The Sirdar
Kitchener - The Man Behind the Legend
Major-General Sir Horatio Herbert Kitchener is forty-eight years old. He stands several inches over six feet, straight as a lance, and looks out imperiously above most men’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. Steady passionless eyes shaded by decisive brows, brick-red rather full cheeks, a long mustache beneath which you divine an immovable mouth; his face is harsh, and neither appeals for affection nor stirs dislike. Neither age, nor figure, nor face, nor any accident of person, has any bearing on the essential Sirdar. You could imagine the character just the same as if all the externals were different. He has no age but the prime of life, no body but one to carry his mind, no face but one to keep his brain behind. The brain and the will are the essence and whole of the man – a brain and a will so perfect in their workings that, in the face of [the most extreme] difficulty, they never seem to know what struggle is. You cannot imagine the Sirdar otherwise than as seeing the right thing to do and doing it. his precision is so inhumanly unerring, he is more like a machine than a man. You feel that he ought to be patented and shown with pride at the Paris International Exhibition. British Empire: Exhibit No. 1, hors concours, the Sudan Machine.
It was aptly said of him by one who had closely watched him in his office, and in the field, and at mess, that he is the sort of [fellow] that ought to be made manager of the Army and Navy Stores. The aphorist’s tastes lay perhaps in the direction of those more genial virtues which the Sirdar does not possess, yet the judgment summed him up perfectly. He would be a splendid manager of the Army and Navy Stores. There are some who nurse a desperate hope that he may someday be appointed to sweep out the War Office. He would be a splendid manager of the War Office. He would be a splendid manager of anything.
But it so happens that he has turned himself to the management of war in the Sudan, and he is the complete and the only master of that art. Beginning life in the Royal Engineers – a soil reputed more favorable to machinery than to human nature – he early turned to the study of the Levant. He was one of Beaconsfield’s military vice-consuls in Asia Minor; he was subsequently director of the Palestine Exploration Fund. At the beginning of the Sudan troubles he appeared. He was one of the original twenty-five officers who set to work on the new Egyptian army. And in Egypt and the Sudan he has been ever since – on the staff generally, in the field constantly, alone with natives often, mastering the problem of the Sudan always. The ripe harvest of fifteen years is that he knows everything that is to be learned of his subject. He has seen and profited by the errors of others as by their successes. He has inherited the wisdom and the achievements of his predecessors. He came at the right hour, and he was the right man.
Captain R.E., [Royal Engineers] he began in the Egyptian army as second-in-command of a regiment of cavalry. In Wolseley’s campaign he was Intelligence Officer. During the summer of 1884 he was at Korosko, negotiating with the Ababdeh sheiks in view of an advance across the desert to Abu Hamed; and note how characteristically he has now bettered the then abandoned project by going that way to Berber and Khartoum himself – only with a railway! The idea of the advance across the desert he took over from Lord Wolseley, and indeed from immemorial Arab caravans; and then, for his own stroke of insight and resolution amounting to genius, he turned a raid into an irresistible certain conquest, by superseding camels with the railway. Others had thought of the desert route: the Sirdar, correcting Korosko to Halfa, used it. others had projected desert railways: the Sirdar made one. That, summarized in one instance, is the working of the Sudan machine.
As Intelligence Officer, Kitchener accompanied Sir Herbert Stewart’s desert column, and you may be sure that the utter breakdown of transport which must in any case have marred that heroic folly was not unnoticed by him. afterwards, through the long decade of little fights that made the Egyptian army, Kitchener was fully employed. In 1887 and 1888 he commanded at Suakim, and it is remarkable that his most important enterprise was half a failure. He attacked Osman Digna at Handub, when most of the Emir’s men were away raiding; and although he succeeded in releasing a number of captives, he thought it well to retire, himself wounded in the face by a bullet, without any decisive success. The withdrawal was in no way discreditable, for his force was a jumble of irregulars and levies without discipline. But it is not perhaps fanciful to believe that the Sirdar, who has never given battle without making certain of an annihilating victory, has not forgotten his experience of haphazard Bashi-Bazouking at Handub.
He had his revenge before the end of 1888, when he led a brigade of Sudanese over Osman’s trenches at Gemaizeh. Next year at Toski he again commanded a brigade. In 1890 he succeeded Sir Francis Grenfell as Sirdar. That he meant to be Sirdar in fact as well as name he showed in 1894. The young Khedive traveled south to the frontier, and took the occasion to insult every British officer he came across. Kitchener promptly gave battle: he resigned, a crisis came, and the Khedive was obliged to do public penance by issuing a General Order in praise of the discipline of the army and of its British officers. Two years later he began the reconquest of the Sudan. Without a single throw-back the work has gone forward since – but not without intervals. The Sirdar is never in a hurry. With immovable self-control he holds back from each step till the ground is consolidated under the last. The real fighting power of the Sudan lies in the country itself – in its barrenness which refuses food, and its vastness which paralyzes transport. The Sudan machine obviates barrenness and vastness: the bayonet action stands still until the railway action has piled the camp with supplies or the steamer action can run with a full Nile. Fighting men may chafe and go down with typhoid and cholera: they are in the iron grip of the machine, and they must wait the turn of its wheels. Dervishes wait and wonder, passing from apprehension to security. The Turks are not coming; the Turks are afraid. Then suddenly at daybreak one morning they see the Sirdar advancing upon them from all sides together, and by noon they are dead. Patient and swift, certain and relentless, the Sudan machine rolls conquering southward.
In the meantime, during all the years of preparation and achievement, the man has disappeared. The man Herbert Kitchener owns the affection of private friends in England and of old comrades of fifteen years’ standing; for the rest of the world there is no man Herbert Kitchener, but only the Sirdar, neither asking affection nor giving it. his officer and men are wheels in the machine: he feeds them enough to make them efficient, and works them as mercilessly as he works himself. He will have no married officers in his army – marriage interferes with work. Any officer who breaks down from the climate goes on sick leave once: next time he goes, and the Egyptian army bears him on its strength no more. Asked once why he did not let his officers come down to Cairo during the season he replied, “If it were to go home, where they would get fit and I could get more work out of them, I would. But why should I let them down to Cairo?” It is unamiable, but it is war, and it has a severe magnificence. And if you suppose, therefore, that the Sirdar is unpopular, he is not. No general is unpopular who always beats the enemy. When the columns move out of camp in the evening to march all night through the dark, they know not whither, and fight at dawn with an enemy they have never seen, every man goes forth with a tranquil mind. He may personally come back and he may not; but about the general result there is not a doubt. You bet your boots the Sirdar knows: he wouldn’t fight if he weren’t going to win. Other generals have been better loved; none was ever better trusted.
For of one human weakness the Sirdar is believed not to have purged himself – ambition. He is on his promotion, a man who cannot afford to make a mistake. Homilies against ambition may be left to those who have failed in their own: the Sirdar’s, if apparently purely personal, is legitimate and even lofty. He has attained eminent distinction at an exceptionally early age: he has commanded victorious armies at an age when most men are hoping to command regiments. Even now a junior Major-General, he has been entrusted with an army of six brigades, a command such as few of his seniors have ever led in the field. Finally, he has been charged with a mission such as almost every one of them would have greedily accepted, - the crowning triumph of half a generation’s war. naturally he has awakened jealousies, and he has bought permission to take each step on the way only by brilliant success in the last. If in this case he be not so stiffly unbending to the high as he is to the low, who shall blame him? He has climbed too high not to take every precaution against a fall.
But he will not fall, just yet at any rate. So far as Egypt is concerned he is the man of destiny – the man who has been preparing himself sixteen years for one great purpose. For Anglo-Egypt he is the Mahdi, the expected; the man who has sifted 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 his human heart and made himself a machine to retake Khartoum.
from With Kitchener to Khartoum by G. W. Steevens
Kitchener - The Man Behind the Legend
Major-General Sir Horatio Herbert Kitchener is forty-eight years old. He stands several inches over six feet, straight as a lance, and looks out imperiously above most men’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. Steady passionless eyes shaded by decisive brows, brick-red rather full cheeks, a long mustache beneath which you divine an immovable mouth; his face is harsh, and neither appeals for affection nor stirs dislike. Neither age, nor figure, nor face, nor any accident of person, has any bearing on the essential Sirdar. You could imagine the character just the same as if all the externals were different. He has no age but the prime of life, no body but one to carry his mind, no face but one to keep his brain behind. The brain and the will are the essence and whole of the man – a brain and a will so perfect in their workings that, in the face of [the most extreme] difficulty, they never seem to know what struggle is. You cannot imagine the Sirdar otherwise than as seeing the right thing to do and doing it. his precision is so inhumanly unerring, he is more like a machine than a man. You feel that he ought to be patented and shown with pride at the Paris International Exhibition. British Empire: Exhibit No. 1, hors concours, the Sudan Machine.It was aptly said of him by one who had closely watched him in his office, and in the field, and at mess, that he is the sort of [fellow] that ought to be made manager of the Army and Navy Stores. The aphorist’s tastes lay perhaps in the direction of those more genial virtues which the Sirdar does not possess, yet the judgment summed him up perfectly. He would be a splendid manager of the Army and Navy Stores. There are some who nurse a desperate hope that he may someday be appointed to sweep out the War Office. He would be a splendid manager of the War Office. He would be a splendid manager of anything.
But it so happens that he has turned himself to the management of war in the Sudan, and he is the complete and the only master of that art. Beginning life in the Royal Engineers – a soil reputed more favorable to machinery than to human nature – he early turned to the study of the Levant. He was one of Beaconsfield’s military vice-consuls in Asia Minor; he was subsequently director of the Palestine Exploration Fund. At the beginning of the Sudan troubles he appeared. He was one of the original twenty-five officers who set to work on the new Egyptian army. And in Egypt and the Sudan he has been ever since – on the staff generally, in the field constantly, alone with natives often, mastering the problem of the Sudan always. The ripe harvest of fifteen years is that he knows everything that is to be learned of his subject. He has seen and profited by the errors of others as by their successes. He has inherited the wisdom and the achievements of his predecessors. He came at the right hour, and he was the right man.
Captain R.E., [Royal Engineers] he began in the Egyptian army as second-in-command of a regiment of cavalry. In Wolseley’s campaign he was Intelligence Officer. During the summer of 1884 he was at Korosko, negotiating with the Ababdeh sheiks in view of an advance across the desert to Abu Hamed; and note how characteristically he has now bettered the then abandoned project by going that way to Berber and Khartoum himself – only with a railway! The idea of the advance across the desert he took over from Lord Wolseley, and indeed from immemorial Arab caravans; and then, for his own stroke of insight and resolution amounting to genius, he turned a raid into an irresistible certain conquest, by superseding camels with the railway. Others had thought of the desert route: the Sirdar, correcting Korosko to Halfa, used it. others had projected desert railways: the Sirdar made one. That, summarized in one instance, is the working of the Sudan machine.
As Intelligence Officer, Kitchener accompanied Sir Herbert Stewart’s desert column, and you may be sure that the utter breakdown of transport which must in any case have marred that heroic folly was not unnoticed by him. afterwards, through the long decade of little fights that made the Egyptian army, Kitchener was fully employed. In 1887 and 1888 he commanded at Suakim, and it is remarkable that his most important enterprise was half a failure. He attacked Osman Digna at Handub, when most of the Emir’s men were away raiding; and although he succeeded in releasing a number of captives, he thought it well to retire, himself wounded in the face by a bullet, without any decisive success. The withdrawal was in no way discreditable, for his force was a jumble of irregulars and levies without discipline. But it is not perhaps fanciful to believe that the Sirdar, who has never given battle without making certain of an annihilating victory, has not forgotten his experience of haphazard Bashi-Bazouking at Handub.
He had his revenge before the end of 1888, when he led a brigade of Sudanese over Osman’s trenches at Gemaizeh. Next year at Toski he again commanded a brigade. In 1890 he succeeded Sir Francis Grenfell as Sirdar. That he meant to be Sirdar in fact as well as name he showed in 1894. The young Khedive traveled south to the frontier, and took the occasion to insult every British officer he came across. Kitchener promptly gave battle: he resigned, a crisis came, and the Khedive was obliged to do public penance by issuing a General Order in praise of the discipline of the army and of its British officers. Two years later he began the reconquest of the Sudan. Without a single throw-back the work has gone forward since – but not without intervals. The Sirdar is never in a hurry. With immovable self-control he holds back from each step till the ground is consolidated under the last. The real fighting power of the Sudan lies in the country itself – in its barrenness which refuses food, and its vastness which paralyzes transport. The Sudan machine obviates barrenness and vastness: the bayonet action stands still until the railway action has piled the camp with supplies or the steamer action can run with a full Nile. Fighting men may chafe and go down with typhoid and cholera: they are in the iron grip of the machine, and they must wait the turn of its wheels. Dervishes wait and wonder, passing from apprehension to security. The Turks are not coming; the Turks are afraid. Then suddenly at daybreak one morning they see the Sirdar advancing upon them from all sides together, and by noon they are dead. Patient and swift, certain and relentless, the Sudan machine rolls conquering southward.
In the meantime, during all the years of preparation and achievement, the man has disappeared. The man Herbert Kitchener owns the affection of private friends in England and of old comrades of fifteen years’ standing; for the rest of the world there is no man Herbert Kitchener, but only the Sirdar, neither asking affection nor giving it. his officer and men are wheels in the machine: he feeds them enough to make them efficient, and works them as mercilessly as he works himself. He will have no married officers in his army – marriage interferes with work. Any officer who breaks down from the climate goes on sick leave once: next time he goes, and the Egyptian army bears him on its strength no more. Asked once why he did not let his officers come down to Cairo during the season he replied, “If it were to go home, where they would get fit and I could get more work out of them, I would. But why should I let them down to Cairo?” It is unamiable, but it is war, and it has a severe magnificence. And if you suppose, therefore, that the Sirdar is unpopular, he is not. No general is unpopular who always beats the enemy. When the columns move out of camp in the evening to march all night through the dark, they know not whither, and fight at dawn with an enemy they have never seen, every man goes forth with a tranquil mind. He may personally come back and he may not; but about the general result there is not a doubt. You bet your boots the Sirdar knows: he wouldn’t fight if he weren’t going to win. Other generals have been better loved; none was ever better trusted.
For of one human weakness the Sirdar is believed not to have purged himself – ambition. He is on his promotion, a man who cannot afford to make a mistake. Homilies against ambition may be left to those who have failed in their own: the Sirdar’s, if apparently purely personal, is legitimate and even lofty. He has attained eminent distinction at an exceptionally early age: he has commanded victorious armies at an age when most men are hoping to command regiments. Even now a junior Major-General, he has been entrusted with an army of six brigades, a command such as few of his seniors have ever led in the field. Finally, he has been charged with a mission such as almost every one of them would have greedily accepted, - the crowning triumph of half a generation’s war. naturally he has awakened jealousies, and he has bought permission to take each step on the way only by brilliant success in the last. If in this case he be not so stiffly unbending to the high as he is to the low, who shall blame him? He has climbed too high not to take every precaution against a fall.
But he will not fall, just yet at any rate. So far as Egypt is concerned he is the man of destiny – the man who has been preparing himself sixteen years for one great purpose. For Anglo-Egypt he is the Mahdi, the expected; the man who has sifted 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 his human heart and made himself a machine to retake Khartoum.
