A FORCEFUL CHARACTER
In an illuminating article in COLLIER’S WEEKLY, the well-known Irish journalist, T. P. O’Connor, thus brought out the character of the hero of Khartoum:
“I attribute something of the Lord Kitchener we know to the fact that, though English by blood, he spent the first years of his life in wandering over the hills and looking down on the sea-tossed shores of County Kerry. That tact which enabled him to settle the issue with Marchand, the French explorer, at Fashoda, suggests some of the lessons in the soft answer which Ireland can teach. You remember how, when it was possible that a collision between him and Marchand might mean a war between England and France, Lord Kitchener sent some fresh vegetables and champagne to the daring French explorer, who had gone through the hunger, thirst, and hardship of the desert for months. Marchand had to go from Fashoda all the same, but he went with no personal grievance.
“If I look for the roots of Lord Kitchener’s greatness, I trace them to intense ambition to succeed, to make the most of his opportunities—above all, to the incessant desire to work and fill every hour of his days with something done. He is sent as a youngster to Palestine, through peril to life, through great privation, through heart-breaking drudgery, he pursues his work until he has completed a map of all western Palestine to the amazement and delight of his employers. And he values this experience so largely because he learns Arabic, and, above all, he learns the Arabic character. One of the chroniclers of his career makes the apt observation that, while the baton of the marshal is in every French soldier’s knapsack, Kitchener found his coronet in the Arab grammar. But how many soldiers or men of any class would have devoted the leisure hours of a fiercely active task like Kitchener’s in Palestine to the study of one of the most difficult of languages?
“Hard work, patience, and the utilization of every second of time, the eagerness always to learn—these are the chief secrets of Lord Kitchener’s enormous success in life. But the man who works himself is ineffective in great things unless he has the gift to choose the men who can work for him and with him. This choice of subordinates is one of Lord Kitchener’s greatest powers. He nearly always has had the right man in the right place. And his men return his confidence because he gives them absolute confidence. He never thinks of asking a subordinate whether he has done the job he has given him; he takes that for granted, knowing his man; and he never worries his subordinates.
“This is one of the reasons why, though he works so terrifically, he never is tired, never worried. He sits down at his desk at the War Office for about ten hours a day; but he sits there calmly, isn’t ringing at bells and shouting down pipes; he does it all so quietly that it seems mere pastime; and the effect of this perfect tranquillity produces an extraordinary result on those who work with him. They also do their work easily, tranquilly, and without feeling it.
“A great soldier certainly; but perhaps a greater organizer than anything else. This is his supreme quality, and for that quality there is necessary, above all things, a clear, penetrating brain. He doesn’t form any visions—as Napoleon used to complain of some of his marshals. At school he was celebrated for his knowledge of mathematics, and especially for his phenomenal rapidity in dealing with figures, and it was not accident that so truly a scientific mind found its natural place in the engineers. A mathematician, an engineer, a man of science, a great accountant—these things he has been in all his enterprises. It was these qualities that enabled him to make that astounding railway which brought Cairo almost into touch with the Khalifa, who, with his predecessor, the Mahdi, and with his tragically potent ally, the hungry and all-devouring desert, had beaten back so many other attempts to reach and to beat him.
“This man, who has fought such tremendous and historic battles and confronted great odds, is yet a man who prefers a deal to a struggle; and, though he can be so stern, has yet a diplomatic tact that gets him and his country out of difficult hours. The nature, doubtless, is complex, and stern determination and tenacity are part of it; but there is also the other side, which is much forgotten—especially by that class of writers who have to describe human character as rigidly symmetrical and unnaturally harmonious.
“That cold and penetrating eye of his makes it impossible to imagine anybody taking any liberties with Lord Kitchener; yet one of his greatest qualities, at once useful and charming, is his accessibility. Anybody who has anything to say to him can approach him; anybody who has anything to teach him will find a ready and grateful learner. This is one of the secrets of his extraordinary success and universal popularity in Egypt. Lord Cromer was a great Egyptian ruler, and his services are imperishable and gigantic; but Lord Cromer was the stern, solitary, and inaccessible bureaucrat who worked innumerable hours every day at his desk, never learned the Arabic language, and possibly never quite grasped the Arab nature. Lord Kitchener is the cadi under the tree. The mayor or the citizens of the little Arab village can come to him, and the old soldier, and even the fellah, alone; and they will find Lord Kitchener ready to listen and to talk to them in their own tongue, to enter with gusto into the pettiest details of their daily and squalid lives, and ready also to apply the remedy to such grievances as commend themselves to his judgment.
“As an illustration of his accessibility, let me repeat a delicious story which delighted all Egypt. An old peasant came out of the depths of the land all the way to Cairo to see the great Kitchener, with the complaint that his white mule had been stolen. The whole official machinery was interrupted for a while, and the old fellah went back with his white mule. You can fancy how that story was repeated in every fellah cabin in the land, and how the devotion to Kitchener and trust in his justice and in his sympathy went trumpet-tongued among this race, downtrodden and neglected almost from the beginning of time.”
Such is the man who, when chosen to head the British War Department, had his bed sent to the office, that he might be on duty day and night if needed; who insisted that no raw recruits should be sent to the front, but put them through a rigid system of drill and physical exercise to toughen their muscles and fit them for the work of a soldier; who said that there would be abundant time for fighting, as in his judgment there was a year or more of war in prospect.