Victoria’s Generals

The two wars that made Kitchener’s reputation were very different in character and required contrasting methods of leadership. Kitchener’s conquest of the Sudan between 1896 and 1898 was decided, ultimately, by an open battle, where British technological superiority proved decisive. In South Africa between 1900 and 1902, Kitchener spent two years formulating various schemes to defeat an elusive foe. This war was not only about fighting: it also meant making war on the Boer civilian population, most of whom supported the guerrillas with inspiration, food and intelligence. To some in Britain this amounted to using ‘methods of barbarism’ and constituted a stain on the character and nature of British imperialism. Nevertheless, with victory achieved Kitchener became the personification of the ruthlessness needed to sustain the empire at a time of growing international crisis and national decline. Kitchener’s determination, his supposed machine-like efficiency and ability to get the job done, would provide anxious Britons, wondering what the post-Victorian era would bring, with a degree of certainty that few others could supply.²

Kitchener was born in Ireland on 24 June 1850, his father an eccentric retired lieutenant colonel. In 1864, owing to his mother’s tuberculosis, the family moved to Switzerland for the air, but she died soon after arriving, a blow that shook the young Kitchener and saw him retreat into shyness and introspection. Although his education was mostly informal, his stay in Switzerland helped him acquire fluency in French and revealed an aptitude for languages. He later added Arabic to his repertoire. By the time Kitchener joined the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich in February 1868, he was a tall (6ft 2in or 1.85m), taciturn individual, not given to making friends easily. He was commissioned as lieutenant in the Royal Engineers on 4 January 1871, having already served in a French ambulance unit during the Franco-Prussian War. In 1874, after spells at Aldershot and Chatham, Kitchener was seconded to the Palestine Exploration Fund as a surveyor and in 1878 worked in Cyprus following its annexation by Britain.

Chronology

24 June 1850	Horatio Herbert Kitchener born at Gunsborough Villa, Co. Kerry Educated privately and at Chateau du Grand Clos, Renaz (Switzerland), and at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich
4 January 1871	Commissioned Lieutenant, Royal Engineers
Easter 1873	Appointed ADC to Brigadier General Greaves
2 November 1874	Seconded to Palestine Exploration Fund
3 September 1878	Seconded to Foreign Office and appointed to survey Cyprus
26 June 1879	Military Vice Consul in Kastamonu, Anatolia
15 March 1880	Returned to Cyprus
2 July 1882	Joined British fleet that bombarded Alexandria and went ashore to gather intelligence
4 January 1883	Promoted Captain
21 February 1883	Appointed to Egyptian cavalry
March 1884–April 1885	Provided intelligence for Gordon Relief Expedition
8 October 1884	Promoted Brevet Major
15 June 1885	Promoted Brevet Lieutenant Colonel
June 1885	Resigned from Egyptian service
6 November 1885	Seconded to Foreign Office and appointed to Zanzibar Boundary Commission
September 1886	Appointed Governor General of Eastern Sudan and the Red Sea Littoral
11 April 1888	Promoted Brevet Colonel and appointed ADC to Queen Victoria
September 1888	Appointed Adjutant General of the Egyptian army
Early 1890	Appointed Inspector General of the Egyptian police
13 April 1892	Appointed Sirdar of the Egyptian army
1896–98	Sudan campaign
25 September 1896	Promoted Brevet Major General
2 September 1898	Battle of Omdurman
November 1898	Created Baron Kitchener of Khartoum and Aspall in the County of Suffolk
19 January 1899	Appointed Governor General of Sudan
18 December 1899	Appointed Chief of Staff to Lord Roberts in South Africa
23 December 1899	Promoted Substantive Lieutenant General
29 November 1900	Appointed C in C, South Africa
31 May 1902	Treaty of Vereeniging
1 June 1902	Promoted Brevet General
12 July 1902	Created Viscount Kitchener of Khartoum, and of Vaal in the Colony of the Transvaal, and of Aspall in the County of Suffolk
28 November 1902	Appointed C in C, India
10 September 1909	Promoted Field Marshal
20 June 1911	Appointed British Agent and Consul General in Egypt
17 June 1914	Created Earl Kitchener of Khartoum, and of Broome
5 August 1914	Appointed Secretary of State for War
5 June 1916	Drowned at sea with loss of HMS Hampshire

Appointed CMG, 1886; CB, 1889; KCMG, 1894; KCB, 1896; GCMG, 1901; OM, 1902; GCIE, 1908; GCSI, 1909; KP, 1911; KG, 1915

When trouble broke out in Egypt in 1882, Kitchener flouted official regulations by leaving the island and joining the force sent to bombard Alexandria. After Egypt’s conquest by Sir Garnet Wolseley, Kitchener transferred to the new, British-reformed Egyptian army in 1883 as captain. However, his knowledge of Arabic and his desire for action saw him appointed as Wolseley’s chief intelligence officer during the abortive Gordon relief expedition in 1884–85, during which he led a band of Arab irregulars in the Sudanese desert. This gave Kitchener valuable knowledge of the peoples and area, and he would also learn from Wolseley’s mistakes. Kitchener quickly resigned from the Egyptian service, but was soon appointed to the Zanzibar Boundary Commission in December 1885. The Governor Generalship of the Red Sea Littoral, the territory around the port of Suakin that Britain retained in the Sudan, soon followed and here Kitchener exercised military command for the first time. This, alongside the wound he received, enhanced Kitchener’s reputation further, particularly as he came to the attention of the Queen.

Not long after, in September 1888, Kitchener was made Adjutant General of the Egyptian army, a force now fully reformed and commanded by British officers. In 1889, it fought and routed the Sudanese Dervishes, the followers of the Mahdi – whose forces had captured Khartoum and killed Gordon four years earlier – at the battle of Toski, with Kitchener successfully commanding the cavalry. After a spell reforming the Egyptian police he was made Sirdar, or Commander in Chief, of the Egyptian army in April 1892 and began to prepare the army for the reconquest of the Sudan. In a campaign lasting two years that culminated in the victory at Omdurman in September 1898, his finest battlefield achievement, Kitchener avenged Gordon. Afterwards, he proceeded south along the Nile to confront a small French expedition under Captain Marchand that had trespassed onto Sudanese territory at Fashoda. There the French-speaking Kitchener avoided confrontation and revealed deft diplomatic skills by persuading Marchand to leave the matter to the politicians. His role in the subsequent diplomatic defeat of France added to the laurels won at Omdurman.³

Promoted to Governor General of the Sudan in early 1899 he began the process of reconstruction and development. He was not destined to see it completed because in December he was ordered to accompany Lord Roberts to South Africa, where war had broken out with the Boer republics of the Transvaal and Orange Free State in October.

Once the Boer republics had apparently been conquered, Roberts left in November 1900 to be succeeded by Kitchener as Commander in Chief. He successfully brought the war to an end following the signing of the Treaty of Vereeniging on 31 May 1902, and then took over the Indian army. During his tenure he reformed the army and its administration, clashing with the viceroy, Lord Curzon, who resigned when he failed to stop Kitchener. Once he left India in 1909, Kitchener was made a field marshal but was at a loose end. Eventually, in 1911, he gained the post of British Agent and Consul General of Egypt and was on leave in Britain when war broke out in August 1914. Considered to be a figure too important to leave in an imperial backwater, Kitchener was persuaded to accept the vacant job of Secretary of State for War. By the time of his death in 1916, when he drowned after his ship was sunk by a mine on his way to Russia, Kitchener had achieved mixed results. He had, nevertheless, embodied Britain’s determination to win and remained popular with the British public.

Kitchener’s reputation as a commander was forged in the Sudan, but he was never a confident general, and being an engineer meant that he had not studied strategy and tactics fully. He owed his chance to Lord Cromer, who since 1883 had been the British Agent and Consul General, which meant, effectively, that he ruled Egypt. Cromer had followed Kitchener’s career with interest and when the Sirdar, Sir Francis Grenfell, was recalled by the British government Cromer immediately gave Kitchener his job. According to Cromer, Kitchener’s virtues were manifold but he particularly liked the fact ‘that he left as little as possible to chance’ and ‘did not think that extravagance was the necessary handmaid of efficiency’. Furthermore, Kitchener ‘suppressed with a firm hand any tendency towards waste and extravagance’.⁴ Indeed, when the campaign began Kitchener’s cheese-paring caused comment among his officers. Even so, the need for economies sometimes stretched Kitchener’s abilities and on one occasion, when he felt he was spreading his budget too thinly, he offered his resignation: ‘I must protest’, he wrote to Cromer, ‘against the manner in which I am being asked to make financial impossibilities possible and called for responsible estimates that cannot be more than approximate.’ The resignation was, of course, rescinded, but it revealed the sort of pressure Kitchener worked under in the Sudan.⁵

This was not the only anxiety that undermined Kitchener’s confidence. His appointment as Sirdar was not popular with the British army establishment in Egypt: their favourite was Colonel Josceline Wodehouse, with whom Kitchener had served at Toski in 1889. Kitchener was not liked because he shunned the mess and rarely mixed with wider British society, gaining him a reputation as aloof, gruff and boorish. Indeed, in 1890, Grenfell had reported that while Kitchener was ‘very capable’ and ‘clear-headed’, he was also ‘very ambitious’ and that ‘his rapid promotion had placed him in a somewhat difficult position. He is not popular, but has of late greatly improved in tact and manner and any defects in his character will in my opinion disappear as he gets on in the service.’⁶ Kitchener’s friendship with aristocratic patrons, particularly Lord Salisbury and his daughter-in-law Lady Cranborne, seemed to confirm that he was an officer on the make. Kitchener certainly needed high-ranking friends because he had few contacts within the British army’s hierarchy. The Egyptian army was not the responsibility of the War Office, but came within the remit of the Foreign Office, therefore within the purview of Salisbury, who was both Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary.

Consequently, when the Sudan campaign was launched in 1896, Wolseley, then Commander in Chief of the British army, thought Kitchener too reckless, and wanted an officer from the British army to take command. Thankfully for Kitchener, Cromer and Salisbury vetoed this, but when Grenfell was appointed to command the British garrison in Egypt in 1897, Kitchener’s anxiety about being replaced grew immensely. His mood was not helped by his need for substantial British reinforcements in 1898 for the final leg of the advance. Already, Kitchener had been writing to Grenfell in obsequious tones in an attempt to soothe the latter’s apparent disappointment at not taking overall command of the expedition:

Following his victory at the battle of Atbara on 8 April 1898, the late arrival of congratulations from Wolseley and General Sir Evelyn Wood, the Adjutant General, only added to Kitchener’s gnawing fear about his place in the military hierarchy and his desire for acceptance.⁸

In certain respects he was right to be concerned. Some British officers had been told to report directly to the War Office. Major (later Lieutenant Colonel) Charles à Court (later Repington) recalled that he had been ordered to keep Wolseley informed through his military secretary, Lord Erroll, or through his former colleagues at the Intelligence Department. Douglas Haig, who joined the Egyptian cavalry, was asked by Wood to keep him informed. Consequently, when British units arrived in the Sudan in early 1898, Kitchener’s suspicions grew exponentially: Brigadier General the Hon. Neville Lyttelton felt at first that Kitchener regarded him as ‘an emissary from the War Office sent to keep an eye on him’, although he was friendly enough later.⁹

Nevertheless, Kitchener need not have worried. In early 1898 Cromer made sure the War Office knew his views on the matter. In a letter sent to Salisbury that found its way into the papers of the Secretary of State for War, Lord Lansdowne, Cromer stated bluntly that ‘you will sooner or later hear some military mutterings due to jealousy of Kitchener … I have not a shadow of a doubt that the decision to keep Kitchener in command is wise’. And so he remained in command.¹⁰

All this anxiety, particularly during the early days of the campaign, took its toll on Kitchener’s highly strung personality. Lieutenant Edward Cecil, Lord Salisbury’s son and one of Kitchener’s ADCs, remembered how loathsome his chief could be: ‘He was more uncouth and uncivilised at that time [c. 1896] than he was later.’ Quite often Kitchener could act the bully, with Cecil often on the receiving end. Even Major Reginald Wingate, Kitchener’s invaluable and loyal intelligence officer, could be maddened by his ‘boorish insults’.¹¹ Thus, any discussion of Kitchener’s leadership must include his insecurities. All the worst traits in his character flowed from these.

His officers were not the only ones to suffer. Kitchener was also accused of being cavalier with the lives of his men and for being cruel. During the campaign’s early stages he ordered Colonel Archibald Hunter, his second in command, to force march his men across the desert during which time they were caught in a sandstorm. Hunter raged in a letter to his brother:

The reputation for cruelty reached a height following the battle of Omdurman and threatened his career temporarily. This was about the killing of the wounded Dervishes and Winston Churchill, who was there, was particularly scathing on this point: ‘The stern and unpitying spirit of the commander was communicated to his troops and the victories which marked the progression of the River War were accompanied by acts of barbarity not always justified even by the harsh customs of savage conflicts or the fierce and treacherous nature of the Dervish.’ To his mother, Churchill was even more forthright: ‘I shall merely say that the victory at Omdurman was disgraced by the inhuman slaughter of the wounded and that Kitchener was responsible for this.’¹³ Ernest Bennet, Oxford academic and correspondent for the Westminster Gazette, pursued the matter after the war and complained about the killing of the severely wounded, who could offer no resistance, unlike some of those lightly injured. He failed to get the matter investigated and it never became a major issue. The British public liked their new hero and were not interested, while the attempt by the writer, Wilfred Scawen Blunt, to stop Kitchener receiving his £30,000 reward was an embarrassing failure. Nevertheless, wounded Dervishes were killed and some soldiers explained why it was done. Lieutenant Ronald Meiklejohn, in his personal account of the campaign, told how ‘several dervishes, whom we passed as dead, or beyond harm, slashed at our legs with their swords, or rose and charged’. On an earlier page he had explained that before the battle of the Atbara specific orders had been given to spare those who put up their hands and to be aware of those feigning death or still capable of bearing arms. While it seems no such order was given before the battle of Omdurman presumably the same rules applied.¹⁴ In the end very few complained about the killing of the wounded and it was soon forgotten.

As an army commander, especially during the quiet phases, Kitchener’s methods often caused a great deal of scorn and bafflement to those expected to carry out his orders without question. The most common complaint was about his almost pathological secrecy, and the haphazard manner in which he operated. Captain Sir Henry Rawlinson, who joined the staff in the Sudan as an ADC in early 1898, was informed by Wingate ‘that K is very sketchy in the way he fires off telegrams without letting anyone know sometimes and always without keeping a copy’. His fellow ADC, à Court, was equally exasperated by Kitchener’s rectitude: ‘He scarcely ever issued a written order, and confined himself to curt telegrams, the forms for which he carried in his helmet … He had particularly no staff, and did everything himself.’ This was in spite of appointing his old comrade Colonel Leslie Rundle to be his Chief of Staff. Lieutenant Colonel John Maxwell, commander of the Egyptian 2nd Brigade, told his wife that when Rundle arrived about mid-July 1898 to take up his post, ‘the Sirdar told him he did not want him to do anything except stay quiet and not fuss’. Evidently, Rundle saw the funny side of it and amused his dining companions with tales ‘of the Sirdar’s arbitrary way of doing things’. Brevet Lieutenant Colonel Horace Smith-Dorrien, who returned to the Sudan in July 1898 without knowing what he was to do, fortuitously bumped into Kitchener who told him to take command of his old unit the 13th Sudanese Battalion and then rode off: ‘I found the 13th and announced I had come to take command and, as no one objected, I did.’¹⁵

Rawlinson complained that the Sudan campaign was ‘too much of a one-man show. If anything were to happen to the Sirdar there would be chaos, as no one but he knows the state of preparedness in which various departments are’. Of course, Kitchener’s luck held and nothing did happen to him. Consequently, the vices pointed out by Rawlinson and others were turned into virtues at the end. Grenfell, in his memoirs, wrote of Kitchener’s ‘powers of organisation, his clear head, and the remarkable way he managed a very difficult campaign’. Virtually all those willing to eulogise over Kitchener focused on his apparent ability to run the war single-handedly. Even knowing Kitchener’s aversion to paperwork, Captain Alfred Hubbard could still praise him as a man ‘gifted with tireless energy, unflinching determination, an inflexible purpose, combined with a marvellous memory’. Furthermore, one ‘hot-off-the-press’ account of the campaign helped give rise to an image of Kitchener that would last until his death and told how: ‘The masterly grasp of detail and faculty of organisation possessed by the Sirdar, Sir Herbert Kitchener, showed itself clearly from the day he took command of the Nile Expeditionary Force, in 1896, to the day he finally destroyed the Khalifa’s army. With machine-like precision he carried out his plans; never in a hurry, but never wasting a moment.’ Machine-like was a term that certainly caught on thanks especially to the journalist George W Steevens of the Daily Mail, whose subsequent book lauded Kitchener’s achievement. Steevens wrote of the robotic Sirdar, whose ‘precision is so inhumanly unerring, he is more like a machine than a man’. Yet, hyperbole aside, Steevens also identified the most fundamental aspect of Kitchener’s ability – his skills as an engineer, which were arguably far superior to those of Kitchener the warrior. His master stroke was the building of the Sudan Military Railway (SMR), which Steevens described as ‘the deadliest weapon that Britain used against Mahdism’, and this time he was not exaggerating.¹⁶

The historian of the SMR, Lieutenant Colonel E W C Sandes, writing in 1937, was unequivocal in his praise of Kitchener’s forethought: ‘It cannot be too clearly emphasized that the success of the Desert Railway should be attributed to Kitchener himself.’ It was Kitchener’s zeal for the enterprise and his determination to see it through that ensured the project’s success. He had seen how Wolseley’s expedition had struggled with boats and camels and decided that another way of moving troops and supplies was necessary. And he did this without really knowing whether a railway could be laid across the desert, and in the hope that water could be found along the route. Kitchener’s appointment of Lieutenant E P C Girouard was masterly, not only because Girouard knew his business thoroughly, but because he knew how to handle Kitchener, who had the good sense to let him get on with his work and would often defer to his superior expertise. But what really demonstrated Kitchener’s luck was the discovery of water at two points, 77 and 126 miles from the railhead at Wadi Halfa. To Steevens, this was ‘the luck that goes with genius’.¹⁷

Omdurman, 1898

This was the biggest battle of Kitchener’s career and the event that cemented his reputation as one of the era’s great generals. In many respects it was a battle typical of its age in that the main problem had been to get the troops to the battlefield in reasonable shape across extremely hostile terrain. Once there British and Egyptian technical superiority would be decisive and would not require subtle or imaginative generalship. Omdurman, though, was not a foregone conclusion because the Dervishes were capable of defeating the allied force. Their mistakes gave Kitchener his chance and a good general, if perhaps not a great one, exploits his opponent’s errors. This he did.

Previously, Kitchener’s battlefield experience had been limited. He had only ever fought in the Sudan and had commanded small units before becoming Sirdar. His handling of that force in the early stages of the campaign, between 1896 and 1897, had been exemplary, but the army was not large enough to bring the reconquest to a successful conclusion. Consequently, in January 1898, British troops, under Major General William Gatacre, arrived to help deliver the final blow, and would be joined by more British regiments before the final march on Omdurman in August 1898.

The arrival of British forces was both a boon and a curse for Kitchener. On one hand, their arrival brought much-needed fresh men, who were well disciplined and well armed. On the other hand, their arrival awoke Kitchener’s latent anxieties about being superseded. Before the first major engagement of the combined British and Egyptian army, at the River Atbara on 8 April 1898, Kitchener completely lost confidence in his own ability when he received conflicting advice from his subordinates. The enemy commander, the Emir Mahmoud, had placed his army in a strong defensive position and Kitchener became uncertain how to act. On 1 April 1898, he telegraphed Cromer asking for advice: Hunter, his fighting general, had advised caution, in the hope that Mahmoud would come out to fight; Gatacre, wanted to assault the Dervish position head on. Cromer consulted Grenfell, who then referred to the War Office. Eventually, Cromer too advised caution, but left the matter to Kitchener who was told that whatever he did he had the full support of the British government.¹⁸ Buoyed by the government’s faith in his ability Kitchener ordered a frontal assault, although he left the handling of the respective armies to Hunter and Gatacre. The battle of the Atbara was a complete success, if somewhat costly, and Mahmoud himself was captured.

Chapter 8

Herbert Kitchener

Keith Surridge

Chronology

Omdurman, 1898