7

India and afterwards, 1902–11

Kitchener's first months back in England after returning from South Africa saw him engage in a round of obligatory feting and feasting, none of it, as usual, much to his liking. The protracted victory in South Africa and the Treaty of Vereeniging were being celebrated heartily by the country – perhaps too much so in a self-consciously overdone way in light of the manifest difficulties of winning it – and King Edward capped the celebrations by inaugurating a new royal honour. The Order of Merit as it was named, was to be limited to just 24 recipients, six of whom were to be generals, and Kitchener was delighted to be told by the King himself that he would be the new Order's first invested member.¹ Adding to the festive atmosphere of that summer of 1902 was Kitchener's elevation to viscount and the gift of a Parliamentary victory grant of L50,000, an enormous sum that would effectively confirm his independent wealth for the balance of his life. Throughout the summer too, the prospect of service in India awaited Kitchener. He had long been keen after the appointment of Commander in Chief – ‘if you want me I am always ready to come’ – Kitchener had written to Lord Curzon, then embarking on his new appointment as Viceroy of India back in December of 1898, and his very public aspiration in this regard was met in kind by the Queen's Viceregal representative.² Highly intelligent, aristocratic, superbly educated, and confident of his destiny as a ruler of men (especially of Indians), Curzon had made plain his desire to have Kitchener join him in India as soon as his exertions in Africa were over. Advised against the appointment, however, by a number of his contemporaries – notably Lord Lansdowne, former Viceroy, on the grounds that Kitchener would be a disaster in India because he had no experience of native (sepoy) troops (which was untrue), Curzon rightly ignored the naysayers, listened to advice from those who heartily endorsed Kitchener, and plumped hard for his eventual appointment.³ Curzon was almost four years into his own term as Viceroy before the appointment came to pass, but he still wanted the best man for the job. As events would unfold, the presence of two strong, single-minded figures working side by side in the two Raj capitals of Calcutta and Simla, would prove the naysayers right. But not in the way that they expected and certainly not because, as Curzon's most recent biographer would have it, Kitchener was ‘artistic, devious, and unscrupulous’.⁴ Why in particular an artistic streak should be held against Kitchener when Curzon's own interests ran to preserving the spectacular art and architecture of Moghul India, seems simply churlish, or is ‘artistic’ merely a code-word for the tired calumny that Kitchener was gay?

In any event, Kitchener's summer and early autumn in London and the Home Counties, of visiting family and friends, of pitching up once again at his favourite Belgravia redoubt of Pandeli Ralli's, and of preparing to embark for India came to an end on 17 October when he quietly departed Victoria Station and crossed the Channel en route first to Cairo and Khartoum, and then on to Bombay. Kitchener's stop-over in Sudan was occasioned by the opening and dedication of Gordon Memorial College in the re-built capital city. His handful of days back in Khartoum were celebratory, and he was greatly pleased with the opening of the college named for his slain abiding hero. At the college's inauguration on 8 November Kitchener spoke at length and with urgency about what Sudan required in order for it to prosper, including how its people were ‘anxiously desirous of education for their children’.⁵ The ceremony and Kitchener's speech were given widespread newspaper coverage in Europe and North America, the foreign correspondent of the New York Times, for example, being especially impressed (and surprised) by Kitchener's ‘gracefully worded’ remarks, containing as they did ‘much good common sense, and describing excellently the purposes for which the college has been founded’.⁶

Departing Khartoum on 11 November, Kitchener returned briefly to Cairo before leaving for Bombay via the Suez Canal and the Indian Ocean. ‘My best salaams to Lady Curzon and His Excellency’ he enjoined one of his staffers, Major Raymond ‘Conk’ Marker, to pass on to the Viceregal couple. ‘I am looking forward with great pleasure to serving under him in India’.⁷ On 28 November the new Commander in Chief arrived in Bombay where he met briefly with his outgoing and unlamented predecessor, Sir (Arthur) Power Palmer. Shortly thereafter Kitchener headed north for his first meeting with the Viceroy, which took place at Bharatpur in Rajasthan, the site of an embarrassing British loss back in 1805 during the ultimately successful Second Anglo-Maratha War, a conflict that had marked the emergence of Arthur Wellesley (later Duke of Wellington) as a commander of great promise, especially during the signal Battle of Assaye in 1803. Despite the inauspicious location, the meeting between the two men at Bharatpur was warm and constructive. Having met on a few occasions previously in London, this meeting was their first in India under these new and official circumstances and it went exceedingly well. As Curzon described it: ‘We had long, confidential and most friendly talks …. I feel at last that I shall have a Commander-in-Chief worthy of the name and position’.⁸ The two men were agreed that reform of the Indian Army was absolutely necessary; as to its nature and format, however, more time was needed for Kitchener to acclimate himself to India and to study the configuration and workings of the army as it then stood. Curzon's use of the possessive in describing their initial meeting was perhaps his first mistake in dealing with Kitchener, but regardless all was harmony between them at this very early stage in their Indian relationship, and that included Kitchener's regard for the Viceroy's highly attractive American-born wife, the former Mary Leiter of Chicago. She and Kitchener would quickly forge a close friendship, which would be sustained over the next few years by numerous reciprocal letters until later foundering irrevocably as part of the fall-out over her husband's epic clash with his military chief. In the meantime, Kitchener was the man, as he had written to Curzon back in 1898, who ‘means to take her [Lady Curzon] down to dinner some day in India’.⁹ That day was now at hand.

The initial two-day meeting with Curzon over, Kitchener departed for Simla, the summer capital of the Raj. Part of his discussions with the Viceroy in Bharatpur had revolved around the fast-approaching Delhi Durbar, which Curzon had been planning meticulously in order to celebrate on Indian soil the recent coronation of King Edward VII. But before it would commence at the end of December, and Kitchener's part in its spectacular display of British imperial pomp and circumstance, the new Jangi Lat (Lord of War) had decided to make ‘a run to Simla,’ as he wrote to the Vicereine, ‘just to look at the place and see what Snowdon will require’.¹⁰ Snowdon, the Commander in Chief's residence there first occupied by Lord Roberts during his term as C in C during the 1880s, would be his part-time home for what would prove to be seven inimitable years in India at the very height of the power of the British Raj.¹¹

By the time Kitchener first glimpsed Simla in December of 1902 the British had been ascending regularly to its 7,200-foot perch for almost half-a-century. The first Governor-General to decide that escaping the sultry and debilitating summer heat of Calcutta and moving the operations of the Raj lock, stock and barrel to Simla was John Lawrence, 1st Baron Lawrence.¹² He did so in 1864, not long after the signal rupture of the Indian Rebellion in 1857, and his own part in bringing its murderous violence to an end. Moving the headquarters of the Raj to Simla was an exertion of a different order of course, but once the British decided that the foothills of the mighty snow-capped Himalayas was the right place to locate themselves for six to eight months of the year, then no expense or trouble was spared in ensuring that the move north became an annual rite of passage. Indeed, by the 1880s, the move had become official. Shortly thereafter a railway was built, a narrow-guage winding snake that pushed its way through 103 tunnels before arriving at the picturesque town that stood anchored to a high, mile-long ridge with spectacular views north to the Himalayas and south down across steeply-pitched valleys to the plains below as they stretched away to Delhi some 200 miles distant.

Simla fast developed its own society and mores, as well as its own architecture and social calendar. To it flocked an assortment of government officials and military personnel, of course, capped by the Viceroy and his entourage, but also various other denizens of the Raj, including the young newspaperman and budding fiction writer Rudyard Kipling, whose early prose was much-inspired by what he saw and heard of the Anglo-Indian community at Simla. Kipling's first visit there occurred in the summer of 1883 when he was just 17 years of age, freshly back (home) in India from his English education and on staff at the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore.¹³ That first summer in Simla he booked himself into the Tendrils Cottage on the Mall and every summer for the next five years he would make the journey over from Lahore for what in his memory became (mostly) youthful halcyon days amidst the cool breezes and green deodar trees of this stunning British retreat.¹⁴

The centrality of Simla's position to the Raj was made that much more permanent in the early 1880s too when Lord Lytton fixed upon the idea that a stately home for the Viceroy needed to be constructed in the town. Viceregal Lodge, located at the far western end of the Ridge was duly opened in 1888 under the Viceroyalty of Lord Dufferin, and for the next 60 years until Indian independence in 1947 this Scottish baronial-style castle was the beating-heart of Raj society half the year-round.

The Commander in Chief in India's residence in Simla, on the other hand, was not grand in the way of Viceregal Lodge. Snowdon, as it was called, was located at the opposite end of the Ridge on the slopes of Jakhoo Hill. Not much more than a bungalow, as soon as Kitchener saw Snowdon he determined that it must be altered and enlarged in order for it to serve the rather more august purposes that he saw it fulfilling under his residency. Immediately therefore, he set about making plans to have extensive renovations carried out and within a year after his arrival in India Snowdon had become a showpiece in what had become a crowded local architectural competition.¹⁵ He also, as we shall see, would build a small retreat for himself about five miles outside of Simla, and at an additional elevation gain of about a thousand feet. He called this retreat Wildflower Hall and to it he would go regularly when in Simla, retiring to an alpine, flower-bedecked hideaway, accessible only by horseback (or, for the hearty, a very vigorous hike).¹⁶

Having reconnoitered Simla thoroughly over the course of a couple of early-winter weeks, Kitchener descended back to the plains in mid-December in anticipation of the Durbar. At Delhi, he presided over the last of the pre-Durbar military manoeuvers engaged in by almost 40,000 members of the Indian Army, and on 29 December he took a leading position in the state procession that wound its way through the city. The Durbar, once underway, was an almost overwhelming mélange of sights and sounds. Painted and be-jewelled elephants, flashing swords and glinting boots, colourful military uniforms and costumed Indian princes, the whole panoply of British imperial rule was on display until it climaxed on 1 January 1903 when the King-Emperor, Edward VII, was proclaimed. Most everyone thought the Durbar was a stunning and magnificent success, which in its time and on its own terms can hardly be disputed. There can be little doubt, however, that Curzon had used the Durbar in part to aggrandize himself, something which fit rather nicely with his well-known reputation for arrogance. Not for nothing had he been mocked long before by his Oxford undergraduate peers for being a ‘most superior person’.¹⁷

As for Kitchener, once the Durbar's festivities were over he departed Delhi directly for the North-West Frontier and what was understood to be the chief geographic vulnerability of that Raj grandeur which had just been celebrated. The mid- to late- nineteenth century was the era of the so-called ‘Great Game’ in Central Asia. That period during which Britain, Russia, and to a lesser extent Ottoman Turkey, vied with one another in order to gain preponderant control over the strategically important Afghan borderlands.¹⁸ Beginning in 1839 with the disastrous First Afghan War, the British had played the game hard in an attempt to keep at bay the thrusts of Imperial Russia as it pushed down on the historic mountain passes – the most famous of which was the Khyber – through which an invasion of British India might potentially take place. The Great Game was just that: a surpassing exercise in feints, jousts, half-truths, diplomatic insincerity, and occasional violence engaged in by an assortment of official and unofficial frontier characters, one of the most notable of which was the intrepid, if eccentric, British explorer and diplomat Sir Francis Younghusband.¹⁹ Earlier in his life Curzon himself had travelled extensively in the region, in the process becoming an Asia expert, which naturally and justifiably accorded him a strong and persuasive voice in debates about the nature of British policy on the frontier.²⁰ Kitchener was new to the geographic area (if not to the nature of the issue itself) and during his first traversal through the region travelled rough and hard, accompanied by a handful of staff and led by General Sir Charles Egerton, commander of the Punjab Frontier Force.

By the end of January Kitchener had completed this is his first inspection of the turbulent North-West Frontier and had ensconced himself at Treasury Gate, his residence located within Fort William in British India's capital city of Calcutta. Founded by the East India Company in the Seventeenth Century, Calcutta had grown around Fort William, which itself had had two iterations and now was located permanently a short distance south of Government House along the banks of the Hooghly river. Calcutta then of course was still a very long way from the modern conurbation of today with its millions of people and a well-demonstrated reputation for poverty and human degradation on a wide scale. In 1903 when Kitchener first saw it, the city was a great deal smaller. The square-mile core of the city contained a coterie of Company and Government buildings, most of which were attractively constructed in an Indo-European style. The Maidan, an enormous grassy parkland, was bounded by the elegant Esplanade and the lively avenue called Chowringhee.²¹ Everywhere, architectural evidence of the Raj abounded. Government House, constructed a century earlier by the Governor-General, the Earl of Mornington (the Duke of Wellington's elder brother) and modelled – as it happened – on Curzon's ancestral seat, Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire, dominated the city. But Dalhousie Square with its Writers’ Building and memorial to the victims of the Black Hole, St John's Church and St Paul's Cathedral, and the Bengal Club, all contributed to a cityscape indicative of what some chose to call a ‘tropical London’.²²

Kitchener's first two months in India had been rather a whirlwind, and beginning in February of 1903 he began to settle into the role of Commander in Chief, which meant not simply the apprehension of his physical surroundings, living quarters, and ubiquitous need for transport, but much more importantly, his relationship with the Viceroy and the desire that they both held for substantive, if yet not clearly articulated, reform of the Indian Army. As usual, Kitchener had gathered around him a trusted coterie of staff officers, principally Colonel Hubert Hamilton, Major Frank Maxwell, and Major Marker. Almost always they travelled as a group, and in residence, whether in Calcutta or Simla, formed a tightly-knit band, all of whom were devoted to Kitchener as their ‘Chief’. He in turn had nicknames for all of them, respectively: Hammy, the Brat, and, as noted earlier, Conk. They shared the easy camaraderie that is characteristic of military life and to which Kitchener, without a wife and family of his own, was especially drawn.

The other emotional lynchpin of Kitchener's early days in India was Mary Curzon. As Vicereine, she was at the pinnacle of Raj social life and Kitchener's overtures to her were constant, bordering sometimes on the unctuous. From the very outset of his appointment: ‘It will be most interesting being in India with your husband who has so covered himself with glory in his most able administration of India’, he gushed to her in August of 1902, he cultivated a warm and solicitous relationship, which, as we have seen, had become a hallmark of his dealings generally with married aristocratic women.²³ Indeed, there was something of the ‘salonniere’ about the way in which Kitchener conducted himself initially in India, and clearly Lady Curzon was flattered by his steady attentions. But it is obvious too that the relationship was highly useful politically in navigating the official relationship of the Viceroy and the Commander in Chief, the two most powerful men in British India and through whom everything pertaining to military operations and potential reform had to run.

The first major social occasion attended by Kitchener following the Delhi Durbar occurred at Government House in Calcutta. In commemoration of the hundredth anniversary of its opening, the Viceroy held a state ball at the end of January in which all participants were enjoined to wear period dress. Given Kitchener's diffidence about these kinds of events it is a testament to his regard for Lady Curzon that he had earlier informed her from Delhi that ‘I have wired for a dress of a general of the period for your ball at Calcutta, but you must overlook indifferent dancing’.²⁴ In due course, and having entered into the spirit of the prospective evening, he arrived in a scarlet uniform, of the cut and colour worn by a British full general during the early part of the nineteenth century. As for the quality of the dancing that ensued, the written record is silent.

For the remainder of his first winter in India Kitchener remained in Calcutta. During this time he turned his attention to some minor renovations of Treasury Gate, a reasonably attractive residence fronted by a wide and long terrace supported by columns and offering a commanding view of the Maidan. Meetings with his officers were many, along with regular gatherings of the Viceroy's Council held a short ride away at Government House. To anyone from a northern climate the Calcutta winter was close to balmy with temperatures in the moderate 50 F range. December, January, and February were much this way, but then inexorably the temperature would begin to climb and the debilitating heat and humidity that were (and are) Calcutta's climatic signature would strike. By the end of March, Kitchener was entertaining the prospect of escaping increasingly steamy Calcutta for the north, of enjoying ‘cold weather and long rides’ and of leaving behind what he would soon come to regard as infernal Council meetings.²⁵ By now he had been long enough in the country to begin drawing some conclusions about what ailed the Indian Army, and he was determined to ensure that the Viceroy saw the prevailing situation in the same way that he did. But before any of the hard discussions about army reform commenced Kitchener happily departed Calcutta for another tour of the North-West Frontier, culminating with his arrival at Simla in May.²⁶

Kitchener's return to Simla coincided with that of much of the rest of the Indian government in its annual May migration north from the scorched plains to the verdant hills. Stations like Simla existed all over British India: Ootacamund, Darjeeling, Mussoorie, the list is a long one. But it is Simla, owing to its designation as the official summer capital, which became the so-called ‘Queen of the Hill Stations’. Indeed, by the first decade of the twentieth century, Simla was a well-developed burgh with a hint of sophistication and an accompanying whiff of scandal. ‘No one should go up to Simla’, warned the authors of a contemporary book on Raj manners, ‘who has not a bag of rupees and many pretty frocks’.²⁷ Army officers abounded, many of them single, and there was no shortage of women – both married and unmarried – so the scope for both romance and adultery was considerable. Scandal, the handmaiden of both, of course was never far behind, and it was this element of Simla life that Kipling had recognized early and chose to chronicle in his writing of the period, if not overtly.²⁸ Kipling's ‘Simla Notes’ became a regular part of the pieces he filed for the Civil and Military Gazette in the mid-1880s, although the constant round of dances, theatricals and balls ultimately left him bored, complaining that ‘the dullest of dull things is to be chroniquer of a Gay Season in the hills’.²⁹ As a chaste, though typically hormonal young man, the frisson of sex that was a part of the Simla scene proved serially vexing to Kipling, especially when it was going on right next to his room, its varied ecstasies easily communicated to him through paper-thin walls: ‘Wish they wouldn't put married couple next door to me with one ½ [inch] plank between’, he diarized. ‘Saps one's morality’.³⁰

For the stern figure of Kitchener, Lord of War and living an unattached life however, much of what Kipling had written of Simla a generation earlier was of little consequence to him. Kitchener's experience of it was social and festive, to be sure: ‘I have been having a dose of Simla entertainments’, he wrote to Lady Curzon. But, he concluded in a style typical of the man, ‘the effect is depressing’.³¹ Nonetheless, as Commander in Chief, Kitchener certainly enjoyed being one of the only residents of Simla to be allowed the luxury of conveyance in a carriage along the Mall, and his 90-minute ‘charming’ rides on horseback out to Wildflower Hall he valued as a highly welcome form of recreation. Moreover, invitations to dine, especially at Viceregal Lodge presided over by Lord Curzon and accompanied by his highly admired chatelaine, appealed greatly to the otherwise socially reticent Kitchener.³² But he was also keen to return the favour and therefore he began to hold dinner parties at Snowdon regularly. But still, Kitchener's life in Simla was largely a steady round of military meetings together with Sunday morning service attendance at Christ Church located at the top of the Mall, next to the aptly-named-for-Simla Scandal Point. The church had been built in 1857 and its tower dominated the Simla skyline. The Commander in Chief's reserved pew was second on the right, directly behind that of the Viceroy's, and invariably Kitchener and members of his staff could be found there for Matins or Holy Communion every Sunday.³³

Kitchener's staff, on the other hand, all young(ish) officers were of the very type written of earlier by Kipling and happy to make the most of just those ‘Simla entertainments’ mostly scorned by their chief. Such was especially true of Conk Marker. Tall and handsome with slicked-back dark hair and a moustache outdone only by that of Kitchener himself, Marker was the alpha-male amongst the Commander in Chief's men. Simla ladies of good breeding were known to almost swoon in his presence, especially when he played the leading man role in one of the many plays put on at the Gaiety Theatre. The centre of Simla's social life, the Gaiety had been built in 1887. Seating about 300, complete with a Viceregal box, a deep-set stage and (eventually) electric heat and light, the Gaiety could be counted on to offer a series of plays and musicals every season, its well-trod boards populated mostly by extravert army officers. One of the regular actors in the troupe was Marker, and Kitchener, not known for his appreciation for the stage, was nonetheless coaxed out to watch his man act and sing with aplomb.³⁴

During Kitchener's first year in Simla it was hardly surprising then that Marker became engaged to Lady Curzon's younger sister, Margaret ‘Daisy’ Leiter. Earlier, Marker had served on the Viceroy's staff and in due course had been introduced to the visiting Miss Leiter in Calcutta. In short order they had fallen in love, before her return to the US. Her presence later at the Delhi Durbar had re-kindled their mutual ardour and now in the spring of 1903 it culminated in a betrothal. Ultimately, however, no wedding would follow. A year later, Marker found himself jilted by Daisy, who went on to marry a peer, the Earl of Suffolk. The charismatic Marker, who had probably never been thrown over in his life, was devastated by this capricious turn of events. ‘I have never seen anyone so completely knocked out’, commented his officer colleague Hubert Hamilton.³⁵ But the damage was done. Upon hearing of Marker's fate Kitchener wrote to Lady Curzon that he was ‘much astonished … to hear the sad news of your sister's affections’.³⁶ Altogether, their story was exactly as Kipling might have scripted it, and in the end, as we shall see, Marker's subsequent posting to England put him in a position to be of great service to Kitchener when eventually the tide broke in his relationship with the Viceroy. In the short term, however, a small squall had disrupted the otherwise rather placid waters of the Viceroy's relationship with the Commander in Chief, or at least that part of it dependent upon concinnity between Kitchener and Lady Curzon.

Throughout that summer of 1903 until the autumn descent to the plains and thence to Calcutta took place Kitchener continued to acclimate himself to all facets of life in Simla. Renovations continued apace at Snowdon, although to Kitchener at least they proceeded in a rather glacial fashion. The residence was having a second storey added, and the whole house was to be wired for electricity, an uncommon occurrence in Simla; indeed electricity had come to the town only 15 years earlier when it was installed in Viceregal Lodge and powered by a generator.³⁷ By no means common even yet, having electricity at Snowdon would be a significant step forward and a boon to Kitchener in his desire to show off his war banners, china and pottery – including two new ‘delightful mustard pots’ from Lady Curzon – and flowers with which he had assiduously decorated all of his official residences going all the way back to his first one at Suakin.³⁸ Better the electric switch than the ‘50 candles’ entertaining usually required, and even then the room is dark, he had complained to the Vicereine.³⁹

The winter in Calcutta and his speedy apprehension of life in Simla spurred Kitchener now to turn his undivided attention to what he believed to be the fundamental reforms necessary to enable the Indian Army to withstand any potential threat to British India, emanating principally, as it was thought, from Imperial Russia. Internal threats from nascent (Indian) nationalists, which were beginning to be felt in Bengal especially, were not regarded as potentially imminent in the same way as the broadly geo-strategic threat along the North-West Frontier. But Kitchener's eye was on both as he started to draft a comprehensive plan for reform of the army.⁴⁰ To that end, he began to correspond with and speak directly to Curzon about the issue, while at the same time sounding out his old South Africa colleague, Lord Roberts, whose friendship was firm and who brought with him some 40 years’ experience soldiering in India, including serving as Commander in Chief from 1885 until 1893, about which he had recently published his memoirs.⁴¹ If the first half-year of Kitchener's time in India had seen a durbar and a series of glittering balls, riding out, and supervising the renovations of three official residences, together with some necessary meetings, tours and inspections, such (mundane) engagements would now swiftly give way to over two years of concerted struggle between the two titans of the contemporary Raj over the nature and extent of army reform. In the end, as we shall see, the outcome of that struggle brought the glittering Curzon Viceroyalty crashing down. For those whose sympathies lay with Curzon in the dispute Kitchener would be cast as the villain of the piece, and by extension the destroyer of that sepia-tinged era when the Raj had reached its apotheosis.

The history of the Indian Army stretched back to the mid-eighteenth century and the era of the expansionary East India Company. Major General Stringer Lawrence, a contemporary of Clive's, was considered the army's father, and after him had come a steady line of successors of which Kitchener numbered 59th. In that long list were counted a series of storied names in the annals of Company and Raj history, including Clive, of course, as well as Sir Eyre Coote, Sir Hector Munro, Earl Cornwallis, Lords Dalhousie and Bentinck, Sir Charles Napier, Sir Colin Campbell, and Sir Hugh Rose.⁴² The traditions of the army naturally were strong, therefore, if not perhaps congealed, and the understanding of it as a bulwark set against all enemies both external and internal was a shibboleth of command. Its necessary reorganization in the 1860s following on the severe challenge to its authority made clear by the Indian Mutiny was the last time thoroughgoing reform had been carried out. Kitchener's firm position was that now, almost half-a-century on from the Mutiny, the time had come to re-organize and modernize the Indian Army in such a way as to ready it for twentieth-century duty.

No one, least of all Curzon, was against the army's reform, per se. The necessity of army reform as a first principle therefore was shared by the Viceroy and his expectation in this regard was clearly a part of what Kitchener's appointment as Commander in Chief portended. In their very first discussion at Bharatpur in December of 1902, as we have seen, just after Kitchener's arrival in India, the subject of army reform had been broached. The new Commander in Chief's considered view – and the fount from which would flow his entire argument concerning army reform – was that the presence and reach of the Military Member on the Viceroy's Council compromised irredeemably the ability of the C in C to perform his duties in a maximally effective way, and therefore the position should simply be eliminated. Curzon disagreed, however, arguing that in Constitutional terms the presence of the Military Member on the Council ensured civilian control of the army. Fundamentally therefore, the two men disagreed over first principles and therein lay the nub of the argument, an argument that would fester and grow until becoming unresolvable, leaving a showdown as the only way forward and the subsequent declaration of a winner and a loser.⁴³

In mid-May 1903, Kitchener decided that the time was now ripe to push forward the issue. As Commander in Chief, he controlled the Indian Army's operations and training; but supply, transport, ordnance, and general organization were under the purview of the Military Member, a position then-occupied by Major General Sir Edmond Elles, a career military worthy, but in Kitchener's view slavishly devoted to the existing ‘dual control’ system and therefore beyond convincing that reform was urgently required. Kitchener believed that the main failing of the Indian Army was that its balkanization precluded its ability to mount a coordinated defence against a potential Russian invasion. ‘Higgeldy-piggeldy’ was the way he described the current disposition of regiments around India, and it was simply beyond debate to him that uniformity in the interests of strategic viability must prevail.⁴⁴ In order to achieve uniformity and hence better execution, Kitchener held, complete control over the totality of military supply, disposition, and operations must be in the hands of the Commander in Chief. His view was powerfully rational, spoke to efficiency, and kept the thinly-veiled Russian strategic threat plainly in view. But of course such a view necessarily undercut the role and power of the Military Member, and in the person of Elles opposition to Kitchener's view therefore was nigh unto automatic. Curzon, with evident sympathy for Elles's position, explained the prevailing situation to Kitchener on 20 May: ‘I have seen Elles …. He says frankly that he would feel it his duty to oppose them [Kitchener's proposals] since they amount in his opinion to the abolition of the Military Department and the reduction of the Military Member to being a staff officer of the C. in C.’.⁴⁵

The balance of May was spent in a flurry of missives back and forth between Kitchener and Curzon each of which attempted to state ever more clearly and with increasing force that the position held by the other party was impossible to uphold and therefore should be surrendered. Stymied, Kitchener wished to put his proposals before the Viceroy's Council, a plan rejected by Curzon since it had become his opinion that behind Kitchener's plan for reform lay a grander scheme to ‘revolutionise the Constitution’. He therefore advised him ‘not to persevere with your plan’.⁴⁶ To Kitchener, talk of revolution and the Constitution was little short of nonsense. Curzon may have believed that India's august position within the British Empire had yielded its own ‘Constitution’ in which the norms pertaining to the office of Commander in Chief were immutable, but in any principled sense this view was a stretch and, at any rate, it was held by no one else.⁴⁷ Kitchener was dumbfounded that his eminently reasonable proposals had elicited such a strong response from the Viceroy given that none of what he was saying about the nature and necessity of reform should have come as a surprise to him. Elles's resistance, for his part, was understandable to Kitchener since his stake in the existing system was obvious. But for Curzon as the Viceroy to continue to advocate for the continuation of the present system meant that for Kitchener it appeared ‘quite hopeless … to expect any success’, and, as he continued in a letter to Curzon on the 21st, ‘under the circumstances I agree with you that it would not be wise for me to now press the matter further’.⁴⁸

Over the following few days after sending this letter Kitchener fretted over what to do about the growing cleavage between his position and that of Curzon. His residence of Snowdon became a kind of forcing house in the service of determining what he believed to be the right way forward in this, as yet, two-person dispute. On 25 May, spurred by other niggling issues with Elles such as control over the issuing of daily orders to the army, Kitchener peremptorily made up his mind to resign: ‘I feel there is no course open to me’, he opined to the Viceroy, ‘but to resign my present command; I need hardly say that I shall greatly regret to leave India, as I was in great hopes of being able to do some good in the Indian Army’.⁴⁹ Shocked, but acting sensibly given the scope for severe upset both in India and in London should Kitchener leave his post after a mere six months, Curzon rejected his resignation immediately.

Kitchener's fit of pique and attempted resignation at this moment in the dispute was rather operatic, to be sure, and Curzon was right to try and marshal the direction of their relationship and send it toward calmer waters. But their division over the issue of dual control was clear and without agreement on the fundamental issue of the normative ambit of the Commander in Chief's powers it would only be a matter of time before the dispute would flare up again. But status quo ante-bellum prevailed, for now. Stung sharply by the whole business, Kitchener chose this moment to rely more heavily on Lord Roberts's counsel about how to deal with the widening chasm between himself and the Viceroy. On 28 May, just three days after his attempted resignation, Kitchener packaged up his recent correspondence with Curzon, and together with an explanatory covering letter, sent everything off to Roberts who was then in his final year as Commander in Chief of the British Army before the position was abolished and replaced by a new model of military governance complete with a Chief of the General Staff. Hoping that once having read the correspondence Roberts would think he had taken the ‘right line’ in his dispute with Curzon, Kitchener enjoined the outgoing Commander in Chief not to show the private correspondence to anyone, especially ‘not to Brodrick’, the Secretary of State for War who was soon to become the Secretary of State for India, and an odious politician in Kitchener's view.⁵⁰

In drawing Roberts into the dispute Kitchener may have been acting unethically, as some have sinced maintained, although in matters of state amongst Privy Councillors virtually nothing by way of consultation was considered ultra vires. Moreover, Roberts was bound by Kitchener's request for confidentiality, which he duly respected. Kitchener, as would befit his close relationship with Roberts, wrote freely about the ‘very galling’ state of affairs in Simla over the issue of dual control and how ‘what would have been a pleasure [has become] a disagreeable duty’. Kitchener saved most of his pointed criticism for Elles rather than for the Viceroy, lamenting to Roberts that if the Military Member had any ‘knowledge of what an army ought to be to hold its own in a big war, we might get on, but he is narrow minded and bigoted to a degree’. Elles, as far as Kitchener could tell, simply wished ‘to keep things as they are, certainly not to improve, possibly the reverse’. Sadly, he concluded, ‘the Viceroy will, of course, support Elles’. This fact, more than any other, kept Kitchener from wanting to engender a public rupture between Curzon and himself; at least not yet, and so his settled conviction was clear: ‘I do not want to have a fall over a question of this sort’.⁵¹ Throughout this stressful period Roberts, while in agreement with Kitchener's goal of improving the Indian Army's ability to fight, advised caution. After all, the former Commander in Chief himself had spent eight years in India under the very same system and had made it work.⁵² And thus, there the matter stood mid-way through 1903.

Still, even though the situation remained quiet at that moment, enough had been said over the preceding few weeks to render doubtful an amicable future between Kitchener and Curzon. Indeed, as it turned out, mid-1903 comprised only early days in the ultimate course that the disagreement took, but once the initial heat of the moment had passed the two men settled back into the normal run of affairs for the balance of that year's Simla Season. Conversations, dinners, consultations, all were conducted with little or no reference to the unresolved dispute. Later that summer Kitchener went back out on tour once again through the always testy Frontier region, as well as up into the stunning natural beauty of Kashmir, before returning to Simla in late-October for the last weeks of the Season: ‘Will there be sufficient dancing people left in Simla at that time. What do you think?’⁵³ His jaunty question to Lady Curzon was made in a letter inviting the Viceregal couple to dinner on 3 November. They duly came across the mall the short distance from Viceregal Lodge, past Peterhof, the original rather tumbledown informal residence of the Viceroy, to Snowdon. Once there they enjoyed themselves thoroughly as over the years Kitchener had developed into a superb host, sparing nothing in quality of food, wine, plate, and presentation. Both they and Kitchener were preparing shortly to decamp back down to Calcutta for the winter. Indeed, Kitchener had made 16 November his projected departure date. On the 15th, a Sunday, he decided to take one last ride out to Wildflower Hall. Shortly after attending church and eating lunch at Snowdon, his horse was saddled and, unusually, he rode out unaccompanied by a staffer (most of his staff had gone down already to the railhead at Kalka where they planned to meet him on Monday). As always, the ride was pleasant, about five miles over a good, if winding mountain road that if followed to its end would (then as today) terminate at the Tibetan border. The road is steep, but the footing was stable and Kitchener visited his arrestingly beautiful mountain retreat and started his return to town by late-afternoon. The descent brought him back down to the village of Sanjauli located on the other side of Jakhoo Hill. Years earlier in 1870 a tunnel had been bored through a spur at Sanjauli that allowed traffic coming from both Chota (little) Simla and Simla to connect to the mountain road.⁵⁴ Upon his descent from Wildflower Kitchener proceeded through the then dimly-lit and narrow tunnel supported only by wooden braces. Halfway through the tunnel his horse was spooked by a passing pedestrian. It reared and then moved sideways jamming Kitchener's left leg between two of the unforgiving braces hard against the side of tunnel. A further turn by the skittish horse put enormous pressure on the leg and the bones above the ankle gave way. Stricken, Kitchener tumbled from the horse. Unable to walk he waited to be rescued, which happened quickly, and by suppertime he was back at Snowdon, but in great pain and in a supremely foul mood. Plans to depart the next day for Calcutta naturally had to be shelved.

In short order an army surgeon was called in to set the broken leg, which he did by elevating it and then encasing it in splints. In the manner of the time only after a few weeks would a plaster cast be applied. Altogether, for Kitchener, the accident was highly unfortunate, vaguely embarrassing, and irritatingly inconvenient. Its impact was also long-lasting as he was left for years with a recurringly painful leg and a slight limp. For the next month he hardly left his bed. The leg was checked regularly, including by the world-famous London surgeon, Sir Frederick Treves – whose fame had been made by his performing the first appendectomy in England in 1888 and around the same time offering treatment (and friendship) to the horribly deformed ‘Elephant Man’, Joseph Merrick. Treves, who had been Surgeon Extraordinary to the Queen and now was one of King Edward's Honourary Surgeons, made a special trip up from Bombay to Simla in order to examine Kitchener. But there was not much to be done other than to allow the bones to heal, which they did, although too slowly for the terminally impatient Kitchener. ‘I am now able to get out of bed’, he wrote in exasperation to Lady Curzon, just before finally departing Simla for Calcutta on 17 December, a month later than planned. The Vicereine had written to suggest that once arrived in Calcutta he should come and convalesce at Government House. But he declined the ‘extremely kind’ offer in favour of staying at Treasury Gate and receiving ‘regular treatment of the leg’.⁵⁵ By Christmas therefore, and cheered by a note from the Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour, saying ‘how thankful I am that we have got you … as our military adviser and guide on the problems of Indian defence’, Kitchener had settled back into his residence at Fort William and was enjoying the relative winter warmth of Calcutta after Simla's seasonal chill.⁵⁶ ‘A happy Xmas to you and the Viceroy’, he wrote to Lady Curzon on 25 December. ‘They are tinkering at my leg which is rather unpleasant … and fear that the leg will take longer [to heal] than was originally supposed’. Indeed, Kitchener was right in his prediction because it took until well into the New Year 1904 until he was fully mobile, and much longer still before he was effectively pain-free.⁵⁷

Throughout this period of enforced convalescence Kitchener complained of having no energy and little desire to accomplish work. Unsurprisingly, he was grateful for the solicitations of Lady Curzon especially and told her so in a letter penned on New Year's Day: ‘I can never forget the constant and unfailing kindnesses you have shown me since I have been out here’.⁵⁸ Little did either of them know that the year to come would effectively sunder their amity because of the ongoing crisis over Kitchener's determination to re-make the role of the Military Member on the Viceroy's Council in the face of her husband's strenuous objections.

For the second half of 1903, as we have seen, Kitchener had complied dutifully with the Viceroy's request and therefore had desisted in his desire to take the issue of army reform to the whole Council. But his thinking on dual control was firm and unwavering and just as when he had drawn in Lord Roberts to his debating circle, he now began to do likewise with others such as Lady Salisbury, and much more importantly, Arthur Balfour. In office since the summer of 1902 when he had succeeded his uncle, the ailing Lord Salisbury, as prime minister, Balfour's view of India's place in the Empire was similar to that of Kitchener's; that is, India's interests were inseparable from but subordinate to those of the Empire as a whole. The exceptionality that Curzon accorded India as against the wider Empire was not a view shared by Balfour. The Prime Minister's party political Conservatism did not preclude him from sharing at least part of his Liberal predecessor William Gladstone's view, expressed to the then Viceroy, Lord Ripon, back in 1881, that ‘I am one of those who think that to the actual, as distinguished from the reported, strength of Empire, India adds nothing’.⁵⁹ No late-nineteenth or early-twentieth century Conservative prime minister was going to disavow the centrality of India to Britain's international position even if, as has been suggested by some historians, India had become a strategic burden by then.⁶⁰ But Balfour certainly was well-prepared to ensure that Indian strategic and defence policy ran through the Commander in Chief and hence emanated from the British Cabinet, and not solely through the Viceroy's Council. And in his 3 December 1903 response to Kitchener's earlier letter Balfour could not have been clearer on the point: ‘My own personal conviction is (at least at present advised) that the existing division of attributes between the Commander-in-Chief and the Military Member of the Council is quite indefensible’.⁶¹ Thus it was that despite Kitchener's leg woes and mental lethargy at the outset of 1904 he was becoming increasingly confident in his position versus that of the Viceroy for the simple reason that his views lined up much more readily with those of the home government than did Curzon's. The Viceroy's, on the other hand, were suggestive of the belief that the Indian government was in some significant measure sovereign from, rather than creaturely of, London. A priori, then, Curzon's position on the issue was potentially weak in a way that Kitchener's was not.

By February, Kitchener's leg had healed well enough to allow him to take ‘a short ride in the mornings’, and with the winter soon over he went back out on tour in April – mostly to South India where in addition to regular army inspections he indulged in an obligatory round of tiger shooting – before going into residence once again at Simla.⁶² His correspondent, Lady Curzon, had returned earlier to London in order to give birth near the end of March to the Viceregal couple's third (and final) child, a daughter they named Alexandra. ‘I am so sorry it is a daughter as I think you would have preferred a son’, wrote Kitchener a little brusquely though accurately since they had two daughters already and had expressed the same opinion themselves.⁶³ It had been a difficult pregnancy, and in conjunction with her other ills Lady Curzon's health suffered permanently because of it, which would lead two years later to her sadly premature death. In the meantime, the Viceroy – whose own health was not stellar – would shortly join her in England leaving Indian governance in the hands of the acting Viceroy, Lord Ampthill, from the end of April, which came just after Kitchener had moved back into Snowden for the new Season.

Kitchener's summer of 1904 in Simla was much as it had been the previous year. Meetings, dinners, rides out to verdant Wildflower Hall – ‘it all looks very nice and when more flowers are out I shall be quite satisfied’ – but he found life to be somewhat tedious.⁶⁴ ‘There is very little going on here’, he wrote to the convalescing Lady Curzon in July. ‘The rains are on us and it pours steadily. The usual lot of uninteresting bores everyday’.⁶⁵ There's little doubt that the recent partial break-up of Kitchener's staff had something to do with his melancholy as Conk Marker had gone back to England in order to attend a course at the army's Camberley Staff College. But Kitchener's ennui also was simply part of the price he paid for the bachelor life. Clearly too, the absence of the genuine pleasure he derived from socializing with the Curzons had put a damper on the Simla Season. While balls of course still took place amidst the Burmese teak-panelled splendour of Viceregal Lodge now under its temporary occupant, Ampthill, without Lady Curzon in residence ‘the sun’, wrote Kitchener to her effusively, ‘has given up shining’.⁶⁶

And so it went for the balance of the Simla summer. Meanwhile, Kitchener's mind was never too far away from the continuing question of dual control. But with Curzon still in England the issue remained unresolved, although Kitchener continued to advocate for its abolition with both Ampthill, and with Arthur Balfour in London. At a meeting of the Committee of Imperial Defence in June Curzon was angered by the fact that Kitchener's earlier memorandum on Indian defence was gaining ground in its singular focus of blaming the Military Member for all of India's alleged troubles in this regard. Curzon would react strongly with a detailed memorandum of his own later in the year in which he made clear his belief that ‘Lord K's desire is to centralize the entire military administration of the Government of India in the hands of the c7-in-C’.⁶⁷ Kitchener's back-channel strategy in this regard was risky to say the least since such communications probably should have gone through Curzon as Viceroy, which Balfour took the trouble to point out to Kitchener. Naturally, therefore, Curzon's reading of Kitchener's full-blown memorandum detailing his abolition plan made him properly indignant that the Commander in Chief would engage in what he saw to be underhanded politics in this way. In the estimation of some historians and biographers, this course of action by Kitchener is enough to brand him conniving and duplicitous. Certainly that is the view of David Gilmour.⁶⁸ The more balanced view of the situation, however, and one that steers clear of demonization by arguing that Kitchener was within the bounds of political convention in operating in this way, is that offered by David Dilks.⁶⁹

At any rate, by mid-1904, the dispute over dual control had begun to move from a disagreement largely confined to the principal parties concerned, to one that was pulling into its vortex a range of persons political, military, and civil. Kitchener threatened to resign yet again on 24 June, driven to it by Elles's ordering of a troop movement without consulting him. But throughout all the strain Kitchener kept up his exceedingly friendly correspondence with Lady Curzon herself – ‘I am sure you know and realize how deeply we have all felt for you in your terrible illness’, he wrote to her in November – just before the erstwhile Viceroy left England to return to India for what turned out to be his final year in office.⁷⁰ Lady Curzon did not return with him, but once feeling well enough in the spring she would come back out to India also, an event much anticipated by Kitchener – ‘How splendid it is!’, he wrote to her.⁷¹ After sharing in many of her husband's early triumphs, including of course the Delhi Durbar at which she had worn the spectacular ‘Peacock Dress’ made of gold cloth embroidered with peacock feathers, her health had fallen into terminal decline.⁷² And so by Christmas the lonely Viceroy was back in Calcutta, as too was Kitchener, freshly returned from yet another inspection tour, this one having taken him to Burma, which would remain part of British India until 1937, and a country Kitchener thought rich though as yet undeveloped.⁷³

As it happened, Curzon and Kitchener spent Christmas together at Barrackpore, near Calcutta and the site of Warren Hastings’ old Governor-General's residence turned Viceregal retreat.⁷⁴ Their ongoing dispute did not seem to dampen the holiday spirit, however; indeed, they genuinely enjoyed one another's company, which included together taking a tour of the nearby Plassey battlefield made famous by Clive and his East India Company troops’ seminal victory over the Nawab Siraj ud-Daula in 1757.⁷⁵ Still, the relative conviviality of the holiday season did not mask the fact that the two men continued to hold diametrically opposed views on the issue of dual control, which neither one was about to compromise in order for the other's view to carry the day. ‘I regard K's proposals as a positive menace to the State’, Curzon wrote emphatically to his ailing wife in London. ‘He proposes to set up the c7-in-C as an absolute military autocrat in our administration. The scheme would collapse within a year of his leaving India. I do not see why we should revolutionize our constitution to humour him’.⁷⁶ To Kitchener, Curzon's continuing talk of ‘autocracy’ and ‘constitutional revolution’ remained fundamentally incomprehensible. He simply could not grasp why it was that Curzon insisted on turning a question of military preparedness in an era when all agreed that Russia posed a serious threat to Indian security, into a faux question of constitutional integrity. He said as much to their common correspondent, Lady Curzon, on 19 January 1905. ‘Poor Army! Poor Soldiers!’ he exclaimed. ‘It is hard that they should be sent to fight the battles of the empire all unprepared and without leaders to guide them. It is next door to wholesale murder’.⁷⁷ To Kitchener, Curzon was a highly skilled practitioner of the art of political obfuscation and because of that in the same letter he metaphorically threw up his hands in surrender to the Viceroy's expected victory in the dispute. But so strong did Kitchener's feelings run on the matter that he doggedly fought on nonetheless over what he believed to be an issue of essential value to the health and organization of the Indian army, even if it meant that ineluctably he was making an enemy out of the Viceroy (and presumably, eventually, his wife too) and likely to sacrifice a job which he had grown to love.

Accordingly, in order to buttress his position, Kitchener began adding to his list of military voices of support beyond that of Lord Roberts, soliciting and receiving the endorsement of a range of generals, including Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien, Adjutant General (second-in-command) of India and Sir O'Moore Creagh, eventually Kitchener's successor as Commander in Chief.⁷⁸ As the early weeks of 1905 passed by it was clear that the climactic moment in the dispute was fast-approaching. In anticipation of what he assumed would be Curzon's withholding of the full brief of the prevailing local situation from the Cabinet in London, Kitchener chose to employ Lady Salisbury to circulate privately to certain members of the Cabinet a full-orbed memorandum that he had written on 1 January. She did so and in this way circumvented official channels which otherwise would have seen the memorandum cross the Viceroy's desk first. Kitchener's critics have long-held this action to have been especially dishonourable, but what is usually ignored in the case is that without his use of unofficial means – an entirely de rigeur practice in contemporary British politics – in stating his position, the debate would have been orchestrated by Curzon in such a way as to stifle the opposing view.

On 10 March the Viceroy's Council met in session at Government House in Calcutta to consider the question of dual control as a first step in what was to lead to full Cabinet consideration in London. Kitchener rode over from Treasury Gate for the meeting, as he viewed it yet another instalment in Curzon's ‘long dull councils’ from which he was longing to escape, as he wearily informed Conk Marker.⁷⁹ He was pessimistic about its outcome and thinking that ultimately his only chance for success lay with the Cabinet. The despised Military Member – that ‘ass’ Sir Edmond Elles, who personified for Kitchener all that was wrong with dual control – of course was in attendance.⁸⁰ The meeting was interminable from Kitchener's point of view. He chose to say very little, at the end dissenting from the Council's decision to reject his proposal, but agreeing naturally that the case should now be turned over to the Secretary of State for India and the whole Cabinet in London. The final word on this ‘bad show’ would have to come from home.⁸¹ That, in itself, was a victory for Kitchener and if nothing else made his point that India indeed was a constituent part of the British Empire and consequently ruled ultimately by the Cabinet in Parliament, and not by what some were now suggesting was the quasi-emperor, Lord Curzon.

The Viceroy's Council meeting had clarified the dispute, at least for the time being, and with that Kitchener shortly departed Calcutta for his usual round of inspections culminating in his going into summer residency at Simla. All the while in London, the political wheels were turning, and Kitchener's allies – which now included Conk Marker, recently appointed Assistant Private Secretary to the War Secretary, St John Brodrick, and The Times journalist Charles a Court Repington, did what they could to influence both public and private opinion in favour of the abolition of dual control. Repington proved especially useful in this regard. As an ‘enthusiastic supporter’ of Lord Kitchener ‘who knows a lot about the whole business’ of his contest with Curzon, as Hubert Hamilton later wrote to Marker, Repington was well-placed in London to champion the ‘Chief's’ position.⁸² Meanwhile, far away from the political machinations in London, Kitchener was enjoying ‘a very pleasant tour’, as he informed a still-friendly Lady Curzon: ‘I got a tiger. I hit him in the head but he got into some very thick high reeds and the elephants would not face it – so at last we had to set fire to the reeds and got a cooked tiger’.⁸³

By April Kitchener had reached Simla, there to meet the likewise recently arrived Vicereine. On the fourth of the month a severe earthquake rattled North India, killing over 15,000 people and causing enormous damage to countless buildings, including to Viceregal Lodge. Kitchener felt ‘thunder and quakes’ at dinner that evening although upon inspection he was relieved to find that no one had been killed in Simla itself, and neither Snowdon nor Wildflower Hall had been damaged.⁸⁴ Ensconced at Snowdon, he returned to his usual round of meetings and dinners – some still ‘horrid’ such as those at the Masonic Lodge – interspersed with restorative rides out to Wildflower Hall.⁸⁵ Similarly, the usual social niceties were maintained by Kitchener and Curzon while the fate of their epic clash – ‘K wishes to destroy our Military Dept’, the latter wrote to his father, Lord Scarsdale, in growing anguish – was about to be decided in London.⁸⁶

For Curzon, however, as vexing as the fight with Kitchener had become, another equally vexing issue had arisen out of his insistence on partitioning the province of Bengal. For Curzon, the plan to partition Bengal, first proposed in 1903, was akin to his struggle with Kitchener in that he came to it from a position of high Raj politics; that is to say, the enemy to be engaged in the partition plan was the emergent Congress party which, he believed, needed to be reined in by a confident Raj whose best hope of continued success was to ensure that its governance of India was perceived to be far-sighted and progressive. He believed that partitioning Bengal, a province of some 80 million people, was suggestive of just this sort of administrative sense and advanced local government. Moreover, and probably more important, it was also a way to check the growth of Bengal (Indian) nationalism, the home he believed of the Congress Party's ‘best wire pullers and its most frothy orators’. Upon Bengal, and therefore India itself, could be stamped ever more securely the fact of British rule as an indispensable feature of their the future, since, as Curzon asserted imperiously, the British ‘possess partly by heredity, partly by upbringing, and partly by education, the habits of mind and vigour of character which are essential for the task’.⁸⁷

Criticism and denunciation of Curzon's partition plan predictably came fast and furious. A host of febrile Bengali intellectuals, most notably Rabindranath Tagore (who later in 1913 would be the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature), had long nurtured a local indigenous cultural renaissance to which the proposed partition came as an intolerable affront.⁸⁸ Bengal, they argued, was not a Raj-engineered administrative designation, but rather a developed society in its own right even if just then it found itself under the unwelcome political control of the British Raj. Tagore and likeminded others therefore pushed back as hard as they dared against the plan, and in so doing had the sympathies of some leading British administrators such as Sir Henry John Stedman Cotton, past Chief Commissioner of Assam, a district that under partition would fall under the proposed East Bengal province. Curzon would not be denied, however, and in a monumental display of executive arrogance he announced the partition in July 1905, with its enactment coming in the following October.⁸⁹

The final months of Curzon's viceroyalty, therefore, were controversial in ways that sapped his strength and certainly that also of his now permanently fragile wife. For his part, Kitchener stayed well clear of the Bengal controversy while waiting on events in London. And he did not have long to do so because the Cabinet met and considered the issue of dual control at the end of May. Earlier that month, the Secretary of State for India Brodrick had established a committee in order to examine closely Curzon's despatch describing the proceedings of the Viceroy's Council meeting in March, to which Kitchener had appended a dissenting minute. The committee, which consisted of Brodrick, Balfour, Roberts, and Lord Lansdowne, the Foreign Secretary and formerly Viceroy of India, duly met, and then made its report to Cabinet. The Military Member, the report recommended, should be replaced by a ‘Military Supply Member’ who would not have a seat on the Viceroy's Council: ‘The organisation now proposed will give the c7-in-C a Staff which will make it possible for him to meet the more extended responsibilities which we propose to cast upon him’.⁹⁰ On 30 May the Cabinet then convened and made its decision based largely on the committee's report. The culminating moment in the protracted controversy had arrived at last.

First news of the Cabinet's decision reached Kitchener via a telegram from Conk Marker the next day, 1 June. In the telegram, Marker made it clear that the Cabinet had decided in favour of Kitchener and that the Military Department would indeed be abolished. Kitchener was instantly pleased with the news, a pleasure sustained privately for the following almost three weeks until the official despatch had made its way from the India Office in London to Viceregal Lodge in Simla, and then distributed. Once the full despatch had been read, however, it was clear that Marker's post-Cabinet meeting enthusiasm had gotten some elements of the decision wrong; still, in essence, the victory remained Kitchener's. The Military Department would indeed cease to exist, the former Military Member to become the Military Supply Member, as advised by Brodrick's committee, retaining some control over financial and political matters but none whatsoever over those deemed to be of a military nature. Brodrick and the Cabinet had been at pains to cobble together a ‘fair compromise’, as he wrote to Lord Cromer in Egypt, who had taken a keen interest in the dispute, without forcing either man to resign on a point of principle.⁹¹ Brodrick's clarifying despatch, while it was not the triumphant document that Marker had led Kitchener to believe it would be, nevertheless still signalled a sea-change in the way the Indian Army would henceforth be commanded. Notwithstanding Kitchener's correct assumption that Curzon would still try to ‘wreck it’, the way forward to achieve a new iteration of command and control of the Indian Army had been reached.⁹² Indeed, to Kitchener, this new system was merely a return to what had earlier prevailed for years in British India. As he had recently written to General Sir Edward Stedman, the Military Member in the India Office in London, ‘From 1785 to 1853 – that is, during the whole period in which the Indian Empire was being built up by constant warfare – the c7-in-C not only held the executive command of the army, but, as President of the Military Board, controlled all its departments’.⁹³ The view expressed to Stedman was merely a partial articulation of the long memorandum Kitchener would write in July spelling out his conviction that despite recent wrangling India's military policy must ultimately be determined by the Committee of Imperial Defence; yet another demonstration that far from attempting to arrogate to himself dictatorial powers over the Indian Army, as Curzon had always maintained, Kitchener's primary concern remained the Empire as a whole, and India's place within it.⁹⁴

Curzon's reaction to the Cabinet's decision, on the other hand, was typically operatic. After receiving it in full he took a week to contact Kitchener, then inviting him to meet at the Retreat, the Viceroy's cottage situated along the Mall. Kitchener duly attended only to find a distraught Curzon fretting over the assumed loss of prestige that the Cabinet's decision entailed for himself, and threatening to resign if modifications to the despatch were not undertaken immediately by Brodrick. Kitchener attempted to mollify the plainly agitated Curzon, but to no avail as the Viceroy suddenly upped the ante by bursting into tears.⁹⁵ Embarrassed by Curzon's show of emotion in this way, Kitchener reluctantly agreed to send a jointly-written telegram to Brodrick containing some suggested modifications. After an annoyed but satisfied Kitchener shortly had left to return to Wildflower Hall, Curzon then pieced together a series of five modifications to the despatch that he said were non-negotiable. One of these was saving the name of ‘Military Department’, and all five modifications, he stated, came together with the agreement of the Commander in Chief. Curzon then sent them off to Brodrick in London. Once received, the India Secretary could not quite believe what he was reading and when Kitchener was duly contacted for confirmation of the despatch's revised content, neither could he. There then ensued a rather ridiculous series of accusations and counter-accusations as both Curzon and Kitchener scrambled to explain and clarify their positions with respect to the Cabinet's decision. The ‘discrepancy between what I write and what you write’, as Curzon had earlier characterized their ongoing dispute, was at the centre of the turbulence, a roil made worse by the assumption now that each man was a liar, and that as far as Kitchener was concerned Curzon's conduct amounted to little more than a series of ‘knavish tricks’.⁹⁶

In this penultimate act of their two-year old controversy Curzon had much more to lose than Kitchener. Threats of resignation by the former had grown tiresome to the Balfour government, and indeed it had already been decided that the spring of 1906 would be the right moment for the Curzon Viceroyalty to come to an end. What would it really matter if it came a little earlier than planned? No one in politics is ever really indispensable, and that was surely true of Curzon by mid-1905. In full-flail mode now the Viceroy desperately attempted to save face by attempting to blacken Kitchener's name with charges that the Commander in Chief displayed ‘indifference to truth’.⁹⁷ All through June and July the bickering and bad-blood continued. But in the midst of it Kitchener was prevailing nonetheless. Conk Marker confirmed that the King now was simply waiting for Curzon to ‘yield’.⁹⁸ Ultimately, a final showdown between the Viceroy and the Commander in Chief ensued over who should be named the new Military (Supply) Member: Curzon wanted Major General Sir Edmund Barrow, Secretary to the Military Department since 1901; Kitchener, on the other hand, plumped for Major General Sir Charles Scott, the Indian Army's Director General of Ordnance. In the event, Kitchener won the day. The Cabinet sided with him, a decision Curzon took as undercutting his fundamental ability to carry on as Viceroy. He therefore submitted his resignation on 12 August, which a relieved Balfour duly accepted a few days later. The Curzon era in India had formally come to an end. ‘The end of the crisis has at last come’, Kitchener wrote in evident relief to Marker.⁹⁹ Curzon would remain in office until 18 November, for him a sad, three-month-long, good-bye. On 25 October, just prior to his departing Simla, all the local great and good assembled on the expansive front lawn of Viceregal Lodge to bid Curzon farewell in a leave-taking that was teary for many in attendance except for the stoical Kitchener, who looked on bemusedly.

The three months from Curzon's resignation in August until his departure from India in November would see a campaign undertaken by the Viceregal couple to assassinate Kitchener's character to whomever might listen to a tale they regarded as being one of betrayal. In this way, Lady Curzon now turned on Kitchener ferociously, writing to her mother in October about his ‘bare faced lies’ and ‘intrigues’; about how he had gone out on tour in order to avoid showing ‘his face’ in Simla; about how he was ‘abhorred’ and that ‘the Army hate[d] him’. If that were not enough, Lady Curzon then became excruciatingly personal in her attack. In an almost unhinged way she ranted to her presumably shocked mother (Kitchener had maintained a friendly correspondence with her in the past also) ‘that he has never been the same since that accident [the broken leg] – he is purple and his hands and feet shake like palsy. England thinks him a hero – I know him to be a liar …’. And then in a pathetic fillip: ‘Everyone is stirred … to lose the Great man [Curzon] and keep the ignoble one’.¹⁰⁰

Lady Curzon's plaintive wailings aside, Curzon himself was doing an effective job of likewise libeling Kitchener, though on a broader stage, by writing to the journalist Valentine Chirol of The Times in which he referred to the Commander in Chief as having ‘not a regard for truth’.¹⁰¹ Naturally, each side in what had become an epic dispute and a scarcely less epic aftermath marshalled their forces in defence of their man. But of course Curzon's resignation was a clear admission of defeat whatever his bitter recriminations might suggest about his opponent's character and veracity. To Kitchener, for the Viceroy to have resigned in the end simply over the choice of a new Military Member was a weak, incomprehensible, and foolish act, deserving of contempt.¹⁰² Perhaps it was in the nature of a military man to play to win above all else and so Kitchener took the victory in stride. For Curzon, on the other hand, in losing all the features of the martinet in him were there to be seen, that part of his otherwise impressive character which had always been the fly in the ointment. Still, he had his champions, some even today insisting, for example, that in the dispute Kitchener had shown himself to be a ‘vain, amoral self-seeker’, or that Kitchener was at the centre of a vast ‘conspiracy’ to bring down Curzon.¹⁰³ A simpler, certainly less shrill, and arguably much more accurate summation of the dispute between the two men is that their views of the correct nature of Indian governance were sharply at odds; as a result they each pursued their stated goals, and did so within the accepted political and social conventions of the day; Kitchener's position was ultimately much more consonant with that of the British government than was Curzon's, and, ironically, he was more adept at realpolitik than was Curzon the professional politician; and finally, in losing Curzon made it much worse for himself by allowing his demise to become as theatrical as possible. In many ways he had been a great Viceroy: he is almost the only one remembered with respect and even affection by Indians today owing to his steady work in preserving many of the country's historic buildings and monuments such as the Red Fort in Delhi and the Mughal emperor Humayun's Tomb. But Curzon besmirched his reputation in the nasty dispute with Kitchener. While it would be an overstatement to say that Curzon returned to England a spent force, he would not hold high government office again for almost 15 years and of course never found his way to occupying No. 10 Downing Street, a life-long ambition of his which would be left unfulfilled at the time of his death in 1925.

The resignation and subsequent departure of Lord and Lady Curzon in the late-autumn of 1905 opened the way for the appointment and arrival of the 4th Earl of Minto as Viceroy. A career soldier, Minto had seen military service in most of the main theatres of the late-Victorian empire, including Afghanistan, Egypt, and South Africa. Subsequently, he was appointed Governor-General of Canada where he spent six happy years until 1904. Now, a year later, he was to succeed Curzon, in the process becoming the second Minto to hold the Viceroyalty, his great-grandfather, the 1st Earl of Minto, having occupied what amounted to the same office as Governor-General of the Presidency of Fort William (Bengal) about a century earlier, from 1807 until 1813.

If Curzon had been the Viceregal high-flyer: handsome, intellectual, confident of his destiny but with a whiff of megalomania about his person, Minto was his antithesis. Soldierly, sporting, a bit of a plodder, but supremely loyal and practical, Minto took an instant liking to Kitchener despite Curzon's attempts to warn him off. Indeed, both Minto and John Morley, Brodrick's newly-named successor as Secretary of State for India, were of a similar mind about Kitchener and rejected Curzon's continuing attempts to poison their thinking about him. Indeed, by the New Year 1906, Minto was confirming to Morley that Kitchener had been nothing if not ‘perfectly straightforward with me’.¹⁰⁴ Morley, appointed by the new Liberal Prime Minister, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, was an internationalist schooled by the late William Gladstone and his avowed follower in this regard – not to mention his official biographer – and it is revealing to note that if anyone might have come to office suspicious of Kitchener's alleged militarist designs on usurping civil authority, it would have been him. Needless to say, he found nothing of the kind.¹⁰⁵

For Kitchener, now something of an Old India Hand after over three years in the country, the winter of 1906 saw him effectively move clear of the Curzon controversy. He was able, therefore, to get on with implementing the reforms of the army that he had long anticipated, but which had been held up by the resistance of the old regime. During this period the Prince and Princess of Wales – the future King George V and Queen Mary – toured India, spending considerable time with Kitchener over a span of about six months. While on tour the Prince forged a ready friendship with Kitchener and encouraged him with respect to his planned Indian reforms, which he likewise believed were ‘to the great benefit of the Army and to the safety of the Empire’.¹⁰⁶

Accordingly and gradually, Kitchener began to reorganize and to some extent centralize Indian Army operations. He had already established a temporary Staff College at Deolali in 1905, which in 1907 was moved to Quetta and made permanent.¹⁰⁷ Northern and Southern Armies were created in an attempt to make the historic presidency armies act as a complementary national force. Such thinking by Kitchener was engendered by the constant apprehension that Russia might choose to invade across the North-West Frontier and that such a course of action could only be met properly by a ‘national’ response. He reaffirmed his commitment to the divisional system, which put more power into the hands of local commanders. Altogether the Campbell-Bannerman government – for which he had harboured no great hopes: ‘South African Methods of Barbarism are not easily forgotten’, as he had opined earlier to Marker – turned out to recognize the value of Kitchener's reforms by extending his tenure in India in 1907 for two years beyond his initial five year appointment.¹⁰⁸ Soon thereafter also, Kitchener's original recommendation that the position of Military Member on the Viceroy's Council be abolished was acted upon when under the Asquith government, which succeeded Campbell-Bannerman's in 1908, the compromise position of Military Supply Member ceased to exist altogether (albeit mainly in order to save money). In this regard, almost four years after Curzon had departed India in defeat, Kitchener's victory in the dispute was both complete and vindicated.

Kitchener's final years in India thus became somewhat valedictory. He presided over the implementation of his well-earned reforms. He toured relentlessly throughout the sub-continent – all told covering some 65,000 miles – including a visit to Nepal, then still a mysterious kingdom almost unknown to the outside world.¹⁰⁹ He kept up the usual round of dinners and balls; now that he was again a welcome guest at Government House and Viceregal Lodge he even looked forward to attending at least some of them, and certainly he enjoyed playing the host himself at his own frequently-held dinner parties. Kitchener's abiding interest in flowers and gardening had plenty of scope for fulfillment at Treasury Gate, Snowdon, and especially the magnificently situated Wildflower Hall, and he continued to enlarge his collection of ceramics and china. Altogether there was a domesticity and quiescence to Kitchener's last years in India that go some distance in belying the militarist stereotype that defined him.

The only major political issue for Kitchener that arose during his final period in India was the negotiation and enactment of the Anglo-Russian Entente signed in August of 1907. Originating under the Salisbury government in 1898, it later fell to Sir Edward Grey, Foreign Secretary beginning in 1905, to bring the Entente to pass and with it a clear definition of spheres of influence in Central Asia; in other words, it was an attempt to effectively close out the Great Game.¹¹⁰ Not many people with an intimate knowledge of the history of the Anglo-Russian rivalry in Central Asia, India, and Afghanistan, however, thought that this course of action was the right one for Britain. Their number included both Kitchener and Curzon, the latter who was just beginning to re-enter public life after a period of recovery and rehabilitation from his chastening Indian experiences, and even more the death of Mary in July of the previous year. His considered position was that the Entente had given away too much in respect to ‘the efforts of a century’.¹¹¹ Later, during a speech in the House of Lords in February of 1908, Curzon's critique of the Entente was closely-argued but by then his view was of no real consequence. For Grey and the government, the issue was always the security of India and they believed that limiting Russian territorial ambition in the region in the way accomplished by the Entente would provide exactly that outcome.

Kitchener, with similar misgivings to Curzon over the issue, argued that an Entente, whatever its good intentions, could never safeguard India in the way that the strongest possible and most highly unified Indian Army could do – if only the British Treasury would yield up sufficient funds for its continued creation.¹¹² Only through a blatant show of force, Kitchener believed, could Russia be dissuaded from any putative plan to invade British India. On this issue, however, both men were proved wrong for as far as Indian security was concerned, the Entente did take most of the heat and light out of the old Great Game and Anglo-Russian relations did in fact generally relax. And, as a bonus, in the resultant opening of the City of London to Russian investment, some of the sting was taken out of the country's surprising and ignominious defeat to Japan in 1904 and the anarchic Decembrist revolt of the following year.

The year 1908–9, Kitchener's last in India, indeed saw little for him to do other than to offer steady, reforming administration, and relentless regimental inspection. The official plan now was for him to depart India in September of the latter year and then step into a new appointment. But as yet that putative next step remained inchoate. When the time of his leave-taking duly came Kitchener was sent off with the usual round of banquets and salutes. At the Viceroy's farewell dinner, held at Viceregal Lodge on 3 September, for example, Kitchener gave an (uncharacteristically) excellent speech, part of the content of which had been drawn inadvertently from Curzon's own of four years earlier! One of Kitchener's staff had written it for him so that he was unaware of its provenance, and when he did find out about this (on his part, at least) mistaken act of plagiarism, he simply laughed it off. Reported a few days later in the London newspapers Curzon, however, could not see the humour in it. After reading coverage of it in a copy of the Westminster Gazette an angry Curzon had scribbled in its margins: ‘What a cheat the man is! How glad I am he has been exposed’.¹¹³ Even years later after Kitchener's death, Curzon still nursed this particular grievance, calling it ‘Lord Kitchener's famous plagiarism’.¹¹⁴ As pyrrhic victories go, one might say, Curzon's here was rather a textbook case.

On 6 September 1909 Kitchener left Simla for the last time and journeyed down to Bombay where he gave another farewell speech, this time without including the plagiarized content. As speech-giving was always a trial for him having to deliver another one in such a short time was hardly to be relished. But in front of a friendly audience he spoke from the heart: ‘I most sincerely regret that the time has come’, he opined, ‘for me to leave this vast and wonderful country with all its teeming millions and its many unsolved problems’.¹¹⁵ And with that the next day, 10 September, he relinquished command of the Indian Army and was immediately gazetted Field Marshal. He then steamed out of Bombay. After seven remarkable years in India he would never return to it again.

Beginning with his departure from Bombay, for the next two years until September of 1911, as it turned out, Kitchener would be at large. In leaving India he certainly planned a long holiday; but what he absolutely did not wish to do was accede to a request made a few months earlier by Richard Haldane, the Secretary of State for War, to take over the Royal Navy's Mediterranean Command. Haldane had written to Kitchener in July of 1909 asking if he would consider the appointment, explaining that it was critical to the ‘defence of the forces of the Empire …. We [the King and Cabinet] think that the Mediterranean Command would be in your hands capable of being developed into an instrument of power’.¹¹⁶ True, such an appointment would return him to the Middle East (Malta was the fleet's base) and in that way the appointment held some appeal. But on balance, and despite Haldane's high-flown rhetoric, Kitchener saw the post as simply a way-station for which he held no significant aspiration. Especially was this true in light of the fact that the appointment he truly did covet was that of Viceroy of India, and with Minto expected to retire in the autumn of 1910 after serving a five year term the timing seemed potentially auspicious.

Complicating the Mediterranean Command appointment and making it difficult for Kitchener to resist, however, was the fact that Haldane had enlisted the help of the King, as noted above in convincing him to take it up. Edward VII was in declining health and would die the next year, but in the summer of 1909 he had pressed Kitchener to accept, which, at length, and following his initial refusal of the appointment, he did: ‘When they played the King card I was done’, Kitchener wrote wryly to Lord Roberts.¹¹⁷ Thus, upon leaving India Kitchener's future seemed set, although he was a reluctant participant in it.

In the meantime, as part of an open-ended leave, Kitchener had agreed to sail to Australia in order to conduct a review of its defence policy and nascent armed forces. The recent rise of Germany's concerted militarism had made British Empire defence a major topic of discussion and planning, both at home and in the various Dominion capitals. Canada, for example, was deciding whether or not to create its own navy, and if not to make a direct contribution to the strength of the Royal Navy; it would choose the former. Kitchener's review of Australian and New Zealand defence, therefore, was of a piece with the wider Imperial policy of the day.¹¹⁸

Accordingly, after touring Singapore, and various ports in Korea, China, and Japan for a few months – and taking a brief holiday in Indonesia – Kitchener arrived in Australia at the beginning of the New Year 1910. His welcome there was overwhelmingly positive (very little by way of sniping about the earlier fate of Breaker Morant was to be heard). ‘Be assured’, the Australian Prime Minister, Alfred Deakin, told him, ‘your coming is highly appreciated by all of us’.¹¹⁹ Indeed, the Australian and New Zealand newspapers were full of rapturous coverage of Kitchener's progress. ‘Kitchener of Khartoum, Britain's Big Fighting Chief’, blared the headline of The Times of Wellington, for example, upon his arrival there.¹²⁰ In the early winter of 1910 after successfully completing his tour Kitchener duly wrote up a report containing a series of recommendations, including the establishment of a military college in Australia, which the Canberra (designated as the nation's federal capital just two years earlier) government acted upon in short order by founding the Royal Military College at Duntroon the following year.

Upon leaving the Antipodes in mid-March, Kitchener sailed to the United States via Tahiti. Landing at San Francisco on 8 April he travelled cross-country by rail, arriving in New York City a week later. He visited briefly the military academy at West Point, and then on the 20th sailed for home early in keen anticipation of what was assumed to be the imminent naming of Minto's successor as Viceroy. After almost a week at sea he landed at Plymouth on the 26th, his first time back in England for nearly eight years.

But unlike some of his previous arrivals home, which had become exhibitions in ‘conquering hero’ fanfare, Kitchener's return to England this time was quiet, but for him much more portentous. His world tour had only heightened his desire to be named Viceroy; indeed, in cutting short his stay in America in order to be on hand for the Cabinet's deliberations concerning the appointment of a new Viceroy his hope for winning it was made clear.¹²¹ Haldane and John Morley, who remained Secretary of State for India, expected Kitchener to plump hard for the post as the conclusion of Minto's viceroyalty was now being counted in mere months. The Mediterranean Command appointment remained, of course, but now more than ever Kitchener wished to refuse it, if possible, and when the ailing King – just weeks from death – surprisingly reversed himself on the matter and told Kitchener to throw it over, that is exactly what he did.¹²² Kitchener's move enraged Haldane, naturally, but by that point he could not have cared less. His eyes remained steadfast on the much bigger prize of the Viceroyalty, which he hoped would shortly be his. But alas, in this hope Kitchener would be cruelly disappointed.

On 6 May the King died. The state funeral and the obligatory period of mourning combined to slow down the Viceregal appointment process, but the heightening tension over it broke on 9 June when Morley wrote to Kitchener, informing him that ‘a decision has been reached on the Indian Viceroyalty …. We are not going to invite you to go back in a new capacity’.¹²³ In relaying the Cabinet's decision to Kitchener, Morley explained that ‘the sole difficulty arises from misgivings as to the impression that would be likely to arise in India from a military appointment …. I do not think I ever had a more disagreeable task in my life than the writing of this letter’, he concluded.¹²⁴ In adding this encomium, Morley was gilding the lily as it was he, more than anyone else directly concerned with the appointment, who did not want to see Kitchener back in India. Even though the former Commander in Chief was uniquely qualified for the job, the negative residue of the Curzon affair remained, as did Morley's antipathy toward Kitchener's insistence on the wholesale (and therefore costly) reform of the Indian Army. To be sure, also philosophically, Morley was opposed to having ‘the most famous soldier you can find to be the chief agent of His Majesty’. To do so, he maintained, would be to ‘hoist the signal flag of military power before India and the world’.¹²⁵ In the event, Morley's bald politics won out in the decision to bypass Kitchener over any other consideration.

Political symbolism matters, of course, but since the holding of India had been the especial job of the army ever since the Mutiny half a century earlier, it counts as passing strange that the Imperial government would shy away now from appointing the strongest man available in this regard for the job. In this particular political round Kitchener had simply lost. In an environment of increasing Indian nationalist agitation and consequent constitutional reform – the Indian Councils Act (the Morley-Minto Reforms) had been passed in 1909, which allowed for an expanded Indian role on Legislative Councils and the opportunity for them to sit on the Viceroy's Council and on the Secretary of State for India's Council – Kitchener was considered too much the military man to be made viceroy. The late King had been an ally, but without his voice at the moment of decision there were few around the Liberal government's Cabinet table who thought Kitchener to be the right choice. The Prime Minister, Asquith, in fact did think Kitchener highly suitable, but Morley's position was adamant, backed up by threats to resign should his view be overruled. Moreover, hovering in the domestic background was Margot Asquith, the Prime Minister's highly-opinionated wife, who had grown in her dislike over the years for Kitchener. ‘He is a natural cad’, she had written to Lord Crewe, Colonial Secretary and Leader of the House of Lords, in May, ‘tho’ he is remarkably clever. I know if you and Henry [the Prime Minister] … send him to India you will regret it all your days’. By that point she too had accepted Morley's view that the best man for the job was Sir Charles Hardinge, formerly an ambassador and now the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office. He ‘is the man to send’, she concluded, ‘and he is younger and straight and a great gentleman.’ And then to add to her ever-present classism, she confirmed her belief in the calumnies about Kitchener spread by Curzon and his supporters: ‘Never have dealings with a liar however clever’.¹²⁶

Hardinge was duly appointed Viceroy and sailed for India, and – like his grandfather before him, Sir Henry Hardinge, who had been Governor-General in the mid-nineteenth century – he would serve out an unremarkable tenure of six years. But then perhaps that was the point of such a low-risk appointment. In any case, for Kitchener, his rejection for the post came as a sharp blow. Unsurprisingly, rather than remain in London – whatever the creature comforts he always enjoyed at Pandeli Ralli's West End townhouse, and brooding over what might have been – he took himself off to Ireland where he engaged in a kind of personal heritage tour, visiting scenes from his long-ago boyhood in Co. Kerry. Naturally, the disappointment of not being appointed Viceroy stayed with him: ‘Old Morley would not have me for India at any price’, he lamented to one of his favourite former staffers, Frank Maxwell, ‘and the Mediterranean command was mere bunkum so I am at a loose end with nothing to do’.¹²⁷

During much of the succeeding year, therefore, Kitchener exhibited a sustained wanderlust. Following his sojourn in Ireland he went across to Scotland where he observed the Royal Navy's manoevres alongside the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, having risen to high political office since Kitchener first encountered him as an irritating presence at Omdurman a dozen years earlier. This encounter, however, was much friendlier than their first had been. Later that summer, having by then returned to England, Kitchener acted on a plan of his that he had been nursing for years, which was to find a country property suitable for his approaching retirement. After an intensive search, by the end of August he had found it in the form of Broome Park. ‘I have bought a house in Kent, six miles from Canterbury’, he wrote to Maxwell. ‘It is rather a big place and will want a lot of doing up but as I have nothing else to do it will interest me enormously to make it a nice abode’.¹²⁸ Negotiations to secure title to the property were protracted and would take until the following year to complete but Kitchener believed that the right place for his retirement had indeed been found.

Meanwhile, Kitchener decided to continue in his peripatetic sabbatical by going off to Sudan and East Africa for the winter. He departed in November, therefore, stopping first in Cairo where he was joined by his naval officer nephew and eventual heir, Henry ‘Toby’ Kitchener, son of his eldest brother, Chevallier; and thence to Khartoum to re-visit the sites of past triumphs, as well as to see how the city and country were progressing. At the turn of the New Year 1911 he proceeded south to British East Africa, then just on the cusp of the arrival of a large influx of British and other European settlers.¹²⁹ He, like most of them, was instantly taken with the natural beauty of East Africa, the abundance of its game, and the plentitude of its available land, which was just beginning to be parceled out to settlers in a hurried process that would come back to haunt the British severely some half-a-century later in the savage violence of the Mau Mau Rebellion. Kitchener hoped to find a piece of land upon which to build a winter home for his future retirement, a complement to Broome. He did so at Songhor in the Nandi Hills about 40 miles east of Port Florence (today's Kisumu) and 200 hundred miles north of the then recently established ramshackle capital of Nairobi.¹³⁰

Adding to the success of the visit was the opportunity to socialize with the Governor of the British East African Protectorate, Sir Percy Girouard, Kitchener's old Canadian railwayman from the re-conquest of the Sudan, as well as from the war in South Africa. After service in South Africa, Girouard had gone on to a pair of gubernatorial appointments, the latest having brought him to Nairobi in 1909. The reunion of the two former comrades was celebratory. ‘I have had a splendid time in Africa’, he wrote to his sister Millie in mid-March not long before leaving for home, ‘and am sorry it is all over’.¹³¹ Much of his enjoyment came from the endless opportunities it afforded at that time for shooting – ‘I got an elephant, buffaloes and all sorts of antelope’ – made even easier by the Uganda Railway, newly finished within the previous ten years and linking Lake Victoria in the interior with Mombasa on the coast.

Indeed, the entire spring of 1911 would be celebratory for Kitchener as the coronation of King George V was impending and, owing to the new King's particular regard for him, he was asked to command the troops at the elaborate ceremony that would take place in London on 22 June. Arriving back in England at the beginning of April he readied himself for this signal event, as well as the equally happy prospect of soon occupying Broome Park, the L1,400 sale having finally just gone through. ‘Broome is mine’ he excitedly telegraphed to family members upon his return.¹³² His professional future may still have remained unclear, but for the first time in his life Kitchener was a satisfied landlord, and at just shy of his 61st birthday retirement beckoned as perhaps the clearest and best prospect of all.