A BUILDER OF ARMIES.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXVIII, Issue 2722, 29 January 1910, Page 3 (Supplement)

A BUILDER OF ARMIES.

Itigbt or wrong, the. estimate of kora Kitchener's character made by the late G. AV. Steevens is the estimate. Avhich lias been and will be_ accepted. SteeA'ens Avas not only one of the. most brilliant of journalistic Avriters; he had also a keen, penetrating insight into men and their motives; events to him were not. merely events, but results of tne uuman AVdl, human energy, and human power controlling them. History since IS9B has not been contradicted, but lias inarked Avith sharper lines the portrait draAvn by Steei'en’s pen. Kitchener or South. Africa, Kitchener of India, have revealed the same tireless brain, the same supreme gilt of organisation, the same imperious handling of concentrated poAver as Kitchener of Khartoum, lliat is enough excuse for making.an extinct from Steevens’ book the preface to a brief account of Viscount Horatio ileibert Kitchener, formerly Sirdar, afterwards Chief of the Staff and Command-er-in-Chief in South Africa, now Com-mai'der-in-Ohiof in India —and the most remarkable military figure in the whole world. Let us take Steevens in IS9B: ‘'Alajor-General Sir Horatio .Herbert Kitchener is forty-eight years old by the book; hut that is irrelevv ant. "Ho stands several inches over six feet, straight as a lance, and looks out imperiously above most moil’s heads; his motions are deliberate and strong; slender, but firmly knit, he seems built for tireless, steel-wire endurance rather than for power or agility; that also is inelevant. Steady, passionless eyes shaded by decisive brows, brick red rather full cheeks, a long moustache beneath Avhich you devine an immovable mouth ; his face is harsh, and neither appeals for alfection nor stirs dislike. All this is irrelevant too; neitho.r age. nor figure, nor face. no r any accident- of person has any bearing on the essential Sirdar. He has no age but the prime of life, no body but one to carry liis mind, no lace but one to carry his brain behind. The brain and the will are the essence of the whole of the man. . . His presicion is so in. humanly unerring, lie is moro like a machine than a man. You feel that he ought to be patented and slioaatl with pride at the Paris International Exhibition. British Empire: Exhibit No. 1, hors eoncours, the Sudan machine “The man Herbert Kitchener owns the affection of private friends in England and of okl comrades of fifteen years’ standing; for the rest of the AA'orld there is no man Herbert Kitchener, but only the Sirdar, neither asking affection nor giving it. His officers and men are wheels of a machine; he feeds them' enough to make them efficient, and works them as mercilessly as lie Avorks himself. . . “For Anglo-Egypt. he is the Maiidi, the expected; the man avlio has sifter experience and corrected error; who has worked at small things and waited for great; marble to sit still and fire to smite; steadfast, cold, and inflexible; the man who has cut out liis human heart- and made himself a machine to retake Khartum.”

This wonderful personality, Avhich lias loomed gigantic over three- corners of the Avorld came into existence in County Kerry, Ireland, in June, 1850 (although Lord Kitchener is of English parentage). —His Father Avas a Soldier. —

Ho was made a soldier; his brother after him was made a soldier, too. The severest and sternest traditions of the army were his from infancy. Not far back in his mother’s ancestry was a parson, whom Kitchener’s opponents, military and political, perhaps may thank for his intolerance of other men’s errors and weaknesses —even other men’s creeds. Kitchener went into the Royal Engineers, not a school of tactics and strategy, but a system of precision, unerring accuracy, and swift energy. The surveys of Palestine and Cyprus led him to Ef*—'t; from 1882 to 1884 he was in the Egyptain Cavalry. Major Kitehener, a giant in brain as well as in fame, could escape no man’s notice. Gordon saw bim —Gordon, whom Kitchener could have saved had the work been his and been, done as he advised; Gordon, whose fate Kitchener avenged with relentless, undeviating force fifteen years later. “One of the few really first-class officers in the British Army,” was the verdict which Gordon immediately passed. Promotion was not long in coming. Gallantry in the expedition of 1884-5 brought him —A Mention in Despatches—and a brevet lieutenant-colonelcy. He soon became recognised as the man who knew the desert, r and was prophesied *s the man to conquer it. 'When Sir Her. bert Stewart’s desert column broke down for lack of transport, Kitchener was with it as an Intelligence officer. In that debacle he must have meditated the railway which triumphed over the desert in iater years. The years 1886 and 1888 saw him governing Sua’kim—a warlike office. A dervish bullet, in those irregular campaigns, nearly altered much British histsry; Kitchener was shot in the face 1 and severely wounded. In 1890 he was made Sirdar. From that day the reconquest of the Soudan began—if it had not already begun when Major Kitchener was secon3 in command of a regiment of Egyptian horse. Kitchener built an army and a system. That lias been his work through life in Egypt, in the Transvaal, in India. To mound what is shapeless, to make flaccid plans rigid, to put inflexibility in the place of irresolution, , has always been his task—and will be his task, whether he be smashing a, holy war, sweeping a province clean of guerillas, deposing a Viceroy, Or- givmg advice to Now Zealand .Ministry. InEgvpt he created what Steevens called the “Sudan machine.” Slowly, methodically, and infallibly, his work was performed. Khartoum was retaken, the Soudan was reconquered, in 1898; but the fate of dervishdoin was already sealed, in. —The- Cold Brain of the Siydar-r long years before. He held. the. restless, insolent Khedive in a grip of steel: he offered gigantic resistance to all who opposed him, and pressed irresistiblv beKind nil who helped. Ho moved forward to triumph, without haste and without mistake. He never married. Nor did his officers; he would have no tender thought of wives intruding on their work. He had “cut out his .heart.” said Steevens, who afterwards cried in wonder “What a man the Sirdir is—if lie is a man!” The dervishes thought him the Devil. ■. After all it was Kitchener of the Engineers who won back .the Soudan. It' was conquered by a railway.' Mile by mile it went southwards —a mile and a half a day!—an iron -chain) leaping the desert, and;-binding Soudan to

KITCHENER’S GREAT CAREER.

THE BRAIN IN THE AIACHINE

<Vvpt. AVitli the railway Avont the army—British, Egyptian, and Soudanese—ail army Avluch Kitchener himself had manufactured. It marched from victory to victory, making every one of its blows deadly and inevitable. Arab fatalism learned to succumb to it. AVo knoAV Avhat happened at Omdurman. — “not a battle, but an execution.” The dervish forces rushed fonyard, knowing they Avere to die. Mahdism threw itself upon the spearhead, perfectly forged and tempered ; and Kitchener, cold and confident, held the spear. The nineteenth century suav no other battle like that of Omdurman. The Egyptian army, which started south ward with 9000 men, now contained 15,000, stiffened by a brigade' of British regulars. It fought a horde of some 50,000 dervishes. That day it destroyed them. The Anglo-Egyptian force lost 46 killed and 333 Avounded. The dervishes lost 11,000 killed and 16,000 Avounded, and 4000 prisoners. They charged into death, knowing Avhitlier they Avere charging. To massacre or be massacred. The 21st Lancers rode into a concealed force of 3000 swordsmen, and hacked their Avay through, inflictin<>- fearful slaughter. Then shrapnel (unshed the 3000. Tribes! of Baggara horsemen perished —to a man. AVoundod dervishes, bleeding on the ground, still loaded tihcrir rifles or muskets and fired; they also Avere silenced, o’-omptly and piteously. The huge black standard of the Khalifa flapped in the midst of —An Aero of Corpses,—and round it Ya’koub, the Khalifa’s brother, had rallied a desperate group. Yakoub died; the standard fluttered still. The Avounded men around it pushed rotten cartridges into their Aveapons, and Avere killed before they could fire. The last to die Avas a spearman. He throw his spear, cried out on God, and plunged forAvard as a thousand rifles crashed.

Kitchener had sought Gordon before, when the Avorld ached for news of him — going in disguise among the merciless fanatics to learn Avliat they might have to toll. Noaa', while the corpses rotted thickh- over acres of the desert, he held Gordon’s funeral service in Khartoum. Thereafter —He B!eAV up the Tomb of the —Maiidi, — _ and burned his body. Mahdism must be destroyed utterly, even to the last relic of superstition. There Avas a great sentimental outcry. “It Avas a political necessity,” Avas Kitchener’s cold, final word This AA'as the man, resolute, and inexorable. who Avas sent to be Chief of the Staff to Lord Roberts, in South Africa, in 1899. AVe cannot folloAV him through' all that war. Let us begin with Paardeberg, and tlie capture of Cronje; the turning noint of a war which, up to that time, had been full of sorrow ancl failure, Avith some humiliation.

Bolting aAvay from Lord Roberts, Cronje was amazed by an attack from French’s dashing cavalry, Aldrich drove him to earth at Paarcleberg The army confronting him Avas General Kelly-Ken-ny’s, but at Kelly-Ivenny’s elboAV Avas the masterful Chief of the Staff, sent forward by Roberts. “Lord Kitchener.” Roberts ivrote to Ivelly-Kenny, on February 17, 1900, “is Avith you for the puroose of communicating to you my orders, so that there may be no delay, such as reference to and fro may entail.’’ Lord Roberts lias said since that he did not intend to supercede KellyKen ny ; Kelly-Kenny thought differently. So, too, did Kitchener, for, Avhatever his technical position Avas, ho ordered the battle of February 18 v “Whoever commanded the troops, Kitchener drove them,” is the summary of “The Times” historian. That day saAV severer losses than those of any previous battle in the AA r ar. Kitchener, fresh from a. triumph over ill-armed savage forces, under-rated the resistance of Boer rifles. He felt the taste of the great victory already in his mouth. In the morning, as the troops- Avent into action, he pulled out his watch, and said; “It is now 7 o’clock. We shall be in the laager by half-past 10. I’ll then load up French and send him on to Bloemfontein at once.” His plan Avas a frontal attack. It was delivered. It failed. Historians cannot yet agree lioav much, of the failure was due to the method of attack, and how much to the backward policy of other commanders, restive under Kitchener’s imperious control. Kitchener Avas unshaken. He ordered a (huik attack, in Avhich the Canadians played a great part. But the laager was not stormed. Kitchener ordered that every regiment should intrench at the furthest point to Avhich it had advanced. Nevertheless, many regiments drew back at nightfall. The British troops in a day’s fighting had lost 8 per cent, in killed and wounded —not ail appalling loss, but higher than the war had yet seen, and the engagement had not been decisive. Many a brigadier declared that night —That Kitchener had Failed.— If so- his failure had greater results than the brightest successes of others. British generals, as military critics iioav agree, prolonged the war through fear of facing casualties, forgetting that, a decisive victory, though costly, is merciful of human life in the end/ Had Cronje’s laager been stormed, then or in succeeding days, the effect on Boer “morale” Avould have been immeasurable. But the Boer army was not taught to fear crushing assaults. Cronje sought an armistice, he obtained from Kitchener a reply which he thought unmerciful. “During my lifetime,” the grim ojd Boer then Avrote, “I have never surrendered. If A’ou Avish to bombard, fire aAvav. Roberts and reinforcements haa arrived. Cronje Avas invested, hunted out of his laager— iioav a Avretched scene of pestilence l and slaughter, and was captured. . After that victory the whole aspect of the Avar changed. One asks whether, save for Kitchener’s resolute attack, Cronje might not _ have slipoed away from Paardeberg AVitli little.harm? When Kitchener became Commander. in-Chief in Africa, the war Lad taken on a guerilla character. The Boers Avere inspired by marvellous courage; there never Avas a.mountaineer in Spain more clever than they in guerilla . tactics. Kitchener set to work to build another machine, to forge. lieAV irresistible weapons. In the'Soudan , he had faced an enemy which came to dash itself to ,pieces on a wall cf steel; in the Transvaal, he hunted and drove an< enemy always swift and elusive, arising unoonquered after each pounding. Some military opinion holds that much energy was Avasted in the ending of the South African War. There is room for dispute. Tliere hai'e been guerilla Avars in other countries 1 Avhich in generations could not be stamped down. Kitchener set himself to sweep the country as

clean as a ball-room floor. Ho had chained the Soudan Avith a railway; lie nailed down the Transvaal, mile by mile, by studding it Avith block-houses, and pushing the guerillas back Avith unyielding “drives/’ It Avas not Avar of‘a petty kind; the resistance Avas heroic, and the misery in proportion to the heroism. But the -machine moved on and the Avar Avas ended. Lastly, this manufacturer of armies, avlio turns a force of human troops into a tiling of steel, created a new machine in India. South Africa had shown how he hated, with an intolerable hatred, dual control which vexed his own swift decision. In India, he found a system of administrative control Avliicii lie would not brook. He or the Viceroy (Lord Curzon) had to yield. It Avas Lord Kitchener avlio offered to ]eaA r e India, but —lt Avas Lord Curzon Who Left It.— (ow Aveeks ago. in the House of Lords .Lord Curzon complained that Lord ’ Kitchener had built a system which must smash because all the direction lies in the brain of one man, and Indian military politics of to-day Avere fought upon this issue. But the army—the point of the sword Avliich Kitchener lias forged and is holding—is such an army that no other part of the empire possesses. He lias re-armed it; ho has made it self-supporting, mobile, and efficient. If these were the clays of Caesars, and proconsuls in their provinces were training armies for the assault on Rome, Kitchener’s army in India, could it march to conquest, would probably triumph over the resistance of the rest of the empire. “You have a had army,” he said when he first went to India. He took that army in his own hands, and made it the fighting machine it is. Such is the man who has come to look at the Australian and New Zealand military forces, and advise how they may be improved. To Avliat extent his plans Avill be thought possible, it would be risky to prophesy. But Ayemay feel certain that his two watchwords will be what they were in India —efficiency and mobility. A sham army, painted with bright political fancies, will not satisfy him.