We found the rest of the company at table, where a place next his hostess was waiting for him. If you had seen Lord Kitchener for the first time you would have felt that his toilet did not much matter. The man's personality was the thing. There are many men who produce an impression of power, but with this man it was military power. You could not take him for anything but a soldier. Not at all the soldier as he presents himself to the youthful imagination. He was not in uniform; no English soldier ever is except on duty or on occasions of ceremony. But it is possible to be a soldier without gold lace or gilt buttons, and to appear to be. The carriage of his head, rising out of square shoulders, announced him a soldier; so did his pale grey-blue, steel-blue eyes, and the air of command; a quite unconscious air for the simplicity of his bearing was as remarkable as anything about him. It has been said he is not a natural leader of men, not a man whom other men follow in the field just because they cannot help it; that he does not "inspire" his soldiers. I doubt it; but even were it so he is a man whose orders other men must obey when they are sent. His pale steel-blue eyes have in them the hard light of the desert. I believe, in fact, the light of the desert, which we consider a poetic thing, injured his eyes. But there is in them that far-off look as of one whose sight has ranged over great spaces for great intervals of time. The races of South-eastern Europe and of Central Asia have it. There has been seen in London a beautiful girl who has it; gazing out, from the graceful movement of the waltz, on a distant horizon much beyond the walls of a ballroom.
Yet as Lord Kitchener sits there talking at luncheon the hardness of the face softens. The merciless eyes grow kindly and human; you may forget, if you like, the frontal attack at Paardeberg and the corpse-strewn plains of Omdurman, and remember only that an English gentleman who has made a study of the science of war sits there, devoting himself to the entertainment of two English ladies. It is a picture which has a charm of its own. And it is a Kitchener of whom you hear none too often. That is why you hear of him in these social circumstances from me. Most men have a human side to them. Even "K." has, and sometimes allows it to be seen.
He had a human side when he departed without leave from the Military Academy at Woolwich to take a look for himself at what was going on near the French frontier in July or August 1870, when the Prussians were giving their French neighbours a lesson in the art of war that seemed to young Kitchener a lesson likely to be more profitable than those of Woolwich; so he went. It was a grave breach of discipline. I never heard how the matter was settled but it did not keep Kitchener out of the army for he entered the Royal Engineers the next year. But I imagine we all like him the better for such an adventure.
CHAPTER XXXII
SIR GEORGE LEWIS—KING'S SOLICITOR AND FRIEND
A SOCIAL FORCE
Lord Russel said of him:
"What is most remarkable in Lewis is not his knowledge of the law, which is very great, nor his skill in the conduct of difficult causes, in which he is unrivalled, nor his tact, nor his genius for compromise. It is his courage."
That was said not long after the Parnell trial, in which Lord Russell—then Sir Charles Russell and afterwards Lord Chief Justice of England—who had long been at the head of the English Bar of his own time, proved himself the equal of any advocate of any time. Yet he must divide the honours of that trial with Sir George Lewis. The profession, or the two professions of barrister and solicitor, divided them if the public did not. The public has almost never the means of judging. The work of preparing a great cause is carried on in the solicitor's office. The barrister takes it up ready made and the way in which he handles his material is seen of all men. But no barrister badly briefed could make much of a complicated case. In no trial was this truer than in the Parnell trial. Parnell was perhaps the greatest political leader of his time, and the least scrupulous. He had a black record, and the men behind him a blacker. Not even Sir George Lewis could wash it all white, but without him the judgment would have gone far more heavily against the Irish dictator. And if ever there was a case in which Lord Russell's eulogy on Sir George Lewis was to the point it was the Parnell case. It needed all his courage in handling facts to save his client from a condemnation which would have carried with it his banishment from public life. Mr. Gladstone marked his sense of the service done by making Mr. George Lewis Sir George Lewis. The knighthood some years later became a baronetcy, the late King, I believe, suggesting it.
For the late King, while Prince of Wales, had stood to the great solicitor in the relation of client, and this business connection had become one of friendship. They were much together at Homburg, where both spent three or four weeks each year for many years. Homburg is a place where the houses are of glass and everything is known. The Prince gave his dinners at Ritter's or at the Kursaal in the open air. If he went afterward to play whist—for these were ante-bridge days—at Mr. Lewis's rooms, that was known. Nor is publicity, so far as Prince and King are concerned, much less in England, and when Mr. Lewis dined at Marlborough House, or was present at a levee at St. James's Palace, or was a guest at Sandringham, all these things were of common knowledge. And since the English are a very loyal people, who had a strong personal attachment to their late King, the confidence and liking the King showed him won for Sir George the confidence and liking of others.