was the expeditionary force of Major Marchand
and his Senegalese. The Sirdar thereupon pro
ceeded to Fashoda, and told the French officer,
who said he was acting under the order of his
Government, that the presence of a French force
was an infringement of the rights of Egypt by
the French Government. A very strained feel
ing arose out of this incident between the British
and French Governments, but after a long dip
lomatic correspondence the matter was amiably
settled, and Major Marchand and his troops
returned to France.
Lord Kitchener was still at Khartoum, build
ing a new city, and organizing a new adminis
tration to replace the vanished Dervish rule, of
which the last fragments had been crushed by his
heutenants, when he was summoned to act as
Chief of the Staff with Lord Roberts, who was
about to proceed, in December, 1899, to South
Africa to take up the command against the
Boers, after the weary movements and strange
84

KITCHENER'S BATTLES
blunderings of British generals on the upper
Tugela. In the Egyptian campaigns and the
conquest of the Sudan, brilliant as they were,
there had been hardly any opportunities for the
display of high strategy, tactical, skiU, or genius
for command. The Nile and the railway that
ran alongside it and crossed one of its great sin
uosities, had been the hne of approach. The
strategy was always direct and frontal, for the
desert protected both flanks. The great merit of
Lord Kitchener had been his talent for admin
istration, his foresight, his slow but certain prog
ress towards his object, and the rigid economy
with which he built up and maintained his army.
In South Africa the situation was entirely dif
ferent. There was no narrow limitation of space
or opportunity. The enemy was alert and elusive,
and though the business of maintaining the army
depended, in the new plans, on a single line of
railway, that line was long and exposed to attack
on every side. What Lord Roberts expected from
Kitchener, who had been appointed at his own
request, was not brilliant and rapid strategy, but
sure calculation and inflexible strength. Kitch
ener possessed the power of decision and dis
tinction, and he consistently eliminated the per
sonal factor, depending for success on energy,
organization, and numbers. The staff organiza-
85

KITCHENER
tion of the British Army was not complete, and,
as Chief of the Staff, Kitchener became Lord
Roberts's right-hand man, ready to undertake
any organizing work, such as the reorganizing
of the transport and intelligence departments,
or to implant energy where it was wanting.
As Chief of the Staff, Kitchener was not re
sponsible for the strategical plans or the general
ship, though he was not without influence on both.
These plans brought about the crossing of the
Orange River without fighting, the turning of the
Boers' front, the threatening of their communi
cations and of their capital, and the opening of
the whole country to the British to march where
they chose. There was no such impasse as had
been reached on the Tugela. The Modder Drifts
were seized by French and his cavalry, Cronje
was driven from his lines, and Kimberley was
reheved, though Cronje slipped through.
The Boers had been outmanoeuvred and cap
tured, but the blow had not fallen. In the busi
ness of the pursuit of Cronje, General Kelly-
Kenny was nominally in command, " but," said
Lord Roberts, "Lord Kitchener is with you for the
purpose of communicating my orders." In prac
tice Kitchener was the driving force, and when
Cronje had taken refuge at Paardeberg, Kitch
ener's idea was to rush his laager at once, an-
86

KITCHENER'S BATTLES
nihilate his force, and march straight on Bloem-
fontein. But Kitchener's resolution to attack has been
criticized on the ground that the object would
have been attained by occupying the surround
ing positions, concerning which it must be ob
served that Kitchener did not know what Boer
reinforcements might arrive. The actual attack
directed by Kitchener was certainly defective,
two out of four brigades being thrown away
in a frontal advance without cover and on the
wrong side of the river, while the flank attacks
were not in sufficient force, and orders were con
fused. This may be ascribed to Kitchener's des
perate eagerness to attack, and to his limited
tactical experience. His ambiguous status in the
field complicated the difficulty. The assault was
abandoned, and Cronje soon afterwards surren
dered. Subsequently Kitchener was charged with
the duty of repairing the railway and the bridges
over the Orange River.
The plans whereby Bloemfontein was occu
pied and Ladysmith and Kimberley relieved
were Lord Roberts's own. So, too, after a six
weeks' interval, there was the rapid advance by
which Johannesburg and Pretoria were occu
pied, the issue of the campaign being thus de
cided, though another leap was required which
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KITCHENER
carried Roberts to Komatipoort. Then Lord
Roberts, in December, 1900, returned to England,
and Lord Kitchener assumed the command.
During the previous months he had been actively
employed, and was concerned in Lord Methuen's
pursuit of De Wet, who once came very near to
capturing Kitchener himseK.
In February and March, 1901, Lord Kitchener
made efforts to conclude the campaign by nego
tiation, but President Kruger by cable coun
selled protracted resistance, and President Steyn
adopted the same hne, looking for some outside
intervention. Kitchener then, with the utmost
energy, set about a series of vigorous operations
by which the country was to be swept from end
to end, large numbers of mounted men being
required, but before they^arrived Eatchener had
delivered some shrewd blows at the enemy. The
blockhouse plan and the scheme of gathering
the civil population into camps were his. He
created a great organization, and the columns
of Gorringe, Crabbe, Henniker, Scobell, Doran,
Kavanagh, Alexander, and others carried out his
plans. It is unnecessary to describe the operations
which brought the war to a close. They were
prolonged and chequered, but brought about
the ultimate success of British arms and the
88

KITCHENER'S BATTLES
settlement of South Africa. For his services
Lord Kitchener was promoted to be Lieuten-
ant-General and General, was given a vis
county, and received the thanks of Parliament
and a grant of £50,000. For great strategy the
campaigns had offered no opportunities, and the
occasions for generalship in command were few,
but Kitchener had again proved himseK a won
derful organizer and administrator in the mih
tary sphere, and he possessed the supreme merit
of clearly recognizing the end, combined with
a precise and detailed knowledge of the means
by which it could be attained.

CHAPTER IX
THE MAN HIMSELF
Dull and tiresome, brilhant and wonderful,
— whichever his career may be, — Kitchener
himseK, Kitchener the man, the domestic unit,
the poor fallible human brother, must be inter
esting — interesting to the gossip and interest
ing to the peering and appraising psychologist.
What manner of creature is this tall, heavy,
fierce, and rather truculent-looking man who
strides about in the popular imagination with
the inexorableness of destiny and whose eyes,
brooding on the confusion of human disarrange
ments, are mystic with the propulsive force of
the Universal Will?
The little chalk-faced, mild-mannered clerk
loves to relate stories of Kitchener's iron disci-
phne and hugs himseK over any incident which
acquaints him with brutahtyof his hero's mind.
The least pugilistic Sunday-school teacher adores
in Kitchener quahties which in himseK, beyond
a doubt, would incur the everlasting torments of
divine displeasure. Ascetic and charming clergy
men, poets, painters, musicians, and philanthro-
90

THE MAN HIMSELF
pists, editors of Liberal newspapers, Sociahst
lecturers, pacifists, vegetarians, and the whole
company of those who compose the army of
Sweetness and Light, see in Kitchener not only
the Man of Destmy and the Man for "The Day,"
but a Man whose personahty is in itseK an excel
lence — as beguiling, enchanting, and intoxicat
ing as forbidden fruit.
Pubhcly everybody is ready to acquiesce in
the gospel of civilization, the gospel of Chris
tianity, and to say that the greatest of things is
love; but privately the citizen, whose furniture,
larder, and salary are the acrid envy of watchful
foes, is apt to consider the gospel of Christianity
an experiment in idealism and to hold the sterner
faith which has been so sedulously, frankly, and
successfully preached in Germany for the last
forty years. We must be invincible. Look to
your guns!
But is Kitchener of Khartoum, in fact, the
tremendous person of popular imagination? We
have aheady suggested that he is of a milder
brand. In a man so victorious and inevitable there
must be an element of Prussian sternness, K not
brutahty, and we may say at once that popular
imagination has something to go upon in its idea
of this British national hero pro tern. We shall
91

KITCHENER
tell two stories which justKy the public convic
tion. Kitchener can be excessively hard, and al
most inhumanly brutal. But this by no means
exhausts his character. There are other sides to
him. Indeed, one may say that his brutahty is
rather an accident of his ambition than one of
his original elements, for the man was nothing
of a buUy as a boy, and from youth to the present
day has been naturally and profoundly shy.
Ambition was the earhest manKestation of his
character. But even this distinguishing charac
teristic began its career modestly and tamely.
He wanted to swim well and ride weU, but he
never risked his boy's neck at either game. In
youth he made up his mind to pass an examina
tion. As a heutenant of Engineers his growing
sense of uncommon powers led him no farther
afield than map-drawing in Palestine. Here he
learned to know that the management of men is
not so difficult a thing as it seems to youth, and
IKe became a pleasanter adventure than the
classrooms of Woolwich had led him to suppose.
Then came Egypt, and with Egypt ambition was
in supreme command of Kitchener's soul.
A brother of the present writer was a cadet at
the Royal Military College of Sandhurst at a
time when one of Kitchener's brothers was on the
staff of lecturers. It happened one day — this
93

THE MAN HIMSELF
was in the early eighties — that my brother was
walking in the grounds of the college with Kitch
ener's brother, and as they went along the lec
turer said to the cadet, "My young brother has
just got himseK appointed to Egypt; he'U never
come out till he's at the top." This remark
amused my brother as a piece of family conceit,
for he had never even heard of Herbert Kitch
ener ; but it shows one that so early as 1884 the
future Sirdar of Egypt had impressed his brother
with the forcefulness of his ambition.
But there was an element of tenderness in
Herbert Kitchener during those hard and toil
some years, — an element which persisted long
after he was world famous and which possibly
exists to the present day. Among his relations
were two dear diminutive old Scotch ladies who
hved in Phillimore Gardens, Kensington, by
name the Misses Hutchinson, and Kitchener was
no dearer to these charming spinsters than they
to him. He wrote to them brightly and boyishly
by almost every mail, and whenever he returned
to London the house in Philhmore Gardens was
not only his regular headquarters, but the first
goal at which he aimed. Before he went to Egypt
for his advance to Khartoum these dear old
ladies presented him with a gold-headed swagger
cane, and when the advance was accomphshed
93

KITCHENER
and the photographer arrived to make a picture
of the general and his staff. Kitchener seated him
self in the centre of the group with this stick held
so ostentatiously that the old ladies in Kensington
could not fail to recognize it when the4)hotograph
appeared in the illustrated papers. That, I think,
is a charming touch in the man of blood and iron.
He sent them roses from Gordon's grave at
Khartoum and coats of the Khahfa from the
Sudan. When he returned to London in a blaze
of glory, the arrangements made for his recep
tion would not admit of his proceeding immedi
ately to the house of his old friends; but he wrote
to them in the midst of his lionizing, explaining
the reasons for his delay, and adding, "But I am
coming soon, and I hope you will give me a jolly
tea like the teas of old days — bread and jam,
and no people." They called him Herbert, pro
nouncing it "Hairburrt," and they would sit one
on either side of him, studying his bronzed face
with their small, smiling, shrewd eyes, teasing
him, chaffing him, adoring him, and giving him
sound advice. In their house he was like a school
boy, running up the stairs two at a time, whis
tling in his bedroom, going in and out just as he
pleased, and telling them such stories of his cam
paign as no one else in London ever heard —
stories, I am afraid, lost to the future biographer,
94

LORD KITCHENER

THE MAN HIMSELF
for the Misses Hutchinson are no longer the good
angels of mortahty.
These charming old ladies hved to see their
hero's success in South Africa, and I know a story
of Kitchener's setting out for the campaign which
deserves to be told. The spinsters, who rejoiced
in his peerage, thought it would be a fine thing
to send him a riding-whip for this campaign, and
they took cab to Piccadilly and ordered a very
handsome whip with a gold handle ornamented
with a coronet, the letter "K" and the word
"Pretoria." When the whip was ready to be
sent, they paid a second visit to the shop, a visit
of inspection, and examined the present with
minute carefulness and a slow, grudging, and
canny approval. "Yes," said the humorous-
minded tradesman, pointing to the coronet and
the "K," "I fancy old Kruger will be very well
pleased with it when he gets it into his hand," —
a jest which threw the old ladies into a condition
of the very greatest indignation, for they were
Scotch, and therefore something superstitious.
Kitchener once offered to give these faithful
friends one of the many gold caskets which had
been presented to him by the grateful corpora
tions of provincial cities. The old ladies consulted
together as to the acceptance of the gift. One
of them asked, "Do we need it?" The other
95

KITCHENER
said, "No, we certainly don't need it." "What
could we do with it?" asked the first. "Hum,"
rephed the contemplative other, "we could per
haps use it as a tea-caddy."
Other friends have been as greatly devoted to
Kitchener, and to these other friends he has
been equally faithful. When he was at Simla,
and at a time when he was exceedingly busy, one
of his friends died at Lahore. As soon as the news
reached him, Kitchener started off from Simla,
not to be present at the funeral, but to comfort
the widow of his friend, a woman for whom he
entertained great respect and affection. The
idea that Kitchener is a woman-hater is false,
and has its origin only in a busy man's natural
distaste for chatter and frivolity. It is said that
Queen Victoria challenged him on this question,
anxious to arrange a match for the triumphant
young general, and that Kitchener rephed, "But
I love one woman already, ma'am, and always
have loved her." Here was romance and mys
tery. The old Queen raised her head. "Who is
she?" asked Victoria. "Your Majesty," rephed
Kitchener. Some of Kitchener's most intimate friends are
women. I suppose, for instance, that few people
know more of his character than Lady Salisbury
and Lady Desborough, to name only two of his

THE MAN HIMSELF
friends among women. He was a great friend, as
we have said aheady, of Lady Curzon. That he
is not in any sense a lady's man is happily true,
but that he dishkes intelhgent, sympathetic, and
good women is entirely false. Moreover, to tell
a httle-known truth, he has been in love, and has
proposed marriage: but in this campaign he failed
to organize victory.
Two things have beaten Lord Kitchener, — a
woman and a pond. Of the woman we have said
enough; she is delightful, pretty, and very clear
headed; she hked K. of K., was proud of his
friendship, but could not be subdued by his wiU.
She is now married, and is one of the great host
esses of London.
With less restraint we can speak of the pond.
Lord Kitchener has three hobbies; he is a collec
tor, an architect, and a gardener. Above every
thing else he loves altering and improving a house
or a garden, particularly a house, and he really
does this difficult and dehcate work very well
indeed. At Simla he set about improving Snow-
don, the official residence of the commander-in-
chief, and succeeded in making this rather com
monplace and trivial building a very fine and
handsome palace. He made like improvements,
but on a smaller scale, in his country house at
Simla, Wildflower Hall. Here he built a fine
97

KITCHENER
hbrary, and panelled the waUs, embelhshing the
panels with the coats of arms of the great Indian
princes — a fine exhibition of good taste and a
telhng stroke in diplomacy. But he wanted to
improve the garden of Snowdon, and nothing
would satisfy him in the midst of the garden but
a pond. Now Simla is high up in the Himalayas,
and to make a pond in the Snowdon garden was
a more difficult matter than to construct the
dam at Assouan. But K. had spoken, and the
impossible was attempted. Every effort failed.
Kitchener came and surveyed the wreck, "Send
for a buffalo," he commanded. A buffalo was
brought up from the plains below, and for a num
ber of days walked round and round in the em
bryonic pond, puddling the soil. Then it fell over
the khud, or precipice, and perished miserably.
"Send for oxen," said K. Oxen came and tram
pled the resisting bottom of the postulated but
effectively expostulating pond, tramphng it,
trampling it, and trampling it till winter came,
when they died of pneumonia. To this day the
very beautiful gardens of Snowdon are waterless.
In his garden, wherever he may be. Kitchener
is accustomed to do a great deal of the work.
Officers who come to report to him are always
glad when the interview is conducted in this
fashion, for Kitchener is more human in a gar-
98

THE MAN HIMSELF
den, and when one walks at his side, even at six
o'clock in the morning when he begins his day's
work, the nerves are not called upon to bear the
strain of meeting his eyes. In his garden at Simla
he has expressed to officers very close to him the
pain it causes him to dismiss a man, even when
the offender is guilty of a serious fault. Without
compunction he gets rid of the inefficient and
the studiously stupid, but it really hurts him to
punish a good man who has blundered. In one
particular case of which I know, it was a matter
of days before he could make up his mind to
dismiss such a man.
About the eyes of Kitchener it may be said
without offence that the terror they inspire is
heightened by a squint which has tended to grow
more pronounced with age. The eyes are blue,
penetrating, and full of judgment; without their
irregularity they would be difficult eyes to face,
but with this irregularity they fill certain men
with a veritable paralysis of terror. Some one
who knows him very well has described to me
the effect of those eyes upon people who meet him
for the first time. "They strike you," I was told,
"with a kind of clutching terror; you look at
them, try to say something, look away, and then,
trying to speak, find your eyes returning to that
dreadful gaze, and once more choke with silence."
99

KITCHENER
Another person, a man of very great social im
portance, said to me, "I have never felt the least
dread of Kitchener; he has stayed with me, and
has been perfectly jolly and nice, entering into
any fun that was going on, and being as larky
and jovial as the youngest. Moreover, he tells a
story very well, particularly a story against him
seK. No, I have never experienced that feehng of
terror which he certainly inspires in many people,
men and women alike." Then after a pause, this
great nobleman said, "All the same, K he were
coming to inspect my regiment I should be fright
ened out of my hfe!"
It seems to me that the man's character is
excellently suggested by a phrase which a singu
larly clever and observant woman used in de
scribing to me the effect he produced upon her
mind. "He sits in a chair," she said, "as K it
were a throne," The man has natural dignity of
mind, and that dignity has been developed into
a distinct and sensible kingliness by the long
exercise of an almost autocratic authority. He
has never leaned on another man. He has never
consulted and taken advice. Always it has been
upon his own brain that his masterful will has
depended for the victory of his purposes.
But such men are sometimes frightfully con
scious of solitude; moments come to them when
100

LORD KITCHENER IN HIS ACADEMIC GOWN

THE MAN HIMSELF
they are bowed and dizzied by the burden of
responsibihty. "Ah, K you only knew," he said
to one of his closest friends in Egypt, "the awful
strain of having to make up one's mind in crisis
after crisis, knowmg that on that one decision
everything depends." Such moments have come
to him, and those who look can see the marks of
that tremendous strain visible in his face, which
is no longer alert, eager, and lean with the pacing
energy of his brain. On the whole, however, re
sponsibihty and authority have made him a
greater man than his parts would have suggested
to the most admiring of his friends forty years
ago. "K. is a wonderful administrator," one of his
friends told me, "but he is not otherwise an able
man." This is true. Kitchener is by no means,
for instance, a great general. Again, his states
manship has never advanced out of gun range,
because it is entirely without the genius which
trusts humanity. In consequence he is something
of a bungler, something of a blunderer. "In
Egypt," I was told, "he behaved like a great bull
in a china shop. We used to call him K. of Chaos.
The man was never any good except in making
an army and preparing for a campaign." I do
not think this judgment altogether a true one,
but it is sufficiently true to show that Kitchener
101

KITCHENER
is not the heaven-born genius of popular imagi
nation. He is a slow, thorough, painstaking, labo
rious, and determined organizer. He takes a long
time to get anywhere, but when he arrives the
man on the spot knows immediately why he has
come. He is a little conscious, perhaps, that soldiers
do not regard him as quite one of themselves.
He is said to be much more genial and human
among his civilian staff in Egypt than he has ever
shown himseK when holding a purely military
command. It is as K the man were always on his
guard with soldiers. Among civil servants, where
his talents are indisputable, he unbends, although
he always sits in a chair as K it were a throne.
Occasionally, even among his civilians, and even
at dinner, Eatchener can be ferocious. With
guests in his house, a lady or two at the table, he
has been known to handle a man so angrily and
pitilessly that it has been an ordeal of the nerves
for the women to remain.
I will now tell the two worst stories I know
about Kitchener, and get rid as quickly as possi
ble of this particular aspect of his character. One
is of Egypt and one of South Africa; both are
true. It happened that Kitchener, during his Egyp
tian command, wanted a certain bridge to be
102

THE MAN HIMSELF
built, and sent for an engineer to give him his
orders. WTien the command was finished, he
added, "I will inspect the bridge on  ," nam
ing a certain date. The engineer expressed his
doubt whether the bridge could possibly be fin
ished in so short a time. He was told that on that
day Kitchener would come to the spot and K the
bridge was not finished there would be trouble.
There the interview ended.
The engineer set off on his labour of Hercules.
He was young, devoted, and ambitious. He
worked by night and by day, did incredible
things, and at the moment when Kitchener
arrived had everything ready for the inspection.
His eyes shining with pleasure, his face wet with
perspiration, his hands still grimed with the anx
ious work of last touches, he advanced to Kitch
ener, saluted, and said, with a smile, "Well, sir,
we've just managed to do it in time." The only
answer he received, the dreadful eyes fixed upon
him, the voice cold with authority, was this:
"Yes; but you ought not to appear before me
unshaved." This is what I caU the Prussian element in
Kitchener's character, and for myseK I hate it so
much, detest it so spiritually, that I would give
much to add to my story that the engineer threw
the piece of cotton-waste, on which he was wip-
103

KITCHENER
ing his dirty hands, straight into K.'s face, even
K one had to record that he was subsequently
buried in close proximity to his bridge. Never
theless, I remind myseK that Kitchener is a man
burdened with responsibility, that the East is not
good for the liver, and that perhaps something
had occurred that day to put him out. But I
don't like to hear that when this story was retold
to Kitchener in after years he laughed heartily.
It would have been rather nice to record that he
covered his face with his hands.
The other story is this. During the war in
South Africa it was necessary on a certain occa
sion for Kitchener to make a quick and highly
perilous journey by train. A daring and high-
spirited youngster volunteered to drive the en
gine. The journey was accomplished. The vol
unteer driver, delighted that he had got the great
general safely through most dangerous country,
said to Kitchener as the Chief of the Staff passed
him standing beside his sweating engine — "We
weren't very long, sir, were we?" To which
K. of K. replied, scarce looking at him, "You'll
have to be quicker going back."
Well, it's horrid and odious and uncivihzed,
but this is undeniable, that such a spirit does get
things done, and without such a spirit no one
man perhaps could produce efficiency over a
104

THE MAN HIMSELF
tremendously wide and infinitely difficult field.
Kitchener, I think, is not brutal by nature, but,
as we have said, has acquired brutality in the
course of his journey from a big job to a bigger,
and from a bigger to a still bigger.
Of his personal courage there can be no ques
tion, nor of his sacrifice of himseK in the public
interest. If he has spared no man, never has he
spared himseK. If he has exposed other men to
danger, he himseK in the face of the most immi
nent death has remained calm and indifferent.
During a serious time in Egypt, only a year ago,
he was sitting one evening with some friends in
the courtyard of his house when a fanatic sud
denly sprang through the dusk into the midst of
the group and waving his right hand above his
head seemed as if he were about to hurl a bomb
straight at Kitchener's head. Kitchener, I am told
by two persons who were present, never moved
a muscle, never turned a hair. He remained
exactly as he had been a moment before, occupy
ing his chair as if it were a throne, and showing
not the smallest concern for his safety. The
madman, who carried no bomb, was caught and
removed, and K. of K. went on with the conver
sation. A German officer who accompanied the British
troops in Egypt said of Kitchener: "Personal
105

KITCHENER
danger does not seem to exist for him, although
he has nothing whatever of the braggart about
him. His entry into Omdurman was madly ven
turesome, but there was something almost comic
about his calm, when, for instance, he lit a ciga
rette, carefully considering which way the wind
blew, while bullets were whizzing all round him,
and this, in his case, is not playing to the gallery,
it is simply the man's natural manner."
The chief and distinguishing trait of his inner
most character is a love of altering things, a dis
position probably inherited from his land-
improving father. He never quite approves of
other people's work. His way is always the better
way. Once in Egypt, when two great ladies from
England were staying at the Agency, he took
these distinguished guests to see the magnificent
baU-room which he had just added to the rather
mean official residence of the British Agent. A
number of natives were on their hands and knees
pohshing the floor in imison. K. of K. regarded
them for a moment or two, and then striding for
ward told them that their method was the wrong
method and that the best way of polishing a floor
was in such a fashion. The natives altered their
positions, got ready to work in the new order,
and then started. The next moment they were
a broken and disorganized line, some of them
106

THE MAN HIMSELF
sprawling and roUing on the floor. The two ladies
laughed at this tableau. "Do it your own way,"
commanded Kitchener, and the scowl on his face
very effectually expressed his chagrin. Certainly
he disapproved of the spontaneous laughter of
his guests.
In many instances his alterations have been
great and valuable improvements. The hobby
nearest to his heart is architecture, and on
Broome Park, his place near Canterbury, made
famous by Ingoldsby, he has expended infinite
labour and no httle money. As an evidence of his
dihgence in this work and his thoroughness in
detail, it may be related that he spent several
days with Lord and Lady Sackville at Knole —
probably the most perfect house in the whole
world — taking impressions of the carvings with
sheets of wet blotting-paper. He would spend
hours at this work, a lady standing by with water,
and scarcely any words escaped his lips during
the operation except the command, "More
water." He wanted to see the interior of Rufford Hall,
and, staying in the neighbourhood, asked his
hostess to drive him over. The lady told him that
Lord and Lady Savile were away, and that for
a very good and somewhat dehcate reason the
house was never shown. Kitchener persisted in
107

KITCHENER
his request, but the lady persisted in her refusal.
One day, without a word to his hostess, he
ordered a car, drove over to Rufford, where he
found only an old woman in charge, and suc
ceeded in forcing an entry. He told the story at
dinner that night, laughing boisterously at his
ruse; but the lady, need we say, did not join in
his laughter.
His love for Broome is now the dearest affec
tion of his heart. During the alterations, which
he superintends very closely, he resides in an
unused gardener's cottage, among exceedingly
shabby surroundings, and hves with scarcely
more luxury than you find at the table of an agri
cultural labourer. "You don't know what it costs
me to leave Broome," he said, with real feehng,
the last time he went back to Egypt. The friend
to whom he made this remark told me that he
was like a schoolboy going back from dehghtsome
holidays to the grind of school.
With this love of altering, extending, and im
proving houses and gardens, there goes the cupid
ity of the collector. Lord Kitchener knows a good
deal about silver and china, a little about furni
ture, and he is a furious collector. I was told by
an incomparable judge that he has knowledge
but not taste. However this may be, he has,
beyond all question, the passion of a collector,
108

THE MAN HIMSELF
and will do almost anything to get possession of
an object of his desire. His friends frankly tell
him that he visits them chiefly for loot, and he
has been told to his face, good-humouredly of
course, that he is an incorrigible cadger. Many
people are strong enough to ignore his hints and
to refuse his beggings; but it is not so easy for
those who happen to be his official inferiors to
refuse him the piece for which he hints steadily
and with increasing emphasis, I am told that this
habit of the collector has grown with the years,
is exceedingly unpleasant, and appears to be
quite incurable. His collection of swords is said
to be one of the finest in the world.
Lord Kitchener is neither an effective speaker
nor a great writer. But he has two epigrams and
one humorous remark which he is said to fire off,
watching eagerly for their effect, at every fresh
European visitor to Cairo. The first sententious
epigram is this: "The future of Egypt is in
Abyssinia." The second: "I started life as a
consul: it has taken me forty years to get ^my
seK made a consul-general," The humorous re
mark, made to people who talk to him about
Egyptian art, is as follows: "I don't think much
of the art of a people who for four thousand years
have drawn cats in precisely the same way,"
It has been related of him — but I doubt the
109

KITCHENER
truth of the story — that to a man who began call
ing him Kitchener very soon after introduction,
the Sirdar put the sudden question, "Why not
Herbert, for short?"
Two other things really said by Lord Kitchener
may be recorded. Speaking at a dinner of the
East Anglians after his smashing of the Mahdi,
he said that he was dehghted to be welcomed
home by brother Anglians, who evidently did not
hold the ancient belief that a prophet had no
honour in his own country. "I cannot claim to
be a prophet," he continued, "but I have been
engaged recently in upsetting one, — one who is
now being received in his own country with a far
different and perhaps warmer reception than that
which I have the honour to receive to-night."
The other remark was made quite spontaneously
to a man of my acquaintance. Kitchener was
speaking of his early days, and of the impressions
made upon him forty years ago by all the beauty,
and silence, and mystery of the East. "Damas
cus," he said, "made the profoundest impression;
I continually see it even now, and exactly as I
saw it then — it presents itseK to my mind in per
fect miniature as K I were looking at the city it
seK, but through the wrong end of a telescope."
He does not seem to be a great reader. He has
studied with fair thoroughness the curious notes
110

THE MAN HIMSELF
of Richard Burton to the "Nights," and he is
occasionally interested by a modern novel, par
ticularly imaginative novels masquerading as
future history with the trappings of science. But
he is no judge of a book, and does not seem to
care a straw for the higher regions of literature.
One need not bore the reader by a summing-up.
It is fairly obvious that this man, who stands
just at present so totally and bracingly for the
whole British Empire, is neither romantic hero
nor heaven-sent genius. But also it is plain, I
hope, that he is neither the absolute tyrant nor
the bloodless machine of popular fancy. He is a
simple, not very amiable, and occasionally a dis
tinctly unpleasant official, who by the concentra
tion of his will in a narrow groove, and by inces
sant, slow, unsparing, and plodding labour has
achieved great and enormous victories. But
within the man himseK there is a certain dig
nity of soul, not white-robed and transfigured, it
is true, but stiff with buckram and heavy with
gold-lace, which gives a real weight, a genuine
authority, to the impression he makes upon
even considerable people.
Married to a woman who realized that history
is spiritual progress, and that lordship, in spite
of cocks' feathers and scarlet, is only the police
of civihzation. Lord Kitchener might have been
111

KITCHENER
one of the greatest officials in modern English
history. But he is a man who does not inspire
the love of women, he has no spiritual ideals, no
inspiration, and all his work has been charac
terized by so exclusive a mascuhnity that it is
almost certain posterity will not be greatly curi
ous about him. He will live in the shadows with
Welhngton, not in the sunlight with Nelson and
Napoleon. His service to his generation, however, has
been nobly rendered, the living world owes him
gratitude, and perhaps K the two little old ladies
of Phillimore Gardens could rise to tell us all they
know about him we might add to our gratitude
the warmer and kinder feeling of affectionate
admiration. For we know that K Kitchener has
made enemies, he has also grappled to his side
one or two great and steady friends who find in
him not only a powerful official and a remarkably
able administrator, but a man whose friendship
is a very pleasant possession.

THE END

(Ctie Stiber^ibe ^ce#^
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KITCHENER, Organizer of Victory
By HAROLD BEGBIE
This picturesque biography and illuminating character
study is the first satisfactory account of the life and
deeds of England's soldier hero that has been given
to the world. Mr. Begbie has had access to special
sources of information, and tells with authority and
with a wealth of picturesque detail the tale of Kitchen
er's birth and boyhood, his first service in the English
army, his fighting in the armies of France during the
Franco-Prussian war, his services in Egypt and in
South Africa. Illustrated. $1.2^ net.
THE SECRET OF
AN EMPRESS By COUNTESS ZANARDI LANDI
In this sensational book the author, who is the fourth
child of the Austrian Emperor, gives an intimate and
fascinating account of life at the Austrian court. Her
story throws a flood of light on the present generation
of the House of Hapsburg in Austria, particularly on
the life and mysterious death of the author's brother,
Prince Rudolph, and on the intrigue in regard to the
succession to the imperial throne, and is of extraordi
nary interest, especially at the present time.
Lavishly illustrated. 1^4.50 net.
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY