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 byextraction, being born in County Kerry, the son of an English colonel. The fanciful might see in this first and accidental fact the presenceof this simple and practical man amid the more mystical westernproblems and dreams which were very distant from his mind, an elementwhich clings to all his career and gives it an unconscious poetry. Hehad many qualities of the epic hero, and especially this--that he wasthe last man in the world to be the epic poet. There is somethingalmost provocative to superstition in the way in which he stands atevery turn as the symbol of the special trials and the moderntransfiguration of England; from this moment when he was born amongthe peasants of Ireland to the moment when he died upon the sea, seeking at the other end of the world the other great peasantcivilisation 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 isspeechless and supremely significant, like an ensign or a flag. Thesuperficial picturesqueness of his life, at least, lies very much inthis--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 oneof the most picturesque of all the facts that are recorded or reportedof him. As a youth, tall, very shy and quiet, he was only notable forintellectual 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 theSoudan, by which his fame was established, was based wholly upon suchcalculations. It was not merely mathematical but literallygeometrical. His work bore the same relation to Gordon's that a rigidmathematical diagram bears to a rough pencil sketch on which it isbased. Yet the student thus bent on the strictest side of hisprofession, studying it at Woolwich and entering the Engineers as themost severely scientific branch of the army, had as a first experienceof war something so romantic that it has been counted incredible, yetsomething so relevant to the great reality of to-day that it mighthave been made up centuries after his death, as a myth is made upabout a god. He happened to be in France in the most tragic hour thatFrance has ever known or, please God, will ever know. She was bearingalone the weight of that alien tyranny, of that hopeless and almostlifeless violence, which the other nations have since found to be theworst of all the terrors which God tolerates in this world. She trodthat winepress alone; and of the peoples there were none to help her. In 1870 the Prussian had already encircled Paris, and General Chanzywas fighting against enormous odds to push northwards to its relief, when his army was joined by the young and silent traveller fromEngland. All that was in Kitchener's mind or motives will perhapsnever be known. France was still something of an ideal of civilisationfor many of the more generous English gentry. Prussia was never reallyan ideal for anybody, even the Prussians, and mere success, whichcould not make her an ideal, had not yet calamitously made her amodel. There was in it also, no doubt, a touch of the schoolboy whoruns away to sea--that touch of the schoolboy without the sense ofwhich the staidest Englishman will always be inexplicable. Butconsidered historically there is something strangely moving about theincident--the fact that Kitchener was a French soldier almost beforehe was an English one. As Hannibal was dedicated in boyhood to waragainst the eagles of Rome, Kitchener was dedicated, almost inboyhood, to war against the eagles of Germany. Romance came to thisrealist, whether by impulse or by accident, like a wind from without, as first love will come to the woman-hater. He was already, both byfate and choice, something more than he had meant to be. Themathematician, we might almost say the calculating boy, was alreadygambling in the highest lottery which led to the highest and mosthistoric loss. The engineer devoted to discipline was already a freelance, because already a knight-errant. He returned to England to continue his comparatively humdrum order ofadvancement; and the next call that came to him was of a strangelydifferent and yet also of a strangely significant kind. The PalestineExploration Fund sent him with another officer to conducttopographical and antiquarian investigations in a country wherepractical exertions are always relieved against a curiouslyincongruous background--as if they were setting up telegraph-poststhrough the Garden of Eden or opening a railway station at the NewJerusalem. But the contrast between antiquity and modernity was notthe only one; there was still the sort of contrast that can be acollision. Kitchener was almost immediately to come in contact withwhat was to be, in various aspects, the problem of his life--themodern fanaticisms of the Near East. There is an English proverb whichasks whether the mountain goes to Mahomet or he to the mountain, andit may be a question whether his religion be the cause or the effectof a certain spirit, vivid and yet strangely negative, which dwells insuch deserts. Walking among the olives of Gaza or looking on thePhilistine plain, such travellers may well feel that they are treadingon cold volcanoes, as empty as the mountains of the moon. But themountain 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 smallparty had found itself surrounded by an Arab mob, stricken suddenlymad with emotions unintelligible to the political mobs of the West. Hewas himself wounded, but, defending himself as best he could with awalking-stick, not only saved his own life but that of hisfellow-officer, Lieutenant Conder, who had been beaten to the earthwith an Arab club. He continued his work indeed with prosaicpertinacity, and developed in the survey of the Holy Land all thatalmost secretive enthusiasm for detail which lasted all his life. Ofthe 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 "ahundred. " It is characteristic of his type that he did not even thinkin round numbers. But there was in him, parallel to this almostarithmetical passion, another quality which is, in a double sense, thesecret of his life. For it was the cause of at least half his success;and yet he very successfully concealed it--especially from hisadmirers. The paradox of all this part of his life lies in this--that, destinedas he was to be the greatest enemy of Mahomedanism, he was quiteexceptionally a friend of Mahomedans. He had been first received inthat land, so to speak, with a blow on the head with a club; he wasdestined to break the sword of the last Arab conqueror, to wreck hisholy city and treat all the religious traditions of it with adeliberate desecration which has often been held oppressive and wasundoubtedly ruthless. Yet with the individual Moslem he had a sort ofnatural brotherhood which has never been explained. Had it been shownby a soldier of the Crusades, it would have been called witchcraft. Inthis, as in many other cases, the advance of a larger enlightenmentprevents us from calling it anything. There was mixed with it, nodoubt, the deep Moslem admiration for mere masculinity, which hasprobably by its exaggeration permitted the Moslem subordination ofwomen. But Kitchener (who was himself accused, rightly or wrongly, ofa disdain for women) must have himself contributed some other elementto the strangest of international sympathies. Whatever it was, it mustbe constantly kept in mind as running parallel to his scientificindustry and particularity; for it was these two powers, usedsystematically for many years before the event, that prepared theground for the overthrow of that wild papacy and wandering empirewhich so long hung in the desert, like a mirage to mislead and todestroy. Kitchener was called away in 1878 to similar surveying duties inCyprus, and afterwards in Anatolia, where the same faculty obtainedhim a _firman_, making him safe in all the Holy Cities of Islam. Healso dealt much with the Turkish fugitives fleeing from the Russianguns to Erzerum--whither, so long after, the guns were to follow. Butit is with his later summons to Egypt that we feel he has returned tothe theatre of the great things of his life. It is not necessary inthis rough sketch to discuss the rights and wrongs or the generalinternational origin of the British occupation of Egypt; the degree ofpraise 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 chiefpower in his place. Kitchener's services in the operations by whichArabi was defeated were confined to some reconnaissance workimmediately preceding the bombardment of Alexandria; and the problemwith which his own personality became identified was not that of theGovernment of Egypt, but of the more barbaric power beyond, by whichEgypt, and any powers ruling it, came to be increasingly imperilled. And what advanced him rapidly to posts of real responsibility in thenew politics of the country was the knowledge he already had of wildermen and more mysterious forces than could be found in Egyptian courtsor even Egyptian camps. It was the combination, of which we havealready spoken, of detailed experience and almost eccentric sympathy. In practice it was his knowledge of Arabic, and still more hisknowledge of Arabs. There is in Islam a paradox which is perhaps a permanent menace. Thegreat creed born in the desert creates a kind of ecstasy out of thevery emptiness of its own land, and even, one may say, out of theemptiness of its own theology. It affirms, with no little sublimity, something that is not merely the singleness but rather the solitude ofGod. There is the same extreme simplification in the solitary figureof the Prophet; and yet this isolation perpetually reacts into its ownopposite. A void is made in the heart of Islam which has to be filledup again and again by a mere repetition of the revolution that foundedit. There are no sacraments; the only thing that can happen is a sortof apocalypse, as unique as the end of the world; so the apocalypsecan only be repeated and the world end again and again. There are nopriests; and yet this equality can only breed a multitude of lawlessprophets almost as numerous as priests. The very dogma that there isonly one Mahomet produces an endless procession of Mahomets. Of thesethe mightiest in modern times were the man whose name was Ahmed, andwhose more famous title was the Mahdi; and his more ferocioussuccessor Abdullahi, who was generally known as the Khalifa. Thesegreat fanatics, or great creators of fanaticism, succeeded in making amilitarism almost as famous and formidable as that of the TurkishEmpire on whose frontiers it hovered, and in spreading a reign ofterror such as can seldom be organised except by civilisation. WithNapoleonic suddenness and success the Mahdist hordes had fallen on thearmy of Hicks Pasha, when it left its camp at Omdurman, on the Nileopposite Khartoum, and had cut it to pieces in a fashion incredible. They had established at Omdurman their Holy City, the Rome of theirnomadic Roman Empire. Towards that terrible place many adventurousmen, like poor Hicks, had gone and were destined to go. The sands thatencircled it were like that entrance to the lion's cavern in thefable, towards which many footprints pointed, and from which nonereturned. The last of these was Gordon, that romantic and even eccentric figureof whom so much might be said. Perhaps the most essential thing to sayof him here is that fortune once again played the artist in sendingsuch a man, at once as the leader and the herald of a man likeKitchener; to show the way and to make the occasion; to be a sacrificeand 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 atragedy. Something Oriental in his own mysticism, something most ofhis countrymen would have called moonshine, something perverse in hiscourage, something childish and beautiful in that perversity, markedhim out as the man who walks to doom--the man who in a hundred poemsor fables goes up to a city to be crucified. He had gone to Khartoumto arrange the withdrawal of the troops from the Soudan, theGovernment having decided, if possible, to live at peace with the newMahdist dictatorship; and he went through the deserts almost assolitary as a bird, on a journey as lonely as his end. He was cut offand besieged in Khartoum by the Mahdist armies, and fell with thefalling city. Long before his end he had been in touch with Kitchener, now of the Egyptian Intelligence Department, and weaving verycarefully a vast net of diplomacy and strategy in which the slayers ofGordon were to be taken at last. A well-known English journalist, Bennet Burleigh, wandering nearDongola, fell into conversation with an Arab who spoke excellentEnglish, and who, with a hospitality highly improper in a Moslem, produced two bottles of claret for his entertainment. The name of thisArab was Kitchener; and the two bottles were all he had. Thejournalist obtained, along with the claret, his first glimpse of thegreat and extraordinary schemes with which Kitchener was alreadyworking to avenge the comrade who had fallen in Khartoum. This part ofthe work was as personal as that of a private detective plottingagainst a private murderer in a modern detective story. Kitchener hadlearned to speak the Arab tongue not only freely but sociably. He worethe Arab dress and fell into the Arab type of courtesy so effectivelythat even his blue northern eyes did not betray him. Above all, hesympathised with the Arab character; and in a thousand placessprinkled over the map of North-East Africa he made friends forhimself and therefore enemies for the Mahdi. This was the first andsuperficially the most individual of the converging plans which wereto checkmate the desert empire; and its effects were veryfar-reaching. Again and again, in subsequent years, when themissionaries of the Mahdist religion pushed northward, they foundthemselves entangled among tribes which the English power had not somuch conquered as converted. The legend of the great Prophetencountered something more elusive than laws or military plans; itencountered another legend--an influence which also carried the echoesof the voice of a man. The Ababdeh Arabs, it was said, made a chainacross the desert, which the new and awful faith could not pass. TheMudir of Dongola was on the point of joining the ever-victoriousProphet of Omdurman. Kitchener, clad as an Arab, went out almost aloneto speak with him. What passed, perhaps, we can never tell; butbefore his guest had even left him the Mudir flew to arms, fell uponthe Prophet's hosts at Korti, and drove them before him. The second and superficially more solid process of preparation is muchbetter known. It was the education of the native Egyptian army. It isnot necessary to swallow all the natural jingoism of Englishjournalism in order to see something truly historic about the Englishofficer's work with the Fellaheen, or native race of Egypt. Forcenturies they had lain as level as the slime of the Nile, and all theconquerors in the chronicles of men had passed over them like apavement. Though professing the challenging creed of the Moslems, theyseem to have reached something like the pessimist patience of theHindoos. To have turned this slime once more into a human river, tohave 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 bymere power, still less by mere money--and this Kitchener and hisEnglish companions certainly did. There must have been something muchmore than a mere cynical severity in "organisation" in the man who didit. There must be something more than a mere commercial common-sensein the nation in whose name it was done. It is easy enough, withsufficient dulness and greed of detail, to "organise" anything oranybody. It is easy enough to make people obey a bugle (or a factoryhooter) as the Prussian soldiers obey a bugle. But it is no suchtrumpet that makes possible the resurrection of the dead. The success of this second of the three converging designs ofKitchener, the making of a new Egyptian army, was soon seen in theexpedition against Dongola. It had been foreshadowed in a successfuldefence of Suakin, in which Kitchener was wounded; a defence againstOsman Digna, perhaps the first of the Mahdist generals whose ownstrongholds were eventually stormed at Gemaizeh; and in the victory atToski, where fell the great warrior Wad el Njume, whose strategy hadstruck down both Hicks and Gordon. But the turn of the tide wasDongola. In 1892 General, now Lord Grenfell, who had been Sirdar, orCommander-in-Chief of the Egyptian Army, and ordered the advance atToski, retired and left his post vacant. The great public servantknown latterly as Lord Cromer had long had his eye on Kitchener andthe part he had played, even as a young lieutenant, in the newmilitary formation of the Fellaheen. He was now put at the head of thewhole new army; and the first work that fell to him was leading thenew expedition. In three days after the order was received the forcestarted at nightfall and marched southward into the night. The detailis something more than picturesque; for on all accounts of thatformidable attack on the Mahdi's power a quality of darkness restslike a kind of cloud. It was, for one thing, a surprise attack and avery secret one, so that the cloud was as practical as a cloak; but itwas also the re-entrance of a territory which an instinct has led theEnglish to call the Dark Continent even under its blazing noon. Therevast distances alone made a veil like that of darkness, and there thelives of Gordon and Hicks and hundreds more had been swallowed up inan ancient silence. Perhaps we cannot guess to-day, after the coldercompletion of Kitchener's work, what it meant for those who went onthat nocturnal march; who crept up in two lines, one along the riverand the other along an abandoned railway track, moving through theblack night; and in the black night encamped, and waited for therising of the moon. Anyhow, the tale told of it strikes this note, especially in one touch of what can only be called a terribletriviality. I mean the reference to the new noise heard just beforeday-break, revealing the nearness of the enemy: the dreadful drum ofIslam, calling for prayer to an awful God--a God not to be worshippedby the changing and sometimes cheerful notes of harp or organ, butonly 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 likearmies, and in one place practically wiped out a brigade, to the fallof Dongola itself. But Dongola was not the high place of the enemy; itwas not there that Gordon died or that Abdullahi was still alive. Faraway up the dark river were the twin cities of the tragedy, the cityof the murder and the city of the murderer. It was in relation to thisfixed point of fact that Kitchener's next proceeding is seen to besupremely characteristic. He was so anxious to do one thing that hewas cautious about doing it. He was more concerned to obtain a successthan to appear to deserve it; he did not want a moral victory, but amathematical certainty. So far from following up the dash in the dark, upon Firket or Dongola, with more romantic risks, he decided not toadvance on the Mahdi's host a minute faster than men could follow himbuilding a railway. He created behind him a colossal causeway ofcommunications, going out alone into wastes where there was and hadbeen no other mortal trace or track. The engineering genius ofGirouard, a Canadian, designed and developed it with what was, considering the nature of the task, brilliant rapidity; but by thestandards of desert warfare it must have seemed that Kitchener and hisEnglish made war as slowly as grass grows or orchards bear fruit. Thehorsemen of Araby, darting to and fro like swallows, must have felt asif they were menaced by the advance of a giant snail. But it was asnail that left a shining track unknown to those sands; for the firsttime since Rome decayed something was being made there that couldremain. The effect of this growing road, one might almost say thisliving road, began to be felt. Mahmoud, the Mahdist military leader, fell back from Berber, and gathered his hosts more closely round thesacred city on the Nile. Kitchener, making another night march up theAtbara river, stormed the Arab camp and took Mahmoud prisoner. Then atlast he moved finally up the western bank of the Nile and came insight of Omdurman. It is somewhat of a disproportion to dwell on thefight that followed and the fall of the great city. The fighting hadbeen done already, and more than half of it was working; fighting along fight against the centuries, against ages of sloth and the greatsleep of the desert, where there had been nothing but visions, andagainst a racial decline that men had accepted as a doom. On thefollowing Sunday a memorial service for Charles Gordon was held in theplace where he was slain. The fact that Kitchener fought with rails as much as with guns ratherfixed from this time forward the fashionable view of his character. Hewas talked of as if he were himself made of metal, with a head fillednot only with calculations but with clockwork. This is symbolicallytrue, in so far as it means that he was by temper what he was bytrade, an engineer. He had conquered the Mahdi, where many had failedto do so. But what he had chiefly conquered was the desert--a greatand greedy giant. He brought Cairo to Khartoum; we might say that hebrought London or Liverpool with him to the gates of the strange cityof Omdurman. Some parts of his action supported, even regrettably, thereputation of rigidity. But if any admirer had, in this hour oftriumph, been staring at him as at a stone sphinx of inflexible fate, that admirer would have been very much puzzled by the next passage ofhis life. Kitchener was something much more than a machine; for in themind, as much as in the body, flexibility is far more masculine thaninflexibility. A situation developed almost instantly after his victory in which hewas to show that he was a diplomatist as well as a soldier. AtFashoda, a little farther up the Nile, he found something moresurprising, and perhaps more romantic, than the wildest dervish of thedesert solitudes. A French officer, and one of the most valiant anddistinguished of French officers, Major Marchand, had penetrated tothe place with the pertinacity of a great explorer, and seemedprepared to hold it with all the unselfish arrogance of a patriot. Itis said that the Frenchman not only welcomed Kitchener in the name ofFrance, but invited him, with courteous irony, to partake ofvegetables grown on the spot, a symbol of stable occupation. Thestory, if it be true, is admirably French; for it reveals at once thewit and the peasant. But the humour of the Englishman was worthilyequal to the wit of the Frenchman; and it was humour of that sane sortwhich we call good humour. Political papers in pacific England andFrance raved and ranted over the crisis, responsible journals howledwith jingoism; but through it all, until the moment when the Frenchagreed to retire, the two most placable and even sociable figures werethe two grim tropical travellers and soldiers who faced each other onthe burning sands of Fashoda. As we see them facing each other, wehave again the vague sense of a sign or a parable which runs throughthis story. For they were to meet again long afterwards as allies, when both were leading their countrymen against the great enemy in theGreat War. Something of the same shadow of prophecy is perhaps the deepest memoryleft by the last war of Kitchener before the greatest. After furtheractivities in Egypt and the Soudan, of which the attempt to educatethe Fellaheen by the Gordon Memorial College was the most remarkable, he was abruptly summoned to South Africa to be the right hand of LordRoberts in the war then being waged against the Boers. He conductedthe opening of the determining battle of Paardeberg, and was typicallysystematic in covering the half-conquered country with a system ofblock-houses and enclosures like a diagram of geometry. But to-day, and for many reasons, Englishmen will think first of the last scene ofthat war. When Botha and the Boer Generals surrendered to Kitchener, there was the same goodwill among the soldiers to contrast with theill-will of the journalists. Botha also became almost a friend; andBotha also was to be in the far future an ally, smiting the German inAfrica as Kitchener smote him in Europe. There was the same hint ofprophecy about the war that ended at Vereeniging as about that otherwar that so nearly began at Fashoda. It seemed almost as if God werepitting his heroes against each other in tournament, before they allrode together against the heathen pouring upon them out of Germany. It is with that name of Germany that this mere skeleton of the factsmust end. After the South African War Kitchener had been madeCommander-in-Chief in India, where he effected several vital changes, notably the emancipation of that office from the veto of the MilitaryMember of the Council of the Viceroy, and where he showed once more, in his dealings with the Sepoys, that obscure yet powerful sympathywith the mysterious intellect of the East. Thence he had been againshifted to Egypt; but the next summons that came to him swallowed upall these things. A short time after war broke out with Germany he wasmade Minister of War, and held that post until the dark season when heset out on a mission to Russia, which never reached its goal. But whenhis ship went down he had already done a work and registered a changein England, with some words about which this sketch may well conclude. Journalistic attacks were indeed made upon him, but in writing for aforeign reader I pass them by. In such a place I will not say even ofthe meanest of Englishmen what they were not ashamed to say of one ofthe greatest. In his new work he was not only a very great man, butone dealing with very great things; and perhaps his most historicmoment was when he broke his customary silence about the deeperemotions of life, and became the mouthpiece of the national horror atthe German fashion of fighting, which he declared to have left a stainupon the whole profession of arms. For, by a movement unusually andunconsciously dramatic, he chose that moment to salute across the longstretch of years the comparative chivalry and nobility of his deadenemies of the Soudan, and to announce that in the heart of Europe, inlearned academies and ordered government offices, there had appeared alunacy so cruel and unclean that the maddest dervish dead in thedesert had a right to disdain it where he lay. Kitchener, like other Englishmen of his type, made his name outsideEngland and even outside Europe. But it was in England, and after hisreturn to England, that he did what will perhaps make his name mostpermanent in history. That return to England was indeed as symbolic ashis last and tragic journey to Russia. Both will stand as symbols ofthe deepest things which are moving mankind in the Great War. In truththe whole of that great European movement which we call the cause ofthe Allies is in itself a homeward journey. It is a return to nativeand historic ideals, after an exile in the howling wilderness of thepolitical pessimism and cynicism of Prussia. After his greatadventures in Africa and Asia, the Englishman has re-discoveredEurope; and in the very act of discovering Europe, the Englishman hasat last discovered England. The revelation of the forces still reallyto be found in England itself, when all is said that can possibly orplausibly be said against English commercialism and selfishness, wasthe last work of Lord Kitchener. He was the embodiment of an enormousexperience which has passed through Imperialism and reachedpatriotism. He had been the supreme figure of that strange andsprawling England which lies beyond England; which carries the habitsof English clubs and hotels into the solitudes of the Nile or up thepasses of the Himalayas, and is infinitely ignorant of thingsinfinitely nearer home. For this type of Englishman Cairo was nearerthan Calais. Yet the typical figure which we associated with suchplaces as Cairo was destined before he died to open again the ancientgate of Calais and lead in a new and noble fashion the return ofEngland to Europe. The great change for which his countrymen willprobably remember him longest was what we should call in England therevolution of the New Armies. It is almost impossible to express how great a revolution it was so asto convey its dimensions to the citizens of any other great Europeancountry where military service has long been the rule and not theexception, where the people itself is only the army in mufti. In itsmere aspect to the eye it was something like an invasion by a strangerace. The English professional soldier of our youth had beenconspicuous not only by his red coat but by his rarity. When rarethings become common they do not become commonplace. The memory oftheir singularity is still strong enough to give them rather theappearance of a prodigy, as anyone can realise by imagining an army ofhunchbacks or a city of one-eyed men. The English soldier had indeedbeen respected as a patriotic symbol, but rather as a priest or aprince can be a symbol, as being the exception and not the rule. Achild was taken to see the soldier outside Buckingham Palace almost ashe was taken to see the King driving out of Buckingham Palace. Hencethe first effect of the enlargement of the armies was something almostlike a fairy-tale--almost as if the streets were crowded with kings, walking about and wearing crowns of gold. This merely optical visionof the revolution was but the first impression of a reality equallyvast and new. The first levies which came to be called popularlyKitchener's Army, because of the energy and inspiration with which heset himself to their organisation, consisted entirely of volunteers. It was not till long after the whole face of England had beentransformed by this mobilisation that the Government resorted tocompulsion to bring in a mere margin of men. Save for the personalityof Kitchener, the new militarism of England came wholly and freelyfrom the English. While it was as universal as a tax, it was asspontaneous as a riot. But it is obvious that to produce so large andnovel an effect out of the mere psychology of a nation, apart from itsorganisation, was something which required tact as well as decision:and it is this which illustrated a side of the English general'scharacter without which he may be, and indeed has been, whollymisunderstood. It is of the nature of national heroes of Kitchener's type that theiradmirers are unjust to them. They would have been better appreciatedif they had been less praised. When a soldier is turned into an idolthere seems an unfortunate tendency to turn him into a wooden idol, like the wooden figure of Hindenburg erected by the ridiculousauthorities of Berlin. In a more moderate and metaphorical sense therehas been an unfortunate tendency to represent Kitchener as strong bymerely representing him as stiff--to suggest that he was made of woodand not of steel. There are two maxims, which have been, I believe, the mottoes of two English families, both of which are boasts but eachthe contrary of the other. The first runs, "You can break me, but youcannot bend me"; and the second, "You can bend me, but you cannotbreak me. " With all respect to whoever may have borne it, the first isthe boast of the barbarian and therefore of the Prussian; the secondis the boast of the Christian and the civilised man--that he is freeand flexible, yet always returns to his true position, like a temperedsword. Now too much of the eulogy on a man like Kitchener tended topraise him not as a sword but as a poker. He happened to rise into hisfirst fame at a time when much of the English Press and governingclass was still entirely duped by Germany, and to some extent judgedeverything by a Bismarckian test of blood and iron. It tended toneglect the very real disadvantages, even in practical life, which lieupon the man of blood and iron, as compared with the man of blood andbone. It is one grave disadvantage, for instance, that if a man madeof iron were to break his bones, they would not heal. In other words, the Prussian Empire, with all its perfections and efficiencies, hasone notable defect--that it is a dead thing. It does not draw its lifefrom any primary human religion or poetry; it does not grow again fromwithin. And being a dead thing, it suffers also from having no nervesto give warning or reaction; it reads no danger signals; it has nopremonitions; about its own spiritual doom its sentinels are deaf andall its spies are blind. On the other hand, the British Empire, withall its blunders and bad anomalies, to which I am the last person tobe blind, has one noticeable advantage--that it is a living thing. Itis not that it makes no mistakes, but it knows it has made them, asthe living hand knows when it has touched hot iron. That is exactlywhat a hand of iron would not know; and that is exactly the error inthe German ideal of a hand of iron. No candid critic of England canread its history fairly and fail to see a certain flexibility andself-modification; illiberal policies followed by liberal ones; menfailing in something and succeeding in something else; men sent to doone thing and being wise enough to do another; the human power of theliving hand to draw back. As it happens, Kitchener was extraordinarilyEnglish in this lively and vital moderation. And it is to be fearedthat the more German idealisation of him, in the largely unenlightenedEngland before the war, has already done some harm to his reputation, and in missing what was particularly English has missed what wasparticularly interesting. Lord Kitchener was personally a somewhat silent man; and his socialconventions were those of the ordinary English officer, especially theofficer who has lived among Orientals--conventions which in any casetend in the direction of silence. He also really had, and to an extentof which some people complained, a certain English embarrassment aboutmaking all his purposes clear, especially before they were clear tohimself. He probably liked to think a thing out in his own way andtherefore at his own time, which was not always the time at whichpeople thought they had a right to question him. In this way it istrue of him, as of such another strong man as the Irish patriotParnell, that his very simplicity had an effect of secrecy. But it isa complete error about him, as it was a complete error about Parnell, to suppose that he took the Prussian pose of disdaining anddisregarding everybody; that he settled everything in solitary egoism;that he was a Superman too self-sufficing to listen to friends and toophilosophical to listen to reason. It will be noted that every crisisof his life that is lit up by history contradicts the colours of thispicture. He could not only take counsel with his friends, but he wasabnormally successful in taking counsel with his foes. It is notablethat whenever he came in personal contact with a great captainactually or potentially in arms against him, the result was not a merecollision but a mutual comprehension. He established the friendliestrelations with the chivalrous and adventurous Marchand, standing onthe deadly debatable land of Fashoda. He established equally friendlyrelations with the Boer generals, gathered under the dark cloud ofnational disappointment and defeat. In all such instances, so far ashis individuality could count, it is clear that he acted as a moderateand, in the universal sense, as a liberal. The results and the recordsof those who met him in such hours are quite sufficient to prove thathe did not leave the impression of a Prussian arrogance. If he wassilent, his silence must have been more friendly, I had almost saidmore convivial, than many men's conversation. But on the largerplatform of the European War, this quiet but unique gift ofopen-mindedness and intellectual hospitality was destined to do twovery decisive things, which may profoundly affect history. In thefirst he dealt with the more democratic and even revolutionaryelements in England; and in the second he represents a very realchange that has passed over the English traditions about Russia. Personally, as has already been noted, Lord Kitchener never was andnever pretended to be anything more or less than the good militaryman, and by the time of the Great War he was already an elderlymilitary man. The type has much the same standards and traditions inall European countries; but in England it is, if anything, a littlemore traditional, for the very reason that the army has been somethingseparate, professional, and relatively small--a sort of club. Themilitary man was all the more military because the nation was notmilitary. Such a man is inevitably conservative in his views, conventional in his manners, and simplifies the problem of patriotismto a single-eyed obedience. When he took over the business of raisingthe first levies for the present war he was confronted with theproblem of the English Trades Unions--the very last problem in theworld which one could reasonably expect such a man to understand. Andyet he did understand it; he was perhaps the only person in thegoverning class who did. If it be hard to explain to the richerclasses in England, it is almost impossible to explain to any classesin any other country, because the English situation is largely unique. There is the same difficulty as we have already found in describinghow vast and even violent a transformation scene the growth of thegreat army appeared; it has been almost impossible to describe it tothe chief conscript countries, which take a great army for granted. The key to the parallel problem of the Trades Unions is simplythis--that England is the only European country that is practicallyindustrial and nothing else. Trades Unions can never play such a partin countries where the masses live on the land; such masses alwayshave some status and support--yes, even if they are serfs. The statusof the English workman is not in the earth; it is, so to speak, in theair--in a scaffolding of artificial abstractions, a framework of rulesand rights, of verbal bargains or paper resolutions. If he loses this, he becomes nothing so human or homely as a slave. Rather he becomes awild beast, a sort of wandering vermin with no place in the state atall. It would be necessary to explain this, and a great deal morewhich cannot possibly be explained here, before we could measure theenormity of the enigma facing the British official who had to proposeto the English the practical suspension of the Trades Unions. To thismust 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 greatChristian Guilds of the Middle Ages; a more revolutionary Press hadappeared to champion them; gigantic strikes had split the country inevery direction. Anyone would have said that under these circumstancesthe very virtues and attainments of Kitchener would at least make itfairly certain that he would quarrel with the Trades Unions. It soonbecame apparent that the one man who was not going to quarrel with theTrades 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 andold-fashioned Anglo-Egyptian militarist, with his doctrine anddiscipline of the barrack-room and the drumhead court-martial, wasnever regarded by the workers with a shade of suspicion. They simplytook him at his word, and the leader of the most turbulent TradesUnion element paid to him after his death the simplest tribute in theplainest and most popular language--"He was a straight man. " I am soantiquated as to think it a better epitaph than the fashionable phraseabout a strong man. Some silent indescribable geniality of fairness inthe man once more prevailed against the possibility of passionatemisunderstandings, as it had prevailed against the internationalnervousness of the atmosphere of Fashoda or the tragic border feud ofthe Boers. I suspect that it lay largely in the fact that this greatEnglishman was sufficiently English to guess one thing missed by manymore sophisticated people--that the English Trades Unions are veryEnglish. For good or evil, they are national; they have very little incommon with the more international Socialism of the Continent, andnothing whatever in common with the pedantic Socialism of Prussia. Understanding his countrymen by instinct, he did not make a parade ofefficiency; for the English dislike the symbols of dictatorship muchmore than dictatorship. They hate the crown and sceptre of the tyrantmuch more than his tyranny. They have a national tradition whichallows of far too much inequality so long as it is softened with acertain camaraderie, and in which even snobs only remember the coronetof a nobleman on condition that he shall himself seem to forget it. The other matter is much more important. Though the reverse ofvivacious, Kitchener was very vital; and he had one unique mark ofvitality--that he had not stopped growing. "An oak should not betransplanted at sixty, " said the great orator Grattan when he wastransferred from the Parliament of Dublin to the Parliament ofWestminster. Kitchener was sixty-four when he turned his face westwardto the problem of his own country. There clung to him already all thetraditional attributes of the oak--its toughness, its angularity, itscloseness of grain and ruggedness of outline--when he was uprootedfrom the Arabian sands and replanted in the remote western island. Yetthe oak not only grew green again and put forth new leaves; it wasalmost 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 neworder 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 oftime was felt even by the poetic and emotional Grattan, it would nothave been strange if the hardening had been quite hopeless in therigid and reticent Kitchener. Yet it was not hopeless; and the factbecame the spring of much of the national hope. The grizzled martinetfrom India and Egypt showed a certain power which is in nearly allgreat men, but of which St. Paul has become the traditional type--thepower of being a great convert as well as a great crusader. It is thereal power of re-forming an opinion, which is the very opposite ofthat mere formlessness which we call fickleness. Nor is the comparisonto such an example as St. Paul altogether historically disproportionate;for the point upon which this very typical Englishman changed his mindwas a point which is now the pivot of the whole future and perhaps ofthe very existence of Christendom. For many such Englishmen it mightalmost be called the discovery of Christendom. It can be called withgreater precision, and indeed with almost complete precision, thediscovery of Russia. Military bureaucratic systems everywhere have too much tendency towork upon one idea, and there was a time when the military andbureaucratic system of the British in the East worked on the idea ofthe fear of Russia. It is needless here to explain that sentiment, anduseless to explain it away. It was partly a mere tradition from thenatural jingoism of the Crimean War; it was partly in itself a tributeto the epic majesty of the Russian march across mysterious Asia to thelegendary Chinese Wall. The point here is that it existed; and wherethere exists such an idea in such military rulers, they very seldomalter their idea. But Kitchener did alter his idea. Not in meremilitary obedience, but in genuine human reasonableness, he came latein life to see the Russian as the friend and the Prussian as theenemy. In the inevitable division of British ministerial councilsabout the distribution of British aid and attention he was the one manwho stood most enthusiastically, one might say stubbornly, for thesupreme importance of munitioning the magnificent Russian defence. Hemystified all the English pessimists, in what seemed to them theblackest hour of pessimism, by announcing that Germany had "shot herbolt"; that she had already lost her chance, not by any of the Alliedattacks, but by the stupendous skill and valour of that Russianretreat, which was more triumphant than any attack. It is thisdiscovery that marks an epoch; for that great deliverance was not onlythe victory of Russia, but very specially the victory of the Russians. Never before was there such a war of men against guns--as awful andinspiring to watch as a war of men against demons. Perhaps the duel ofa man with a modern gun is more like that between a man and anenormous dragon; nor is there anything on the weaker side save theultimate and almost metaphysical truth, that a man can make a gun anda gun cannot make a man. It is the man--the Russian soldier andpeasant himself--who has emerged like the hero of an epic, and who isnow secure for ever from the sophisticated scandal-mongering and thecultured ignorance of the West. And it is this that lends an epic and almost primeval symbolism to thetragedy of Kitchener's end. Somehow the very fact that it wasincomplete as an action makes it more complete as an allegory. Englishin his very limitations, English in his late emancipation from them, he was setting forth on an eastward journey different indeed from themany eastward journeys of his life. There are many such nobletragedies of travel in the records of his country; it was so, silentlywithout a trace, that the track of Franklin faded in the polar snowsor the track of Gordon in the desert sands. But this was an adventurenew for such adventurous men--the finding not of strange foes but offriends yet stranger. Many men of his blood and type--simple, strenuous, somewhat prosaic--had threaded their way through some darkcontinent to add some treasure or territory to the English name. Hewas seeking what for us his countrymen has long been a darkcontinent--but which contains a much more noble treasure. The glory ofa 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. Itremains like a mighty bridge, the mightier for being broken, pointingacross a chasm, and promising a mightier thoroughfare between the eastand west. In that waste of seas beyond the last northern islets wherehis ship went down one might fancy his spirit standing, a figurefrustrated yet prophetic and pointing to the East, whence are thelight 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_.