LORD KITCHENER
At the battle of Omdurman, fought on September 2, 1898, the Dervishes
had 10,800 killed and some 16,000 wounded; the losses of the British and
Egyptian forces amounted to only 47 killed and 342 wounded.
This fact must be borne in mind in considering the character of that
enormous Kitchener legend which grew up—or rather started up almost in
a single night—late in the Nineties. At the beginning of the decade the
name of Herbert Kitchener conveyed nothing to people outside an extremely
narrow military and diplomatic circle; a year or two later vague rumours
of some extremely capable soldier, a discovery of Lord Cromer’s, the very
man to regain the Sudan and “avenge Gordon,” began to circulate; by the
middle Nineties the new Sirdar had established a certain definite repute
as a strong man who would stand no nonsense from anybody, and who had
even terrorised an unfriendly Khedive; in 1896 there began to be talk
about the expedition authorised by the Government on Mr. Chamberlain’s
suggestion; the next two years the papers were at intervals interested
in the building of the desert railway which was to be Kitchener’s
instrument for the reconquest of the Sudan. Then came news, on the Good
Friday of 1898, of a considerable victory at the Atbara; and after, for
some months, there was almost silence. At last it was gloriously broken.
A great battle had been fought and won outside Omdurman, the mushroom
capital of the Khalifa, erected opposite the ruins of Khartoum on the
other side of the Nile. The Dervishes had attacked with all their force;
they had been utterly defeated; and, though the Khalifa and the remnants
of his army had got away, his power had evidently been broken for ever.
Khartoum was ours, Gordon had been splendidly avenged, and the reign of
civilisation in the home of an aggressive barbarism was now assured.
Kitchener, who had planned every detail of the business, and had ended it
by violating the Mahdi’s tomb and throwing the body of the false prophet
(parted from his head) into the Nile, suddenly emerged from the status of
a comparatively unmarked man to that of the “greatest living soldier.”
The first fever had hardly died away when excitement, and with it the
renown of the successful General, was intensified by the great irony
which is summarised in the word “Fashoda.” Kitchener, going forward
on the Nile from Omdurman, was met by a small steel rowing-boat,
which proved to contain a Senegalese sergeant and two men, charged
with a letter from Major Marchand, who had fought his way from the
Atlantic to the Upper Nile, and now lay encamped at Fashoda, right
on the Cape-to-Cairo line. Major Marchand presented his compliments,
congratulated General Kitchener on what he had heard was an uncommonly
fine victory, and would be honoured, charmed, and even ravished to
welcome him at Fashoda under the shadow of the tricolour.
[Illustration: LORD KITCHENER.]
Here was a pretty kettle of fish, with the prospect of a considerable
amount of fat in a truly terrible fire if anything went awry in the
cookery. Kitchener had been tested as a soldier; he was now to prove
himself as a diplomatist. Many a British officer and gentleman, charged
to the teeth with good form, might have started there and then a European
war. But Kitchener, whose manners were sometimes sufficiently brusque
where his own countrymen were concerned, had very fortunately much
tact when dealing with foreigners, and especially when in contact with
Frenchmen. He spoke their language not only accurately but with grace
and fluency, and it almost seemed as if the use of that idiom dissolved
much of the ice which generally abounded in his neighbourhood. During
the Great War not his least service was the establishment of thoroughly
good relations with the French high command; they not only trusted in
him, as one who knew, and knew that they knew, but they liked him. It was
not only that they never forgot that he had been a volunteer in the war
of 1870, but they discovered in the grim Field-Marshal something more
sympathetic than they could find in British officers of ordinarily far
more expansive manner. Kitchener, on his part, had no doubt something in
excess of the natural interest and friendliness which (other things being
equal) most men entertain for foreigners whose language they speak well.
He had a real admiration for French qualities in general, a still greater
admiration for French military qualities in particular, and an admiration
greater still for an individual French soldier so transparently brave and
chivalrous as Marchand. “I congratulate you,” he said, in shaking hands
with the Major, “on all you have accomplished,” meaning the terrible
march across Africa, in which a fifth of Marchand’s little force had
perished. “No,” was the French soldier’s reply, “the credit is not to me,
but to these soldiers,” pointing to his troops. “Then,” said Kitchener in
describing the interview, “then I knew he was a gentleman.”
It was a difficult business, that of getting the gallant Marchand to
consent, helpless as he was, to the replacement of the French by the
Egyptian flag. But the thing was done, and done in such a way that,
though there might be chagrin, there was no hurt of that kind that
festers in a proud heart: years after Kitchener and Marchand could meet
without either feeling the smallest awkwardness. Indeed, not for the
first time, soldiers proved themselves better at the diplomat’s trade
than the diplomats themselves. The real peril of Fashoda was due to
the professional speechifiers; and the embitterment of Anglo-French
relations, which long survived the formal settlement of this affair,
might well have been averted had statesmen, comfortably seated in
palace-offices in a northern latitude, imitated the courtesy and
restraint of two war-worn and nerve-racked men of war, fretted by the
hundred little miseries of one of the most detestable regions of tropical
Africa.
It was Omdurman and Fashoda that made the Kitchener legend, and
Kitchener’s part in the Boer War scarcely added to it. Critics might say
that the dispositions at Omdurman were faulty, and that though Kitchener
was the prince of military organisers, he was not, and never would be,
a great general in the field. The people would not have it. They had
made up their mind that he was a great man; they went on thinking he
was a great man; and many years later, when behind the scenes every
small detractor was sneering at the “Kitchener myth,” the general public
suffered no smallest shadow of doubt to creep over its full faith in
him. He had carried out a clean job cleanly, winding up by a tremendous
and final success a business which had been marked by one tragic failure
after another. He had achieved, for less money than he had promised to
spend, a complete victory, while others had merely added recklessly to
the National Debt while subtracting heavily from the national prestige.
The critics might say that Kitchener had much luck, that he profited by
the efforts of those who preceded him, that means were available for his
campaign which were beyond the reach of others. All this was nothing to
the public. They saw a great success, and they honoured the man who had
accomplished it, all the more because they had been accustomed to connect
with defeat all the place-names in his itinerary of triumph.
But the main point of the whole thing was that summarised in the opening
paragraph: “Dervishes, 10,800 killed, 16,000 wounded; British and
Egyptians, 47 killed, 342 wounded.” Had Kitchener’s victory been dear
in life the whole glamour of the business would have been absent. For
the British people at that time took an interest in war rather like a
virtuous spinster’s interest in wickedness. They liked to hear about
it, to talk about it, to feel the thrill of it. But they did not like
it to come too near their own homes. Their idea of a good kind of war
was one waged against a barbarous foe on a picturesque far-away terrain;
one which would enable the Prime Minister, in proposing the thanks of
Parliament to the successful general, to talk about “thin red lines”
creeping beside gorges that would appal a Canadian trapper, or scaling
mountains which would terrify an Alpine guide, until they had “planted
the standard of St. George upon the mountains of Rasselas,” or some
equally interesting range. They liked the foe to come on bravely but
rather injudiciously, and to be “mown down” by machine-guns that never
jammed. They liked him to be easily surprised and bamboozled, and then
they paid the highest compliments to his “unavailing heroism”; Mr.
Kipling probably compensated him with a poem in cockney dialect. But
if, declining himself to be surprised and bamboozled, the barbarian
succeeded in surprising and bamboozling our own men, we are very apt
to describe the ensuing disaster as a “treacherous massacre.” It was,
perhaps, this dislike of unobliging enemies, no less than our unmixed
joy over the disasters of any foreign force in similar circumstances,
that contributed to the want of affection for us on the Continent.
However that may be, it is certain that a great part of the popularity
of Omdurman was due to the fact that it was an amazingly cheap victory
of discipline and apparatus over barbaric and comparatively ill-equipped
valour; and no small degree of Kitchener’s prestige was accounted for
by the popular comparison of the tiny cost in life of his great feat
with the large outlay, in blood as well as in money, of some of his
unsuccessful predecessors. The fact was of enormous importance, both in
the South African War and later. People always felt that Kitchener could
do things by a kind of magic if they were do-able that way, and were
thus reconciled to heavy loss when it arrived to troops for which he had
responsibility. It was felt that he had no motive but to get results at
the very lowest cost; that he would spare neither himself nor another
in pursuing that purpose; and that no influences of any kind—personal,
political, or social—would ever be allowed to interfere with his ideals
of military economy and efficiency.
The public, as usual, was perfectly right in its instinct in all matters
which it was competent to judge. It was less right, of course, when
it attempted to appraise the military genius of Kitchener. Yet it was
less wrong, probably, than the professed critics who in the Great War
concentrated on the inevitable shortcomings of a man past his prime,
in an unfamiliar environment, surrounded by politicians, nervous of
public opinion in a country with representative institutions, who had to
build up from the beginning the immense organisation needed for such an
effort as that to which this country was committed. When all is said of
these shortcomings, the fact remains that the only British soldier who
foresaw the duration of the war, and the means necessary to bring it to a
successful conclusion, was one who had spent only a few months in Europe
since his early manhood, who had never handled white troops on a great
scale, and had had no opportunity of applying himself to those problems
which had been the life-long occupation of German and French generals.
The marvel was not that Lord Kitchener made mistakes, but that he was
able to form so just a judgment of the grand contours of the enormous
affair with which he was called at a moment’s notice to deal. Judged only
by that vast experiment, the greatness of the man is still apparent.
But it would be quite unjust so to judge him. The public instinct was
correct in fastening on the campaign that culminated at Omdurman as a
supreme illustration of his qualities. They were less those of a great
commander in the field than of a patient planner, plotter, and organiser,
a super-sapper and miner, the manager of a great military business. From
first to last he was always the engineer, the mathematician, and the
business man; and if at the last he appeared less a business man than at
the first, it was only because he was that kind of business man who must
have all the threads in his own hands, and the threads of the last great
business were too numerous for any one pair of hands to hold.
It was not so in the Nineties. Then Kitchener had a measurable task
and immeasurable energy; he could do everything himself, and anything
that he could do himself was well done. One most authentic proof of his
greatness was his choice of instruments; “Kitchener’s men” have always
shown themselves good for something, and generally good for most things.
Another was the manner in which he impressed his personality on all
who came near him. It is easy and safe to talk about the absurdity of
the “Kitchener myth” in general society; the experience is much more
embarrassing when an old officer of Kitchener happens to be present.
For the grim man who was so ruthless to incompetence, one might almost
add so cruel to misfortune, the man who treated ill-health as a kind
of crime, and marriage as a kind of treason, somehow managed to get
himself loved. That part of the Kitchener legend which represented him
as without heart or bowels was, indeed, false. He was inexorable in
business, and in general society he always assumed, partly out of shyness
and partly from policy, a defensive armour that was most difficult to
penetrate. But at bottom there was not a little geniality in his nature,
and among intimates he was often cheerful and sometimes garrulous; the
habit grew on him with years, and in most serious times, and in the
midst of intensely serious discussions, he would frequently develop a
curious irrelevancy and small-talkativeness. At no time did he like to
be alone; if he did not talk himself—and sometimes he indulged a mood of
strict taciturnity—he liked to have someone to talk to him. And, being
an autocrat, he always preferred that the somebody should be one who
would not take offence if suddenly snubbed for doing what he was there
to do. There are kings who love the society of great lords as near as
may be to their own station, and there are kings who prefer for their
intimates and confidants men of inferior standing. Lord Kitchener was
a potentate of the latter kind, and for the most part the true man was
only seen by people who were in effect little more than members of his
suite. The chief exceptions were a few favoured generals, and the few
men, and the fewer women, who had the privilege of being his friends in
general society. With such he could be utterly charming; and he had also
a way of getting into the affections of their children: one little girl,
now a mother herself, used always to say her prayers at his knee when
he was a visitor at her father’s house; and the Grenfell boys were on
small-brotherly terms with the grim Field-Marshal. Kitchener, in short,
had a very human heart, and a quite human longing for affection. His
celibacy was partly a matter of accident and partly of principle: he
disliked extremely the idea of a married soldier; he seems to have shared
Athos’ view that a dying warrior should cry with his last breath “_Vive
le roi_,” and not murmur, “Adieu, my dear wife.” Thus in South Africa he
would allow none of the married officers to be joined by their wives,
and once in a general company, on hearing of the marriage of one of his
men, he burst into an angry tirade. With such a view of the vocation of
soldiering, and with the mere fact of so much of his life being passed
in remote places, it is small wonder that his own marrying age went by.
But, though in his later years he may not have regretted the lack of
a wife, he certainly felt the want of children, and realised somewhat
pathetically his own loneliness.
But this gentler side was known to very few indeed, and only guessed by
a few more. To the majority of those who met Kitchener, even frequently
and in some intimacy, he appeared until the very last years of his life a
man of one idea and no emotions. The truth was rather that his emotions
were mostly in complete subjection to his will, while the idea exercised
a despotic domination over his whole being. There was really something
of the old anchorite in this very modern and secular person, and it is
not altogether irrelevant to recall that in his early days he was vividly
interested in small minutiæ of Church ritual.
“I have heard him indulge in coarse ungentlemanly emphatics,
When the Protestant Church has been divided on the subject of
the proper width of a chasuble’s hem;
I have even known him to sneer at albs, and as for dalmatics,
Words cannot convey an idea of the contempt he always expressed
for them.”
The young Kitchener was far from sharing the sentiments of Gilbert’s
latitudinarian hero. He would have discussed albs with fervour, and
dalmatics with reverence, and would have seen nothing more ridiculous
in caring about the size of a chasuble than about the strength of a
platoon. He would have argued, or rather felt, that discipline, dogma—in
other words, shape, consistency, and fighting unity—were as necessary
in affairs of the Spirit as in secular life. In other days and other
circumstances he might well have been either a peaceful abbot or the
head of an order of religious knights; there was deep in his nature
that passion for self-immolation which made the most businesslike
people monks, as well as that passion for meticulous order and method
which made monks the most businesslike people of their time. His other
passions, probably, were not strong; strong or weak, they were wholly
under control. He hated incontinence in any form. The effusive youth who
called him “Kitchener,” and was met with the cool reply “Perhaps you’d
rather use my Christian name,” was not more discouraged than the swearer
of oaths or the teller of profane or unseemly anecdotes. To Kitchener
might be applied the eulogy of Clarendon on Charles I: “He was so severe
an exactor of gravity and reverence in all mention of religion, that
he could never endure any light or profane word, with what sharpness
of wit soever it was covered; and ... no man durst bring before him
any thing that was profane or unclean.” Sir George Arthur has remarked
on the mingled astonishment and irritation with which he listened to a
questionable performance at Cairo, given on an occasion when official
reasons obliged him to be present; and there was something hugely
disconcerting in the manner in which he received a jest of doubtful taste
made in general society. His attitude was too well known for such a thing
to be a possibility among his own intimates.
It has been said that the man who is not afraid to die is lord and
master of all other men. Equally true is it to say that the man who is
not afraid to live according to his own plan will always dominate those
who yield to fashion in opinion, to social modes, or to the weaknesses
of their own natures. Kitchener’s peculiar power was due to his immense
self-discipline. He could hardly be called, in the real sense, a military
genius; Roberts was his superior as an intellectual soldier, and among
his own subordinates there were men more richly endowed even in those
qualities he really possessed in large measure—the qualities of the
organiser which were so signally shown in the long preparations for the
triumph, so swift and sure in its final realisation, of Omdurman. But
other soldiers were sometimes off duty. Kitchener was never off duty. The
moment one task was done he was preparing himself for another; he was
that kind of moral athlete who never permits himself a day’s departure
from strict training. Practically this rigidity has its dangers; there is
such a thing in life, as in sport, as getting stale from over-fitness;
and when the final test of Kitchener’s life came it might perhaps have
been well for him and for others if he had wasted (as he would have
thought it) a little more time during his prime. For, with all his
painfully acquired lore, he lacked the full knowledge of men, and in
whole departments of things he could only oppose an enormous innocence
to people grown old in wile. But in the meantime he gained indefinitely
in influence through his almost inhuman absorption in soldiering, his
complete indifference to money, society, and everything men prize as
soon as their purely material desires have reached saturation point.
He received full credit for the qualities which were really his. He
was conceded some qualities which, in fact, he did not possess. He was
trusted as the final court of appeal on all questions relating to the
East, even those affecting parts of the East with which he was really
not familiar, for it is our habit to think that a man who has lived in
Suez must in some mysterious way know much about Bombay. He was regarded
above all as “straight,” and justly so, for, though habituation to
Eastern conditions had given him in minor matters some touch of Oriental
guile, he was, in all great things, the soul of truth, and in everything
the essence of probity. But there were occasions on which his great
prestige was something of a disadvantage. It was assumed that on all
military and Eastern questions Kitchener must be right and all other men
wrong, and that he must be especially right whenever his opinion happened
to clash with that of a politician. A good many things might have gone
better had not the infallibility of Lord Kitchener become a journalistic
dogma, to be disputed only at the cost of excommunication. In the same
way the magic of his personality was used to give weight to a certain
set of political ideas. It was so used without collusion or privity or
consent on his part; all his life he had an almost superstitious terror
of politics, and no hint of sympathy with one party or reprobation of
another ever crossed his lips. But it is not beyond the ingenuity of
politicians to convey an impression without making a statement, and they
so contrived matters that a good many people, while honouring him as a
soldier and recognising him as a high-minded public servant, watched him
with a certain strained attention. It needed the Great War to reveal
to the working classes the true nature of the man and the absolute
singleness of his aims. Then they were convinced, and he had no heartier
admirers than the working men, who honoured his name, and trusted his
word, above all other war-lords’.
But though Kitchener was in every sense the farthest removed from a
politician, he had many of the qualities of a statesman, and his work at
every period of his career (and at no period more than during the Great
War) cannot be properly measured solely by his military achievements. We
have seen his statesmanship at work at Fashoda, but it had its influence
at every stage of his career. If the Kitchener legend, whatever measure
of falsity mingled with its truth, was of immense value in sustaining
the spirit of England in the great ordeal, it was not less useful in
vitalising the Alliance. Frenchmen felt that they had in Kitchener
someone who understood the real nature of the vast transaction before
them; someone who would not yield to the traditional English conception
of Continental war as colony-seizing and island-collecting, but who, on
the other hand, knew in his very bones that the thing must be fought out
on the main battlefield, and that no showy successes elsewhere would
avail against defeat in that sombre theatre. The visit to Paris, in the
gloomy days before the Marne, was that of a soldier who understood war
on the great scale, and was understood at once by men grown grey in the
study of war of that kind. Kitchener’s work at the War Office can never
be measured by shells and machine-guns; the greatest part of it was that
of a military foreign minister, able to speak a language unknown to a
civilian Secretary for Foreign Affairs.
It is this latent quality of statesmanship which makes one wonder whether
Lord Kitchener would not have done even greater things for the Empire had
it been his lot to spend more time at its heart and less in the outer
marches. But his fate was decided partly by his circumstances and partly
by his peculiar constitution. He could only expect promotion by taking
jobs that nobody else wanted, and he had a horror of cold weather which
would have made continuous residence in a northern latitude insupportable
to him. Once he got the label of the soldier of the outer Empire it stuck
to him, and thus it happened that the Englishman with the broadest
military outlook of his time never faced, until he was called to the
greatest of all tasks, a military problem of the largest kind. His
own view of himself is well known. He looked forward, just before his
death, to tasks rather of a statesmanlike than a military kind; and it
is permissible to distrust that optimism which professed, when the news
of the _Hampshire’s_ loss came, the comfortable belief that he had done
his country all the service of which he was capable. For there was much
in the man which would assuredly not have been useless in the final
liquidation of accounts; and, even had no specific employment been found
for his talents, the mere force of his living example would have been
valuable. In the presence of one who had shown such large fidelity, such
noble disdain of the objects of selfish desire, such self-forgetting
devotion to a trust, it would have been more difficult for faction and
self-seeking to display themselves unashamed. He is too recently dead
for his spirit to work on this generation as it will, doubtless, on men
still unborn. But alive he might have reminded the masses that there can
be true greatness in great place, and people in great place that true
greatness is a matter of a man’s soul and not of his station.