Portraits of the Nineties

by E. T. Raymond

This fact must be borne in mind in considering the character of that enormous Kitchener legend which grew up—or rather started up almost in a single night—late in the Nineties. At the beginning of the decade the name of Herbert Kitchener conveyed nothing to people outside an extremely narrow military and diplomatic circle; a year or two later vague rumours of some extremely capable soldier, a discovery of Lord Cromer’s, the very man to regain the Sudan and “avenge Gordon,” began to circulate; by the middle Nineties the new Sirdar had established a certain definite repute as a strong man who would stand no nonsense from anybody, and who had even terrorised an unfriendly Khedive; in 1896 there began to be talk about the expedition authorised by the Government on Mr. Chamberlain’s suggestion; the next two years the papers were at intervals interested in the building of the desert railway which was to be Kitchener’s instrument for the reconquest of the Sudan. Then came news, on the Good Friday of 1898, of a considerable victory at the Atbara; and after, for some months, there was almost silence. At last it was gloriously broken. A great battle had been fought and won outside Omdurman, the mushroom capital of the Khalifa, erected opposite the ruins of Khartoum on the other side of the Nile. The Dervishes had attacked with all their force; they had been utterly defeated; and, though the Khalifa and the remnants of his army had got away, his power had evidently been broken for ever. Khartoum was ours, Gordon had been splendidly avenged, and the reign of civilisation in the home of an aggressive barbarism was now assured. Kitchener, who had planned every detail of the business, and had ended it by violating the Mahdi’s tomb and throwing the body of the false prophet (parted from his head) into the Nile, suddenly emerged from the status of a comparatively unmarked man to that of the “greatest living soldier.”

The first fever had hardly died away when excitement, and with it the renown of the successful General, was intensified by the great irony which is summarised in the word “Fashoda.” Kitchener, going forward on the Nile from Omdurman, was met by a small steel rowing-boat, which proved to contain a Senegalese sergeant and two men, charged with a letter from Major Marchand, who had fought his way from the Atlantic to the Upper Nile, and now lay encamped at Fashoda, right on the Cape-to-Cairo line. Major Marchand presented his compliments, congratulated General Kitchener on what he had heard was an uncommonly fine victory, and would be honoured, charmed, and even ravished to welcome him at Fashoda under the shadow of the tricolour.

LORD KITCHENER.

Here was a pretty kettle of fish, with the prospect of a considerable amount of fat in a truly terrible fire if anything went awry in the cookery. Kitchener had been tested as a soldier; he was now to prove himself as a diplomatist. Many a British officer and gentleman, charged to the teeth with good form, might have started there and then a European war. But Kitchener, whose manners were sometimes sufficiently brusque where his own countrymen were concerned, had very fortunately much tact when dealing with foreigners, and especially when in contact with Frenchmen. He spoke their language not only accurately but with grace and fluency, and it almost seemed as if the use of that idiom dissolved much of the ice which generally abounded in his neighbourhood. During the Great War not his least service was the establishment of thoroughly good relations with the French high command; they not only trusted in him, as one who knew, and knew that they knew, but they liked him. It was not only that they never forgot that he had been a volunteer in the war of 1870, but they discovered in the grim Field-Marshal something more sympathetic than they could find in British officers of ordinarily far more expansive manner. Kitchener, on his part, had no doubt something in excess of the natural interest and friendliness which (other things being equal) most men entertain for foreigners whose language they speak well. He had a real admiration for French qualities in general, a still greater admiration for French military qualities in particular, and an admiration greater still for an individual French soldier so transparently brave and chivalrous as Marchand. “I congratulate you,” he said, in shaking hands with the Major, “on all you have accomplished,” meaning the terrible march across Africa, in which a fifth of Marchand’s little force had perished. “No,” was the French soldier’s reply, “the credit is not to me, but to these soldiers,” pointing to his troops. “Then,” said Kitchener in describing the interview, “then I knew he was a gentleman.”

It was a difficult business, that of getting the gallant Marchand to consent, helpless as he was, to the replacement of the French by the Egyptian flag. But the thing was done, and done in such a way that, though there might be chagrin, there was no hurt of that kind that festers in a proud heart: years after Kitchener and Marchand could meet without either feeling the smallest awkwardness. Indeed, not for the first time, soldiers proved themselves better at the diplomat’s trade than the diplomats themselves. The real peril of Fashoda was due to the professional speechifiers; and the embitterment of Anglo-French relations, which long survived the formal settlement of this affair, might well have been averted had statesmen, comfortably seated in palace-offices in a northern latitude, imitated the courtesy and restraint of two war-worn and nerve-racked men of war, fretted by the hundred little miseries of one of the most detestable regions of tropical Africa.

It was Omdurman and Fashoda that made the Kitchener legend, and Kitchener’s part in the Boer War scarcely added to it. Critics might say that the dispositions at Omdurman were faulty, and that though Kitchener was the prince of military organisers, he was not, and never would be, a great general in the field. The people would not have it. They had made up their mind that he was a great man; they went on thinking he was a great man; and many years later, when behind the scenes every small detractor was sneering at the “Kitchener myth,” the general public suffered no smallest shadow of doubt to creep over its full faith in him. He had carried out a clean job cleanly, winding up by a tremendous and final success a business which had been marked by one tragic failure after another. He had achieved, for less money than he had promised to spend, a complete victory, while others had merely added recklessly to the National Debt while subtracting heavily from the national prestige. The critics might say that Kitchener had much luck, that he profited by the efforts of those who preceded him, that means were available for his campaign which were beyond the reach of others. All this was nothing to the public. They saw a great success, and they honoured the man who had accomplished it, all the more because they had been accustomed to connect with defeat all the place-names in his itinerary of triumph.

But the main point of the whole thing was that summarised in the opening paragraph: “Dervishes, 10,800 killed, 16,000 wounded; British and Egyptians, 47 killed, 342 wounded.” Had Kitchener’s victory been dear in life the whole glamour of the business would have been absent. For the British people at that time took an interest in war rather like a virtuous spinster’s interest in wickedness. They liked to hear about it, to talk about it, to feel the thrill of it. But they did not like it to come too near their own homes. Their idea of a good kind of war was one waged against a barbarous foe on a picturesque far-away terrain; one which would enable the Prime Minister, in proposing the thanks of Parliament to the successful general, to talk about “thin red lines” creeping beside gorges that would appal a Canadian trapper, or scaling mountains which would terrify an Alpine guide, until they had “planted the standard of St. George upon the mountains of Rasselas,” or some equally interesting range. They liked the foe to come on bravely but rather injudiciously, and to be “mown down” by machine-guns that never jammed. They liked him to be easily surprised and bamboozled, and then they paid the highest compliments to his “unavailing heroism”; Mr. Kipling probably compensated him with a poem in cockney dialect. But if, declining himself to be surprised and bamboozled, the barbarian succeeded in surprising and bamboozling our own men, we are very apt to describe the ensuing disaster as a “treacherous massacre.” It was, perhaps, this dislike of unobliging enemies, no less than our unmixed joy over the disasters of any foreign force in similar circumstances, that contributed to the want of affection for us on the Continent. However that may be, it is certain that a great part of the popularity of Omdurman was due to the fact that it was an amazingly cheap victory of discipline and apparatus over barbaric and comparatively ill-equipped valour; and no small degree of Kitchener’s prestige was accounted for by the popular comparison of the tiny cost in life of his great feat with the large outlay, in blood as well as in money, of some of his unsuccessful predecessors. The fact was of enormous importance, both in the South African War and later. People always felt that Kitchener could do things by a kind of magic if they were do-able that way, and were thus reconciled to heavy loss when it arrived to troops for which he had responsibility. It was felt that he had no motive but to get results at the very lowest cost; that he would spare neither himself nor another in pursuing that purpose; and that no influences of any kind—personal, political, or social—would ever be allowed to interfere with his ideals of military economy and efficiency.

The public, as usual, was perfectly right in its instinct in all matters which it was competent to judge. It was less right, of course, when it attempted to appraise the military genius of Kitchener. Yet it was less wrong, probably, than the professed critics who in the Great War concentrated on the inevitable shortcomings of a man past his prime, in an unfamiliar environment, surrounded by politicians, nervous of public opinion in a country with representative institutions, who had to build up from the beginning the immense organisation needed for such an effort as that to which this country was committed. When all is said of these shortcomings, the fact remains that the only British soldier who foresaw the duration of the war, and the means necessary to bring it to a successful conclusion, was one who had spent only a few months in Europe since his early manhood, who had never handled white troops on a great scale, and had had no opportunity of applying himself to those problems which had been the life-long occupation of German and French generals. The marvel was not that Lord Kitchener made mistakes, but that he was able to form so just a judgment of the grand contours of the enormous affair with which he was called at a moment’s notice to deal. Judged only by that vast experiment, the greatness of the man is still apparent. But it would be quite unjust so to judge him. The public instinct was correct in fastening on the campaign that culminated at Omdurman as a supreme illustration of his qualities. They were less those of a great commander in the field than of a patient planner, plotter, and organiser, a super-sapper and miner, the manager of a great military business. From first to last he was always the engineer, the mathematician, and the business man; and if at the last he appeared less a business man than at the first, it was only because he was that kind of business man who must have all the threads in his own hands, and the threads of the last great business were too numerous for any one pair of hands to hold.

It was not so in the Nineties. Then Kitchener had a measurable task and immeasurable energy; he could do everything himself, and anything that he could do himself was well done. One most authentic proof of his greatness was his choice of instruments; “Kitchener’s men” have always shown themselves good for something, and generally good for most things. Another was the manner in which he impressed his personality on all who came near him. It is easy and safe to talk about the absurdity of the “Kitchener myth” in general society; the experience is much more embarrassing when an old officer of Kitchener happens to be present. For the grim man who was so ruthless to incompetence, one might almost add so cruel to misfortune, the man who treated ill-health as a kind of crime, and marriage as a kind of treason, somehow managed to get himself loved. That part of the Kitchener legend which represented him as without heart or bowels was, indeed, false. He was inexorable in business, and in general society he always assumed, partly out of shyness and partly from policy, a defensive armour that was most difficult to penetrate. But at bottom there was not a little geniality in his nature, and among intimates he was often cheerful and sometimes garrulous; the habit grew on him with years, and in most serious times, and in the midst of intensely serious discussions, he would frequently develop a curious irrelevancy and small-talkativeness. At no time did he like to be alone; if he did not talk himself—and sometimes he indulged a mood of strict taciturnity—he liked to have someone to talk to him. And, being an autocrat, he always preferred that the somebody should be one who would not take offence if suddenly snubbed for doing what he was there to do. There are kings who love the society of great lords as near as may be to their own station, and there are kings who prefer for their intimates and confidants men of inferior standing. Lord Kitchener was a potentate of the latter kind, and for the most part the true man was only seen by people who were in effect little more than members of his suite. The chief exceptions were a few favoured generals, and the few men, and the fewer women, who had the privilege of being his friends in general society. With such he could be utterly charming; and he had also a way of getting into the affections of their children: one little girl, now a mother herself, used always to say her prayers at his knee when he was a visitor at her father’s house; and the Grenfell boys were on small-brotherly terms with the grim Field-Marshal. Kitchener, in short, had a very human heart, and a quite human longing for affection. His celibacy was partly a matter of accident and partly of principle: he disliked extremely the idea of a married soldier; he seems to have shared Athos’ view that a dying warrior should cry with his last breath “Vive le roi,” and not murmur, “Adieu, my dear wife.” Thus in South Africa he would allow none of the married officers to be joined by their wives, and once in a general company, on hearing of the marriage of one of his men, he burst into an angry tirade. With such a view of the vocation of soldiering, and with the mere fact of so much of his life being passed in remote places, it is small wonder that his own marrying age went by. But, though in his later years he may not have regretted the lack of a wife, he certainly felt the want of children, and realised somewhat pathetically his own loneliness.