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Page 20
Lord Kitchener was opposed to the idea, which seemed to him irregular,
unnecessary, and expensive, involving a waste of transport, rations, and
clerks' labour. But Mr. Lloyd George stuck to his sectarian guns, and
was so insistent, especially in respect of Presbyterians, that at last
the Secretary of State for War yielded in this one case. He took up his
pen rather grudgingly and growled out, "Very well: you shall have a
Presbyterian." Then one of his awkward smiles broke up the firmness of
his bucolic face. "Let's see," he asked; "Presbyterian?--how do you
spell it?"
This was one of his earliest adventures with politicians, and he ended
it with a sly cut at unorthodoxy. A little later came another political
experience which afforded him real insight into this new world of Party
faction, one of those experiences not to be lightly dismissed with a
jest.
He discovered at the War Office that preparations had been made for just
such an emergency as had now occurred. The thoughtfulness and
thoroughness of this work struck him with surprise, and he inquired the
name of its author. He was told that Lord Haldane had made these
preparations. "Haldane!" he exclaimed; "but isn't he the man who is
being attacked by the newspapers?"
A chivalrous feeling which does not seem to have visited the bosoms of
any of Lord Haldane's colleagues visited the bosom of this honest
soldier. Someone about him who had enjoyed personal relations with
various editors was dispatched to one of the most offending editors
conducting the campaign against Lord Haldane with the object of stopping
this infamous vendetta.
"I know what you say is true," replied this editor, "and I regret the
attack as much as Lord Kitchener does; but I have received my orders and
they come from so important a quarter that I dare not disobey them." He
gave Lord Kitchener's emissary the name of a much respected leader of
the Unionist Party.
Thus early in his career at the War Office Lord Kitchener learnt that
the spirit of the public school does not operate in Westminster and that
politics are a dirty business.
At no time in his life was Lord Kitchener "a racehorse amongst cows,"
as the Greeks put it, being, even in his greatest period, of a slow,
heavy, and laborious turn of mind; but when he entered Mr. Asquith's
Cabinet he was at least an honest man amongst lawyers. He was a great
man; wherever he sat, to borrow a useful phrase, was the head of the
table; but this greatness of his, not being the full greatness of a
complete man, and having neither the support of a keen intellect nor the
foundations of a strong moral character, wilted in the atmosphere of
politics, and in the end left him with little but the frayed cloak of
his former reputation.
There is no doubt that his administration of the War Office was not a
success. In all important matters of strategy he shifted his ground from
obstinacy to sulkiness, yielding where he should not have yielded at
all, and yielding grudgingly where to yield without the whole heart was
fatal to success: in the end he was among the drifters, "something
between a hindrance and a help," and the efforts to get rid of him were
perhaps justified, although Mr. Asquith's policy of curtailing his
autocracy on the occasions when he was abroad had the greater wisdom.
I shall not trouble to correct the popular idea of Lord Kitchener's
character beyond saying that he was the last man in the world to be
called a machine, and that he solemnly distrusted the mechanism of all
organizations. He was first and last an out-and-out individualist, a
believer in men, a hater of all systems. As Sir Ian Hamilton has said,
wherever he saw organization his first instinct was to smash it. I think
his autocracy at the War Office might have been of greater service to
the country if all the trained thinkers of the Army, that small body of
brilliant men, had not been in France. Even in his prime Lord Kitchener
was the most helpless of men without lieutenants he could trust to do
his bidding or to improve upon it in the doing.
It will better serve the main purpose of this book to suggest in what
particulars the real greatness of this once glorious and finally
pathetic figure came to suffer shipwreck at the hands of the
politicians.
Lord Kitchener's greatness was the indefinable greatness of personality.
He was not a clever man. He had no gifts of any kind. In the society of
scholars he was mum and among the lovers of the beautiful he cut an
awkward figure. At certain moments he had curious flashes of
inspiration, but they came at long intervals and were seldom to be had
in the day of drudgery, when his mind was not excited. On the whole his
intelligence was of a dull order, plodding heavily through experience,
mapping the surface of life rather than penetrating any of its
mysteries, making slowly quite sure of one or two things rather than
grasping the whole problem at a stroke.
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