LordKitchener
by Chesterton · Cluster: Heroism · Hero · Last Stand
Abstract
A wartime biography and character study of the WWI general Lord Kitchener, read as a silent epic hero condemned to act an allegory of England’s imperial-to-patriotic transfiguration and the raising of the New Armies.
Testo / Text
Parti / Parts
Connections
Settings: Egypt, Desert, Russia, Battlefield, Sea (2), Ship, South Africa, Europe
Topoi: Last Stand, Combat Strife, Open Road Homecoming, Night Journey Vision
Characters: Kitchener, Charles Gordon, Marchand, Botha, The Mahdi
Archetypes: Hero, Tragic Hero, Avenger, Prophet, Martyr Saint Motifs: Sea, Crown, Machine, Silence, Drums and Bugles, River, Ship, Light and Dark, Blood Themes & Concepts: Heroism, Honour, War and its Cost, Nationalism and Patriotism, Common Man, Fanaticism, Friendship, Fate and Free Will, Conversion, Masculinity and the Male Code, Self-Sacrifice, Reconciliation, Greatness, Silence (2), Martyrdom, History Forms & Genres: Biography, Sketch, Elegy, Nonfiction Historical References: First World War, Islam and the East, Crusades, Irish Question
Testo integrale / Full text
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Title: Lord Kitchener
Author: G. K. Chesterton
Release Date: June 15, 2008 [EBook #25795]
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LORD KITCHENER
BY
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.
Printed in Great Britain by THE FIELD & QUEEN (HORACE COX) LTD.,
_Bream's Buildings, London, E.C. 4_.
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