THE LATE LORD KITCHENER.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 1562, 10 June 1916, Page 4

THE LATE LORD KITCHENER.

A PEN PICTURE. THE CHARACTER OF “K. OF K.” Sydney Brooks, a well-known writer, gave a bright character sketch of Kitchener in 1911. Here are the main touches of the pen picture : —Kitchener uses his subordinates ' remorselessly, but not more remorselessly 'than England uses Kitchener. Almost the only part of the Empire he has never had a chance of really knowing is England itself. For the past three and a-half decades he has spent more years out of his own country than months in it. All Englishmen know his photographs ; comparatively few have set eyes on the man himself ; fewer still would recognise him in mufti. Two or three times within the past year I have caught sight of him in some of the most crowded streets of the West llnd, wearing the glossiest of silk hats and a faultless cut - away, striding . along with huge, lunging, ungainly gait, his body bent forward from the hips, six feet three or so of loose - jointed humanity crowned with a massive, seamed, brick-red face —and not a single passer-by has turned round to look at him or has penetrated (he effectual disguise of his civilian dress. Take away his uniform and rig him out in (he ordinary attire of the ordinary Londoner, and the most: famous and the least known of Englishmen might walk from end to end of the metropolis unnoticed. MOST SPHINX-LIKE OF MEN.

I feel pretty sure lie would not, have it otherwise. A man more indifferent to popular! iy, more disdainful of the favour and attentions of the mob, never lived. One can imagine-him meeting the importunities ,of ' casual admirers with more than the gruffness of Wellington's “Don’t he a damned fool, sir.” Not that the temptation to any such retort is likely to come his way. Nineteen-twentieths of his active life has been passed in exile, and he is going, and going gladly into exile (Egypt) once more. He is at once the most dazzling and the •most obscure of all the servants of the British State —his name and achievements the pride of all men, his personality hardly even guessed at, and his appearance so little familiar to the crowd that, when he doffs his uniform, he becomes unrecognisable. What chance, indeed, have his countrymen had of learning to know him ? He was barely four-and-twenty when he left England to spend four engrossing years on the Palestine survey. Another four years devoted to similar work in Cyprus followed immediately. Their .termination found him without a, pause in Egypt, and for the next seventeen years, with but a single gap —a gap of service on the Zanzibar Boundary Commission —■ the land of the Sphinx held the most sphinx-like of men continuously. Then came four lighting years in South Africa, followed at once by seven as Commander-in-Chief in India, and rounded off with a tour of inspection and observation through Australia, Now Zealand, China, Japan, and the United States.

WORK AND OBEDIENCE. The Kitchener of common report, the embodiment of stork, snturnine efficiency, 1 In* relentless diseipliunrinn, the silent, insatiable organiser of his own nnd his country's success, is not fable ; hut neither is he the whole man. lie believes, indeed, with all the might of his simple, concentrated nature in the gospel of work and its twin gospel of obedience ; he has an illimitable self-confidence ; for bungling and faint-heartedness he is incapable of feeling sympathy or showing mercy; an officer who fails him once gets no second chance. “Sunstroke ? What the devil does he mean by having sunstroke f” is the classic instance of his attitude towards the weaker vessels. A favourite captain of his was once entrusted with un important commission. There was a delay in executing it through his horse easting.a shoe. “Very sorry,” was Kitchener's comment, “hut I cannot rest my plan of campaign on a horse’s shoe or an officer's carelessness." He Ims a grim laconic humour. “Keep the gun,” he is said to have wired (o the War Office authorities, who were anxiously pressing a certain weapon upon him, “Lean throw stones myself." SOLID. “1 don’t profess to he able to win battles without losing men,” was his sole contemptuous reply to the criticism levelled against Ins generalship ,at Paardeherg. Few men feel comfortable in his masterful presence and beneath his steady, questioning, appraising ga/.e; fewer still feel real

affection for him ; but all men regard him with the (rust and respect that qualities such as his invariably command. He is real all through — which is the sufficient reason why children instinctively take to him. Every attribute rings true ; there is nothing of tinsel or spectacular posturing about him ; he is too big a. man not to be simple, unconscious of himself, indifferent to effect. If he is inexorable, he is also just ; if strict, he is also considerate. Perhaps of late years he has somewhat mellowed. No one, at any rate, who met him at a country house to-day for the first time, and who listened to his quick, rank, terse, talk, interspersed with frequent smiles, would for a moment think of him as a hard or unsociable man. He enjoyed the honours and festivities showered upon him after Omdurman and South Africa with an almost boyish abandon. The reserve and shyness natural in one who has spent five-and-twenty indefatigable years in the desert have given away before the obligations of official hospitality in Calcutta and eighteen months of country and metropolitan life in England ; and Lord Kitchener to-day, so far from being a woman-hater, rather delights in society and its diversions, and finds in the company of pretty and intelligent women at least :*s much pleasure as in his gardens, his china, or his golf. He is allowing the world, in short, a glimpse of that side of him which only a very few intimates have hitherto known —(he side that moved him to (dicers that quavered with emotion at the parade of the veterans of the Indian Mutiny in the Delhi Durbar, the side that has made him the most thoughtful, tender, and assiduous of nurses by the bedside of many a stricken soldier.