8

Egypt Again, 1911–14

Following the King's coronation, Kitchener's leave-taking continued throughout mid-1911, his only official duty at that time being the seat he occupied on the Committee of Imperial Defence. But even this relatively minor assignment had been the focus of a mild contretemps with the government the previous October when Kitchener suspected that his rejection of the Mediterranean Command appointment might have been the reason for his ‘removal’ from the CID. In reply to Kitchener's query, the Prime Minister, H.H. Asquith, was at pains to clarify to him that he had not been removed, but rather that the Mediterranean appointment and the one to the CID were ‘part and parcel of the same offer’ so that when the former was rejected it meant that the seat on the CID automatically went with it. Kitchener, still sore over India, acted a little huffily in this exchange, but in the same letter Asquith now offered him a seat unconditionally, to which he promptly replied: ‘I shall be glad to accept’.¹ Upon his return from Africa in time for the coronation he had duly begun to sit on the Council, an ideal vantage point from which to monitor the possibility of other (greater) appointments, especially that of Agent and Consul General in Egypt, the likelihood of which, as we shall see, was now growing.

In the meantime, the renovation of Kitchener's new country home of Broome Park was a constant pre-occupation, but as it was not yet ready for full-time habitation (he did stay over from to time in order to supervise work on it) he spent considerable time at Pandeli Ralli's in London, as well as visiting family and the country estates of various society figures, especially his old favourite, Hatfield House.

These largely domestic and social activities, however, masked the real anticipation Kitchener felt over the prospect of the Egyptian appointment. The current holder of the office was Sir Eldon Gorst, who had succeeded the inimitable Lord Cromer upon his retirement to England in 1907. A career diplomat who had been in Egypt since 1886, Gorst had fulfilled the role of British Agent competently, but the long shadow cast over the job by the singular figure of Cromer was a very difficult one to escape. Moreover, Gorst's health had broken down in 1910 and now, by mid-1911, and suffering acutely from advanced cancer of the pancreas and liver, he had returned to England in anticipation of dying.² He did so on 12 July and with his sad passing (he was just 50 years old) the Egyptian appointment indeed went to Kitchener.

In the weeks leading up to Gorst's expected death the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, had requested Kitchener to come to Whitehall for a meeting, which he did on 19 June. Throughout this period Cromer had been recommending strongly to Grey that Kitchener be given the appointment, and in this the two men's views were consonant.³ Indeed, Cromer's view on this point was the only one that carried much weight with the Foreign Secretary. Grey's interview with Kitchener went gratifyingly well, the result of which was an offer made to him to return to Egypt as the new British Agent and Consul General. The appointment was approved of heartily by the King the next day, to whom, Grey informed Kitchener, it had given ‘much pleasure’.⁴ A few weeks later on 16 July, following the splendours of the coronation and Kitchener's role in it, and Gorst's passing, Parliament was informed that ‘K of K’ would be going back to Egypt. In a deliberate gesture aimed at ameliorating past animosities, the Khedive, Abbas Hilmi II, wrote to Kitchener immediately to say that he was ‘very pleased to know that you are returning to the scene of your earlier labours’, and for the next two months until his departure for Cairo on 16 September the new British Agent readied himself to undertake his first major administrative task since leaving India two years earlier.⁵

In returning to Egypt Kitchener was over ten years removed from the scene of many of his former triumphs. Always one of his favourite theatres of imperial service, Egypt remained a place of administrative idiosyncrasies played out now within the context of markedly increased local nationalism, a feature of Egyptian society harking back directly to Urabi Pasha and the revolt of 1882. Over this issue, as was true of many others, Kitchener could, and did, take the long view. As would be described of Winston Churchill many years later when he became prime minister near the outset of World War II, he had been all his life in preparation for that day. By May 1940, when he succeeded his discredited predecessor Neville Chamberlain, Churchill indeed had accumulated vast experience of high government office, something which, as he declared forcefully to the House of Commons, ‘has been bought, not taught’.⁶ Similarly, on 28 September 1911 when Kitchener's special train pulled into Cairo station, the same thing could be said of him. He brought vast experience to the job: indeed, a lifetime's preparation for this particular proconsular position, one that would amount to his becoming the effective ruler of Egypt for most of the next three years.

Much has been written about the 40 years, 1882 to 1922, that Britain spent ruling Egypt.⁷ Cromer, naturally, looms large in any re-telling of the period prior to the establishment of the Kingdom of Egypt in the latter year. Like much else in the history of the Middle East, the impact of World War I would smash the old verities of Egyptian rule. For Kitchener, his arrival on the cusp of the war was (unknowably) portentous in that he inherited a colonial state in the throes of renewed nationalism and anti-European feeling. Indeed, his deceased predecessor Gorst, had been grappling with these very things in the last years of his abbreviated service. In an attempt to begin a process of liberalization from the traditional governing autocracy embodied by Cromer, Gorst had undertaken a clutch of reforms beginning in the autumn of 1907. These changes in governing style – such as rendering ‘our rule more sympathetic to the Egyptians in general, and to Muhammedans in particular’; or cultivating ‘good relations with the Khedive’; or settling ‘quickly and definitely various questions regarding the pay and pension of officers and officials’, were carried out in line with the wishes of first, the Campbell-Bannerman, and then the Asquith, governments under the aegis of Grey as Foreign Secretary.⁸

In so doing, both the Anglo-Egyptian and British governments were engaged in a ‘liberal experiment’, the goal of which was to blunt disruptive nationalist thrusts. The difficulty with the experiment, however, as it proceeded in the years following its adoption, was rather than blunt nationalist feeling, such feeling became inflamed. This kind of outcome was hardly the first or the last time that it would be seen in the history of nationalist reactions to empire, but the fact that it happened under the ‘self-effacing’ Gorst was evidence for some that a much a stronger figure was required in order to right the listing ship of British control in Egypt.⁹ Accordingly, Kitchener's endorsement and appointment came quite clearly with Grey's desire that the dangerously sharp edge of Egyptian nationalist protest, as witnessed beginning in 1908 and demonstrated especially the following year when the Egyptian Prime Minister, Boutros Ghali, had been assassinated, be dulled. Ghali, whose cooperation Gorst had cultivated along with that of the Khedive, had been shot by a member of the Nationalist Party who cited, among other reasons for his act of violence, the recent extension of Britain's Suez Canal concession (potentially running until 2008!).¹⁰ Into this simmering mix of violent nationalism, aspirational liberalism, and residual authoritarianism, therefore, strode the invariably autocratic figure of Kitchener in the early autumn of 1911.

As if to defy the stereotype of the military autocrat, for his arrival at Cairo railway station Kitchener chose to wear civilian clothes; indeed, he wore a frock-coat and top-hat, a move self-consciously disingenuous, presumably, and one which he would not repeat. He lingered only briefly at the station, but long enough to receive a rousing cheer from the assembled onlookers and then departed immediately by carriage for the short ride to the British Agency. The central location of the British Agency in Cairo meant that every site of governmental importance, especially the Abdin Palace and various ministries, was easily reachable from it, which since 1894 had been located in an elegant neo-classical building near the Nile river. As was his wont, Kitchener settled in quickly to the Agency, immediately affording it his personal touch as seen earlier in Calcutta and Simla.

Between Kitchener and Grey in particular there was agreement that one of the first and most important tasks to be undertaken in Egypt was to restore a clear sense of authority emanating from the person of the British Agent and Consul General. Cromer, in the main, had supplied exactly that and it was understood a figure as militarily august as Kitchener would have little trouble in exercising this feature of his brief too. To do so meant initially that the two consultative bodies established by the existing Egyptian constitution following the usual British colonial pattern of Legislative Council and General Assembly be made to toe the new authoritarian line. A sharp turn of this sort was believed to be necessary in light of their having been given their relative head under Gorst's somewhat relaxed oversight, which in turn had been mediated unsuccessfully by the unfortunate Ghali. Kitchener was not a natural constitutionalist, given to re-making forms of colonial governance, but over the first two years of his tenure in Egypt, as we shall see, he delved nonetheless rather deeply into reforming the way in which Britain chose to rule its Egyptian subjects.

The other area of especial interest to Kitchener, but which fit much more closely his own predilections as a nascent civilian governor, was the Egyptian economy. The financial crisis of the period leading up to the British occupation of 1882 had never been wholly resolved in its aftermath; indeed, almost the totality of Cromer's long service as Agent and Consul General was comprised of a steady attempt to stave off national bankruptcy, and then to increase Egypt's national economic output. Cromer undertook the first task successfully beginning in the mid- to-late 1880s, with the second one a marked feature of the years 1900–4.¹¹

In the early years of the twentieth century Egypt remained an almost completely pre-industrial country; a kind of primeval agricultural land gathered round the rich alluvial delta of the Nile before the gigantic imposition of the Sahara Desert swallowed up everything in its path as far south as the still-dependent Sudan. Accordingly, economic reform and industrial growth meant altering at least some of the traditional Egyptian patterns of agricultural production, and more particularly how they had long been financed. The growth and harvesting of cotton remained the overwhelming economic driver of the country – comprising 93 per cent of all Egyptian exports at the time of Kitchener's arrival – so reforming the cotton trade was clearly at the heart of any attempt at more general economic and fiscal reform.¹² Indeed, the dominance of cotton meant that Egyptian agriculture was very close to being a monoculture economy, the result of which was had been to severely marginalize the production of other crops. Limited exports in this regard were one thing, but the increasing inability of the country to grow enough basic food crops – such as rice, peas, and lentils – in order to feed itself was reaching crisis proportions. In part, therefore, Kitchener's early resolve to reform the land tenure system in Egypt sprang from the eminently practical concern of food production for the local market, a concern that he had first grappled with in Sudan back in 1899.

To this end, Kitchener got to work right away. One of the crying grievances of the tens of thousands of small peasant cultivators, the fellaheen, was that they could be readily expelled from their plots of their land, or their simple agricultural implements seized by creditors for debt. The regime then in place in Egypt was akin to that which had prevailed in Ireland before the agricultural reforms of the mid- to late-nineteenth century began to re-set the balance of land rights for Irish smallholders. Similarly, in Egypt, the ‘fellah’ smallholder was at the mercy of landlords and their financial backers who profited from their ability to hold in thrall a whole class of peasant producer. Kitchener, while certainly always holding conservative views on property-holding generally, as on all other social issues, nevertheless had a well-developed sense of natural justice, particularly as it pertained to the poor. Throughout 1911 and into the following year, therefore, he worked towards reforms that would benefit the peasantry in particular, the result of which was the promulgation of the ‘Five Feddans Law’.¹³ A ‘feddan’ was the equivalent of about one acre, and a typical Egyptian fellah worked a plot of some five feddans. Hence the attempt to pass a law that would empower the fellaheen – traditionally at the mercy of capricious money lenders and debt collectors and their obliging legal counsel – to avoid expropriation for debt. The social and political objective of the law, argued Kitchener, was to create a contented, conservative, even prosperous peasant class who would furnish an impermeable bar against creeping Egyptian political radicalization.¹⁴

As a complementary legislative move to the Five Feddans Law, Kitchener then chose to establish local or ‘cantonal’ courts to enforce the new system, located in close proximity to the life and work of the peasants. As a form of ‘Indirect Rule’, the peasant cantonal in Egypt was an early example of what would become central to the way in which the British sought to govern many parts of Africa in the very near future, and under Frederick (later Lord) Lugard in Nigeria, IR as a form of colonial governance would reach its apotheosis.¹⁵

Kitchener's twin legislative moves in 1912 naturally were opposed by the entrenched moneyed interests who benefited directly from Egypt's existing system. Their complaints were made loudly because under what had long been established as the ‘capitulations’ system of foreigner privilege their unearned increment had allowed for the creation of a class of small financiers now run to ground by the implementation of the new law. Kitchener could not have been better pleased than to go after them and their sense of entitlement which had resulted in moneylending ‘at exorbitant rates of interest – 30–40 per cent, and even higher’, he complained.¹⁶ Kitchener's successes in practical administration were met with (perhaps surprising) approbation by Cromer, who followed closely events in Egypt from England and was in steady correspondence with him about his reforms. In July of that year, for example, Cromer wrote at length to Kitchener praising him for ‘how thoroughly sound I think all your Egyptian views are. May you go on and prosper’. Cromer then continued, although in a somewhat maudlin tone, telling Kitchener that ‘it is a real consolation to me to think that under your auspices the work of my lifetime will not be thrown away; until your advent I confess that I began to fear that such would not be the case’.¹⁷ Given Cromer's long and rather uneven personal history with Kitchener his tone comes across as cloying in this missive; equally, however, Cromer was of the strong opinion that the Gorst regime had indeed weakened Britain's hand in Egypt and if nothing else the undoubted resolve of Kitchener to restore a fulsome British authority in the country was to him highly welcome.

Cromer's enthusiastic approbation of Kitchener's reforming plans continued as they were extended throughout 1912 and into 1913, and latterly were made to include the widespread drainage of alluvial swamp and the reclamation and creation of arable land. The drainage project was undertaken on a vast scale and put under the control of the highly biddable Lord Edward Cecil, Under-Secretary at the Egyptian Ministry of Finance, and, it will be recalled, a former aide to Kitchener during the Sudan campaign. Indeed, as had been the case in India, Kitchener worked closely in Egypt with a small coterie of trusted lieutenants, another one of which was Ronald Storrs, the British Agency's Oriental Secretary. Though barely 30 years of age upon Kitchener's arrival, Storrs had been in Cairo since 1904 and was seen properly as a high-flyer. Indeed, T.E. Lawrence, with whom Storrs and others at the Agency in Cairo would be closely associated during the First World War, later described him as ‘the most brilliant Englishman in the Middle East … always first, and the great man among us’.¹⁸ Kitchener took an immediate liking to Storrs and they got on very well together. The feeling was mutual, as Storrs later described working under Kitchener as having brought him ‘three years of such happiness, interest and responsibility as no gratitude could repay’.¹⁹ Destined for a long career in the service of the British Empire, Storrs would go on to fulfill gubernatorial appointments in Jerusalem, Cyprus and Northern Rhodesia.

In pursuing his drainage and land reclamation scheme Kitchener became a kind of all-seeing supervisor, going out on tour regularly by train to examine the rate of progress being made and to urge continued expansion and development. In this activity Kitchener adopted much the same approach as he had taken during his military inspections in India, but with the added feature of the whistle-stop display of a large banner featuring a likeness of himself emblazoned with the words: ‘Welcome to Lord Kitchener – the Friend of the Peasant’. To a later generation such self-promotion may smack of the potentate-approach to politics, and undoubtedly, amongst the traditionally downtrodden fellaheen, there were endless malleable marks to be had. But, despite the mild propagandistic theatrics, it should not be overlooked that Kitchener's personal and reforming impact was real. Storrs remembers that Kitchener ‘actively liked meeting, talking and laughing with Egyptians, who in spite of the habitual sternness of his expression never said of him, as of some of his compatriots, that the Englishman's face is mubawwiz – sullen or overcast’.²⁰ And whether it was the steady rise in Egypt's export base that occurred under his administration, or the establishment of a midwifery school that would evolve into Cairo's first modern hospital, Kitchener's impact on Egypt was neither simply authoritarian nor mainly militaristic.²¹ In Egypt, for the first time in his long professional life, Kitchener was neither solely the lord of war nor the negotiating diplomat of earlier iterations, but rather he had become a proconsul of significant skill and progressive impact.²²

This proconsular evolution of Kitchener's was measured also – and perhaps most forcefully – by his understanding and treatment of the political and constitutional constructs of the Anglo-Egyptian state. In particular this meant the Khedive, Abbas Hilmi, Kitchener's old nemesis from his time as Sirdar of the Egyptian Army. The Khedive's youthful and clumsy nationalism of the late-1890s in which he had tried to take an a priori stance against the authority of the British Agent, gradually had given way to a more mature statesmanship. But it is clear that regardless of this change neither the new British Agent nor the former one, Cromer, had any use for him. Indeed, Cromer's view of the Khedive remained intensely negative: he was ‘an inveterate liar’, Cromer wrote to Kitchener in July 1913, who needed to be brought ‘to book’.²³ Just then home on his annual summer leave, Kitchener's view of the Khedive after 1911 had become fairly pragmatic in that he believed constitutional reform in Egypt could be brought about best through abolishing the General Assembly, a body full of ‘political wirepullers’, he argued, who had come very close to wrecking the extension of the Suez Canal concession.²⁴ Out of that regrettable protest – engendered by Gorst's attempt at liberalization, it was believed by Kitchener, Cromer and others – had come the assassination of Boutros Ghali. ‘After I left’, in a direct attack on Gorst's administration, wrote Cromer to Kitchener, ‘he [the Khedive] got completely out of hand’. Therefore, to rein in what Kitchener believed was the Khedive's nefarious influence on the increasingly radical General Assembly, he decided that it should be abolished and then replaced by a new Legislative Assembly comprised of both appointed and elected members. Kitchener argued that with proper constitutional evolution this new iteration of an Egyptian assembly would in time come to provide measured good government, embodying the ‘true progress’ that all desired.²⁵

Later, Kitchener's decision to re-make the cardinal features of Egypt's nascent representative governmental institutions was seen by some as confirming his reputation for autocracy and high-handedness. Unsurprisingly, Gorst's recent biographer, in defence of his subject's record in Egypt, continues to perpetuate the view that the ‘autocratic Kitchener’ reversed the achievements of his predecessor.²⁶ Gorst himself had an intense dislike for Kitchener from his days working under Cromer during the Sudan campaign (the feeling, it will be recalled, was mutual) and it seems that this fact more than any other is what coloured his perception of the man. In turn, so too that of his biographer. Where Gorst had tried to curry favour with the Khedive, Kitchener made no secret that he saw Abbas Hilmi as weak, unprincipled, and in thrall to Egyptian nationalists who were intent upon inciting chaos in the country. Indeed, one of their number had already tried to assassinate Kitchener outside the railway station in Cairo in April.²⁷ The attempt to do so was weak and easily rebuffed, but Kitchener believed that the Khedive's known succour of radical nationalists had emboldened the violent among them to take action against the British. For these reasons he believed that the best course politically was for the Khedive to abdicate, thereby leaving the door open for the installation of his much more trustworthy and cooperative uncle, Hussein Kamel. Cromer, meanwhile, while continuing to despise the Khedive, counselled Kitchener against the active ‘deposition’ of Abbas in order to preclude the possibility of a level of ‘public sympathy’ that would make of him a political martyr.²⁸

Reluctantly, Kitchener took Cromer's sage advice to heart. So in place of taking executive action to depose the Khedive, Kitchener instead began to restrict his privileges in what amounted to serial humiliation. On one hand, banning the Khedive from attendance at meetings of the Council of Ministers without the permission of the British Agent, was indeed humiliating and perhaps unjustifiable. On the other, Kitchener putting a stop to the routine corruption engaged in by the Khedive and his circle of advisers in the handling of contributions to Muslim charities, by establishing a new and accountable ministry, was a reforming act of good governance. Naturally, neither the Khedive nor his henchmen agreed, but Kitchener was unmoved. Indeed, what was really at stake in these moves by the British Agent – beyond the reduction in status of someone he believed to be a pseudo-potentate – was someone he hoped would be a steady progression towards the foundation of a new British Imperial viceroyalty of Egypt and Sudan. If created, Kitchener argued, it would end both the pretense of Ottoman overrule altogether, and the privileged position of the various European investor states.

On both fronts, however, the prospect of a new British colony along the lines of India was virtually impossible to envisage, much less undertake. The unaligned historical parallels were obvious, but more to the point was the heightened symbolism of a Western power potentially usurping wholly the position of an Islamic one in an age that had begun to witness sustained jihad for the first time since Islam's foundational era in the seventh and eight centuries AD. Moreover, the intractable problem of the foreign ‘capitulations’ – the web of financial and tax privileges in Egypt accorded to invested Europeans and the states they represented – appeared to most observers with any knowledge of the complexities of Egpytian governance at least as far back as the 1870s to be an impossible knot to unravel. Cromer, for one, whose knowledge of Egypt's labyrinthine financial system was probably unequalled by anyone else, strongly advised Kitchener to drop any plan that he might be fomenting to have Egypt annexed.²⁹ Accordingly, Kitchener did so, but not without resistance and not before pleading his case to others, especially to Grey at the Foreign Office.

Altogether when it came to Egypt's place in the Empire, as well as to its local politics, Kitchener displayed a closely reasoned conservatism, one that was not out of step with wider informed British opinion on Egypt. Wilfred Scawen Blunt's provocative views notwithstanding, most government and journalistic voices agreed with Kitchener that radical nationalism must be restrained in Egypt, and therefore a policy of constitutional gradualism was the right way forward for the country. The Khedive was entirely untrustworthy in this regard, they believed, and so replacing him would be a worthy example of an acceptable practice – what a later age would call ‘regime change’ – and demonstrative to nationalist sympathizers that the British Lion as represented by Kitchener intended to carry on administering the country in the established pattern. Accordingly, attempting to blunt nationalist agitation was at the very heart of the early twentieth-century British project in Egypt, as it was just then in India also, as was seen in the previous chapter. ‘I deprecate any very large expansion of what is called in Egypt primary education’, advised Cromer to this end in a letter to Kitchener in the summer of 1913, ‘which merely turns out a number of discontented youths of the babu description …. All this class go to swell the ranks of the discontented’.³⁰ There was no stronger epithet against colonial nationalism anywhere than the derogatory ‘babu’ of (in)famous Indian usage. And of course, such a reference resonated greatly with Kitchener given his understanding of nationalist agitation as he had seen it expressed some years earlier in India, especially in Bengal.

By 1914, Kitchener had achieved substantial economic and political reform in Egypt. He was well into his third year as British Agent and Consul General, with the anticipation of more to follow. The alluring prospect of the Indian viceroyalty remained aspirational, if likely unrealizable, in what was assumed would be the change-over year of 1915, but Kitchener was well-contented to continue in Egypt until his impending retirement. (In the end, with the outbreak of war, Hardinge remained in office as Viceroy of India until 1916.) But the tension of Kitchener's rocky relationship with the Khedive was wearing on him, and in the spring of the year he seemed almost to buckle – one of the few such times ever in his career – under the pressure of governing the restless country while at the same time holding at bay the imprecations of the perpetually dissatisfied Abbas Hilmi.³¹ Indeed, one might have thought it a joint plan to escape one another when they both left the country that summer at almost the same time, Kitchener for his usual summer leave at home in England, and the Khedive to journey to a number of European capitals in what for him over the years had become a kind of annual Egyptian royal progress in an attempt to reinforce his kingly status. Naturally, one of the European capitals he was supposed to visit that summer was London, which for Kitchener of course was the very last place he wanted the Khedive to go. Kitchener got to London first, however, and insisted that the Khedive should not be received by King George. Ever-compliant when it came to a request from Kitchener, the King agreed and the Khedive was duly informed that should he indeed come to London that summer he would not be granted a royal audience. Insulted, the Khedive duly took the hint and stayed away.

Little did either Kitchener or the Khedive know in leaving Egypt during June of 1914 that neither one of them would ever again return to it. Abbas Hilmi's summertime European peregrinations eventually brought him to Constantinople, there to await events, the most portentous of which for him personally was the declaration in November of a state of war existing between Britain and the Ottomans, which in turn led Britain to declare a protectorate over Egypt. Establishing a British protectorate meant the effective deposition of the Khedive, the exigencies of war having done what Kitchener could not achieve himself. Naturally enraged by this development, the Khedive issued a virulently anti-British proclamation in which he claimed that ‘the decisive hour for its [Egypt's] liberation has now arrived’.³² In response, the Asquith government then formally deposed him. The now former Khedive – he refused to acknowledge his diminished status and did not formally abdicate until years later in 1931 – would go on to live in rather ignominious European exile for the rest of his life, dying in Geneva in 1944.

As for Kitchener, like most everyone else in England, the summer of 1914 brought increased anticipation of war with each passing day, especially during the 37 days that separated the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand on 28 June with the lapse of the British ultimatum given to Germany to withdraw from Belgium on 4 August. As of a few weeks earlier, Kitchener had been elevated to the rank of earl when the King had seen fit to create him Earl Kitchener of Khartoum, and of Broome. Good wishes over this latest honour poured in: ‘I was so pleased to see your name in the Gazette’, wrote Sir Spencer Harcourt Butler, longtime Indian Civil Servant and future Governor of Burma, ‘and congratulate you on the Earldom’.³³ In Kitchener's long string of royal honours the creation of an earldom marked the pinnacle. And upon reaching England on 23 June from Egypt he went straight to his country estate of Broome Park, as if to confirm in his own mind the intersection of his new title with the broad and well-treed acres – Lady Ilchester had recently added to its greenery by sending ‘a lovely lot of trees’ – that (at least symbolically) supported it.³⁴ The anticipation of war did not necessarily dampen Kitchener's spirits, however. Staying at Broome and, when in London, at Pendali Ralli's, he engaged in the usual social round. His expectation was to go back to Egypt at the beginning of August and once there to continue along the reforming path that he had begun to follow three years earlier. A long holiday, an unsurpassed royal honour, and the timely comeuppance given the Khedive, had all combined to refresh his spirits for a return to Cairo, even if the candle still burned unrequitedly for India. And so on 3 August after a rejuvenating six-weeks in England he departed Broome for Dover, just ten miles away, from which he planned to proceed to Calais and then on to Paris, Marseilles and across the Mediterranean to Alexandria. But as he waited impatiently in his cabin for the delayed steamer to cross the Channel on the first leg of the journey back to Egypt, a telephone message from the Prime Minister was brought to him by the ship's captain: Would he return immediately to London? War with Germany, as Kitchener was about to find out, was just hours away and his presence there was urgently required. At just before 1:00 p.m., therefore, he quickly disembarked from the ship and departed for the capital. ‘Kitchener's War’ was at hand.