LORD KITCHENER
_"I never knew a man so fixed upon doing what he considered his
duty."_--CROKER PAPERS.
Soon after he had taken his chair at the War Office, Lord Kitchener
received a call from Mr. Lloyd George. The politician had come to urge
the appointment of denominational chaplains for all the various sects
represented in the British Army.
Lord Kitchener was opposed to the idea, which seemed to him irregular,
unnecessary, and expensive, involving a waste of transport, rations, and
clerks' labour. But Mr. Lloyd George stuck to his sectarian guns, and
was so insistent, especially in respect of Presbyterians, that at last
the Secretary of State for War yielded in this one case. He took up his
pen rather grudgingly and growled out, "Very well: you shall have a
Presbyterian." Then one of his awkward smiles broke up the firmness of
his bucolic face. "Let's see," he asked; "Presbyterian?--how do you
spell it?"
This was one of his earliest adventures with politicians, and he ended
it with a sly cut at unorthodoxy. A little later came another political
experience which afforded him real insight into this new world of Party
faction, one of those experiences not to be lightly dismissed with a
jest.
He discovered at the War Office that preparations had been made for just
such an emergency as had now occurred. The thoughtfulness and
thoroughness of this work struck him with surprise, and he inquired the
name of its author. He was told that Lord Haldane had made these
preparations. "Haldane!" he exclaimed; "but isn't he the man who is
being attacked by the newspapers?"
A chivalrous feeling which does not seem to have visited the bosoms of
any of Lord Haldane's colleagues visited the bosom of this honest
soldier. Someone about him who had enjoyed personal relations with
various editors was dispatched to one of the most offending editors
conducting the campaign against Lord Haldane with the object of stopping
this infamous vendetta.
"I know what you say is true," replied this editor, "and I regret the
attack as much as Lord Kitchener does; but I have received my orders and
they come from so important a quarter that I dare not disobey them." He
gave Lord Kitchener's emissary the name of a much respected leader of
the Unionist Party.
Thus early in his career at the War Office Lord Kitchener learnt that
the spirit of the public school does not operate in Westminster and that
politics are a dirty business.
At no time in his life was Lord Kitchener "a racehorse amongst cows,"
as the Greeks put it, being, even in his greatest period, of a slow,
heavy, and laborious turn of mind; but when he entered Mr. Asquith's
Cabinet he was at least an honest man amongst lawyers. He was a great
man; wherever he sat, to borrow a useful phrase, was the head of the
table; but this greatness of his, not being the full greatness of a
complete man, and having neither the support of a keen intellect nor the
foundations of a strong moral character, wilted in the atmosphere of
politics, and in the end left him with little but the frayed cloak of
his former reputation.
There is no doubt that his administration of the War Office was not a
success. In all important matters of strategy he shifted his ground from
obstinacy to sulkiness, yielding where he should not have yielded at
all, and yielding grudgingly where to yield without the whole heart was
fatal to success: in the end he was among the drifters, "something
between a hindrance and a help," and the efforts to get rid of him were
perhaps justified, although Mr. Asquith's policy of curtailing his
autocracy on the occasions when he was abroad had the greater wisdom.
I shall not trouble to correct the popular idea of Lord Kitchener's
character beyond saying that he was the last man in the world to be
called a machine, and that he solemnly distrusted the mechanism of all
organizations. He was first and last an out-and-out individualist, a
believer in men, a hater of all systems. As Sir Ian Hamilton has said,
wherever he saw organization his first instinct was to smash it. I think
his autocracy at the War Office might have been of greater service to
the country if all the trained thinkers of the Army, that small body of
brilliant men, had not been in France. Even in his prime Lord Kitchener
was the most helpless of men without lieutenants he could trust to do
his bidding or to improve upon it in the doing.
It will better serve the main purpose of this book to suggest in what
particulars the real greatness of this once glorious and finally
pathetic figure came to suffer shipwreck at the hands of the
politicians.
Lord Kitchener's greatness was the indefinable greatness of personality.
He was not a clever man. He had no gifts of any kind. In the society of
scholars he was mum and among the lovers of the beautiful he cut an
awkward figure. At certain moments he had curious flashes of
inspiration, but they came at long intervals and were seldom to be had
in the day of drudgery, when his mind was not excited. On the whole his
intelligence was of a dull order, plodding heavily through experience,
mapping the surface of life rather than penetrating any of its
mysteries, making slowly quite sure of one or two things rather than
grasping the whole problem at a stroke.
But there was one movement in his character which developed greatness
and by its power brought him to wonderful success and great honour;
this was a deep, an unquestioning, a religious sense of duty.
He started life with a stubborn ambition. As he went along he felt the
lightness of duty, and married his ambition to this Spartan virtue. He
remained in most respects as selfish a man as ever lived, as selfish as
a greedy schoolboy; nevertheless by the power of his single virtue, to
which he was faithful up to his last moments on this earth, he was able
to sacrifice his absorbing self-interest to the national welfare even in
a political atmosphere which sickened him at every turn.
You may see what I mean by considering that while he longed for nothing
so much in later life as the possession of Broome Park, and that while
his selfishness stopped hardly at anything to enrich that house with
pictures, china, and furniture, and that while he would shamelessly hint
for things in the houses of the people who were entertaining him, even
in the houses of his own subordinates, until the weaker or the more
timorous gave him the object of his covetousness, nevertheless for the
sake of his country he clung to the uncongenial chair in Whitehall, not
merely working like a cart-horse for what he considered to be his
nation's good, but suffering without public complaint of any kind, and
scarcely a private grumble, all the numerous humiliations that came his
way either from his own colleagues in the Cabinet or from a powerful
section of the newspapers outside.
I remember hearing from the late Mr. John Bonner, a most admirable
artist in many fields, an amusing account of an interview with Lord
Kitchener which illustrates the Field-Marshal's passion for his Kentish
home, and also sheds a telling light on the æsthetic side of his
character.
Mr. Bonner had been recommended to Lord Kitchener, who wanted amorini
scattered about the leafy gardens at Broome. Drawings were made and
approved: a few months afterwards the amorini were set up in the
gardens.
Soon came a summons to the presence of the great man. Mr. Bonner found
him a terrible object in a terrible rage. In his late years, be it
remembered, Lord Kitchener was not good to look upon. He appeared a
coarse, a top-heavy person; and in anger, his cross-eyes could be
painfully disconcerting.
Lord Kitchener forgot that Mr. Bonner was not only an artist of a
singularly beautiful spirit, but a gentleman. He blazed at him. What did
he mean by sticking up those ridiculous little figures in Broome?--what
did he mean by it?--with an unpleasant reference to the account.
The poor artist, terribly affrighted, said that he thought Lord
Kitchener had seen his drawings and approved of them. "Yes, the
drawings!--but you can't see the figures when they're up! What's the
good of something you can't see?"
The great man, it appeared at last, wanted amorini the size of giants; a
rather Rosherville taste.
"He had knowledge," said Lady Sackville, from whose beautiful house he
borrowed many ideas for Broome, and would have liked to have carried off
many of its possessions, particularly a William the Fourth drum which he
found in his bedroom as a waste-paper receptacle; "he had knowledge but
no taste."
Her daughter said to me on one occasion, "Every chair he sits in becomes
a throne," referring to the atmosphere of power and dignity which
surrounded him.
It is instructive, I think, to remark how a single virtue passionately
held--held, I mean, with a religious sense of its seriousness--can carry
even a second-class mind to genuine greatness, a greatness that can be
felt if not defined. In every sense of the word greatness, as we apply
it to a saint, a poet, or a statesman, Lord Kitchener was a second-class
and even a third-class person; but so driving was his sense of duty that
it carried him to the very forefront of national life, and but for the
political atmosphere in which he had to work for the last few years of
his distinguished service to the State he might have easily become one
of the great and shining heroes of British history. He had no taste; but
the impression he made on those who had was the impression of a great
character.
How was it that his greatness, that is to say his greatness of
personality, made so pitiable an end? What was lacking that this
indubitable greatness should have been so easily brayed in the mortar of
politics?
The answer I think is this: a single virtue can bestow greatness, and
the greatness may never fail when it has time and space in which to
express itself; but many virtues of intellect and character are
necessary when time is of the essence of the contract, and more
especially in a situation of shared responsibility.
Lord Kitchener knew many of his own failings. He was by no means a vain
man. Indeed he suffered considerable pain from the knowledge that he was
not the tremendous person of the popular imagination. This knowledge
robbed him of self-assurance. He tried to live up to the legendary
Kitchener, and so long as he could find men as brave as himself, but of
swifter and more adaptable intelligence, to do his bidding, he
succeeded: many of the public, indeed, believed in the legendary
Kitchener up to the day of his tragic death--death, that unmistakable
reality, meeting him on a journey, the object of which was to impress
Russia with the legendary Kitchener. But more and more, particularly in
consultation with the quick wits of politicians, he found it impossible
to impersonate his reputation.
I have been told by more than one Cabinet Minister that it was
impressive to see how the lightning intellects of Mr. Lloyd George and
Mr. Winston Churchill again and again reduced the gigantic soldier to a
stupefied and sulking silence.
A proposal would be made by a minister, and Mr. Asquith would turn to
Lord Kitchener for his opinion. Lord Kitchener would say, "It's
impossible," and close his lips firmly. At this Mr. Lloyd George would
attack him, pointing out the reasonableness of this proposal in swift
and persuasive phrases. Lord Kitchener, shifting on his chair, would
repeat, "It's impossible." Then in question after question Mr. Churchill
would ask why it was impossible. "It's impossible," Lord Kitchener would
mumble at the end of these questions. Finally, when nearly everybody had
attempted to extract from him the reason for his refusal to countenance
this proposal, he would make an impatient side movement of his head,
unfold his arms, bend over the papers on the table before him, and grunt
out, sometimes with a boyish smile of relief, "Oh, all right, have it
your own way."
He lacked almost every grace of the spirit. There was nothing amiable in
his character. Very few men liked him a great deal, and none I should
say loved him. I do not think he was brutal by nature, although his
nature was not refined; but he cultivated a brutal manner. He had the
happiness of three or four friendships with cultivated and good women,
but the beautiful creature whom he loved hungrily and doggedly, and to
whom he proposed several times, could never bring herself to marry him.
I think there was no holy of holies in his character, no sanctuaries for
the finer intimacies of human life. As Sainte-Beuve said of Rousseau,
"he has at times a little goître in his voice." One sees the fulness of
his limitations by comparing him with such great figures of Indian
history as the Lawrences and Nicholson: in that comparison he shrinks
at once to the dimensions of a colour-sergeant.
But in attempting to study a man of this nature, for our own learning,
we should rather observe how notable a victory he achieved in making so
much of so little than vociferate that he was not this thing or that.
He began life with no gifts from the gods; it was not in his horoscope
to be either a saint or a hero; no one was less likely to create
enthusiasm or to become a legend; and yet by resolutely following the
road of duty, by earnestly and stubbornly striving to serve his
country's interests, and by never for one moment considering in that
service the safety of his own life or the making of his own fortune,
this rough and ordinary man bred in himself a greatness which, magnified
by the legend itself created, helped his country in one of the darkest
hours, perhaps the very darkest, of its long history.
One could wish that behind this formidable greatness of personality
there had been greatness of mind, greatness of character, greatness of
heart, so that he might have been capable of directing the whole war and
holding the politicians in leash to the conclusion of a righteous peace.
But these things he lacked, and the end was what it was.
"Character," says Epicharmus, "is destiny to man." Lord Kitchener, let
us assert, was faithful to his destiny. And he was something more than
faithful, for he sanctified this loyalty to his own character by a
devotion to his country which was pure and incorruptible. Certainly he
can never be styled "the son of Cronos and Double-dealing."
LORD ROBERT CECIL
LORD ROBERT CECIL
(EDGAR ALGERNON CECIL)
Born, 1864. Educ.: at Eton and Oxford. Private Secretary to his
father, the late Marquis of Salisbury, 1886-88; called to the Bar,
1887; M.P. for East Marylebone, 1906-10; for Hitchin Division of
Herts, 1912; Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs, 1915-16;
Assistant Secretary for Foreign Affairs, 1918; Manager of Blockade,
1916-18. Author of _Principles of Commercial Law_ and _Our National
Church_.
[Illustration: LORD ROBERT CECIL]