2

The Making of a Surveyor-Soldier, 1868–82

The immediate impetus for Kitchener's returning to England in the spring of 1867 was an undisclosed breakdown in his health. The nature of this malady is unrecoverable today from the available sources, but by that summer and the passing of his 17th birthday Kitchener had returned to physical fitness and was well into a period of intensive cramming in anticipation of sitting the entrance examination for admission to the Royal Military Academy Woolwich. Initially after returning from Switzerland, Kitchener had stayed with his cousin Frank in the latter's rooms at Trinity College, Cambridge, and at Rugby School where he then went to take up a teaching post. But once recovered from illness and ready to prepare for Woolwich, Kitchener moved down to London for a few months hard of work under the careful eye of the results-proven crammer, the Reverend George Frost. The genial Anglican clergyman was a good tutor, and while in residence in his Kensington house Kitchener not only readied himself academically for what the examination required but also struck up a warm and lasting friendship with a fellow crammer, Claude Conder, with whom he would have much to do over the next few years.

The Royal Military Academy Woolwich was the place of preparation for those seeking a commission either in the Royal Engineers or in the Royal Artillery. Known as ‘The Shop’ – a nickname having come from the fact that it had grown out of the old royal arsenal workshop at Woolwich – it was less glamorous than the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, which specialized in the cavalry and infantry, but its history stretching back to 1741 and establishment under the reign of King George II was no less storied. The same could also be said of its alumni, the most recently famous of whom included Colonel Charles ‘Chinese’ Gordon, the hero of the just-fought Taiping Rebellion in China, who had received his commission in the Royal Engineers in 1852 and whose life, as we shall see, would intersect in a vitally important way with Kitchener's own. But that was some distance in the future. For now, Kitchener was following the path that seemed almost inevitable for him as a son of the Colonel.¹ Whether or not the father preferred Herbert for Woolwich or Sandhurst is unclear, but the son himself was committed to the former and in January of 1868 he successfully sat the examination, his score coming exactly in the middle of those taking the test, ranking 28th out of 56 candidates.² The next month he began what would be almost three years as a gentleman-cadet. Herbert Kitchener's military career now was underway.

Not much is or can be known of Kitchener's years at Woolwich, however. A fire in 1873 destroyed just about the whole of the Shop's archives and records, including those that pertained to Kitchener's time there. He was not, and never had been, an academic high-flyer; but nor was he a mere ‘plodder’, as one of his early biographers would have it.³ The general view held by the staff was that he was unremarkable, except for his height (he had now reached his maximum of 6’ 2”, very tall when the average height of a mid-Victorian male was about 5’ 8”), and that he was a keen horseman. But existing beneath the parapet is no bad thing in the highly competitive atmosphere that prevails in any college or school and the naturally reticent Kitchener simply got on with his business. Photographs of the period show him to be notably handsome and well-proportioned with his hair parted quite precisely down the middle of his head. Undoubtedly, like just about any young man in the company of his peers, there was fun to be had, (small) acts of rebellion or hi-jinks. During his cadet years he may have emerged from a kind of self-imposed social retirement and become more inclined to fraternize, but altogether he remained reserved and even awkward in most social settings. What we do know more clearly about Kitchener the cadet is that his most important friendship at Woolwich was with Claude Conder, his former colleague at the crammer Frost's.

Conder was a little older than Kitchener, but they had similar interests and aspirations as ‘sappers’ (engineers) and perhaps as future surveyors. Conder was interested in languages, particularly those of the Middle East. Kitchener's own linguistic cosmopolitanism may have been a further bond. Whatever the impetus, they began to study Hebrew together with a view to a closer reading of the Old Testament. Engaging in such a pursuit during his personal time suggests a seriousness of mind beyond that typical of a budding military officer. Indeed, in their own amateur way the two young men were participating in a keenly-practiced Victorian pastime: that of pursuit of the ancient languages. Whether it was studying the classics of undergraduate ‘Greats’ fame at Oxbridge, or the necessarily more rarified learning of the Biblical languages that had grown out of German scholarship's move into Old and New Testament higher criticism earlier in the nineteenth century, studying languages as the key to unlocking Biblical textual meaning was little short of a rage in certain Victorian circles. In this way the young Kitchener was very much a man of his time and soon enough his antiquarian interests would coincide more clearly with both his abiding Christian religiosity and his first real professional military service.

In the meantime, Kitchener carried on with the required work of an engineer cadet and when out of term holidayed with family and friends in the south of England and then, beginning, after the New Year 1869, in France where the Colonel had finally settled permanently after a peripatetic couple of years going back and forth between England and New Zealand. The antipodean farming experiment had not gone as planned, and the Colonel decided that life could be lived best and certainly in those days more economically just across the Channel in Brittany, in a chateau near the beautiful riverside town of Dinan. Like a lot of other Englishmen – for example, Sir John Everett Millais, the celebrated painter and member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, whose father had moved the family to Dinan for a few years when Millais was a child – the Colonel saw no incongruity and considerable convenience in taking up residence in northern France. For Kitchener himself, Dinan, then with a population of about 8,000 and built mostly high on the banks of the Rance river, became a favourite vacation destination and with his fluent French learned as a schoolboy in Switzerland an easy place to socialize and relax. His brothers would visit also, as would his sister Millie in the run-up to her impending marriage. Altogether, after the disjointed years following the death of wife and mother Fanny, the complete family was able to reconvene and thereby re-establish their filial bond.

There is little doubt that Kitchener worked hard at the Shop, ploughing through a curriculum heavy with mathematics, geometry, chemistry, surveying, and drill. His time there would be punctuated by periods of vacation and even by an enforced brief leave of absence owing to another undisclosed illness, perhaps brought on by dint of the pressure of academic work as had likely been the case in 1867 in Switzerland. Beyond the lecture hall, library, and parade ground sport and recreation did not seem to matter very much to the young Kitchener. He would later point to eye trouble as being responsible for his routine avoidance of games. Perhaps relevant too was the fact that his formative private education had provided him with no opportunity for participating in team sports, something that had become greatly popular at the Victorian public school, as epitomized by the Arnoldian ‘revolution’ at Rugby in which schoolmaster cousin Frank Kitchener was just then participating.⁴ Still, given his love of riding he raced steeplechase from time to time, attended dances, and in June of 1869 met the heroic Colonel Gordon at a celebratory Royal Engineers luncheon, a singular highlight of Kitchener's time as a cadet.⁵

In December of 1870, aged 20 years, Kitchener completed his training at Woolwich and successfully passed out of an institution that would go on producing generations of engineers and artillerymen for the British Army until the eve of World War II in 1939, when it was closed and its functions transferred eventually to Sandhurst where they have remained ever since. In military terms, Kitchener was an embryonic sapper awaiting his commission. He did not have long to wait, though. On 4 January 1871, he was gazetted as Lieutenant H.H. Kitchener, R.E. The date of his commission would shortly become problematic for him, however, because after spending the Christmas holidays with his father and family at Dinan he decided that since he was not yet commissioned and therefore technically a free agent, he would seek temporary action with the French, just then engaged in the Franco-Prussian War. At that moment in their brief but highly consequential war the Prussians were about to win a decisive victory from which would flow a declaration of German unity and proclamation of empire under the stentorian leadership of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck.

From his domestic perch high above Dinan old Colonel Kitchener was much engaged by the ongoing war between the up-thrusting Prussians and the overmatched French. The Battle of Sedan in September 1870 had produced an overwhelming Prussian victory, including the capture of France's emperor, Napoleon III, an ignominy that seemed defining of the course of the war.⁶ A similar victory at Metz would follow in October and with Paris now under a brutal siege, the French were wholly desperate and on the verge of a general surrender. The Colonel may have become a late-in-life relative francophile, but fatherly advice to his son to join the French army in its hour of need was surely needlessly patriotic, even reckless. But such is what the young Kitchener followed and endeavoured to do. Together with a similarly inclined friend, Harry Dawson, Kitchener was put in touch with General Alfred Chanzy, who just then was attempting to withstand sustained Prussian might with an army comprised increasingly of conscripts. It is unclear whether or not Kitchener and Dawson themselves were ever admitted formally to French service.⁷ They did manage to reach Chanzy's headquarters at Laval, however, although their arrival did not come until almost three weeks after what proved to be France's final defeat at Le Mans on 12 January 1871. France's fall now was inevitable. The Prussians, even though outmanned by a ratio of 3:1 (150,000 to 50,000), were battle-hardened professional soldiers opposed by a ragtag, even cowardly it was thought by some, French force. As if to prove the critics right, the French were duly routed, suffering some 25,000 casualties as compared to 9,400 for the Prussians. Altogether, Le Mans was an unmitigated disaster for the French, although Chanzy himself was regarded as both brave and sound in his generalship but hobbled irredeemably by inferior troops. By the time Kitchener got to the front the war therefore was essentially over and on 28 January with Paris in enemy hands the French government declared for an armistice formally ending the conflict.⁸

The tail-end of the Franco-Prussian War, accordingly, did not offer Kitchener any real soldiering, but it did serve up for him a first glimpse of the sights and sounds of semi-modern warfare. As it happened, some of these came from the vantage point of several hundred feet up in the air as Kitchener was offered and accepted a view of the front lines from a hot-air balloon. The episode has the feel of a stunt about it as ever since the Montgolfier brothers had launched the first hotter than air balloon in France in 1783 ‘balloonomania’ had taken hold of both the military and of the popular mind in Europe. Kitchener never wrote about the experience, but presumably he thought it a quick way to gain a clear sense of the battlefield having missed out on the fighting, so up he went. Inappropriately dressed for the cold winter air, however, he got thoroughly chilled during his time aloft and soon enough went down with pneumonia. Recumbent and despairing in a rundown local inn Kitchener asked Dawson to contact the Colonel who came quickly to fetch his sick son. Kitchener would take some time to recover from this adventure. But it was not his physical health that was in peril so much as what his apparent violation of British neutrality might mean for his putative military career.

The timing and nature of Kitchener's actions in France were such that they became known rather swiftly at Horse Guards in London, to which he was duly summoned in March in order to stand under the judgement of the Commander in Chief of the British Army, Prince George, Duke of Cambridge. An overbearing authoritarian whose tenure at the head of the army would last some 40 years, the Duke was notorious for his sharp tongue and his intolerance of either change or challenge. In the Duke's overawing presence the jejeune Kitchener was wisely silent, but believing himself to have acted properly in that he was unaware of his 4 January British commission and therefore free to act in France as he chose, thought the whole business an exercise in tiresome military bureaucracy. At the interview the Duke acted true to form. In his usual forceful way and employing colourful language he dressed down the young lieutenant. As Kitchener recounted long afterwards, ‘He called me every name he could lay his tongue to; and said I was a deserter, and that I had disgraced the British Army. I never said a word; and then at the end the Duke, with a funny sort of twinkle, added, ‘Well, anyhow, boy, go away, and don't do it again’.⁹

In April 1871, following on his wryly dyspeptic encounter with the Duke of Cambridge, Kitchener was sent to Chatham, to the School of Military Engineering. Chatham was and is the depot for the Corps of Royal Engineers. It looks down over the Medway and across to the spire of Rochester Cathedral in whose shadow Charles Dickens had long lived at nearby Gad's Hill until his unexpectedly early death just the year before. For Kitchener, the next two years would prove to be professionally formative. He took surveying out of the classroom and applied it to the local topography. He rode out constantly and became even more comfortable in the saddle. Eventually, he sat the exams which marked his formal passage on the road to becoming a skilled military engineer. Socially during these years Kitchener's life was typically quiet and, for a time, intensely religious. His best friend at Chatham was a young officer named Captain R.H. Williams, whose introduction to Kitchener came as a result of a brief dust-up over contested room occupancy. Once settled, however, the two men became close friends – ‘inseparable’ is the way Williams described it – bound together by a shared professionalism and an even more seriously held Christian faith.¹⁰

The 1870s in Britain was a time in which the theological and liturgical controversies initiated by the Oxford Movement some 40 years earlier were still causing a roil within the Church of England, as well as in society more broadly. Beginning publicly in 1833 the men of the Oxford Movement had called for a sustained recovery of the independent Catholic heritage of the national church which, they maintained, had been compromised by the prevailing erastianism of the first third of the nineteenth century. Over the succeeding two generations, years marked by discord and departure (namely John Henry Newman's decision to leave the Church of England for Roman Catholicism in 1845), an intense brand of Anglo-Catholic churchmanship had developed whose spiritual leader was one of the founding Tractarians, Edward Bouverie Pusey. From his base at Christ Church, Oxford as Regius Professor of Hebrew, Pusey gave shape and meaning to the rituals and practices of Victorian Anglo-Catholicism. These, he believed, were reviving of a church that had grown both increasingly liberal and overly Protestant and therefore needed to be recalled to its ancient Catholic formularies. Within the context of the day where British freedom and prosperity were seen as being very closely allied with the country's manifest Protestantism, and where any brand of Catholicism was seen as implicitly Irish or suspiciously Continental and therefore to be feared, Anglo-Catholic ritualism was believed by many to be religiously suspect at best, and highly disruptive of the national fabric at worst.¹¹

R.H. Williams was a devout Anglo-Catholic nonetheless and Kitchener's somewhat dormant Christian faith was revivified by the bracing, disciplined approach to Anglican Christianity taken by his new friend. Consequently, he too began to engage in a highly structured apprehension of religious life. Attendance at service or ‘mass’ became daily. The Eucharist was made much more central to his liturgical life. Fasting was occasionally practiced. In the mess hall, Kitchener told Williams that fasting would be easier if they were able to ‘find something unpleasant’ to eat, and the pair of them acted accordingly.¹² Altogether, Kitchener became a devotional Anglo-Catholic, and in an age when church party politics were pronounced, declared his allegiance to Anglo-Catholicism in the last years prior to the government's passing of the Public Worship Regulation Act in 1874. Designed to curb what some believed were the ritualistic excesses of the Anglo-Catholics, the Act was brought in by the Disraeli Conservatives at the behest of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Archibald Tait, in a spasm of governmental overzealousness in defence of Protestant Anglicanism. In response to what was seen by Anglo-Catholics as a blatant attack on religious freedom and tolerance, likeminded partisans had already formed the Church of England Protection Society, later called the English Church Union. Kitchener and Williams were two such partisans and readily took out membership in the Society. These years left a permanent mark on Kitchener's churchmanship as he would remain decidedly Anglo-Catholic – although never personally adopting ritualistic practices – for the remainder of his life.

In 1873, after two years at Chatham, Kitchener was selected by Brigadier General George Greaves to be his aide de camp. His selection in this regard was a singular mark of favour, perhaps prompted by the fact that Kitchener's height, good looks and military bearing were always impressive, and it got him assigned shortly to the manoevres of the Austro-Hungarian army and to the dining table of the emperor, Franz Josef. Exposure at this level of the European politico-military hierarchy was a heady experience for the young Kitchener. In the process his rudimentary German language skills served him well, as did his familiarity generally with Continental life.

The following year, 1874, Kitchener would spend largely at Aldershot Camp. Destined later to become central to British army life, Aldershot then was newly-acquired by the military and rudimentarily basic in its facilities and services. Except for his friend Williams’ presence there also, Kitchener did not much like the place – perhaps his recent rather exalted European experience made him less than tolerant of the rough camp atmosphere – but whatever the content of his private thoughts on this latest posting he once again managed to favourably impress his superiors. Described by one of them as ‘a most zealous and promising officer’, Kitchener regularly displayed high skill in the emerging military field of telegraphy, the long-distance transmission of textual or symbolic messages, as well as in his horsemanship.

As with most young officers in peacetime, Kitchener had to wait on events in order to commence a real career, however. One possibility in this regard which had emerged in 1873 was joining the Ashanti Expedition in Africa under the command of Garnet Wolseley. Designed to exert British control over West Africa's Gold Coast, the expedition would make Wolseley's reputation as a soldier of empire and resulted ultimately in 1877 in his promotion to major general.¹³ Kitchener volunteered to go to Africa – ‘the next thing you may hear will be my slaying niggers by the dozen’ – he wrote to his sister Millie, employing a term of the time that was not yet recognized by most contemporaries as constituting a racist epithet; but he was not called upon to serve.¹⁴

His work at Aldershot essentially completed by mid-1874 but not yet sure of what his next move would be, Kitchener took a short leave and went across the Channel to Dinan to think about his future. The family remained based there, although his father and stepmother were not getting on well together and would soon separate, but never divorce. Much of the rest of the year Kitchener divided between England and Germany where he had decided to go in order to work on his facility in the German language, and to await future prospects. And indeed, while studying in Hanover that summer he received a letter from his old friend at the Shop, Claude Conder, containing a request that was exactly what the increasingly bored Kitchener needed to hear.

Since receiving his commission in the Royal Engineers in 1870 Conder had spent considerable time in what Europeans were just then beginning to call the Middle East attached to the new London-based Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF). Founded a few years earlier in 1865 by a group of archaeologists and clergymen – most notably, Arthur Stanley, Dean of Westminster – the PEF was rapidly gaining a reputation for first rate survey work in the Holy Land.¹⁵ The question of the Bible's historical veracity was a lively and controversial one in those years, marked as they were by the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species in 1859, as well as by Benjamin Jowett's Essays and Reviews of 1860. Devout Christians felt it their duty to defend the traditional interpretation of the Bible's chronology, while at the same time discovering physical evidence for its chronicled sites and events. The collateral impact – and this is where someone like Conder made his mark – came in the political and intelligence gathering possibilities for the government of having the PEF active in Ottoman-controlled Palestine. Though an out of the way province of the Turkish Empire, Palestine's 6,000 square miles nonetheless had an obvious importance to Western Christian culture, which the PEF had been founded to recognize and elaborate. But Palestine also sat at the crossroads of competing empires, a position that would only heighten in the latter part of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, which is why the War Office was willing to make available to the PEF (on secondment) members of the Royal Engineers such as Conder and, soon enough, Kitchener too.

Conder's letter to Kitchener was occasioned by the death of his field assistant, Charles Tyrwhitt-Drake, from malaria in Jerusalem in June. To Conder, his old friend Kitchener was exactly the man to replace his unlucky former assistant who had been with him for the preceding two years. For his part, at rather loose ends in Germany and very glad to be considered for the appointment, Kitchener thought the prospect a sterling one, duly applied, and set out immediately for London and the PEF's headquarters.¹⁶ Upon arrival Kitchener attended an interview, was offered the job – ‘the very man’ the PEF wanted it seems – enrolled in an Arabic language course and otherwise prepared to leave for Palestine, which he then did early in November.¹⁷ Travelling by way of Vienna, Trieste, and Alexandria Kitchener steamed into the port of Jaffa on 15 November 1874, after having ‘got up early to see the sun rise over the Holy Land. It was glorious more from association than anything else, seeing for the first time that land which must be the most interesting for any Christian’.¹⁸ Palestine would be Kitchener's professional home for the next four years and the scene of his first real work as a commissioned engineer, albeit on special service. In many ways Palestine would be the making of him in this initial stage of his professional military life.

Upon Kitchener's arrival in mid-November Conder and his small team were working in the south of the country, in the serrated topography of the Judean hills. Conder met his new assistant at Jerusalem the next day and together they rode out to the survey's camp at El Dhoheriyeh. The landscape was desolate, the camp rough, and the survey party a mere handful of men, together with a few servants, horses, and mules. But the location of the work was storied in Biblical terms – Jericho was not far away – and the task exactly suited to a green and eager sapper like Kitchener. Accordingly, he got down to work immediately, and revelled in it. The daily routine demanded both physical heartiness and attention to detail. A comprehensive ordnance survey – which was the PEF party's assignment – required the full range of engineering and map-making skills. Kitchener therefore was in his element, surveying and sketching, deepening his facility in Arabic which he had begun to acquire in London, and enjoying being back in the ever-convivial company of Conder.¹⁹ The New Year 1875 saw the group move closer to the territory abutting Judea's Dead Sea. Lying at about 1,400 feet below sea level, the lowest surface point on earth, and with a high degree of salinity, the Dead Sea generated an immediate attraction to the dusty survey crew: ‘the water looked so blue and nice we were soon stripped and in it. The sensation is extraordinary’.²⁰ (Kitchener makes no mention, surprisingly, of the nearby ancient mountain-top fortress of Masada, reinforced by Herod the Great around the time of Christ, and the site of a siege in 73–4 AD about which Josephus the Jewish-Roman historian recorded the mass suicide of some 960 Jewish resisters to Roman rule.)

A short time later, however, disaster struck when Kitchener became ill with what was probably malaria. Fearing the same end as the unfortunate Tyrwhitt-Drake a year earlier, he was sick for weeks. But by the end of February Kitchener had passed through the worst of it, and helped by the apparent medicinal effect of consuming considerable amounts of ‘small’ beer was convalescing and enjoying the sights and sounds of Old Jerusalem including the Western Wall of the ancient temple, the tomb of King David, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The veracity of the latter as the site of the tomb of Jesus would be called into question later in 1883 when during a sabbatical year spent in Palestine Charles Gordon became convinced that a site outside the old city walls constituted both Calvary, as well as the location of Christ's tomb.²¹ Meanwhile, at last well and fit, Kitchener readied himself to rejoin the survey, which he did in mid-March.

During Kitchener's absence the work of the survey had continued apace. The demands were many, but being out on the land, riding, hiking, measuring, photographing and, for recreation, swimming, meant that he was living a full and invigorating life. Once having returned, Kitchener fell back into the survey's rhythm immediately and none too soon for at the beginning of April while the group was taking its daily plunge in the Mediterranean, Conder – evidently a rather weak swimmer – got caught in an undertow just off the legendary port of Ascalon, site of the last battle of the first crusade, fought in 1099, and was pulled out into the deep water only to be ‘rescued by Lieutenant Kitchener’.²² Not for the only time would Kitchener play the hero, for later in April while the survey was encamped at Safeh in the hills above Lake Galilee they were attacked by a group of angry locals. Safeh was a small Arab Muslim village whose inhabitants viewed with suspicion the incursion of the obvious ‘infidel’ in the form of the survey's members. Initially, the local people denounced them verbally and lobbed a few rocks in their direction. But the atmosphere soon became more hostile and a scuffle ensued between Conder and the putative Arab leader, a vituperative village tough named Ali Agha Alan. After Alan made an attack on the survey party he was knocked down in response and restrained with a rope. Conder and Kitchener then thought the unfortunate incident to be over. However, just at that moment one of Alan's allies jumped forward and clubbed Conder on the head, knocking him down, opening up a deep wound in his scalp, and rendering him almost senseless. Unsurprisingly, a melee ensued with Kitchener caught in the middle of it. Outnumbered, the survey members wisely retreated as bullets and stones began to punctuate the air. Dragging Conder along with them, they made it to safety but might just as easily been cut down. Kitchener did his part in the dust-up, in the process suffering a sharp blow to the leg, but soon enough a small detachment of Turkish troops rode in to apprehend Alan and his men, who were later tried, convicted, and imprisoned for their unprovoked assault on the survey party. For Kitchener, the incident at Safeh was his first real ‘battlefield’ experience and in the subsequent view of Conder his colleague's ‘cool and prompt assistance’ had made all the difference in their escaping the violent situation with their lives.²³

In the aftermath of the Safeh incident Conder's physical incapacity, along with the presence of simmering local hostility and the ever present danger of fever, both malarial and choleric, resulted in a suspension of the survey's operations. Kitchener and Conder therefore returned to London in October. At Christmas, Kitchener crossed the Channel to Dinan to spend time with his family, and then returned to London where he would spend the whole of the following year, 1876, working with Conder on map-making and writing up their survey notes.²⁴ He also put considerable work into preparing and then having published privately a book which he called Lieutenant Kitchener's Guinea Book of Photographs of Biblical Sites. Seeking a ‘fresh view of many of the most interesting Biblical sites’ was Kitchener's stated aim in giving an outlet for his growing hobbyist photography, and while the book did not sell well it was not for lack of authorial and editorial keenness.²⁵

This year-long London interregnum also allowed Kitchener to pursue other enthusiasms, principally his continuing religious devotion which he demonstrated by joining the recently-founded Guild of the Holy Standard. ‘Brothers’ of the guild were military men committed to an overt (Anglo-Catholic) religiosity by way of attendance at Holy Communion, engaging in good works and clean living, and other such practices that spoke of personal sobriety and self-discipline. Apparently, in this way Kitchener, young and at large in mid-Victorian London, posed no danger to the virginal virtue of any of the women he might encounter, and his correspondence on the topic of the opposite sex accordingly is non-existent.

By the end of the year Kitchener, now in excellent health but bored in London, was keen to return to Palestine. Conder, however, was not deemed fit to do so and so the PEF chose to give command of the survey to the 26-year-old Kitchener, a move that did not sit well with the ailing former chief but was inevitable given the circumstances.²⁶ The PEF also enlarged the size of the survey, which meant that upon landing in Beirut at the beginning of February 1877 Kitchener at the head of almost 20 men: ‘quite a little army to feed’, he remarked with evident pride.²⁷ For the next nine months Kitchener and the survey went about their business in a comprehensive and mostly harassment-free manner. On his own and in charge, Kitchener grew quickly into the habit of command. While map-making remained his main focus, the parallel track of politico-intelligence work would soon come into sharper relief because in April war broke out between Russia and the Ottoman Empire.

Conflict between these two powers had simmered for some time and in the context of Balkan nationalism, one of the legacies of the mid-century Crimean War, and complaints about the ongoing ill-treatment of Christian minorities within the Ottoman Empire, the two sides plunged into a war that would rage for ten months and take the lives through both battle and disease of over 300,000 people. For Britain, long supportive of the Ottomans’ stance in the Eastern Mediterranean of holding Russia at bay, there was much at stake geo-politically. And Disraeli's Conservative government knew exactly which side it was on, notwithstanding Liberal leader William Gladstone's impassioned defence of Bulgarian Christians in the pages of his bestselling pamphlet, The Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East, published before the outbreak of war in the autumn of 1876.²⁸

Britain's official endorsement of the Ottomans in the war meant that the PEF would receive continuing protection and nothing like that which had happened at Safeh was repeated. And Kitchener, it seems, could not have been happier during these months. ‘Every day’, he rhapsodized in a letter to sister Millie, ‘from morning to night, I enjoy life’.²⁹ And such would prevail until the survey's work was completed in November, with the whole of Palestine having been surveyed and, eventually, mapped. The PEF's achievement was great, and its success in this regard would have a significant impact on generations of archaeologists and cartographers in the Middle East, notably T.E. Lawrence some 40 years later. The work now complete, Kitchener sent his colleagues home. But rather than go with them, and with his interest piqued by the deepening Russo-Turkish War, he decided to seek a taste of the fighting in Bulgaria. Departing Palestine on 26 November, therefore, he headed for Constantinople and from there travelled to the frontline at Kamerleh. Once arrived he was distinctly unimpressed with what he saw of the Bulgarian Christians for whom so much ink had been spilt by Gladstone, who, in any case to Kitchener, was a political sentimentalist. His visit was brief, but long enough to assure himself that the Disraeli government was right in backing the Ottomans. But the brevity of his time at the front did not preclude his being introduced to Valentine Baker, one-half of the intrepid Baker Brothers of mid- to late-Victorian fame. Just then Valentine was serving as a Turkish officer having been drummed out of the British Army and then spending time in prison for sexually assaulted a young woman in a railway carriage in 1875.³⁰ As such, Baker was disreputable in the extreme, but his life was exotic nonetheless, and unknown to Kitchener at the time, he was the father of a young daughter, Hermione, with whom Kitchener would fall in love a few years later in Cairo.

The Bulgarian episode over, by the end of 1877 Kitchener had returned to London where he would take up residence with his recently separated father who had relocated there, having left both Dinan and his second wife forever.³¹ The New Year 1878 began with Kitchener continuing to work on completing the Palestine map. From his small flat in South Kensington he would walk the brief distance to Kensington Gore, the site of the headquarters of the Royal Geographical Society, in order to complete the work. As a recently-made fellow of the society, he was entitled to use its map room and throughout the first part of the year he, along with a now-recovered Conder, occupied themselves with finishing off the project for the PEF. Early in March while Kitchener laboured over the map, the Russo-Turkish War came to an end with a Russian victory and the resultant signing of the Treaty of San Stefano that would briefly settle the dispute. The British were not well-pleased by all of the treaty's provisions, however, especially the creation of an independent Bulgaria which, it was assumed by Whitehall, would become a satellite state of Russia. Britain's Turkish policy continued to divide political opinion, although for some the issue was never less than crystal clear. As Queen Victoria put it in a note to her prized prime minister, Disraeli: ‘Oh if the Queen were a man, she would like to go and give those horrid Russians whose word one cannot trust such a beating’.³²

Prime minister since 1874 and always much concerned with the vagaries of the interminable Eastern Question, Disraeli saw that in order for British interests to be properly served the Treaty of San Stefano simply could not be allowed to be the final word on the outcome of the war. Great Power interest naturally included Imperial Germany under the direction of its chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, whose own view of the unsatisfactory nature of the San Stefano settlement mirrored that of Disraeli's. Accordingly, within a few months and with Bismarck acting as host and ‘honest broker’, the Congress of Berlin opened with the express intention of revising San Stefano in order to achieve a settlement in southern Europe acceptable to the Great Powers whose job it was – they believed – to maintain the Continental balance of power.

During the spring of 1878 the chancelleries of Europe therefore were abuzz in the run-up to the Congress, which was slated to begin in mid-June. Pre-Berlin intensive negotiations between Britain and Russia took place apace resulting in the Anglo-Russian Conventions signed at the end of May. Disraeli and his newly-appointed Foreign Secretary, Lord Salisbury, were of the same view in these negotiations; that being, first, Russia needed to trim the territorial size of Bulgaria, and second, be thwarted in extending her reach in the eastern Mediterranean.³³ Both British objectives were achieved, the latter doubly guaranteed by a separate negotiation with the Sultan of Turkey to allow the British use of the island of Cyprus as a military staging base. Located strategically just some 240 miles from the entrance to the Suez Canal, Disraeli and Salisbury – both of whom regarded the route to India to be at the centre of British imperial policy – saw it as an ideal point from which to balance any Russian incursions southward. The Anglo-Turkish agreement, known formally as the ‘Cyprus Convention’, was signed therefore just ahead of the Anglo-Russian agreement – the order of which Gladstone would shortly complain smacked of Disraelian duplicity – and the British delegation arrived in Berlin full of confidence that what the war had not been able to achieve, diplomacy had and would.

Over the month of negotiations that followed such an assumption was proved correct. By the time the Congress ended on 13 July with the signing of the Treaty of Berlin and its supersession of San Stefano, Disraeli had become the best-known political leader in Europe, every bit Bismarck's match as a negotiator, and in concert with Salisbury the bringer of ‘peace with honour’.³⁴

The acquisition by Britain of Cyprus as a base for military operations (sovereignty over it remained with the Turks) meant that in order to apply proper administration to the island a map of it must be created. The eastern Mediterranean had long been of strategic interest to the British. Ever since the days of Nelson and the victorious Battle of the Nile in 1798, the region had occupied an important place in official thinking. Nearby to the north, for example, lay the seven major members of the Ionian Islands, which had come under British sovereignty as part of the post-Napoleonic settlement of 1815 and had remained so until just a few years earlier in 1864.³⁵ Now it would be Cyprus's turn.³⁶ And who better to undertake the job of conducting its first survey and producing a map than the proven and impressive young subaltern, Lieutenant Kitchener? At least that was the view of Thomas Cobbold, former charge d'affaires at Baden Baden, Rio de Janeiro, and Lisbon, turned (since 1876) Conservative Member of Parliament for Ipswich (and also Kitchener's distant cousin). Cobbald's access to Salisbury at the Foreign Office meant that his recommendation carried considerable weight. Quickly, therefore, the post was offered to Kitchener, who was more than pleased to accept: ‘It is exactly what I like’ Kitchener wrote in gratitude to Cobbald, ‘and will be a great advance to me professionally’.³⁷ Accordingly, Kitchener left England immediately and arrived at the Cypriot capital of Nicosia on 15 September 1878, then a small city of some 11,000 people contained wholly within its old Venetian-built walls.

Kitchener's immediate superior in Cyprus was its recently appointed high commissioner, Major General Garnet Wolseley, who had arrived in Cyprus a few months earlier at the end of July. His service in the Crimea, India, Canada, and the Gold Coast had made Wolseley famous, and now here he was surrounded by members of his so-called ‘Ring’ of subordinate officers encamped at a temporary headquarters in the garden of one of Nicosia's many monasteries.³⁸ Even though Wolseley and Kitchener shared in common both an Irish birthplace and a surveyor's vocation, they did not get on together especially well. Kitchener's Palestine experience pre-disposed him to believing that surveying and map-making were skills he had mastered. And while he was probably right in this estimation, his high-minded view of what the Foreign Office expected from his Cyprus survey was rejected immediately by the eminently pragmatic Wolseley. Where Kitchener proposed a full survey that would include the island's many archaeological sites in the manner of what had been done in Palestine, Wolseley countered with the view that all the British state required in Cyprus was a simple, short, and inexpensive charting of the island enabling basic distances to be known and taxes collected. In the near term Wolseley was probably right about this view, but doubtless his dogmatic insistence upon it annoyed Kitchener and even, perhaps, damaged his youthful pride. Was he a trained surveyor in charge of a significant task, he may have asked himself, or a mere map-making cypher for Wolseley? In any event, Kitchener's supporting sappers and equipment arrived in mid-October and together they got on with the job, however understood. Owing to the fact that in Kitchener's considered opinion, ‘Cyprus was handed over to Great Britain by Turkey in a thoroughly exhausted and ruined condition’, the job at hand was a big one, even if its complete scope remained unclear.³⁹ By early in the New Year 1879, however, Wolseley had grown tired of Kitchener's many imprecations on the point and, in his view, the constant insubordination that accompanied them, and a short while later therefore the high commissioner had the survey suspended. In doing so Wolseley cited the financial cost, but if so it was only because such cost was on account of Lieutenant Kitchener's aggrandized view of the nature of the survey, he maintained.

‘I don't like his manner much’, had been Kitchener's first impression of Wolseley, and nothing that had happened between meeting him in September and the suspension of the survey during the following May disavowed him of it.⁴⁰ Naturally he was bitterly disappointed at this turn of events. He wrote to Lord Salisbury, imploring him to allow the survey to continue. Such overtures from a junior officer were bound to be in vain, however, and indeed they were rejected. As a consequence, shortly thereafter and with the task left incomplete Kitchener returned to London while Wolseley himself left Cyprus for South Africa where he took command of the British forces there just then on the cusp of the Anglo-Zulu War.⁴¹ And with that Kitchener's unfulfilling Cyprus interregnum appeared to be over.

Back in London under less than ideal circumstances, however, Kitchener did not have much time to bemoan the apparent end of the Cyprus survey for almost immediately he was made a British military vice-consul in Anatolia charged with overseeing Turkey's implementation of certain articles of the previous year's Treaty of Berlin. Articles 61 and 62 of the treaty were essentially humanitarian provisions requiring the Ottoman Empire to respect the rights of its Armenian Christian minority living in the region. Kitchener was one of four such vice-consuls named under the supervision of Lieutenant Colonel Charles Wilson, who had been appointed Consul General in April. Kitchener and Wilson were well-acquainted through their mutual service to the PEF. Wilson was a Royal Engineer, having preceded Kitchener at Woolwich by 15 years. He was also an accomplished surveyor through work in Sinai, Jerusalem, Scotland, and Ireland. Later he would be part of the Gordon Relief Expedition where events would result in his taking command of the two-steamer advance party that arrived at Khartoum just 48 hours after its fall and Gordon's death.⁴² Later still from 1901 until his own death in 1905, Wilson would be chairman of the PEF. He quite liked Kitchener from the start, admiring his pluck in the recent contretemps with Wolseley. And now that Kitchener was a free agent Wilson thought him perfect for the job of vice-consul. Accordingly, at the end of June he posted Kitchener to Kastamonu in Anatolia for what would turn out to be a brief eight-month diplomatic passage.

Subsequently, Kitchener's time amongst the Armenians, Circassians, Turks and others was usually interesting, occasionally eye-opening, and often enraging. The Anatolian autumn and winter of 1879-80 were especially cold, his house drafty, and the cuisine basic. Corruption and brutality were ubiquitous in the Turkish administration, as far as Kitchener could discern, and human suffering everywhere rampant. On the other hand, the Anatolian natural landscape was beautiful and the local people friendly. Kitchener was in a position to do some social good, and in the limited ways at his disposal he attempted to do so. But, as it turned out, his time in Anatolia would be brief. Back in Cyprus, the departed Wolseley's former deputy, Major General Sir Robert Biddulph, following a brief residency in Constantinople, had succeeded as high commissioner and was keen to see the survey revived and completed. He also was of the opinion that Kitchener's fulsome approach to it had been the correct one and therefore was the right way now to proceed, and that the erstwhile surveyor turned vice-consul was just the man to lead it. By the end of 1879, therefore, Biddulph had convinced Lord Salisbury to renew the survey and in so doing offered Kitchener the position of its director. In Kastamonu, Kitchener was temporarily reticent at the prospect, wondering about the possibilities of life as a British diplomat and also whether or not a second stint in Cyprus would really yield the kind of survey that he believed was right for optimal British administration of the island. In this brief moment of contemplation when, as he wrote to Millie, he had become used to ‘being the biggest swell in the country’, the cartographer in him won out. ‘I shall get used to being an ordinary mortal again before long’, he continued.⁴³ And so by March of 1880 he had left his stint in diplomacy behind and was back on survey in Nicosia.⁴⁴

His return to Cyprus, as expected, was done in a much more confident manner than had prevailed back in 1878. He had the full support of Biddulph, the high commissioner, a good staff to carry out the hard work of surveying, comfortable accommodation, and an increasingly convivial social life. For the next two years – save a three-month home leave in the summer of 1881 – Kitchener enjoyed some of the most halcyon days of his fast retreating youth. During these years he participated in a kind of ‘band of brothers’ lifestyle: working hard and occasionally being shot at by suspicious locals; riding to hounds and steeplechase racing; and attending dances and balls. He made two lasting friendships during his Cyprus years, one with Pandeli Ralli, an Anglo-Greek merchant trader and scion of the London-based Ralli Brothers firm, who was a sometime MP and to whose fashionable Belgravia townhouse Kitchener would later often retreat; and Sir Samuel Baker, peripatetic man of empire, explorer, just then author of the book, Cyprus as I saw it in 1879, and the disreputable Valentine's older brother. Kitchener developed a more cultured side in Cyprus also, taking a keen interest in, for example, ceramics as well as in porcelain collecting, which would continue for the rest of his life. Amusingly, a Black bear cub had been sent to him from Anatolia proving, in the manner of the time, to be a good pet. Physically, Kitchener remained lean, which because of his height made him appear almost thin. A constant outdoor life meant that his complexion had darkened and been made swarthy by steady exposure to the sun. The prominent moustache that would later become his most marked physical feature, had grown out, although it was not yet as bushy as it would be in the future. Altogether, now in his early 30s, Kitchener was having a great time of it, even if occasionally he fretted about the fact that anything that could be called real military service had not yet come his way. But in Egypt, not far to the south of Cyprus, events there were about to change that abiding concern decisively and forever.