LordKitchener

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LORD KITCHENER

G. K. CHESTERTON

LONDON

1917

[Illustration: LORD KITCHENER

By G. K. Chesterton

Photo by Elliott & Fry, Ltd., London.]

LORD KITCHENER

Horatio Herbert Kitchener was Irish by birth but English by

extraction, being born in County Kerry, the son of an English colonel.

The fanciful might see in this first and accidental fact the presence

of this simple and practical man amid the more mystical western

problems and dreams which were very distant from his mind, an element

which clings to all his career and gives it an unconscious poetry. He

had many qualities of the epic hero, and especially this—that he was

the last man in the world to be the epic poet. There is something

almost provocative to superstition in the way in which he stands at

every turn as the symbol of the special trials and the modern

transfiguration of England; from this moment when he was born among

the peasants of Ireland to the moment when he died upon the sea,

seeking at the other end of the world the other great peasant

civilisation of Russia. Yet at each of these symbolic moments he is,

if not as unconscious as a symbol, then as silent as a symbol; he is

speechless and supremely significant, like an ensign or a flag. The

superficial picturesqueness of his life, at least, lies very much in

this—that he was like a hero condemned by fate to act an allegory.

We find this, for instance, in one of the very first and perhaps one

of the most picturesque of all the facts that are recorded or reported

of him. As a youth, tall, very shy and quiet, he was only notable for

intellectual interests of the soberest and most methodical sort,

especially for the close study of mathematics. This also,

incidentally, was typical enough, for his work in Egypt and the

Soudan, by which his fame was established, was based wholly upon such

calculations. It was not merely mathematical but literally

geometrical. His work bore the same relation to Gordon’s that a rigid

mathematical diagram bears to a rough pencil sketch on which it is

based. Yet the student thus bent on the strictest side of his

profession, studying it at Woolwich and entering the Engineers as the

most severely scientific branch of the army, had as a first experience

of war something so romantic that it has been counted incredible, yet

something so relevant to the great reality of to-day that it might

have been made up centuries after his death, as a myth is made up

about a god. He happened to be in France in the most tragic hour that

France has ever known or, please God, will ever know. She was bearing

alone the weight of that alien tyranny, of that hopeless and almost

lifeless violence, which the other nations have since found to be the

worst of all the terrors which God tolerates in this world. She trod

that winepress alone; and of the peoples there were none to help her.

In 1870 the Prussian had already encircled Paris, and General Chanzy

was fighting against enormous odds to push northwards to its relief,

when his army was joined by the young and silent traveller from

England. All that was in Kitchener’s mind or motives will perhaps

never be known. France was still something of an ideal of civilisation

for many of the more generous English gentry. Prussia was never really

an ideal for anybody, even the Prussians, and mere success, which

could not make her an ideal, had not yet calamitously made her a

model. There was in it also, no doubt, a touch of the schoolboy who

runs away to sea—that touch of the schoolboy without the sense of

which the staidest Englishman will always be inexplicable. But

considered historically there is something strangely moving about the

incident—the fact that Kitchener was a French soldier almost before

he was an English one. As Hannibal was dedicated in boyhood to war

against the eagles of Rome, Kitchener was dedicated, almost in

boyhood, to war against the eagles of Germany. Romance came to this

realist, whether by impulse or by accident, like a wind from without,

as first love will come to the woman-hater. He was already, both by

fate and choice, something more than he had meant to be. The

mathematician, we might almost say the calculating boy, was already

gambling in the highest lottery which led to the highest and most

historic loss. The engineer devoted to discipline was already a free

lance, because already a knight-errant.

He returned to England to continue his comparatively humdrum order of

advancement; and the next call that came to him was of a strangely

different and yet also of a strangely significant kind. The Palestine

Exploration Fund sent him with another officer to conduct

topographical and antiquarian investigations in a country where

practical exertions are always relieved against a curiously

incongruous background—as if they were setting up telegraph-posts

through the Garden of Eden or opening a railway station at the New

Jerusalem. But the contrast between antiquity and modernity was not

the only one; there was still the sort of contrast that can be a

collision. Kitchener was almost immediately to come in contact with

what was to be, in various aspects, the problem of his life—the

modern fanaticisms of the Near East. There is an English proverb which

asks whether the mountain goes to Mahomet or he to the mountain, and

it may be a question whether his religion be the cause or the effect

of a certain spirit, vivid and yet strangely negative, which dwells in

such deserts. Walking among the olives of Gaza or looking on the

Philistine plain, such travellers may well feel that they are treading

on cold volcanoes, as empty as the mountains of the moon. But the

mountain of Mahomet is not yet an extinct volcano.

Kitchener, in these first days of seemingly mild and minute duties,

was early aware of it. At Safed, in the Galilean hills, his small

party had found itself surrounded by an Arab mob, stricken suddenly

mad with emotions unintelligible to the political mobs of the West. He

was himself wounded, but, defending himself as best he could with a

walking-stick, not only saved his own life but that of his

fellow-officer, Lieutenant Conder, who had been beaten to the earth

with an Arab club. He continued his work indeed with prosaic

pertinacity, and developed in the survey of the Holy Land all that

almost secretive enthusiasm for detail which lasted all his life. Of

the most famous English guide-book he made the characteristic remark,

“Where Murray has seven names I have a hundred and sixteen.” Most men,

in speaking or writing of such a thing, would certainly have said “a

hundred.” It is characteristic of his type that he did not even think

in round numbers. But there was in him, parallel to this almost

arithmetical passion, another quality which is, in a double sense, the

secret of his life. For it was the cause of at least half his success;

and yet he very successfully concealed it—especially from his

admirers.

The paradox of all this part of his life lies in this—that, destined

as he was to be the greatest enemy of Mahomedanism, he was quite

exceptionally a friend of Mahomedans. He had been first received in

that land, so to speak, with a blow on the head with a club; he was

destined to break the sword of the last Arab conqueror, to wreck his

holy city and treat all the religious traditions of it with a

deliberate desecration which has often been held oppressive and was

undoubtedly ruthless. Yet with the individual Moslem he had a sort of

natural brotherhood which has never been explained. Had it been shown

by a soldier of the Crusades, it would have been called witchcraft. In

this, as in many other cases, the advance of a larger enlightenment

prevents us from calling it anything. There was mixed with it, no

doubt, the deep Moslem admiration for mere masculinity, which has

probably by its exaggeration permitted the Moslem subordination of

women. But Kitchener (who was himself accused, rightly or wrongly, of

a disdain for women) must have himself contributed some other element

to the strangest of international sympathies. Whatever it was, it must

be constantly kept in mind as running parallel to his scientific

industry and particularity; for it was these two powers, used

systematically for many years before the event, that prepared the

ground for the overthrow of that wild papacy and wandering empire

which so long hung in the desert, like a mirage to mislead and to

destroy.

Kitchener was called away in 1878 to similar surveying duties in

Cyprus, and afterwards in Anatolia, where the same faculty obtained

him a firman, making him safe in all the Holy Cities of Islam. He

also dealt much with the Turkish fugitives fleeing from the Russian

guns to Erzerum—whither, so long after, the guns were to follow. But

it is with his later summons to Egypt that we feel he has returned to

the theatre of the great things of his life. It is not necessary in

this rough sketch to discuss the rights and wrongs or the general

international origin of the British occupation of Egypt; the degree of

praise or blame to be given to the Khedive, who was the nominal ruler,

or to Arabi, the Nationalist leader, who for a time seized the chief

power in his place. Kitchener’s services in the operations by which

Arabi was defeated were confined to some reconnaissance work

immediately preceding the bombardment of Alexandria; and the problem

with which his own personality became identified was not that of the

Government of Egypt, but of the more barbaric power beyond, by which

Egypt, and any powers ruling it, came to be increasingly imperilled.

And what advanced him rapidly to posts of real responsibility in the

new politics of the country was the knowledge he already had of wilder

men and more mysterious forces than could be found in Egyptian courts

or even Egyptian camps. It was the combination, of which we have

already spoken, of detailed experience and almost eccentric sympathy.

In practice it was his knowledge of Arabic, and still more his

knowledge of Arabs.

There is in Islam a paradox which is perhaps a permanent menace. The

great creed born in the desert creates a kind of ecstasy out of the

very emptiness of its own land, and even, one may say, out of the

emptiness of its own theology. It affirms, with no little sublimity,

something that is not merely the singleness but rather the solitude of

God. There is the same extreme simplification in the solitary figure

of the Prophet; and yet this isolation perpetually reacts into its own

opposite. A void is made in the heart of Islam which has to be filled

up again and again by a mere repetition of the revolution that founded

it. There are no sacraments; the only thing that can happen is a sort

of apocalypse, as unique as the end of the world; so the apocalypse

can only be repeated and the world end again and again. There are no

priests; and yet this equality can only breed a multitude of lawless

prophets almost as numerous as priests. The very dogma that there is

only one Mahomet produces an endless procession of Mahomets. Of these

the mightiest in modern times were the man whose name was Ahmed, and

whose more famous title was the Mahdi; and his more ferocious

successor Abdullahi, who was generally known as the Khalifa. These

great fanatics, or great creators of fanaticism, succeeded in making a

militarism almost as famous and formidable as that of the Turkish

Empire on whose frontiers it hovered, and in spreading a reign of

terror such as can seldom be organised except by civilisation. With

Napoleonic suddenness and success the Mahdist hordes had fallen on the

army of Hicks Pasha, when it left its camp at Omdurman, on the Nile

opposite Khartoum, and had cut it to pieces in a fashion incredible.

They had established at Omdurman their Holy City, the Rome of their

nomadic Roman Empire. Towards that terrible place many adventurous

men, like poor Hicks, had gone and were destined to go. The sands that

encircled it were like that entrance to the lion’s cavern in the

fable, towards which many footprints pointed, and from which none

returned.

The last of these was Gordon, that romantic and even eccentric figure

of whom so much might be said. Perhaps the most essential thing to say

of him here is that fortune once again played the artist in sending

such a man, at once as the leader and the herald of a man like

Kitchener; to show the way and to make the occasion; to be a sacrifice

and a signal for vengeance. Whatever else there was about Gordon,

there was about him the air not only of a hero, but of the hero of a

tragedy. Something Oriental in his own mysticism, something most of

his countrymen would have called moonshine, something perverse in his

courage, something childish and beautiful in that perversity, marked

him out as the man who walks to doom—the man who in a hundred poems

or fables goes up to a city to be crucified. He had gone to Khartoum

to arrange the withdrawal of the troops from the Soudan, the

Government having decided, if possible, to live at peace with the new

Mahdist dictatorship; and he went through the deserts almost as

solitary as a bird, on a journey as lonely as his end. He was cut off

and besieged in Khartoum by the Mahdist armies, and fell with the

falling city. Long before his end he had been in touch with Kitchener,

now of the Egyptian Intelligence Department, and weaving very

carefully a vast net of diplomacy and strategy in which the slayers of

Gordon were to be taken at last.

A well-known English journalist, Bennet Burleigh, wandering near

Dongola, fell into conversation with an Arab who spoke excellent

English, and who, with a hospitality highly improper in a Moslem,

produced two bottles of claret for his entertainment. The name of this

Arab was Kitchener; and the two bottles were all he had. The

journalist obtained, along with the claret, his first glimpse of the

great and extraordinary schemes with which Kitchener was already

working to avenge the comrade who had fallen in Khartoum. This part of

the work was as personal as that of a private detective plotting

against a private murderer in a modern detective story. Kitchener had

learned to speak the Arab tongue not only freely but sociably. He wore

the Arab dress and fell into the Arab type of courtesy so effectively

that even his blue northern eyes did not betray him. Above all, he

sympathised with the Arab character; and in a thousand places

sprinkled over the map of North-East Africa he made friends for

himself and therefore enemies for the Mahdi. This was the first and

superficially the most individual of the converging plans which were

to checkmate the desert empire; and its effects were very

far-reaching. Again and again, in subsequent years, when the

missionaries of the Mahdist religion pushed northward, they found

themselves entangled among tribes which the English power had not so

much conquered as converted. The legend of the great Prophet

encountered something more elusive than laws or military plans; it

encountered another legend—an influence which also carried the echoes

of the voice of a man. The Ababdeh Arabs, it was said, made a chain

across the desert, which the new and awful faith could not pass. The

Mudir of Dongola was on the point of joining the ever-victorious

Prophet of Omdurman. Kitchener, clad as an Arab, went out almost alone

to speak with him. What passed, perhaps, we can never tell; but

before his guest had even left him the Mudir flew to arms, fell upon

the Prophet’s hosts at Korti, and drove them before him.

The second and superficially more solid process of preparation is much

better known. It was the education of the native Egyptian army. It is

not necessary to swallow all the natural jingoism of English

journalism in order to see something truly historic about the English

officer’s work with the Fellaheen, or native race of Egypt. For

centuries they had lain as level as the slime of the Nile, and all the

conquerors in the chronicles of men had passed over them like a

pavement. Though professing the challenging creed of the Moslems, they

seem to have reached something like the pessimist patience of the

Hindoos. To have turned this slime once more into a human river, to

have lifted this pavement once more into a human rampart or barricade,

is not a small thing, nor a thing that could possibly be done even by

mere power, still less by mere money—and this Kitchener and his

English companions certainly did. There must have been something much

more than a mere cynical severity in “organisation” in the man who did

it. There must be something more than a mere commercial common-sense

in the nation in whose name it was done. It is easy enough, with

sufficient dulness and greed of detail, to “organise” anything or

anybody. 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; and in the victory at

Toski, where fell the great warrior Wad el Njume, whose strategy had

struck down both Hicks and Gordon. But the turn of the tide was

Dongola. In 1892 General, now Lord Grenfell, who had been Sirdar, or

Commander-in-Chief of the Egyptian Army, and ordered the advance at

Toski, retired and left his post vacant. The great public servant

known latterly as Lord Cromer had long had his eye on Kitchener and

the part he had played, even as a young lieutenant, in the new

military formation of the Fellaheen. He was now put at the head of the

whole new army; and the first work that fell to him was leading the

new expedition. In three days after the order was received the force

started at nightfall and marched southward into the night. The detail

is something more than picturesque; for on all accounts of that

formidable attack on the Mahdi’s power a quality of darkness rests

like a kind of cloud. It was, for one thing, a surprise attack and a

very secret one, so that the cloud was as practical as a cloak; but it

was also the re-entrance of a territory which an instinct has led the

English to call the Dark Continent even under its blazing noon. There

vast distances alone made a veil like that of darkness, and there the

lives of Gordon and Hicks and hundreds more had been swallowed up in

an ancient silence. Perhaps we cannot guess to-day, after the colder

completion of Kitchener’s work, what it meant for those who went on

that nocturnal march; who crept up in two lines, one along the river

and the other along an abandoned railway track, moving through the

black night; and in the black night encamped, and waited for the

rising of the moon. Anyhow, the tale told of it strikes this note,

especially in one touch of what can only be called a terrible

triviality. I mean the reference to the new noise heard just before

day-break, revealing the nearness of the enemy: the dreadful drum of

Islam, calling for prayer to an awful God—a God not to be worshipped

by the changing and sometimes cheerful notes of harp or organ, but

only by the drum that maddens by mere repetition.

But the third of Kitchener’s lines of approach remains to consider.

The surprise attack, which captured the riverside village of Firket,

had eventually led, in spite of storms that warred on the advance like

armies, and in one place practically wiped out a brigade, to the fall

of Dongola itself. But Dongola was not the high place of the enemy; it

was not there that Gordon died or that Abdullahi was still alive. Far

away up the dark river were the twin cities of the tragedy, the city

of the murder and the city of the murderer. It was in relation to this

fixed point of fact that Kitchener’s next proceeding is seen to be

supremely characteristic. He was so anxious to do one thing that he

was cautious about doing it. He was more concerned to obtain a success

than to appear to deserve it; he did not want a moral victory, but a

mathematical certainty. So far from following up the dash in the dark,

upon Firket or Dongola, with more romantic risks, he decided not to

advance on the Mahdi’s host a minute faster than men could follow him

building a railway. He created behind him a colossal causeway of

communications, going out alone into wastes where there was and had

been no other mortal trace or track. The engineering genius of

Girouard, a Canadian, designed and developed it with what was,

considering the nature of the task, brilliant rapidity; but by the

standards of desert warfare it must have seemed that Kitchener and his

English made war as slowly as grass grows or orchards bear fruit. The

horsemen of Araby, darting to and fro like swallows, must have felt as

if they were menaced by the advance of a giant snail. But it was a

snail that left a shining track unknown to those sands; for the first

time since Rome decayed something was being made there that could

remain. The effect of this growing road, one might almost say this

living road, began to be felt. Mahmoud, the Mahdist military leader,

fell back from Berber, and gathered his hosts more closely round the

sacred city on the Nile. Kitchener, making another night march up the

Atbara river, stormed the Arab camp and took Mahmoud prisoner. Then at

last he moved finally up the western bank of the Nile and came in

sight of Omdurman. It is somewhat of a disproportion to dwell on the

fight that followed and the fall of the great city. The fighting had

been done already, and more than half of it was working; fighting a

long fight against the centuries, against ages of sloth and the great

sleep of the desert, where there had been nothing but visions, and

against a racial decline that men had accepted as a doom. On the

following Sunday a memorial service for Charles Gordon was held in the

place where he was slain.

The fact that Kitchener fought with rails as much as with guns rather

fixed from this time forward the fashionable view of his character. He

was talked of as if he were himself made of metal, with a head filled

not only with calculations but with clockwork. This is symbolically

true, in so far as it means that he was by temper what he was by

trade, an engineer. He had conquered the Mahdi, where many had failed

to do so. But what he had chiefly conquered was the desert—a great

and greedy giant. He brought Cairo to Khartoum; we might say that he

brought London or Liverpool with him to the gates of the strange city

of Omdurman. Some parts of his action supported, even regrettably, the

reputation of rigidity. But if any admirer had, in this hour of

triumph, been staring at him as at a stone sphinx of inflexible fate,

that admirer would have been very much puzzled by the next passage of

his life. 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. A French officer, and one of the most valiant and

distinguished of French officers, Major Marchand, had penetrated to

the place with the pertinacity of a great explorer, and seemed

prepared to hold it with all the unselfish arrogance of a patriot. It

is said that the Frenchman not only welcomed Kitchener in the name of

France, but invited him, with courteous irony, to partake of

vegetables grown on the spot, a symbol of stable occupation. The

story, if it be true, is admirably French; for it reveals at once the

wit and the peasant. But the humour of the Englishman was worthily

equal to the wit of the Frenchman; and it was humour of that sane sort

which we call good humour. Political papers in pacific England and

France raved and ranted over the crisis, responsible journals howled

with jingoism; but through it all, until the moment when the French

agreed to retire, the two most placable and even sociable figures were

the two grim tropical travellers and soldiers who faced each other on

the burning sands of Fashoda. As we see them facing each other, we

have again the vague sense of a sign or a parable which runs through

this story. For they were to meet again long afterwards as allies,

when both were leading their countrymen against the great enemy in the

Great War.

Something of the same shadow of prophecy is perhaps the deepest memory

left by the last war of Kitchener before the greatest. After further

activities in Egypt and the Soudan, of which the attempt to educate

the Fellaheen by the Gordon Memorial College was the most remarkable,

he was abruptly summoned to South Africa to be the right hand of Lord

Roberts in the war then being waged against the Boers. He conducted

the opening of the determining battle of Paardeberg, and was typically

systematic in covering the half-conquered country with a system of

block-houses and enclosures like a diagram of geometry. But to-day,

and for many reasons, Englishmen will think first of the last scene of

that war. When Botha and the Boer Generals surrendered to Kitchener,

there was the same goodwill among the soldiers to contrast with the

ill-will of the journalists. Botha also became almost a friend; and

Botha also was to be in the far future an ally, smiting the German in

Africa as Kitchener smote him in Europe. There was the same hint of

prophecy about the war that ended at Vereeniging as about that other

war that so nearly began at Fashoda. It seemed almost as if God were

pitting his heroes against each other in tournament, before they all

rode together against the heathen pouring upon them out of Germany.

It is with that name of Germany that this mere skeleton of the facts

must end. After the South African War Kitchener had been made

Commander-in-Chief in India, where he effected several vital changes,

notably the emancipation of that office from the veto of the Military

Member of the Council of the Viceroy, and where he showed once more,

in his dealings with the Sepoys, that obscure yet powerful sympathy

with the mysterious intellect of the East. Thence he had been again

shifted to Egypt; but the next summons that came to him swallowed up

all these things. A short time after war broke out with Germany he was

made Minister of War, and held that post until the dark season when he

set out on a mission to Russia, which never reached its goal. But when

his ship went down he had already done a work and registered a change

in England, with some words about which this sketch may well conclude.

Journalistic attacks were indeed made upon him, but in writing for a

foreign reader I pass them by. In such a place I will not say even of

the meanest of Englishmen what they were not ashamed to say of one of

the greatest. In his new work he was not only a very great man, but

one dealing with very great things; and perhaps his most historic

moment was when he broke his customary silence about the deeper

emotions of life, and became the mouthpiece of the national horror at

the German fashion of fighting, which he declared to have left a stain

upon the whole profession of arms. For, by a movement unusually and

unconsciously dramatic, he chose that moment to salute across the long

stretch of years the comparative chivalry and nobility of his dead

enemies of the Soudan, and to announce that in the heart of Europe, in

learned academies and ordered government offices, there had appeared a

lunacy so cruel and unclean that the maddest dervish dead in the

desert had a right to disdain it where he lay.

Kitchener, like other Englishmen of his type, made his name outside

England and even outside Europe. But it was in England, and after his

return to England, that he did what will perhaps make his name most

permanent in history. That return to England was indeed as symbolic as

his last and tragic journey to Russia. Both will stand as symbols of

the deepest things which are moving mankind in the Great War. In truth

the whole of that great European movement which we call the cause of

the Allies is in itself a homeward journey. It is a return to native

and historic ideals, after an exile in the howling wilderness of the

political pessimism and cynicism of Prussia. After his great

adventures in Africa and Asia, the Englishman has re-discovered

Europe; and in the very act of discovering Europe, the Englishman has

at last discovered England. The revelation of the forces still really

to be found in England itself, when all is said that can possibly or

plausibly be said against English commercialism and selfishness, was

the last work of Lord Kitchener. He was the embodiment of an enormous

experience which has passed through Imperialism and reached

patriotism. He had been the supreme figure of that strange and

sprawling England which lies beyond England; which carries the habits

of English clubs and hotels into the solitudes of the Nile or up the

passes of the Himalayas, and is infinitely ignorant of things

infinitely nearer home. For this type of Englishman Cairo was nearer

than Calais. Yet the typical figure which we associated with such

places as Cairo was destined before he died to open again the ancient

gate of Calais and lead in a new and noble fashion the return of

England to Europe. The great change for which his countrymen will

probably remember him longest was what we should call in England the

revolution of the New Armies.

It is almost impossible to express how great a revolution it was so as

to convey its dimensions to the citizens of any other great European

country where military service has long been the rule and not the

exception, where the people itself is only the army in mufti. In its

mere aspect to the eye it was something like an invasion by a strange

race. The English professional soldier of our youth had been

conspicuous not only by his red coat but by his rarity. When rare

things become common they do not become commonplace. The memory of

their singularity is still strong enough to give them rather the

appearance of a prodigy, as anyone can realise by imagining an army of

hunchbacks or a city of one-eyed men. The English soldier had indeed

been respected as a patriotic symbol, but rather as a priest or a

prince can be a symbol, as being the exception and not the rule. A

child was taken to see the soldier outside Buckingham Palace almost as

he was taken to see the King driving out of Buckingham Palace. Hence

the first effect of the enlargement of the armies was something almost

like a fairy-tale—almost as if the streets were crowded with kings,

walking about and wearing crowns of gold. This merely optical vision

of the revolution was but the first impression of a reality equally

vast and new. The first levies which came to be called popularly

Kitchener’s Army, because of the energy and inspiration with which he

set himself to their organisation, consisted entirely of volunteers.

It was not till long after the whole face of England had been

transformed by this mobilisation that the Government resorted to

compulsion to bring in a mere margin of men. Save for the personality

of Kitchener, the new militarism of England came wholly and freely

from the English. While it was as universal as a tax, it was as

spontaneous as a riot. But it is obvious that to produce so large and

novel an effect out of the mere psychology of a nation, apart from its

organisation, was something which required tact as well as decision:

and it is this which illustrated a side of the English general’s

character without which he may be, and indeed has been, wholly

misunderstood.

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. There are two maxims, which have been, I believe,

the mottoes of two English families, both of which are boasts but each

the contrary of the other. The first runs, “You can break me, but you

cannot bend me”; and the second, “You can bend me, but you cannot

break me.” With all respect to whoever may have borne it, the first is

the boast of the barbarian and therefore of the Prussian; the second

is the boast of the Christian and the civilised man—that he is free

and flexible, yet always returns to his true position, like a tempered

sword. 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. In other words,

the Prussian Empire, with all its perfections and efficiencies, has

one notable defect—that it is a dead thing. It does not draw its life

from any primary human religion or poetry; it does not grow again from

within. And being a dead thing, it suffers also from having no nerves

to give warning or reaction; it reads no danger signals; it has no

premonitions; about its own spiritual doom its sentinels are deaf and

all its spies are blind. On the other hand, the British Empire, with

all its blunders and bad anomalies, to which I am the last person to

be blind, has one noticeable advantage—that it is a living thing. It

is not that it makes no mistakes, but it knows it has made them, as

the living hand knows when it has touched hot iron. That is exactly

what a hand of iron would not know; and that is exactly the error in

the German ideal of a hand of iron. No candid critic of England can

read its history fairly and fail to see a certain flexibility and

self-modification; illiberal policies followed by liberal ones; men

failing in something and succeeding in something else; men sent to do

one thing and being wise enough to do another; the human power of the

living hand to draw back. As it happens, Kitchener was extraordinarily

English in this lively and vital moderation. And it is to be feared

that the more German idealisation of him, in the largely unenlightened

England before the war, has already done some harm to his reputation,

and in missing what was particularly English has missed what was

particularly interesting.

Lord Kitchener was personally a somewhat silent man; and his social

conventions were those of the ordinary English officer, especially the

officer who has lived among Orientals—conventions which in any case

tend in the direction of silence. He also really had, and to an extent

of which some people complained, a certain English embarrassment about

making all his purposes clear, especially before they were clear to

himself. He probably liked to think a thing out in his own way and

therefore at his own time, which was not always the time at which

people thought they had a right to question him. In this way it is

true of him, as of such another strong man as the Irish patriot

Parnell, that his very simplicity had an effect of secrecy. But it is

a complete error about him, as it was a complete error about Parnell,

to suppose that he took the Prussian pose of disdaining and

disregarding everybody; that he settled everything in solitary egoism;

that he was a Superman too self-sufficing to listen to friends and too

philosophical to listen to reason. It will be noted that every crisis

of his life that is lit up by history contradicts the colours of this

picture. He could not only take counsel with his friends, but he was

abnormally successful in taking counsel with his foes. It is notable

that whenever he came in personal contact with a great captain

actually or potentially in arms against him, the result was not a mere

collision but a mutual comprehension. He established the friendliest

relations with the chivalrous and adventurous Marchand, standing on

the deadly debatable land of Fashoda. He established equally friendly

relations with the Boer generals, gathered under the dark cloud of

national disappointment and defeat. In all such instances, so far as

his individuality could count, it is clear that he acted as a moderate

and, in the universal sense, as a liberal. The results and the records

of those who met him in such hours are quite sufficient to prove that

he did not leave the impression of a Prussian arrogance. If he was

silent, his silence must have been more friendly, I had almost said

more convivial, than many men’s conversation. But on the larger

platform of the European War, this quiet but unique gift of

open-mindedness and intellectual hospitality was destined to do two

very decisive things, which may profoundly affect history. In the

first he dealt with the more democratic and even revolutionary

elements in England; and in the second he represents a very real

change that has passed over the English traditions about Russia.

Personally, as has already been noted, Lord Kitchener never was and

never pretended to be anything more or less than the good military

man, and by the time of the Great War he was already an elderly

military man. The type has much the same standards and traditions in

all European countries; but in England it is, if anything, a little

more traditional, for the very reason that the army has been something

separate, professional, and relatively small—a sort of club. The

military man was all the more military because the nation was not

military. Such a man is inevitably conservative in his views,

conventional in his manners, and simplifies the problem of patriotism

to a single-eyed obedience. When he took over the business of raising

the first levies for the present war he was confronted with the

problem of the English Trades Unions—the very last problem in the

world which one could reasonably expect such a man to understand. And

yet he did understand it; he was perhaps the only person in the

governing class who did. If it be hard to explain to the richer

classes in England, it is almost impossible to explain to any classes

in any other country, because the English situation is largely unique.

There is the same difficulty as we have already found in describing

how vast and even violent a transformation scene the growth of the

great army appeared; it has been almost impossible to describe it to

the chief conscript countries, which take a great army for granted.

The key to the parallel problem of the Trades Unions is simply

this—that England is the only European country that is practically

industrial and nothing else. Trades Unions can never play such a part

in countries where the masses live on the land; such masses always

have some status and support—yes, even if they are serfs. The status

of the English workman is not in the earth; it is, so to speak, in the

air—in a scaffolding of artificial abstractions, a framework of rules

and rights, of verbal bargains or paper resolutions. If he loses this,

he becomes nothing so human or homely as a slave. Rather he becomes a

wild beast, a sort of wandering vermin with no place in the state at

all. It would be necessary to explain this, and a great deal more

which cannot possibly be explained here, before we could measure the

enormity of the enigma facing the British official who had to propose

to the English the practical suspension of the Trades Unions. To this

must be added the fact that the Unions, already national institutions,

had just lately been in a ferment with new and violent doctrines:

Syndicalists had invoked them as the future seats of government;

historical speculators had seen in them the return to the great

Christian Guilds of the Middle Ages; a more revolutionary Press had

appeared to champion them; gigantic strikes had split the country in

every direction. Anyone would have said that under these circumstances

the very virtues and attainments of Kitchener would at least make it

fairly certain that he would quarrel with the Trades Unions. It soon

became apparent that the one man who was not going to quarrel with the

Trades Unions was Kitchener. Politicians and parliamentary leaders,

supposed actually to be elected by the working classes, were regarded,

rightly or wrongly, with implacable suspicion. The elderly and

old-fashioned Anglo-Egyptian militarist, with his doctrine and

discipline of the barrack-room and the drumhead court-martial, was

never regarded by the workers with a shade of suspicion. They simply

took him at his word, and the leader of the most turbulent Trades

Union element paid to him after his death the simplest tribute in the

plainest and most popular language—“He was a straight man.” I am so

antiquated as to think it a better epitaph than the fashionable phrase

about a strong man. Some silent indescribable geniality of fairness in

the man once more prevailed against the possibility of passionate

misunderstandings, as it had prevailed against the international

nervousness of the atmosphere of Fashoda or the tragic border feud of

the Boers. I suspect that it lay largely in the fact that this great

Englishman was sufficiently English to guess one thing missed by many

more sophisticated people—that the English Trades Unions are very

English. For good or evil, they are national; they have very little in

common with the more international Socialism of the Continent, and

nothing whatever in common with the pedantic Socialism of Prussia.

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; and he had one unique mark of

vitality—that he had not stopped growing. “An oak should not be

transplanted at sixty,” said the great orator Grattan when he was

transferred from the Parliament of Dublin to the Parliament of

Westminster. Kitchener was sixty-four when he turned his face westward

to the problem of his own country. There clung to him already all the

traditional attributes of the oak—its toughness, its angularity, its

closeness of grain and ruggedness of outline—when he was uprooted

from the Arabian sands and replanted in the remote western island. Yet

the oak not only grew green again and put forth new leaves; it was

almost as if, as in a legend, it could put forth a new kind of leaves.

Kitchener, with all his taciturnity, really began to put forth a new

order of ideas. If a change of opinions is unusual in an elderly man,

it is almost unknown in an elderly military man. If the hardening of

time was felt even by the poetic and emotional Grattan, it would not

have been strange if the hardening had been quite hopeless in the

rigid and reticent Kitchener. Yet it was not hopeless; and the fact

became the spring of much of the national hope. The grizzled martinet

from India and Egypt showed a certain power which is in nearly all

great men, but of which St. Paul has become the traditional type—the

power of being a great convert as well as a great crusader. It is the

real power of re-forming an opinion, which is the very opposite of

that mere formlessness which we call fickleness. Nor is the comparison

to such an example as St. Paul altogether historically disproportionate;

for the point upon which this very typical Englishman changed his mind

was a point which is now the pivot of the whole future and perhaps of

the very existence of Christendom. For many such Englishmen it might

almost be called the discovery of Christendom. It can be called with

greater precision, and indeed with almost complete precision, the

discovery of Russia.

Military bureaucratic systems everywhere have too much tendency to

work upon one idea, and there was a time when the military and

bureaucratic system of the British in the East worked on the idea of

the fear of Russia. It is needless here to explain that sentiment, and

useless to explain it away. It was partly a mere tradition from the

natural jingoism of the Crimean War; it was partly in itself a tribute

to the epic majesty of the Russian march across mysterious Asia to the

legendary Chinese Wall. The point here is that it existed; and where

there exists such an idea in such military rulers, they very seldom

alter their idea. But Kitchener did alter his idea. Not in mere

military obedience, but in genuine human reasonableness, he came late

in life to see the Russian as the friend and the Prussian as the

enemy. In the inevitable division of British ministerial councils

about the distribution of British aid and attention he was the one man

who stood most enthusiastically, one might say stubbornly, for the

supreme importance of munitioning the magnificent Russian defence. He

mystified all the English pessimists, in what seemed to them the

blackest hour of pessimism, by announcing that Germany had “shot her

bolt”; that she had already lost her chance, not by any of the Allied

attacks, but by the stupendous skill and valour of that Russian

retreat, which was more triumphant than any attack. It is this

discovery that marks an epoch; for that great deliverance was not only

the victory of Russia, but very specially the victory of the Russians.

Never before was there such a war of men against guns—as awful and

inspiring to watch as a war of men against demons. Perhaps the duel of

a man with a modern gun is more like that between a man and an

enormous dragon; nor is there anything on the weaker side save the

ultimate and almost metaphysical truth, that a man can make a gun and

a gun cannot make a man. It is the man—the Russian soldier and

peasant himself—who has emerged like the hero of an epic, and who is

now secure for ever from the sophisticated scandal-mongering and the

cultured ignorance of the West.

And it is this that lends an epic and almost primeval symbolism to the

tragedy of Kitchener’s end. Somehow the very fact that it was

incomplete as an action makes it more complete as an allegory. English

in his very limitations, English in his late emancipation from them,

he was setting forth on an eastward journey different indeed from the

many eastward journeys of his life. There are many such noble

tragedies of travel in the records of his country; it was so, silently

without a trace, that the track of Franklin faded in the polar snows

or the track of Gordon in the desert sands. But this was an adventure

new for such adventurous men—the finding not of strange foes but of

friends yet stranger. Many men of his blood and type—simple,

strenuous, somewhat prosaic—had threaded their way through some dark

continent to add some treasure or territory to the English name. He

was seeking what for us his countrymen has long been a dark

continent—but which contains a much more noble treasure. The glory of

a great people, long hidden from the English by accidents and by lies,

lay before him at his journey’s end. That journey was never ended. It

remains like a mighty bridge, the mightier for being broken, pointing

across a chasm, and promising a mightier thoroughfare between the east

and west. In that waste of seas beyond the last northern islets where

his ship went down one might fancy his spirit standing, a figure

frustrated yet prophetic and pointing to the East, whence are the

light of the world and the reunion of Christian men.

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