Horatio Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl of Kitchener

“ Lord Kitchener being the idol of the British army and most highly esteemed by the nation generally for his powers of organization and administration, as well as for his military fame, the appointment increased the confidence of the British people in the Liberal Government and awakened their enthusiasm for war. ”

“ Lord Kitchener immediately realized the serious nature of the task confronting his country as an ally of France against the military power of Germany. His first step was to increase the regular army. The first call was for 100,000 additional men. This was soon increased to 500,000. Within a month there were 439,000 voluntary enlistments and then a further call was made for 500,000 more, bringing the strength of the British army up to 1,854,000 men, a figure unprecedented for Great Britain. ”

“ But it does not seem unlikely that history may condemn him for clinging to the voluntary principle too long and hesitating to make Englishmen do their duty, instead of relying endlessly on their casual inclination to perform it. Kitchener has ruled the British War Office practically as an autocrat. He brooked no interference, even from the Cabinet. Viewed from that standpoint, "K." can hardly be absolved from cardinal responsibility for British military failures. ”

“ It was fortunate that the name and services of Lord Kitchener were at the disposal of his country, for no other man enjoyed to such an unusual degree the trust and esteem of his compatriots. He was universally recognised as the man pre-eminently fitted to lead the nation in its hour of peril, and his perspicacity and sanity of judgment inspired general confidence. ”

“ It is certainly without precedent of even approximate magnitude in the annals of a non-conscript democracy. Lord Kitchener's accomplishments in other directions have notoriously not kept pace with his successes as a recruiting-sergeant. The shells affair can hardly fail to dim his reputation. The deficiencies of the voluntary system can not be called a failure directly chargeable to him, in that it has not brought forward men in quantity commensurate with the developed necessities of the campaign. ”

“ There was no other man then alive who, as head of the War Office, could have commanded so much of the confidence of the public, and that was in itself sufficient reason for Kitchener's appointment; nor was there anyone who had such first-hand knowledge of the military resources of the Empire as a whole. Within recent years he had examined on the spot the military problems of Egypt, India, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and East Africa, and from that knowledge the Empire was to reap great benefit. ”

“ As commander-in-chief he initiated more reforms than any of his predecessors, not excepting even Lord Roberts, who had the advantage of a lifelong knowledge of the Indian army. Kitchener not only succeeded in improving the central administration and the machinery for mobilization, but he also modernized the system of training, and gave a great stimulus to military education by establishing a Staff College in India. It is certain that without the reforms which he instituted India could not have given the Empire the assistance which she furnished during the European War. ”

“ These men may be honourable and excellent men, but they are essentially practical, and are guided by their head rather than by their heart, and they are often of immense service to the nation. Lord Kitchener has splendidly resolute blue eyes of this sort, but they are entirely different from the sinister blue eyes that are in nearly all the faces now shown. The one sort inspires you with confidence, the other with aversion. ”

“ Understanding his countrymen by instinct, he did not make a parade of efficiency; for the English dislike the symbols of dictatorship much more than dictatorship. They hate the crown and sceptre of the tyrant much more than his tyranny. They have a national tradition which allows of far too much inequality so long as it is softened with a certain camaraderie, and in which even snobs only remember the coronet of a nobleman on condition that he shall himself seem to forget it.
The other matter is much more important. Though the reverse of vivacious, Kitchener was very vital ”

“ 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. ”

“ But if the thing's as big as they say—the common talk is that Kitchener has prophesied three years of it, and it's very likely true—they'll be wanting every man who'll come in before they've done with it. ”

“ Lord Kitchener has always boasted that he scorned popularity. He has need for his philosophical temperament to-day, for there is no manner of doubt that his hold on the imaginations of his countrymen is less firm than it was when the war began. "K.'s" dramatic appointment to the War Office, in the earliest hours of the conflict, heartened the nation to an extraordinary degree. Britain had no army, Englishmen said, but it had Kitchener, who was a host in himself. His name alone was an asset which bred indescribable confidence. ”

“ There is, no doubt, an extreme section who would advocate a sterner attitude on our part, but they are not numerous, and their feelings are not lasting. The terms offered by Lord Kitchener, which are, in substance, identical with repeated declarations of policy on the part of His Majesty's Government, are generally regarded as a generous and statesmanlike offer, as one which, if firmly adhered to, will ultimately be accepted, but as an offer which we cannot afford to enlarge. ”

“ A delicate sense of the incongruous seems to have pervaded him; he is at his whimsical best when he sees himself in a ridiculous light. Lord Kitchener, one of the grimmest warriors ever to serve the British Empire, warmed to the man who made him the butt of a practical joke. ”

“ When Parliament reassembled on August 26th, Earl Kitchener made a statement in the House of Lords—his maiden speech, though he had been a Peer since 1898. As a soldier, he said, he had no politics, and his term as War Secretary was that of the new Army—for the war, but not for longer than three years, a term selected because others would then be ready to replace them. The Expeditionary Force, having advanced to near Mons, had then been for thirty-six hours in contact with a superior German force, and had maintained the traditions of British soldiers and behaved with the utmost gallantry. ”

“ But Kitchener will live in the hearts of the people—his true memorial is to be found in the serried rows of crosses in France and Flanders where so much of the army he called into being lies in consecrated dust that is "forever England." ”

“ Better surely that it should become annoyed with any one rather than the Government, whose patriotic duty, therefore, was to avoid unpopularity with more devoted vigilance than heretofore, if such a thing were possible.
One can imagine Lord Kitchener—somewhat weary {366} of discussions in this airy region, and sorely perplexed by all these cobwebs of the party system—insisting doggedly that his business was to make a New Army, and to come to the assistance of France, without a day's unnecessary delay. He must have the men ”

“ We still have to go to Germany for news about our own country. The latest reliable report is to the effect that there is now serious friction between King George and Lord Kitchener, the former having become alarmed at the raising of "Kitchener's Army." The War Minister, the King fears, is aiming at the throne, and it is now being recalled that Lord Kitchener, when a young man, was once told by a soothsayer, "K stands for King." ”

“ We have seen great figures all but vanish into the mist of neglect. But confidence in Lord Kitchener has remained constant through it all. Things may have gone wrong; the Government may have made mistakes; even the War Office itself may have made mistakes; yet the faith of the British people in the man of their choice has never been shaken for an instant. ”

“ 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. ”

“ With many, indeed with most, men similarly placed this might not have greatly mattered. There were plenty of officers of wide experience in Whitehall who could have posted him up fully in regard to points not within his knowledge. But Lord Kitchener had for many years previously always been absolute master in his own house, with neither the need nor the desire to lean upon others. ”

“ Kitchener knows how to handle disagreeable people who are fighting for their homes and their liberties, and we must let on that we are merely imitating Kitchener, and have no national interest in the matter, further than to get ourselves admired by the Great Family of Nations, in which august company our Master of the Game has bought a place for us in the back row. ”

“ No living English general, not even Lord Roberts, had ever had under him in war so many troops as Lord Kitchener led into the field in 1898, when he marched to Omdurman 8,200 British and 17,600 Egyptian soldiers, with sixty-four field guns and Maxims. ”

“ This has now been changed and Kitchener insists that both officers and men shall regard themselves as property of the Empire, that the exposure of a single life to unnecessary hazard is a breach of discipline. ”

“ Asquith's Government to its foundations. Lord Kitchener himself, the popular idol for whom the press had clamoured at the beginning of the war, was deposed from his shrine in ultra-patriotic hearts because he had devoted himself to the raising of armies more than to the making of munitions. ”

“ In the early days of the European War (1914-1918) he was of great assistance to Earl Kitchener, the secretary of state for war; for no one had a clearer perception of administrative necessities, or a more intimate knowledge of the army generally. He was a great worker, and was still on duty in his high position when he died in London on 25 October 1914. He married in 1887 Ida de Courcy, daughter of George Tomlin Gordon, J.P., of Cuckney, Nottinghamshire. There were no children of the marriage. ”

“ I retain the most profound belief that, had I yielded to these violent solicitations, the whole Allied Army would have been thrown back in disorder over the Marne, and Paris would have fallen an easy prey into the hands of the Germans.
It is impossible to exaggerate the danger of the situation as it existed. Neither on this day nor for several subsequent days did one man, horse, gun, or machine gun reach me to make good deficiencies.
I refused. This brought Lord Kitchener to Paris, where I met him on September 1st at the British Embassy. ”

“ There might be much more elegance and poetry in a shop under William Morris than in a regiment under Lord Kitchener. But the difference is not in the persons or the atmosphere, but in the aim. The British Army does not exist in order to pay Lord Kitchener. ”

“ If I look for the roots of Lord Kitchener’s greatness, I trace them to intense ambition to succeed, to make the most of his opportunities—above all, to the incessant desire to work and fill every hour of his days with something done. ”

“ Kitchener had always maintained that the only possible solution of the problem of the Nile valley was to advance into the Sudan and to defeat the Dervishes; and for the next four years he devoted himself to the preparation of the Egyptian army for that task. He attracted to the service of that army a body of young, able, and energetic British officers, before whom he set, both by example and precept, a high standard of keenness and enterprise. ”

“ But a new Secretary of State as a rule has the time, and is willing, to study questions of organization and policy closely before embarking on fresh projects. Lord Kitchener, however, arrived with certain preconceived ideas and cramped by defective knowledge of the army system. He had scarcely served at home since he had left Chatham as a young subaltern of the Royal Engineers. In Egypt, in India, even to a great extent in South Africa, the troops coming from the United Kingdom with which he had been brought into contact had been regulars. ”

“ It is not a pleasing name for the greatest volunteer army in the history of the world; for more than three millions of toughened, disciplined fighting men, united under one flag, all parts of one magnificent military organization. And yet Kitchener's own Tommies are responsible for it, the rank and file, with their inherent love of ridicule even at their own expense, and their intense dislike of "swank." They fastened the name upon themselves, lest the world at large should think they regarded themselves too highly. ”

“ He remarked, however, that he felt sure that much that was good would be called into being by the military government, which they would not desire afterwards to rescind. But the People would have it in their power to decide in every case.
A desultory discussion followed now, and Lord Kitchener urged that the Governments should make a proposal in accordance with what he had suggested; and both the Presidents replied that the Governments, according to the constitutions of the Republics, were not qualified to make any proposal whereby the Independence of the Republics should be touched. ”