But this gentler side was known to very few indeed, and only guessed by a few more. To the majority of those who met Kitchener, even frequently and in some intimacy, he appeared until the very last years of his life a man of one idea and no emotions. The truth was rather that his emotions were mostly in complete subjection to his will, while the idea exercised a despotic domination over his whole being. There was really something of the old anchorite in this very modern and secular person, and it is not altogether irrelevant to recall that in his early days he was vividly interested in small minutiæ of Church ritual.
“I have heard him indulge in coarse ungentlemanly emphatics,
When the Protestant Church has been divided on the subject of the proper width of a chasuble’s hem;
I have even known him to sneer at albs, and as for dalmatics,
Words cannot convey an idea of the contempt he always expressed for them.”
The young Kitchener was far from sharing the sentiments of Gilbert’s latitudinarian hero. He would have discussed albs with fervour, and dalmatics with reverence, and would have seen nothing more ridiculous in caring about the size of a chasuble than about the strength of a platoon. He would have argued, or rather felt, that discipline, dogma—in other words, shape, consistency, and fighting unity—were as necessary in affairs of the Spirit as in secular life. In other days and other circumstances he might well have been either a peaceful abbot or the head of an order of religious knights; there was deep in his nature that passion for self-immolation which made the most businesslike people monks, as well as that passion for meticulous order and method which made monks the most businesslike people of their time. His other passions, probably, were not strong; strong or weak, they were wholly under control. He hated incontinence in any form. The effusive youth who called him “Kitchener,” and was met with the cool reply “Perhaps you’d rather use my Christian name,” was not more discouraged than the swearer of oaths or the teller of profane or unseemly anecdotes. To Kitchener might be applied the eulogy of Clarendon on Charles I: “He was so severe an exactor of gravity and reverence in all mention of religion, that he could never endure any light or profane word, with what sharpness of wit soever it was covered; and ... no man durst bring before him any thing that was profane or unclean.” Sir George Arthur has remarked on the mingled astonishment and irritation with which he listened to a questionable performance at Cairo, given on an occasion when official reasons obliged him to be present; and there was something hugely disconcerting in the manner in which he received a jest of doubtful taste made in general society. His attitude was too well known for such a thing to be a possibility among his own intimates.
It has been said that the man who is not afraid to die is lord and master of all other men. Equally true is it to say that the man who is not afraid to live according to his own plan will always dominate those who yield to fashion in opinion, to social modes, or to the weaknesses of their own natures. Kitchener’s peculiar power was due to his immense self-discipline. He could hardly be called, in the real sense, a military genius; Roberts was his superior as an intellectual soldier, and among his own subordinates there were men more richly endowed even in those qualities he really possessed in large measure—the qualities of the organiser which were so signally shown in the long preparations for the triumph, so swift and sure in its final realisation, of Omdurman. But other soldiers were sometimes off duty. Kitchener was never off duty. The moment one task was done he was preparing himself for another; he was that kind of moral athlete who never permits himself a day’s departure from strict training. Practically this rigidity has its dangers; there is such a thing in life, as in sport, as getting stale from over-fitness; and when the final test of Kitchener’s life came it might perhaps have been well for him and for others if he had wasted (as he would have thought it) a little more time during his prime. For, with all his painfully acquired lore, he lacked the full knowledge of men, and in whole departments of things he could only oppose an enormous innocence to people grown old in wile. But in the meantime he gained indefinitely in influence through his almost inhuman absorption in soldiering, his complete indifference to money, society, and everything men prize as soon as their purely material desires have reached saturation point. He received full credit for the qualities which were really his. He was conceded some qualities which, in fact, he did not possess. He was trusted as the final court of appeal on all questions relating to the East, even those affecting parts of the East with which he was really not familiar, for it is our habit to think that a man who has lived in Suez must in some mysterious way know much about Bombay. He was regarded above all as “straight,” and justly so, for, though habituation to Eastern conditions had given him in minor matters some touch of Oriental guile, he was, in all great things, the soul of truth, and in everything the essence of probity. But there were occasions on which his great prestige was something of a disadvantage. It was assumed that on all military and Eastern questions Kitchener must be right and all other men wrong, and that he must be especially right whenever his opinion happened to clash with that of a politician. A good many things might have gone better had not the infallibility of Lord Kitchener become a journalistic dogma, to be disputed only at the cost of excommunication. In the same way the magic of his personality was used to give weight to a certain set of political ideas. It was so used without collusion or privity or consent on his part; all his life he had an almost superstitious terror of politics, and no hint of sympathy with one party or reprobation of another ever crossed his lips. But it is not beyond the ingenuity of politicians to convey an impression without making a statement, and they so contrived matters that a good many people, while honouring him as a soldier and recognising him as a high-minded public servant, watched him with a certain strained attention. It needed the Great War to reveal to the working classes the true nature of the man and the absolute singleness of his aims. Then they were convinced, and he had no heartier admirers than the working men, who honoured his name, and trusted his word, above all other war-lords’.
But though Kitchener was in every sense the farthest removed from a politician, he had many of the qualities of a statesman, and his work at every period of his career (and at no period more than during the Great War) cannot be properly measured solely by his military achievements. We have seen his statesmanship at work at Fashoda, but it had its influence at every stage of his career. If the Kitchener legend, whatever measure of falsity mingled with its truth, was of immense value in sustaining the spirit of England in the great ordeal, it was not less useful in vitalising the Alliance. Frenchmen felt that they had in Kitchener someone who understood the real nature of the vast transaction before them; someone who would not yield to the traditional English conception of Continental war as colony-seizing and island-collecting, but who, on the other hand, knew in his very bones that the thing must be fought out on the main battlefield, and that no showy successes elsewhere would avail against defeat in that sombre theatre. The visit to Paris, in the gloomy days before the Marne, was that of a soldier who understood war on the great scale, and was understood at once by men grown grey in the study of war of that kind. Kitchener’s work at the War Office can never be measured by shells and machine-guns; the greatest part of it was that of a military foreign minister, able to speak a language unknown to a civilian Secretary for Foreign Affairs.
It is this latent quality of statesmanship which makes one wonder whether Lord Kitchener would not have done even greater things for the Empire had it been his lot to spend more time at its heart and less in the outer marches. But his fate was decided partly by his circumstances and partly by his peculiar constitution. He could only expect promotion by taking jobs that nobody else wanted, and he had a horror of cold weather which would have made continuous residence in a northern latitude insupportable to him. Once he got the label of the soldier of the outer Empire it stuck to him, and thus it happened that the Englishman with the broadest military outlook of his time never faced, until he was called to the greatest of all tasks, a military problem of the largest kind. His own view of himself is well known. He looked forward, just before his death, to tasks rather of a statesmanlike than a military kind; and it is permissible to distrust that optimism which professed, when the news of the Hampshire’s loss came, the comfortable belief that he had done his country all the service of which he was capable. For there was much in the man which would assuredly not have been useless in the final liquidation of accounts; and, even had no specific employment been found for his talents, the mere force of his living example would have been valuable. In the presence of one who had shown such large fidelity, such noble disdain of the objects of selfish desire, such self-forgetting devotion to a trust, it would have been more difficult for faction and self-seeking to display themselves unashamed. He is too recently dead for his spirit to work on this generation as it will, doubtless, on men still unborn. But alive he might have reminded the masses that there can be true greatness in great place, and people in great place that true greatness is a matter of a man’s soul and not of his station.