LORD KITCHENER
BY
G. K. CHESTERTON
London
1917
Photo by Elliott & Fry, Ltd., London.LORD KITCHENER[1]
Horatio Herbert Kitchener was Irish bybirth but English by extraction, being born inCounty Kerry, the son of an English colonel. Thefanciful might see in this first and accidental factthe presence of this simple and practical manamid the more mystical western problems anddreams which were very distant from his mind, anelement which clings to all his career and gives it anunconscious poetry. He had many qualities of theepic hero, and especially this—that he was the lastman in the world to be the epic poet. There issomething almost provocative to superstition in theway in which he stands at every turn as the symbolof the special trials and the modern transfigurationof England; from this moment when he was bornamong the peasants of Ireland to the momentwhen he died upon the sea, seeking at the other endof the world the other great peasant civilisation ofRussia. Yet at each of these symbolic momentshe is, if not as unconscious as a symbol, then assilent as a symbol; he is speechless and supremelysignificant, like an ensign or a flag. The superficialpicturesqueness of his life, at least, lies very muchin this—that he was like a hero condemned by fateto act an allegory.[2]
We find this, for instance, in one of the very firstand perhaps one of the most picturesque of all thefacts that are recorded or reported of him. As ayouth, tall, very shy and quiet, he was only notablefor intellectual interests of the soberest and mostmethodical sort, especially for the close study ofmathematics. This also, incidentally, was typicalenough, for his work in Egypt and the Soudan, bywhich his fame was established, was based whollyupon such calculations. It was not merelymathematical but literally geometrical. His workbore the same relation to Gordon's that a rigidmathematical diagram bears to a rough pencilsketch on which it is based. Yet the student thusbent on the strictest side of his profession, studyingit at Woolwich and entering the Engineers as themost severely scientific branch of the army, had asa first experience of war something so romantic thatit has been counted incredible, yet something sorelevant to the great reality of to-day that it mighthave been made up centuries after his death, as amyth is made up about a god. He happened to bein France in the most tragic hour that France hasever known or, please God, will ever know. Shewas bearing alone the weight of that alien tyranny,of that hopeless and almost lifeless violence, whichthe other nations have since found to be the worst ofall the terrors which God tolerates in this world. Shetrod that winepress alone; and of the peoples therewere none to help her. In 1870 the Prussian hadalready encircled Paris, and General Chanzy wasfighting against enormous odds to push northwards[3]to its relief, when his army was joined by the youngand silent traveller from England. All that was inKitchener's mind or motives will perhaps never beknown. France was still something of an ideal ofcivilisation for many of the more gen