Horatio Herbert Kitchener

“ Immediately after the peace he went to India as commander-in-chief in the East Indies, and in this position, which he held for seven years, he carried out not only many far-reaching administrative reforms but a complete re-organization and strategical redistribution of the British and native forces. On leaving India in 1909 he was promoted field marshal, and succeeded the duke of Connaught as commander-in-chief and high commissioner in the Mediterranean. ”

“ On a Letter to Ruskin.
Kate Greenaway to Ruskin
What a fuss there has been about Sir Herbert Kitchener!—I like it.—He must have felt it was very nice for people to be so glad. I like a great deal made of people who do things.
In the same strain she had written of another hero to Miss Dickinson the year before:—
I’m very much impressed by Lord Roberts’ Indian book. I met him many years ago at a children’s party at Lady Jeune’s. She told us we were rival attractions and the little Princes and Princesses couldn’t make up their minds which of us they wanted to see most. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Forces mightier than they had settled forever the question of war.
And when hostilities actually began an incredulous America knew they would be over in three months. Anybody with a piece of paper and a pencil could prove that they could not last. It took all of Kitchener's prestige to persuade society that the fighting would keep on through the winter, and his prediction that it would continue three years was received as the error of a reporter or the opinion of a professional soldier who overlooked the economic impossibility of a long war. ”

“ It is of the nature of national heroes of Kitchener's type that their admirers are unjust to them. They would have been better appreciated if they had been less praised. When a soldier is turned into an idol there seems an unfortunate tendency to turn him into a wooden idol, like the wooden figure of Hindenburg erected by the ridiculous authorities of Berlin. In a more moderate and metaphorical sense there has been an unfortunate tendency to represent Kitchener as strong by merely representing him as stiff—to suggest that he was made of wood and not of steel. ”

“ Near at hand, the scent of fried fish is heavy on the air and gingerbread is hot i’ the mouth, and in the centre of the hurly-burly the steam roundabout blares and glares, presided over by a very highly-coloured full-length portrait of no less a person than Lord Roberts, in the full equipment of Field Marshal; the surest test of a soldier’s popularity. Lord Kitchener has never yet become the presiding hero over the galloping horses of the steam roundabout: he is perhaps something too grim for these occasions. ”

“ General Hunter was dining with the Sirdar. The next morning, when Gregory went to say "Goodbye" to him, he said:
"I was telling Sir Herbert Kitchener, yesterday evening, that you were transferred to the naval branch. He said:
"'The gunboats will all take up troops, and there will be native officers on board. It is a rule in our army, you know, that all white officers have the honorary rank of major, so as to make them senior to all Egyptian officers. Will you tell Mr. Hilliard that I authorize him to call himself Bimbashi? There is no occasion to put it in orders. ”

“ They had wiped out British armies and put Gordon's head on a pole. They were in a drunken ecstasy of Mohammedan zeal, eager to fight and ready to die, and they got all that they were looking for.
It is less than eight years since Kitchener went down to call on them. Of all the cold-blooded and frozen-featured military tacticians of the inexorable school, Kitchener stands pre-eminent. General Grant in his grimmest moment was absolutely emotional and acrobatic as compared with Kitchener. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Now too much of the eulogy on a man like Kitchener tended to praise him not as a sword but as a poker. He happened to rise into his first fame at a time when much of the English Press and governing class was still entirely duped by Germany, and to some extent judged everything by a Bismarckian test of blood and iron. It tended to neglect the very real disadvantages, even in practical life, which lie upon the man of blood and iron, as compared with the man of blood and bone. It is one grave disadvantage, for instance, that if a man made of iron were to break his bones, they would not heal. ”

“ Instantly there was the suggestion of Kitchener, not of Kitchener as you see him in flesh, but in photographs, the same coldness, decision. The smile that accompanied the words of welcome vanished and the face was utterly motionless, expressionless. You saw a tall, broad-shouldered man, with every appearance of physical strength, a clear blue eye, looking straight forward and beyond.
My French companion, M. Le Roux, spoke with Pétain. He had just come from Joffre and he told an interesting circumstance. Pétain listened. He said now and then "yes" or "no." Nothing more. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is easy enough to make people obey a bugle (or a factory hooter) as the Prussian soldiers obey a bugle. But it is no such trumpet that makes possible the resurrection of the dead.
The success of this second of the three converging designs of Kitchener, the making of a new Egyptian army, was soon seen in the expedition against Dongola. It had been foreshadowed in a successful defence of Suakin, in which Kitchener was wounded; a defence against Osman Digna, perhaps the first of the Mahdist generals whose own strongholds were eventually stormed at Gemaizeh ”

“ 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. ”

“ I have just been writing to Lord Kitchener telling him how intensely proud and well-nigh overwhelmed I feel at finding myself in command of such a magnificent body of men as we have here; no man could feel otherwise. He will, I know, follow every movement of ours with unfailing interest, and surely we will never risk disappointing him by allowing a few of our men to give us a bad name. ”

“ Had it not been for the Hampshire disaster, had Lord Kitchener succeeded in carrying out his mission in the summer of 1916, it is conceivable that, in virtue of that almost uncanny intuition that he possessed, he would have pieced together the realities of the situation, and would have managed to teach his colleagues in our Cabinet to understand them on his return. His personal influence might have made all the difference in the world in Russia. He would have gained touch with all sorts and conditions of men while out there, and would have got to the back of their minds by methods all his own. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Kitchener was something much more than a machine; for in the mind, as much as in the body, flexibility is far more masculine than inflexibility.
A situation developed almost instantly after his victory in which he was to show that he was a diplomatist as well as a soldier. At Fashoda, a little farther up the Nile, he found something more surprising, and perhaps more romantic, than the wildest dervish of the desert solitudes. ”

“ 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. ”