9

Supreme British Warlord, 1914–16

The protracted lead-up to the outbreak of the Great, or as it would be called later, World War I, is easily one of modern history's more fully-researched and debated subjects. As I write this book, during the early stages of the marking of the centenary of the war, I have on the shelves of my library a number of such studies; many more could be added. The most recent of them, such as those by Margaret MacMillan and Christopher Clark, have once again told the general story well and hence it needs no re-telling here.¹ Suffice to say that the various interpretations of why the war came to pass, in what was an uncommonly warm and beautiful English summer of 1914, made little difference to Kitchener as he sped north by rail from Dover to London on the afternoon of Monday, 3 August 1914. Upon arrival at Pendali Ralli's always welcoming Belgravia residence, he was greeted by a waiting message from Prime Minister Asquith that was both apologetic and prospective in tone: ‘I am very sorry to interrupt your journey today, and I fear caused you inconvenience …’, he wrote, ‘but I was anxious that you should not get beyond the reach of personal consultation and assistance’.² After reading the note Kitchener spent an agitated 24 hours awaiting Asquith's expected telephone call and what was now assumed to be its likely outcome: an offer to sit in the Cabinet as Secretary of State for War.

In the last frantic days before Britain went to war against Germany at 11:00 p.m. London time on 4 August, Asquith agonized over who should be offered the vital post of War Secretary. The Prime Minister himself had been shouldering the responsibility for over a year, but ‘I can't go on with this heavy work’, as he told his wife Margot, and was anxious to relieve himself of the burden, most especially now with the outbreak of war imminent.³ In addition to Kitchener, the most likely possibilities for the post were Viscount Haldane, who had held it formerly from 1905 to 1912, before becoming Lord Chancellor, a position in which he still served; and his successor at the War Office, J.E.B. (Jack) Seely, who had been forced to resign in March over the Curragh Incident in Ireland, thus necessitating Asquith's fairly recent assumption of the job.⁴

Beginning to settle on Kitchener as the right choice in the last hours before war was declared, Asquith had called him in for an interview at No. 10 Downing Street. The meeting took place without benefit of minutes so there is no record of precisely what was said during it, but Margot Asquith's diary entry based on a conversation held with her husband shortly afterwards records Kitchener as not wanting the appointment ‘at all’ (her italics). ‘I wondered’, she continues, ‘in my heart of hearts whether ‘K’ was waiting to be pressed’.⁵ She may have been right. Indeed, in the middle of Asquith's ongoing deliberations Kitchener wrote him to ask ‘if there is any objection now to my making arrangements to leave for Egypt on the P & O next Friday’.⁶ Disingenuous? Perhaps. In any event, by the morning of Wednesday, 5 August, with the war less than 12 hours old, Asquith made up his mind, summoned Kitchener to Downing Street to formally offer him the position – which was accepted in a dutiful spirit – informed the King of his decision, and plunged the country into war under Kitchener's direction. News of Kitchener's appointment broke upon an expectant country – much of the press was pushing for him – almost immediately and the public's reception of him as supreme British warlord was rapturous.⁷ The man himself, however, remained somewhat circumspect about the coming task: ‘May God preserve me from the politicians’, he commented wryly to his old Sudan and South Africa comrade Sir Percy Girouard, the next day.⁸

Kitchener, indeed, was a reluctant office-holder as the newly-named Secretary of War. Hardly the military autocrat in the offing as Curzon once thought him to be, Kitchener had received the agreement of the Prime Minister that once the war was over he would be able to return to Egypt as British Agent and Consul General. No one could and no one did question his ability as a career practitioner of arms, and his public reputation was that of the first military man of the Empire, a genuine martial hero who stood above the vicissitudes and petty jealousies of politics and would see the British through to victory just as he had already done in Sudan and South Africa. But his experience of Cabinet government was non-existent, he disliked the leaden bureaucracy of the War Office over which he would now have to preside, and he was not naturally verbally prolix nor a nimble debater and disliked the necessity of having to explain, as opposed to issue, an order. All of these features of his make-up were entirely understandable given his almost half-century of military service and command, and therefore later when some (within the Cabinet especially) chose to see these deficiencies as debilitating defects they had only themselves (or perhaps Asquith) to blame.

Kitchener's introduction to his new politician colleagues, came late on the morning of 5 August when a hastily called and unofficial Council of War met around the Cabinet table at Downing Street. The newspapers, hitherto filled with the reportage of domestic strife – Emmeline Pankhurst and the Suffragettes' campaign for the vote, for example, had been the bane of Asquith's recent existence with their hunger strikes and poisoning of golf greens, so well-dramatized later by Ford Madox Ford in his novel of the time, Parade's End – now were taken up with war news; that is to say, what was the government doing to execute the war now that it come upon the country? In addition to the Prime Minister, the main participants sitting around the table that portentous morning were the long-time Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey; Winston Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty; Field Marshal Sir John French, recently named Commander in Chief of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF); and General Sir Douglas Haig, then in command at Aldershot; brought into this intimate high-level military circle too was the almost-82-year-old Lord Roberts, the grand old man of British arms, but still spry, acute and beloved by his colleagues, as well as by the general public.

Most of the Council's members were old friends and battlefield comrades of one sort of another. Generals French and Haig, of course, had been with Kitchener in South Africa, for example; Churchill had been, too, but in a different way, needless to say. But the new perilous circumstances in which they found themselves on the eve of a general European conflagration meant that the meeting was tense with war-worry, the first of many to come. His earlier meeting with Asquith not long over, Kitchener had yet to receive the seals of office, but for all intents and purposes he was acknowledged as the Secretary of War, and accordingly he took a leading position in the two-hour-long meeting. General Cabinet agreement was achieved immediately over the alacrity with which the BEF should be sent to the Continent, but not, however, as to where it should be deployed once having arrived. Here, Kitchener disagreed sharply with French (in a foretaste of things to come) in rejecting the latter's stated position that British troops should be dispatched to Maubeuge, located five miles from the Franco-Belgian border and fortified since the end of France's disastrous war with Prussia in 1870 during which, it will be recalled, Kitchener had had his first tentative encounter with the realities of war. Now, in the summer of 1914, Kitchener thought (rightly) that German strategy would include wheeling through Belgium, which in the event of British troops congregating in Maubeuge would leave them subject to encirclement. Instead, Kitchener suggested Amiens as the optimal destination for the first wave of British troops, which was located about 70 miles southeast of Maubeuge and therefore in little danger of first-wave German investment. For the moment, Kitchener's persuasive view prevailed, but the question remained open nonetheless because of the weight of the pre-existing Anglo-French Continental war plan that hinged on Maubeuge.⁹

The other main topic of discussion on that sombre morning, and one which would carry over to the next afternoon's Council meeting, was the expected duration of the war. In the years that followed World War I's ending in 1918 it became (and remains today) a popular belief that the British generals of the day somewhat airily assumed that the war would be ‘over by Christmas’. A short war was to be anticipated, they maintained, victory assured, casualties light, the status quo ante bellum restored, or at least a mutually agreeable alteration of the European map reached. While French held this view, indeed, as did the civilian members of the Council, Kitchener (along with Haig) was emphatic in stating that the war would be long – at least three years – and demand tens of thousands of soldiers – perhaps, staggeringly, as high as a million or more – to execute and win, if such a word could even be used for the mutual devastation that would be wrought by a modern, mechanized war.¹⁰

In stating his views Kitchener was typically blunt, did not elaborate on how they had been arrived at, nor did he engage in a prolonged debate about his conclusions. In short, he acted like the career military commander he was in the midst of a fast-breaking war. In so doing, he pushed hard against accepted opinion, and once informed of his Amiens idea an alarmed French High Command got involved immediately by sending a special delegation to London in order to speak directly to the new Secretary of War over what it assumed had been a set plan for British troops to join their French counterparts at Maubeuge. Over the course of an almost-three-hour-long meeting at the War Office on 12 August Kitchener parried their attempts to change his mind, but to no avail. Sir John French had come with them and he, too, found Kitchener impermeable to their combined reasoning. At a logjam over the issue, it was turned over to Asquith to decide, and quite naturally he took the safest course by agreeing with the delegation from France and with the BEF Commander in Chief that since Maubeuge had been the previously agreed point of Anglo-French troop coalescence it should remain so.¹¹ Kitchener thought it the wrong choice, however, which it would prove to be. But he was already so swamped with other work that he immediately had to leave the issue behind in order to focus on the bigger task at hand, which was that of raising the size of army he believed was required in order for Britain to have any hope whatsoever of waging a victorious war.

Famously, Kitchener's first day at the War Office, the seeming impregnable hulk of a building located between Whitehall and the Victoria Embankment, was marked by his comment, flung out in disgust over the comparative smallness of the British force immediately at his disposal: ‘There is no Army!’¹² To help himself acclimate quickly to the War Office he brought along Herbert Creedy as his Principal Private Secretary, and Ronald Storrs in the subordinate job of Personal Private Secretary. Storrs, however, was ordered back to Cairo a couple of days later and was replaced by Sir George Arthur, known and liked by Kitchener as a society favourite and, as it would turn out, his future official biographer. Immediately, they began to plan for the raising of thousands of fresh recruits to replace those who had begun to embark for France on 9 August. Kitchener's belief in the necessity of a rapid expansion of the British Army, stated clearly in the first meeting of the War Council, was repeated again and became a kind of War Office mantra from the moment he occupied his new office. At the beginning of the war, the Regular Army consisted of about 230,000 men. But only around half of them were stationed in Britain; the other half were posted abroad, mainly in India. Divided into six infantry divisions, these home-based soldiers comprised the core of the BEF, the kernel from which a massive, million-man British Army – the largest volunteer force in history to that date – would swiftly emerge. But in the early days of August 1914, such a 70-division juggernaut existed only in prospect. For Kitchener, the main task at hand was how to achieve its realization.

Various options in this regard presented themselves to him for consideration. There was the Territorial Army, which numbered some 270,000 men. But it was tasked with home defence only, and its men were trained at a much inferior level than were the regular troops. Kitchener himself certainly believed them to be far from ideal for what a comprehensive Continental war demanded. For this reason he insisted that one of the standing Army divisions be kept behind for training purposes, which, for the time being, meant that even fewer British troops were available who could be put into the field. But off went ‘Tommy Atkins’ anyway, four infantry divisions and one of cavalry on 9 August, 90,000 men in their itchy woolen uniforms, puttees wrapped around their calves, Short Magazine Lee Enfield rifles at the ready, and folded into their Pay Book Kitchener's own words enjoining them to perform their dutiful service with a high moral purpose.¹³ Courage, energy, discipline, and patience would be required, he reminded them; indeed, ‘individual conduct’ was paramount. Be ‘courteous, considerate and kind’, and ‘always look upon looting as a disgraceful act’. Since they were going to France, after all, Kitchener added a fillip that spoke exactly of its time, as well as his personally held view of Christian chivalry: ‘wine and women’ as always would be temptations, but be careful to treat ‘all women with perfect courtesy’ and above all ‘avoid any intimacy’. He concluded his message by commanding them to: ‘Do your duty bravely. Fear God. Honour the King’.¹⁴ And with that, four-plus years of as yet unimaginably brutal warfare commenced.

As Kitchener quickly settled into both the job at hand and into the physical surroundings of the War Office, he decided to leave his guest living quarters at Pendali Ralli's and take up the offer to reside – temporarily at least – at No. 2 Carlton Gardens. Located overlooking the Mall and St James's Park, with Gentlemen's Clubland and Piccadilly nearby also, Carlton Gardens was a short, calming walk away from the War Office. The townhouse belonged to Lady Wantage who had made the offer, initially for six-months. Kitchener came to so enjoy living there with his immediate staff that he was sorry when Lady Wantage decided to take back the lease after the allotted half-year, necessitating a move elsewhere. While living there his immediate neighbor, ironically, was Lord Curzon who lived directly east in No. 1 Carlton House Terrace. And, as shall be seen in another twist later in the war, circumstances would bring the two men back together as Cabinet colleagues, which restored to them at least some measure of the harmony lost completely in their dispute of ten years earlier.

In these early August days of the conflict Kitchener effected a whirlwind of activity at the War Office, becoming a kind of Minister of Everything.¹⁵ He was determined to expand the army's numbers as quickly as possible, and at his bidding the government acted accordingly by immediately authorizing the expansion of the army to 500,000 men. As his working style was clearly that of the career commander, right away some around him were put off by his characteristic brusqueness. But he remained nonplussed by that all the same, whether at the Cabinet table or in the warren of rooms that comprised the War Office. If today much is made in corporate and institutional circles of the virtues of the ‘consensual’ leader, Kitchener's expressed habit of authority was its antithesis. Critics both then and earlier had derided Kitchener's on-the-job manner by nicknaming him ‘K of Chaos’, owing to his style of keeping most of his ideas and plans close to the vest and not offering much either by way of explanation or of invitation to discuss their scope.¹⁶ A fair criticism, perhaps, but there is little doubt that without the presence of Kitchener's determined whip-hand at the War Office Britain's ability to wage war in its earliest days would have been even more hindered than it was already.

Despite his predilection to not spend much if any time explaining his reasoning for a chosen course of action in his messaging to Cabinet, Kitchener never varied from expressing himself with force. Infantrymen would win the war, he maintained, and therefore the Royal Navy, the long-accepted senior service, would almost assuredly be a sidelight during its execution. Neither of these two positions was much palatable to most of his Cabinet colleagues, but Kitchener insisted that such was the nature of this war, ‘that we must be prepared to put millions of men in the field and maintain them for several years’.¹⁷ Usually he was much more forthcoming with the Prime Minister about the range and scope of his ideas and plans, but around the Cabinet table with the ‘politicians’, and their wont to discuss and debate and prevaricate and compromise all in the name of collective decision making and Cabinet solidarity, Kitchener's only desire was first to inform, and then to adjourn.

By the end of his first month in office the initial recruiting effort had proved stunningly effective. In a new iteration of the eighteenth-century's practice of ‘taking the King's shilling’, some 300,000 men had jammed the recruiting offices, now a ubiquitous feature of the towns and cities of the realm. By November the number had reached 600,000.¹⁸ Indeed, over the wildly popular first 16 months of the war, until Christmas 1915, almost 2.5-million men joined the British Army in a tidal wave of flag-waving ‘patriotic eagerness’ and prospective adventure.¹⁹ ‘Never such innocence’, as Philip Larkin would write years later in his poem ‘MCMXIV’, an elegy for all those killed in the war, ‘Never before or since … Never such innocence again’.²⁰ Indeed, the War Office could not keep up with the ‘unparalleled expansion’ of the army and its demands, especially for rifles, boots, uniforms, and horses. If, for example, the peacetime requirement for boots was 245,000 pairs annually, the war, in a memo written for the Cabinet by Kitchener six months after it began, demanded ten-million such pairs.²¹ Meanwhile, for at least the first year of the war, 5,000 horses per month were being sent to France in order to keep up with their steady wastage, which would reach the grisly total of 160,000 by the spring of 1915.²² Indeed, an ongoing shortage of horses would force a small number of British regiments to use bicycles as substitutes.²³

Key to telescoping the point that their country was in peril and therefore in great need of the people's armed service in its defence was the use by the War Office of recruiting posters. To this end, it has long been believed by scholar and layperson alike that the most important of these posters featuring Kitchener's image was based on a design by the graphic artist Alfred Leete for a popular London weekly magazine of the time, the London Opinion.²⁴ First published on 5 September, the design featured an illustration of Kitchener portrayed from the neck up, cap on head, eyes staring straight ahead, bushy moustache dominant and with gloved right hand pointing directly at the prospective recruit, while issuing the command that ‘Your Country Needs YOU’. If the febrile male masses of England needed any additional encouragement to join up and ‘do their bit’ for the war, the poster put out subsequently by the War Office surely provided it. Or did it? Based on recent archival research it seems that the archetypal poster with Kitchener's caricatured visage, which later became singularly representative of the war and would have an enduring afterlife in the popular culture of Britain and beyond, in fact was never used by the War Office. Instead, a differently designed poster with some similarities to Leete's totemic illustration and displaying much more text was employed to spur recruiting efforts beginning in the autumn of 1914. ‘Your King & Country Need You’, it read, ‘A Call to Arms – 100,000 Men’. This poster included the period of required service (three years), rates of pay (between one and ten shillings per day) and concluded with a banner across the bottom that read, ‘God save the King’.²⁵ Alas, it would seem that Leete's famously caricatured Kitchener poster never played a role in World War I at all, but later was mistakenly catalogued by the Imperial War Museum along with some other wartime posters as having been central to the recruiting effort. Given its clean lines and direct messaging, the Leete poster probably should have been used by the War Office. But, according to James Taylor who has researched the question thoroughly, and from my own examination of the Kitchener Papers, it was not.²⁶

The use of Leete's poster or no, the ‘New’ or ‘Kitchener's Armies’ exploded into being that first autumn of the war, growing from 21 August by 100,000-man tranches until eventually later in the war they reached their maximum size of some 5.7-million men.²⁷ Kitchener's settled position that the war would be long in duration and require soldiers on a scale never before seen in European armed conflict proved prophetic and stood in the face of the skepticism and sniping of both some members of the Cabinet, as well as others of the elite political classes. ‘Lord K. has asked the country to give him a new army of 100,000 men’, Margot Asquith diarized incredulously four days after Kitchener's appointment as Secretary of War, as if to emphasize the point that it was still believed by her and most others in or near the government that the puny six-division British Army (the 5th Division embarked on 23 August with the 6th shipping out on 8 September) would prevail by Christmas.²⁸ Her ignorance on this point, as well as that of others – such as the terminally dyspeptic Sir Henry Wilson, the BEF's Deputy Chief of Staff – who given their governmental responsibilities should have been much better informed than they were, now appears unbelievable in light of the fact that Germany had entered the war with 1.85-million men and 87 infantry divisions and of course, like everywhere else in Europe save Britain, employed a system of national compulsory military service.

Kitchener's insistence on expanding the size of the army as quickly as possible was based on a two-pronged strategy that in some ways was a natural reflection of his many years of overseas service in most of the main theatres of empire. In the first place, now that war with Germany had arrived – one which he had long thought inevitable – its most important outcome was to preserve Britain's status as a leading international power, complete with a world-girdling empire. A diminution of the country's international position could not be tolerated, he maintained, and the only way to ensure that such a development would not occur was to defeat Britain's only real enemy, Germany. Secondly, in order to do that, the country must be able to marshal its fighting men and resources in such a way as to maximize their impact when deployed at the right time. The right time, Kitchener believed, would not be reached until 1917; hence his three-year prediction for the length of the war and for subsequent victory won. What others mistook as ‘chaos’, or an inability to explain himself, or an exasperating reticence, as we shall see, were really none of these things per se, but rather they were reflective of his iron determination to achieve two clear goals from what was rapidly becoming a highly complicated, an uncommonly brutal, and a colossally costly war.

For Kitchener, the New Armies, called for by him on 7 August and as we have seen, inaugurated two weeks later, were the means by which both these two main war objectives could be achieved. In a sense, despite his conservative demeanor and stentorian reputation, Kitchener's approach to executing and winning the war was decidedly radical. His rejection of attempting to turn the Territorials into the basis of the New Armies was part of his general strategy of creating a wholly new kind of British force by which to win a modern, industrialized war. And based on the overwhelming response by his enthusiastic countrymen, he was right. So too in a different way, perhaps, was the hated Kaiser Wilhelm, whose status as Queen Victoria's eldest grandchild was now a highly unfortunate feature of the Anglo-German bilateral relationship. The Kaiser's description of his grandmother's fighting men as comprising a ‘contemptible little army’ was deeply insulting, to be sure, but at least in one way accurate.²⁹ The BEF indeed was tiny. Valiant, all in Britain naturally agreed, but undeniably small. Perhaps, therefore, given his expansive war strategy, Kitchener might have silently agreed with the Kaiser. After all, even the great Wellington had once called, in a not wholly dissimilar vein, the British Army he commanded the ‘scum of the earth’.³⁰ But henceforth in building a new version of the army Kitchener was determined to swiftly change that view, and in time even the Kaiser would be forced to see the change too.

The burgeoning recruiting centres gave Kitchener his first tranche of would-be soldiers almost immediately and within a few weeks these fresh recruits were in training and under the purview of General Sir Archibald Hunter. Later called Kitchener's ‘sword arm’ by his biographer in reference to Hunter's status as second-in-command to the Sirdar in the Sudan campaign, in 1914 he was living in Scotland on half-pay while enduring a reluctant semi-retirement.³¹ On 9 August Hunter had written to Kitchener in plaintive mode: ‘I live in hopes of your giving me a command’.³² Kitchener obliged, although not exactly in the way that Hunter might have imagined. He would not be going to the fast-developing front line, but rather to Aldershot Training Centre in order to whip the men of the New Armies into fighting shape.

And the fighting would come soon enough. With embarkation of the BEF ongoing since 9 August the entire force of 120,000 men was in France less than a month later. Indeed, on 22 August British soldiers had gotten their first taste of action when a squadron of Royal Irish Dragoons fired upon a group of German soldiers near Mons, just inside the Belgian border.³³ Battle was duly joined and in a foretaste of what was to come in this war that first day of fighting proved long and bloody, especially for the French who also saw action and in much greater numbers than did the British. By the following day the British had dug-in along the left flank of their more numerous French allies and were taking a solid artillery pounding from the attacking Germans. Indeed, over the course of that day the British barely held their stretch of the line. The job proved immediately to be a grim and losing one and already the price paid in blood was high: over 1,600 British casualties, including 330 killed. The Battle of Mons was a markedly inauspicious start to the war for the British, and just as Kitchener had feared when he argued strenuously that the BEF should be sent to Amiens rather than to the Maubeuge region (which included Mons), potentially disastrous. Allied encirclement by the hard-charging Germans (the French were faltering, their fortress of Namur having succumbed to attack), now was a reality. Sir John French, in command of the British, saw no way out of the fast-breaking predicament other than to have his troops fall back, which they duly did, commencing late on the 23rd. By then he had sent Kitchener a telegram informing him of his decision to retreat southwards toward the French frontier, an operation that he indicated in a forbidding tone would itself be ‘difficult’.³⁴

In London, upon receipt of French's grim telegram, Kitchener exploded in anger at this (predicted) development, and later when speaking with the Prime Minister uncharacteristically ‘had cursed and sworn’ a blue streak over the folly of having sent the BEF directly into the path of the onrushing Germans at Mons.³⁵ A ‘Black Day’ all-around, as Margot Asquith recorded it, for what she still regarded as ‘our fresh keen, wonderful force’.³⁶ Moreover, Kitchener, neither then nor later, had any faith in the French Army and their almost immediate collapse upon commencement of hostilities on the 22nd sealed his thinking on the question. Additionally, when shortly thereafter he was informed that they had also thrown ‘untrained African troops’ into the fray along the most vulnerable part of the line, his incredulity knew no bounds.³⁷ Churchill, for whom Kitchener had now developed much greater respect, shared his outrage and together they agonized over the next few hours over whether or not the BEF was about to suffer a humiliating rout at the very outset of the war. It did not come to that, of course, but the British retreat was extremely taxing as the Germans stayed in close pursuit, pushing the now-exhausted and overmatched Tommies further and further south. In the meantime, the much larger French force continued to fare no better and by the end of August the retreat had devolved into a kind of protracted death march, the late-summer heat and dust and the stench of hundreds of dead and dying horses adding to the miseries of the many wounded and psychologically shattered men. An equally beleaguered Sir John French could see no way out of the deplorable situation except to withdraw the BEF all the way to a position behind Paris and leave France to what was expected now to be its sad fate. ‘It is, of course, always difficult to work with an ally,’ wrote a defeated-in-spirit French to Kitchener on 25 August, ‘and I am feeling this rather acutely’.³⁸

Informed by Sir John of his impending ‘retirement’ from the front line and the implication that the Anglo-French battlefield alliance, the actualized military result of the ‘Entente Cordiale’ of 1904, would therefore sunder disastrously, Kitchener reacted with singular purpose. He may not have had a great deal of respect for abilities of the French soldiers or of their High Command, but he was enough of a diplomat and even a politician to understand that if the British pulled out now and indeed left France to its fate a great deal of international opprobrium would fall upon Britain's head, not to mention gravely imperiling the country by opening it up to the prospect of a cross-Channel German invasion. Equally alarmed were Asquith and the Cabinet. Accordingly, Sir John was told clearly not to do anything that would jeopardize Anglo-French cooperation. Naturally, the issue now became also one of dealing effectively with the French government as President Raymond Poincare had already begun to express great dismay at what appeared to be Britain's impending departure from the field.

On the evening of 31 August Sir John sent a long and revealing telegram to the War Office detailing the position of the BEF and what he thought constituted the right way forward. Upon having its alarming contents read to him over the phone while at home at Carlton Gardens, Kitchener resolved to go immediately to France and meet with Sir John face-to-face. The effect of his message, especially the part of it that read: ‘I think you had better trust me to watch the situation, and act according to circumstances’, was not the least bit reassuring to Kitchener.³⁹ Accordingly, he went directly to Downing Street for a midnight meeting with the Prime Minister and by 1:30 a.m. was readying himself to depart Charing Cross station for the Channel and a flying 24-hour visit to France. ‘He is a real old sportsman’, wrote Asquith admiringly of Kitchener to his (platonic) mistress, Venetia Stanley, ‘when an emergency appears’.⁴⁰

A short while later, on the afternoon of 1 September, Kitchener and Sir John duly met at the British Embassy in Paris. Kitchener had planned for a meeting of the two of them alone, but upon his arrival found that the embassy was rather crowded with various officials, including the French Minister of War, Alexandre Millerand. Finally, after some unfruitful general discussions, Kitchener and Sir John were able to steal away and meet privately. The result of this short, unrecorded session was that Sir John agreed to remain in the line and under the general instructions of Marshal Joseph Joffre, Chief of the French General Staff since 1911 and now commander of France's troops in the field. The alliance was preserved, Kitchener's task completed, and the still reeling Anglo-French troops given their unified head to fight another day.

A greatly relieved Kitchener was back home at Carlton Gardens by later that same day and once there was able to relax briefly and turn his attention to the much happier prospect of an invitation for him to become Rector of the University of Edinburgh, in succession to Arthur Balfour.⁴¹ Assured by Balfour that ‘there are no duties attached to the place except that of addressing the students at any period during your three years of office’, Kitchener happily accepted Edinburgh's offer, although events would preclude his ever having to fulfill even the light requirement of making a single address.⁴² As to the much more pressing matter of the conduct of the war, Kitchener's instinct had been right in going to France, although a petulant Sir John himself felt the visit demonstrated ‘interference’, as he complained immediately to Churchill.⁴³ Indeed, the Kitchener-Sir John French relationship would deteriorate steadily in the latter part of 1914 and by the New Year Kitchener was telling Asquith despairingly that indeed the Commander in Chief was ‘not really a scientific soldier: a good and capable leader in the field; but without adequate equipment of expert knowledge for the huge task of commanding 450,000 men’.⁴⁴

Meanwhile, on 5 September, the hitherto beaten-down Anglo-French forces began finally to push back with resistance and authority against the German onslaught with the commencement of the Battle of the Marne. Up until that point, the British had retreated some 150 miles in two weeks. Defeat and ignominy, as we have seen, seemed imminent, but fortuitously on the same evening that Kitchener had returned to London from his rapid visit to Paris, a valuable piece of intelligence concerning German troop movements had fallen into the laps of French High Command. The German First Army was not, as had been believed, heading south to Paris, but rather was beginning to angle slightly to the southeast toward the Marne river and the retreating BEF. For the men themselves the worst of the retreat now seemed finally to be over, and having survived the hellish first fortnight of the war they were intent on finally being able to take the fight to the Germans. ‘The troops have quite recovered their spirits’, wrote General Horace Smith-Dorrien positively, Kitchener's former Sudan and South Africa colleague whom he had appointed to lead the British Army Corps II and was proving himself to be the confident commander that Kitchener believed was lacking in French.⁴⁵ Crossing the Marne river on 3 September, the BEF blew up the bridges behind them in a last act of defiance. Two days later the Battle of the Marne began and with it would come a certain welcome vindication for the BEF, as well as the destruction of any hope the Germans had of keeping to their Schlieffen Plan timetable and its promise of an early and decisive victory in the war.

A tributary of the Seine that begins a little southeast of Paris, the Marne river flows east and then south in a long 320-mile arc all the way down to the Chaumont region located roughly in the middle of France. As a natural barrier against invasion from the east, the Marne was the last hope for the French in the Germans' rapid advance westward. For over 30 days they had moved steadily forward in fulfillment of the plan first enunciated by the former Chief of the German General Staff, Count Alfred von Schlieffen, back in 1905. Now the moment of truth had come for both countries. As World War I would make routine, the size of the opposing armies at the outset of the battle was staggering and on a scale never before seen in the history of human warfare. The Germans had massed an army of almost 1.3-million men while the French mustered about one-million, with the BEF topping up their number by some 120,000. In a cataclysm of modern battle they threw themselves at one another in what became a ferocious four-day encounter along a 125-mile front. The belching guns and rising smoke could be heard and seen easily by Parisians, who were less than 20 miles away from the raging fight. Soldiers from both sides advanced and then retreated, and then advanced again in a see-saw action that used the Marne river as a kind of watery fulcrum. At last on 9 September, and with General Ferdinand Foch of the French 9th Army leading the way – ‘the honour and safety of France are in the balance. One more effort and you are sure to win’ – the Germans were pushed back across the Marne. Paris was saved, western France secured, and the Germans left temporarily dumbfounded by this unexpected setback to their plans.⁴⁶

Sir John, having been forced effectively by Kitchener to remain under Joffre's instructions, had led the BEF to take up a critical role in the middle of the fray, holding the gap against the Germans while the much larger French army fought hard on either side of it. Altogether, the first month of the war had cost the British almost 4,000 dead, many of the soldiers' bodies having been destroyed beyond recognition by the explosively disintegrating power of the modern weapons in use. The French alone suffered some 250,000 casualties at the Marne, including about 80,000 killed, while the Germans endured similar numbers. The sheer killing power of industrialized warfare had done its grim business, but after a stumbling start the Allies were now in harness. The adversaries were well-matched, after all, but as Sir John informed Kitchener mid-way through the battle: ‘It will never do to oppose them [the Germans] with anything but very highly trained troops led by the best officers’.⁴⁷ As a description of exactly what Kitchener was attempting to achieve by the raising of the New Armies, Sir John's words could not have been improved upon. The Marne proved a singular defensive victory: ‘They are routed’, Kitchener insisted the triumphant War Office communique should read, ‘in what I think will be the decisive battle of the War’. He was not wrong, although hyperbole is never a good thing in war, and in World War I especially ‘decisive battle’ became a rather debased term given the epic scale of a large number of the battles fought. Still, the Anglo-French forces had survived, and now had put paid (almost) to the main German plan for victory.

Exhausted but exhilarated, the defensive Battle of the Marne was duly celebrated by the British almost as an offensive victory, but there was much more fighting to come nonetheless in the days that followed. The Germans, scratching and clawing and desperate to avoid the total destruction of their vaunted Schlieffen Plan, re-engaged the Allies along the Aisne river, not far to the north and west of the Marne. For the balance of September, the resulting Battle of the Aisne evolved into the storied ‘Race for the Sea’, in which the opposing sides tried to outflank one another in a mad rush to the English Channel, centred on the fortified Belgian port city of Antwerp. Kitchener was absolutely firm in insisting that Antwerp must not fall to the frenzied German attack, and in concert with the French the city was reinforced with Allied divisional strength and a fresh influx of ammunition. ‘Please give us any you can spare from your ships to us’, wrote Kitchener to Churchill at the Admiralty at the end of August. After setting the desired figure at ‘ten million rounds’ Kitchener suggested sending over an officer ‘to talk to your people about this’. Desperate for ammunition like everyone else Churchill's marginalia, written in red marker at the bottom of Kitchener's letter, pointed out that such a request would reduce what he had at his disposal for the fleet to nothing: ‘No! No! No! No!!! 10,000,000 rounds is all I have for the Fleet’. (In the end, 500,000 rounds were sent.)⁴⁸ Meanwhile, the embattled Belgians were fast running ‘out of morale’ too, wrote Asquith wearily to Venetia Stanley on the last day of September, but ‘Kitchener has given them some good advice – namely not to mind the bombardment of their forts, but to entrench themselves with barbed wire etc. in the intervening spaces, and challenge the Germans to come on’.⁴⁹

And ‘come on’ the Germans did, bombarding Antwerp with 17-inch shells spewed from the angry mouths of huge Howitzers.⁵⁰ After taking a pulverizing pounding for two days, on the morning of 10 October, a heartbroken King Albert finally surrendered his beleaguered nation to the German invaders, the first phase of the ‘rape’ of Belgium, as it would later be characterized, complete.⁵¹ As for the BEF, the time spent by the Germans doing their worst at Antwerp had given it a small window of opportunity to move from the Marne and the Aisne to Flanders and the Channel ports. As First Lord of the Admiralty Churchill took the lead in this removal, the (rather far-fetched) spectre of a sea-borne invasion of Britain inspiring him to rush the Royal Navy into position.⁵² In the event, throughout October and into November the front line – the ‘Western Front’ – began to congeal around the towns and villages whose names would come to be seared first into the minds of the soldiers who fought in them, and then into those of the public back home: Ypres, Passchendaele, Langemarck, Messines, Neuve Chapelle, and others. The complete formation of the Western Front was now in prospect, the war moving from its early weeks of frantic movement ineluctably towards a static battle of entrenchment. Sir John French informed Kitchener that the effort being expended by the Germans to try and dislodge the Allies from their series of hard-won positions in a bid to reach the Channel was their ‘last card’.⁵³ If so, they played it with a grim determination uninhibited by the fact that in the Ypres salient alone it would cost them some 5,000 dead, a figure matched by an equally immovable BEF.

Loss of life on an unprecedented scale was the early defining feature of the war, and given the size of the military operations in France and Belgium the volume of ordnance required to give the BEF its sharp end was enormous. Everything pertaining to fielding a potentially vast army was necessary of course. Uniforms and boots topped the list, as we have seen, but so too was the ongoing and always pressing need for guns and ammunition. And very soon in September and October shortages of rifles, bullets, and shells became a recurring problem for Kitchener and one that would prove a protractedly knotty one to solve. ‘The Chief is also very anxious to get out some mortars’, wrote Lieutenant General William Robertson, Quartermaster General, to Major General Sir Stanley von Donop, Master General of the Ordnance, at the end of November, in a recurring form of communication between them.⁵⁴ The organizational and administrative pressures on Kitchener as Secretary of War in this period were unrelenting. Moreover, like thousands of his countrymen, emotional demands pressed in on him too as he had begun to lose friends and colleagues in battle, most notably his former close aides in India, Conk Marker, cut down by an exploding shell during the retreat from the Marne, and Hubert Hamilton, likewise killed a short time later at Ypres. Equally disheartening was the death (though not in battle) in mid-November of Lord Roberts. Thus far throughout the early months of the war he and Kitchener had been in close touch. ‘The want of both officers and non-commissioned officers’, he wrote to Kitchener from France on 17 September, ‘has been evident to me at the camps I have visited’.⁵⁵ Shortly thereafter, this observation spurred Roberts to enjoin Kitchener to keep a group of Indian Army cavalry officers from following their orders and heading home: ‘India is quiet, a few officers will not be any risk and we need them’. Kitchener agreed.⁵⁶

Indeed, Roberts' special interest in Indian troops spurred him to make a visit to the line and on 13 November he encountered a group of them who had recently arrived at the Front near Messines. While there however he caught a chill, which his elderly body could not fight off, and a mere two days later he died of pneumonia.⁵⁷ Kitchener felt keenly the loss of his old colleague, addressing the House of Lords shortly after Roberts's death that ‘I, more than most men, had occasion to learn and admire his qualities of head and heart …. To us soldiers, the record of his life will ever be a cherished possession’.⁵⁸

For Kitchener, addressing the issue of supply shortages was thorny and never-ending and made more onerous because of the close involvement in it of both the War Council and the Cabinet. The first body's necessary interest in supply Kitchener could of course understand and (just about) abide; the second's constant querying about the issue, however, he had a growing distaste for, and he did little to disguise his ill-feeling in this regard. Kitchener worked relentlessly to increase as rapidly as possible munitions production, mobilizing national resources in an unprecedented way in the service of what was fast-becoming a ‘total war’.⁵⁹ American and Canadian suppliers were tapped also, and every bit of ordnance they could produce was necessary in order to equip the million-man army that Kitchener had promised the French president and his High Command would be in France by 1 July 1915. Indeed, dependence on sources of supply from abroad would remain heavy throughout the war, epitomized by the creation of the Canadian-based Imperial Munitions Board in 1915, which was chaired by the prominent Toronto captain of industry, Joseph Flavelle.⁶⁰

On 1 November, travelling across the Channel for the second time since the war began, Kitchener said ‘non’ to the query by French leaders that could not at least some of the newly recruited men be sent over sooner than July, even if they were still only half-trained? ‘Before that date’, he continued forcefully, ‘do not count on anything’.⁶¹ Kitchener was dogmatic on this point, in the same way that he had been staunch on a similar point in India; that is, he was loath to send under-trained and ill-equipped men into battle. He regarded doing so as being little short of morally repugnant, and certainly militarily irresponsible. His constant reprise at the outset of the war was that the lack of preparedness exhibited by the War Office and the government in general in the years leading up to 1914 had to be overcome in order for success to follow. ‘Did they remember’, he exploded in exasperation one evening in the privacy of Carlton Gardens, ‘when they went headlong into a war like this that they were without an army, and without any preparation to equip one?’⁶² The New Armies would go to France when they were ready to fight, and not a minute before, Kitchener insisted, although in the meantime in recognition of the pressing need for men he did relent partially by authorizing the sending of a small number of Territorial troops.

The Secretary of War's bulldoggish position in this regard naturally had an intensely negative impact on his high-ranking governmental colleagues. The members of both the War Council and the Cabinet found Kitchener's taciturn bearing to be little more than the demonstration of an assumed secretive nature that had no place at the ministerial table in a time of acute national crisis. While Kitchener had long been used to a degree of professional independence that none of his political colleagues had ever experienced, it is too simple, however, to ascribe to his guarded manner a mere predilection for running a ‘one-man show’, as has been sometimes suggested.⁶³ Most hard-pressed leaders in just about any walk of life when faced with great responsibility become ‘one-man shows’, at least for a time. Rather, for Kitchener, he recognized that for the most part trying endlessly to explain complicated military strategy and tactics, turgid supply orders, and detailed troop training and disposition plans were an unnecessary expenditure of time and energy, a further drag upon his already remarkably taxing working day. To those of his colleagues whom he believed had a right to detailed information – namely, of course, the Prime Minister – he was readily forthcoming. To others, principally, for example, David Lloyd George, Chancellor of the Exchequer, whom he felt could neither understand what he was saying nor be trusted to keep it in camera, he found incessant demands to be explanatory and detailed simply unjustifiable and intolerable.⁶⁴

The autumn of 1914 presented Kitchener with a number of instances where his patience was exhausted by what he took to be the constant querying and pestering of some of his colleagues, especially that of the aforementioned Lloyd George. As far as Kitchener was concerned the future prime minister was verbose, needling, and maddeningly self-assured; indeed, the very embodiment of the career politician from whom he had hoped to be ‘saved’. On top of that, Lloyd George was known to be politically indiscreet and therefore potentially compromising of Cabinet secrets, as well as an inveterate adulterer, which to a person of Kitchener's conservatively religious cast of mind, spoke of sexual immorality and weakness of character. His strong Welsh nationalism also rubbed Kitchener the wrong way. Altogether for the Secretary of War, Lloyd George was just about as objectionable a man as could be imagined for a close governmental colleague. They sparred and jousted regularly. Sometimes their disputes devolved into shouting matches, and on one occasion in late-October an exasperated Kitchener threatened to resign as a result. In the end, however, and remarkably, they always seemed to manage to find a way to patch up the worst tears in the fabric of their tense relationship. To Lloyd George, ultimately Kitchener was a ‘Big Man’; and to the Secretary of War, while the ‘little Welshman’ might have been ‘peppery’, they were manifestly on the same side.⁶⁵ Such unity would be tested severely in 1915, as shall be seen. But in the meantime, as the war reached December it was clear that certainly it would not be over by Christmas. Indeed, in a remarkable show of fraternization that broke out along the by-now heavily entrenched front line near Ypres on 24 December, British and German troops engaged in their own brief unofficial truce by singing carols, playing football, and generally exchanging seasonal goodwill in what were the most bitterly ironic of circumstances imaginable.⁶⁶ Elsewhere in the forward lines, as Sir John French telegraphed Kitchener: ‘There is nothing to report and Christmas Day passed quietly’.⁶⁷ Then, soon enough however, it was back to shooting one another.

Despite the best efforts of some opposing soldiers to celebrate the season, Christmas and the New Year 1915 brought no reason for celebration at the War Office, however, or indeed anywhere else in London. In light of the Race to the Sea and the serial entrenchment of the opposing lines that followed, the Western Front now had taken on a firm shape, snaking all the way from the North Sea coast, south through Belgium and northeastern France, to Alsace on the Swiss border. Altogether, the network of trenches – usually three tier deep – if laid end to end eventually would have stretched some 25,000 miles, a figure almost evenly divided between the opposing armies. The ‘troglodyte world’ created by the trenches has been well-described by historians, and the deprivations and horrors endured by the troops on both sides lodged in them throughout the war cannot be exaggerated.⁶⁸ The nature of the war in this regard as it developed in the autumn of 1914 in Belgium and France simply could not be reversed. ‘The war we are engaged in,’ as General Robertson described it to von Donop, ‘is, in fact, one of a process of exhaustion and demoralization, far more than any previous war has been’.⁶⁹ But acceptance of this state of affairs was resisted fiercely. Indeed, Anglo-French High Command, far from being complicit in the growing hegemony of the stultifying trench, was desperate to somehow break out of its controlling maw: but entrenchment and the ‘exhaustion and demoralization’ that went along with it would prove too difficult a style of warfare to overcome. The great perplexity and ultimate tragedy of World War I on the Western Front especially was that through a combination of weaponry – particularly the machine gun – troop configuration, and topography, no one could release the trench's grip on the execution of the war. Attrition was nobody's choice, but it settled on both men and their commanders like a funeral pall that simply could not be removed. In this way, the wastage of French troops alone was reckoned to be approximately 150,000 per month by November.⁷⁰ ‘I don't know what is to be done’, Kitchener admitted wearily that autumn, ‘this isn't war’.⁷¹

In this admission Kitchener was not alone, of course, and during the winter of 1915 both the War Council and Allied High Command grappled with possible courses of action that might restore movement to the war and with it a chance to break through the line and engender a victory. Indeed, the hope of ‘breakout’ was the leading aspiration of commanders and their political masters, ultimately becoming a kind of unachievable but constantly pursued ‘holy grail’ in the context of the war. And if punching a hole through the line in order to effect victory could not be achieved, then victory – or at least a modicum of movement – would have to be tried elsewhere. In the face of this great war of stultification along the Western Front it was hoped that a different kind of war could possibly be fought in other theatres, and it was this very thought that began to be expressed systematically during the latter days of 1914 and in the early ones of 1915.

Among those in the vanguard of such thinking on the War Council were Haldane, Churchill, and Lloyd George. On 28 December, for example, Haldane had sent a memo to Kitchener in which he wrote that the ‘remarkable deadlock’ on the Western Front ‘invites consideration of the question whether some outlet can be found for the effective employment of the great forces of which we shall be able to dispose in a few months’ time'⁷² The anticipation of the New Armies' impact on the war can scarcely be understated, but in the meantime Haldane was quick to point out that in his view ‘such deadlocks are not unique to the present war’. Instancing the Peninsular War and Wellington's creation of the ‘lines of Torres Vedras’ a little over 100 years before, Haldane suggested a number of ways to effect a breakthrough along the Western Front: ‘heavy rollers’ [a precursor of the tank]; ‘bullet-proof shields or armour’; ‘smoke balls’ as a ‘screen’ for advancing troops; ‘rockets with a rope and grapnel attached, which is used to haul in barbed wire’; ‘spring catapults, or special pumping apparatus to throw oil or petrol into the enemy's trenches’. Indeed, Haldane was a veritable fount of ideas, and in their articulation is to be found a foretaste of some of the later technological developments in the war, as well as beyond. Lest his suggestions were thought to be ‘fantastic and absurd’, however, Haldane also counselled ‘diversion elsewhere’.⁷³ And in this particular idea there was almost universal agreement amongst those on the Council.

At almost the same time that Haldane was making his views plain to Kitchener, Churchill was writing to Asquith, enjoining the Prime Minister to launch a seaborne landing on Germany's Baltic shores north of Berlin, a scheme developed initially by Admiral ‘Jacky’ Fisher, First Sea Lord. Better the Baltic, said Churchill, than to send more men ‘to chew barbed wire in Flanders’⁷⁴ Similarly, on 1 January 1915, Lloyd George drafted a long memo for the Committee of Imperial Defence in which he chose to criticize Churchill and Fisher's German plan as being ‘very hazardous’, while substituting his own proposals for either an attack on Austria, which he believed would draw in Italy on the Allied side, or an attack on Ottoman Turkey. Either way, he encouraged pressing on to a ‘decision without delay’.⁷⁵

In these appeals for opening up fighting theatres elsewhere, the Turkish Dardanelles Campaign came clearly into view. From the very beginning, however, of all such non-Western Front considerations, Kitchener remained wary, and this was true of the Turkish proposal in particular. Of the various strategic ideas floated at this time the Dardanelles garnered the most support in the War Council and was loudly and consistently advocated by Churchill especially.⁷⁶ While Fisher continued to favour his own Baltic plan, his Admiralty colleague Churchill (ably supported by Lloyd George) believed strongly that a properly executed naval operation could force open the straits of the Dardanelles, the channel between the Aegean Sea and the Sea of Marmora, and the first part of the strategic waterway that links the Mediterranean with the Black Sea. As the choke point in this link the Dardanelles lay about 130 miles southwest of Constantinople. If successful in forcing their way through the Narrows, then the British could split Turkey in half, knocking it out of the war, and opening up a direct supply line to Russia, which would be a major assist to its imperiled position in the east. Altogether, the knock-on effect would lessen the pressure on the Western Front. In prospect, at least, the plan was imaginative and daring, and encouraged by a direct Russian request for help to relieve its southern flank, was debated excitedly in the War Council and Cabinet over the first two weeks of 1915.

On 15 January, after meeting almost daily, the Council accepted the Dardanelles plan, as moved by Churchill. Taking Constantinople would be its objective. The decision had come, however, after a clear cleavage had opened up in the Council between those who advocated a continued concentration on the Western Front as the surest road to victory since an enormous infusion of men into the line was soon expected courtesy of the New Armies, and those who believed that a strategic shift east must be taken in order to alter the hitherto stultifying nature of the war. In holding the former view no one was stauncher than Sir John French. ‘There are no theatres, other than the ones in progress’, he wrote determinedly to Kitchener, ‘in which decisive results can be attained’.⁷⁷ Kitchener was inclined to agree, although, launching a naval attack on the Dardanelles would not change materially what could, and still should, be done in the West, he believed. Critically, at this point the Turkish operation was understood to be wholly naval, involving no soldiers. Therefore, Kitchener had agreed with it and strategizing for the initial bombardment of Turkish channel defences had duly commenced.

Hurried planning ensued, and barely a month later on 19 February the Royal Navy began its bombardment at the Dardanelles. By that time, however, an irreparably deep rift had been driven between Churchill and Fisher over the Expedition, one that would ultimately undermine the ability of the Asquith government to remain in office. But buoyed by the initial promising results of the operation as it continued through late- February and into mid-March, the War Council and the Cabinet believed the chances of success were high. During this period debate ensued among all the principal participants over whether or not soldiers were ultimately going to be a necessary part of the operation; and if so, which ones they would be, and where and when would they be sent once the naval bombardment had done its work. At the operation's outset, Kitchener remained of the view that troops need not be sent to the Dardanelles as the navy should be capable of forcing the Narrows without calling upon the army for assistance. As always, the number of troops available for use in France and Belgium, and therefore how many would be left for home defence, was uppermost in Kitchener's mind. Consequently, he was determined to see the Dardanelles plan succeed or fail as a solely naval operation. His reasoning was simple in that should the naval operation not succeed in its objectives, it could be called off readily without an immense investment of men and materiel. ‘Much depends upon the Navy in forcing the Dardanelles’, he wrote in an understated memo to the CID on 25 February, as ‘we have not sufficient men at present to attack the Turkish troops on the Gallipoli Peninsula’.⁷⁸

But during the closing days of February and then into March the pressure exerted by virtually the whole Cabinet on Kitchener to release a division for use in the Dardanelles became intense. Most of the intensity emanated from Churchill, as he was committed fully to the operation within Cabinet, while outside of it he was fast becoming the Dardanelles' public face. During these tense days Kitchener resisted every argument designed to change his mind on the question of deploying soldiers, while Asquith was in a real quandary over which way to exert his final support. As he noted in a letter to Venetia Stanley on 26 February, following another long meeting of the War Council: ‘Winston was in some ways at his worst – having quite a presentable case. He was noisy, rhetorical, tactless & temperless – or full. K., I think on the whole rightly, insisted on keeping his 29th Division at home, free to either go to the Dardanelles or to France'.⁷⁹ Altogether, during the winter of 1915, Churchill's verbal clashes over the issue with Kitchener dominated Cabinet and Council meetings, with the unintended effect (for Churchill) of making him by ‘far the most disliked man in my cabinet’, as the Prime Minister frankly told his wife, Margot.⁸⁰

By early March, Kitchener, clearly worn down by the persistence of Churchill's verbal dexterity and incorrigible histrionics, unleashed within Cabinet usually at the Secretary of War's expense, had begun to shift his thinking about dispatching a British division to the Dardanelles. Not an easy shift to make since, if acted upon, it would mean that there would be just one division remaining on home soil from the original army. But Kitchener did so in part because of the fresh availability of the 30,000 men of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (the Anzacs), recently arrived in theatre and training in Egypt. On 10 March, therefore, Kitchener made a final decision to send the British 29th Division to the Dardanelles, to be assisted by the Anzacs, and eight days later on 18 March the Royal Navy (together with its French counterpart) launched an attack in three lines in an attempt to force the Narrows. The results of the bombardment were mixed as two British and one French battleship were sunk by Turkish mines. Nevertheless, the day promised subsequent success had the naval plan been vigourously pursued. Certainly, the Turks themselves assumed that the partially damaged fleet would resume operations, for which they were manifestly unprepared. But, fatefully, it did not. The recently appointed (by Kitchener) commander of the Dardanelles Expeditionary Force, General Sir Ian Hamilton, having arrived in situ just one day earlier, decided that a follow-up to the day's less than impressive naval attack should wait until a combined amphibious operation was ready in order to offer a comprehensive engagement of the Turkish enemy. Churchill, for his part, was apoplectic about the delay; Asquith, always calm in disposition, thought it at least unwise, while Kitchener simply believed Hamilton when told that the fleet was not in a position to carry on the offensive immediately. What turned out to be a ponderous five-week delay, however, allowed the Turks – who as fighters were clearly underestimated by Kitchener, as well as by all the other members of British High Command – to move troops and guns into position in such numbers that by the time the combined operation entered the combat zone at the Gallipoli Peninsula beginning on 25 April their ability to resist had become fierce. And paying the initial price for that resolute fierceness fell largely to the Anzacs, who lost 900 men killed and 2,000 wounded in short order, while the rest were engulfed swiftly in trench warfare every bit as stultifying and immobile as that found on the Western Front.⁸¹ In the immediate aftermath of being informed about the initial slaughter at Gallipoli, a vexed Kitchener brooded in the darkness of his new residence, York House, contained within St James's Palace, a short distance from No. 2 Carlton Gardens, which Lady Wantage now wished returned for her own use. Led along by the overly optimistic and hectoringly persistent Churchill, Kitchener had allowed himself to agree with the Dardanelles operation, which now had the look about it of an impending debacle. Indeed, it would be Kitchener's only serious error in judgement of the war.

If the Dardanelles disaster marked the first major setback of the war for the British since the retreat from Mons that defined its beginning, an issue of a different kind sprang forward at almost the same time and its impact hit Kitchener directly. One of the clear marks of fighting a modern, industrialized war was the exceedingly high demand for ammunition. From very early in the war's execution this demand had been felt by all the combatant armies, and shortages of shells, as we have seen, had been a recurring complaint by most commanders in the field. In attempting to explain why these shortages persisted, Hew Strachan makes the point that an unexpected but then routine over-reliance on high explosive shells and on shrapnel from the start of the war had put enormous pressure on factory production.⁸² Heavy guns emerged quickly as the centerpiece of a new World War I battlefield doctrine, which was designed to pound stable trench lines in what we have seen had become a war of limited movement, or even stasis. As a result, the voracious use of shells – easily brought up to the front by an accommodating rail network – outstripped supply and an ongoing crisis over the issue ensued.

In March of 1915 this crisis burst upon the British public when complaints about shortages of shells began to be made in the press, which had the effect of severely politicizing what had hitherto been essentially an internal War Office issue. On the 10th of the month, the same day that Kitchener had decided to release the 29th Division for temporary service at the Dardanelles – a withering attack was launched by the British on the entrenched German position at Neuve Chapelle, a town located along the Western Front south of the River Lys in the Artois region. Commanded by Sir John French, the British 1st Army was led into action by General Sir Douglas Haig, and throwing it at Neuve Chappelle was the first major British offensive of the war. In planning the attack an element of surprise was retained by the British, which meant that a much-coveted breakthrough indeed was achieved on the first morning of the battle, although as usual at great human cost. In a pointed example of the war's new style of fighting, in excess of 500 heavy guns were used to devastating effect by the British over the course of the four-day battle. But the gains won on the first day were not followed up successfully on the next, and by 12 March the Germans were able to rally and launch a ferocious counter-attack which failed in its objectives but so embroiled the British that the next day they postponed the offensive, and then on the 15th called it off altogether.⁸³

Some 11,000 British and Indian troops were either killed or wounded at Neuve Chapelle. In the process, the town had been captured and four lines of German trenches overrun, but to the north the important objective of the village of Aubers had not been taken. In the context of the stultifying style of warfare on the Western Front the gains were not inconsiderable: a salient 2,000 yards wide and 1,200 yards deep had been won, and the point proven that a sustained bombardment (especially if it came as a surprise) could punch through the line and bring about some degree of mobility and at least a small territorial advance with the promise of more to come. The British tactical success was incomplete, however, and even though the reasons for it were varied: telephone communications interruptions; Intelligence failures; delayed troop movements owing to the halting receipt of orders; the main message that emerged from Neuve Chapelle was that had there been a sufficient supply of shells a complete victory might have been won and a precedent set for successful operations in the future. Notwithstanding the fact that in the opening cacophonous barrage on the morning of 10 March the British had used more shellfire in just 35-minutes than had been used in the entire almost three-year long South African War – a clear example of Hew Strachan's view of ‘over-reliance’ – Sir John French insisted that had there been even more ordnance at his disposal over the course of the days that followed total success would have been his.

By the end of March Sir John had begun (secretly) to use various London newspapers to highlight his belief that British strategic and tactical plans were being hampered by the inability of the War Office to ensure enough shells for the army's use. Naturally, this criticism put Kitchener in the frame as Secretary of War as its main initial target, but beyond that lay the desire of the Fleet Street magnate Lord Northcliffe to engineer the removal of Asquith as Prime Minister, to be replaced by his personal favourite, Lloyd George. As proprietor of The Times, as well as the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror, Northcliffe was the epitome of a self-styled tribune of the people, a view shared by Lloyd George, and used his newspapers as vehicles to foist his opinions on the British reading public in a manner still seen today, for example, in the form of Rupert Murdoch. On 27 March The Times gave an interview to French in which he made the call for more ammunition. This was followed shortly thereafter by Northcliffe publicly blaming Kitchener for the recent battlefield death of his nephew, Lucas King, in which he implied that a better supply of ammunition would have made a difference and therefore saved his life. A few weeks later, on 9 May, Kitchener's old journalistic scourge with whom however, as we saw earlier, he had more or less made-up over the Curzon controversy, Charles a Court Repington, telegraphed his employers at The Times informing them that the failure of the recent British offensive at Aubers was because of the lack of shells necessary to dislodge the Germans from their entrenched position on the ridge. Hence, such shortages had acted as ‘a fatal bar to our success’. In so doing Repington was merely acting as Sir John's cypher, but in the process exacerbating the damage already done to Kitchener's reputation. Less than a week later on 14 May the paper followed it up by running a blaring headline that read: ‘Need for shells: British attacks checked: Limited supply the cause: A Lesson from France’.⁸⁴ Then came the coup de grace in Northcliffe's campaign, which headlined the front page of the Daily Mail on 21 May: ‘The Shell Scandal: Lord Kitchener's Tragic Blunder’.⁸⁵ Altogether, the munitions ‘crisis’ had taken over the government's agenda and both Asquith and Kitchener scrambled madly to stay ahead of events.

Indeed, the early spring of 1915 brought with it an almost perfect storm of linked politico-military crises in Britain. For Kitchener, the attempt to blacken his name became the preamble to the call made by Lloyd George in particular (with Northcliffe as his public mouthpiece) for the government to strike a Munitions Committee with himself as chairman and Kitchener excluded from membership. But of a piece with the putative Munitions Committee was an attempt to undermine Asquith's leadership. Both of these pursuits pre-occupied Lloyd George and in order to stave off intra-Cabinet and -Party strife in the context of maintaining wartime unity, Asquith decided on 17 May to form a coalition government with the Conservatives, although choosing to retain most of the important portfolios for existing Liberal ministers. Kitchener's ongoing value was confirmed when Asquith kept him on as Secretary of War. On the other hand, Churchill's star, owing to the Dardanelles fiasco with which he was properly and inextricably linked, had waned and in conjunction with Jacky Fisher's resignation two days earlier, he was removed from the Admiralty to be replaced by Arthur Balfour. Lloyd George indeed was chosen to be the new Minister of Munitions, but to separate both person and function from Kitchener the War Office no longer would preside over munitions production. The long political play in all of these machinations would not of course come to pass until December of 1916, six months after Kitchener's death, when Lloyd George completed the campaign by forcing Asquith from high office in order to assume the mantle of Prime Minister himself, which he would hold until 1922.

Throughout this period of exceptionally fierce politics, Kitchener somehow had managed to retain his equanimity. Furious at Sir John French for what he rightly saw as his personal betrayal, he did not nonetheless wish to weaken the government further by demanding that Asquith relieve Sir John of his command. Churchill, ever mercurially unpredictable and now throwing his weight behind a surging Lloyd George, got his just reward by being sacked and then given the ignominiously minor Cabinet post of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. ‘Winston was pretty bad, but he is impulsive and borne along on the flood of his too copious tongue’, as the still-generous Asquith had recorded of a particularly fierce Cabinet fight over munitions during which Kitchener had started to walk towards the door in a gesture that suggested he was about to leave the room and resign.⁸⁶ At home, Margot Asquith's reaction to the relentless political drama was typically pointed. ‘Winston is always gassing about a coalition Gov. – so disloyal to his PM’, she wrote two weeks before it came to pass. ‘Winston has no sort of political heart or ‘sentiment’’.⁸⁷

By the end of May and with the formation of the coalition government the acute political crisis of 1915 had passed. Kitchener himself had moved into calmer waters, while the nascent Ministry of Munitions was able to expand the labour pool under the auspices of the new Munitions Act – which he had helped to draft – by making it illegal for munitions workers to resign without their employer's consent.⁸⁸ An enormous munitions factory was built at Gretna in Scotland beginning in November 1915 which soon was producing 800 tons of cordite per week, the smokeless propellant used in explosive shells. That the country needed a greater supply of munitions to effectively fight and potentially win the war was never in doubt. But to have blamed Kitchener for shortages in the first eight months of the war was an exercise in blame-shifting and the worst kind of Machiavellian politics. After all, when Kitchener handed munitions over to the new ministry in May he was in charge of an industry that since August of 1914 had increased British munitions production to the point that what had previously taken an entire year to produce was then being supplied in a mere three days.⁸⁹

On 24 June 1915 Kitchener turned 65 years of age. For his era he had already outlived by a decade the average life expectancy of the British male. He remained lean and vigorous, with no diminution of his intellectual faculties and no chronic physical complaints apart from the leg which he had fractured long ago in India. At one time a few years earlier he had told his sister Millie that, ‘I shall very probably go to Germany and have my leg broken again and reset. They say they can make a good job of it’.⁹⁰ But organizing a visit for this purpose never happened, so he remained slightly hobbled by the leg for the rest of his life. During that summer he made regular visits to Broome, still under renovation but approaching the point where full-time occupancy could be made. War Office issues continued to crowd in relentlessly. Recruiting remained a lively topic for debate, of course, especially when it included the possibility of compulsory service.⁹¹ To this end, he examined British casualty figures constantly. ‘Wastage’ reports sent to Kitchener showed, for example, that 186,074 casualties had occurred during the first six months of the war, with 18,724 killed in action and a further 4,693 having died of wounds.⁹² After close consideration of the figures he came to the conclusion that compulsory service – conscription – was almost certainly going to be necessary in order to maintain frontline strength. For the autumn of 1915 he put the required recruiting figure at 65,000 per month.⁹³ Since Kitchener now believed that Britain would have to put a force of at least 3-million men into the field, and volunteering was just beginning to dip – even the promise of joining a ‘Pals battalion’ comprised of friends and neighbours, alas, was losing its appeal – Cabinet discussions about compulsion began to take place in earnest that summer.⁹⁴

Apart from building up morale both at home and at the Front – ‘The Secretary of State for War …’, as a Special Routine Order informed British soldiers in July, ‘wishes the troops to understand that … their daily deeds are closely and earnestly watched, and very warmly appreciated, by all those in authority at home’ – and the move to restructure munitions production, Kitchener also was obliged to give attention to the impact of the seminal Defence of the Realm Act (DORA).⁹⁵ Legislated during the first week of the war, it was subsequently amended a number of times over the course of the years that followed. As the Act's powers were sweeping, touching upon a variety of social and political features of British life, its impact on wartime society became pervasive. Press censorship was central to its provisions, of course, as too would become the buying and selling of alcohol. On this latter point the government's concern about factory productivity – tied closely as it was to meeting the demand for shells and ammunition at the front – meant that any impediment to a worker's ability to produce maximally for the war effort had to be addressed. Most of the other combatant countries were wrestling with the same sort of problem and, within the context of the munitions debate and the wider social movement of temperance, drunkenness and absenteeism were identified as key inhibitors to the ability of the British factory worker to put their best foot forward.

David Lloyd George, earnest and well-versed in the tee-totaling traditions of the Welsh dissenting chapel (although he did not adhere to them himself), had initiated public discussion about the issue of the (over-)consumption of alcohol's impact on factory production in January of 1915 when he addressed the Shipbuilding Employers' Federation in London, telling the assembled union members with characteristic hyperbole that Britain was ‘fighting Germans, Austrians, and Drink, and as far as I can see the deadliest of these foes is Drink’.⁹⁶ In Russia, Tsar Nicholas II had outlawed the production and sale of vodka as soon as the war started, although as a piece of social policy doing so had proven to be a disaster as illegal stills became rampant and government tax revenue plummeted. Nonetheless, Lloyd George was determined to engender British government intervention on this score as he argued that drinking had ‘seriously retarded’ munitions supplies, as workers were ‘throwing up their tools about the third day in every week to drink the rest of their time’.⁹⁷ Despite the typical Lloyd George rhetoric, once he had plumped for and then taken the ‘pledge’ himself against consuming alcohol for the duration of the war, he began to encourage other leading national figures to do likewise, and the movement gathered a great deal of momentum during the spring and summer of that year.

In April, on Easter Monday, King George himself took up the challenge and indeed pledged that the entire Royal household would remain dry until the war was over. Consequently, public pressure became intense for prominent figures in government to do likewise. As one of their number, Kitchener felt the hot breath of the moralizing Lloyd George on his back and, after hesitating briefly, took the pledge. Not many others did likewise, however. Haldane was one of those who pledged; Churchill was not, the thought of life without Pol Roger champagne, his favourite tipple, presumably being too much to bear. Asquith vacillated, but finally refused to take the pledge, which hurt him politically. In the main and unsurprisingly, Margot thought the whole pledging business amusing, especially when told by the Prime Minister that the pledge had caused Kitchener to become ‘depressed’. Indeed, ‘neither the retreat at [the] beginning of War or Neuve Chapelle affected his spirits as badly as 3 days on lemonade’, she jested.⁹⁸ To be sure, there's little doubt that Kitchener missed his regular glass of wine, but it was an absence made that much harder to accept when he learned that the crusading Lloyd George himself had been unable to live up to the pledge and had taken to imbibing occasionally.⁹⁹ In any event, the DORA was amended that same month to give the government close control over the liquor trade, and in May Lloyd George delivered his last budget as Chancellor of the Exchequer which contained substantial tax increases on the production, sale, and consumption of alcohol.¹⁰⁰ His spasm of temperance would have a long reach, however, with many of the main provisions – afternoon closing hours, for example – of the new Licensing Act of wartime passage remaining on the books in Britain until 1988.

During all the upheavals of the first half of 1915 Kitchener and Asquith had managed to maintain a good and forthright relationship. For both men equanimity in the face of crisis was always the goal, and in its pursuit they had been able to forge a mostly respectful, even cheerful, partnership in the challenging execution of the war. Indeed, Asquith's skillful handling of both his relationship with Kitchener, and of the war altogether during this period has been pointed out persuasively in a recent article by Roland Quinault.¹⁰¹ His conclusion in this regard is that contrary to the way in which Asquith was later portrayed, during the years 1914 to 1916 he was not ‘lethargic and ‘disinterested’, but instead was ‘a successful and effective war premier’. As such, therefore, he was anything but an unfortunate predecessor of the dynamic Lloyd George. Certainly, Asquith knew exactly how to achieve the best results from Kitchener as Secretary of War, which included giving him proper public reward. Accordingly, in recognition of ‘these many months of association in times of stress and trial’, Asquith wrote to Kitchener at the end of May, he had with ‘great pleasure’ advised the King to make him a Knight in the Order of the Garter in the upcoming birthday honours.¹⁰² Kitchener, naturally, was delighted since the honour, outside of royalty, is limited to just 24 living members at a time. As it turned out the Garter would be his last royal reward in a string that now numbered ten in total, and as a mark of appreciation for the enormous challenge he had shouldered of directing the country's war effort thus far, none other could have been higher.

Just a few days prior to this happy exchange, on 27 May, the Cabinet of the new coalition government had met for the first time. On the way to Downing Street for it Kitchener had called at Curzon's home, No. 1 Carlton House Terrace, very near his old abode and not far from his new one, and together the two former enemies had enjoyed an eirenic walk to the Prime Minister's residence. As a leading Conservative Curzon had been brought into the Cabinet by Asquith and given the post of Lord Privy Seal, a sinecure to be sure, but also a mark of respect for its holder. Meantime, the main Cabinet portfolios remained unchanged except for the forced departure of Churchill and his replacement at the Admiralty, by Arthur Balfour. As an issue of pressing importance for the Cabinet munitions had receded, only now to be replaced in earnest by the disposition of the New Armies in the field, as well as the concomitant probable need for conscription. Debate over conscription had now become lively and earnest and, as a first step in its incremental adoption, a National Registration bill was proposed and agreed to the Cabinet.

By this point in time both Asquith and Kitchener saw conscription as virtually inevitable given the nature of the war. To maintain the Western Front in the face of steady German attacks required an unrelenting infusion of men by the hundreds of thousands. They acknowledged the sad reality that the modern war machine had to be fed in order to carry out the strategic plan, but sadness and regret in this regard could not be allowed to change the government's course. And so as Cabinet allies they moved their colleagues – especially those such as Lloyd George, Curzon, and, for the time being, Churchill – along a path that would end with legislation to enact compulsory military service in Britain. The challenge for both Kitchener and Asquith in this regard was to control the process by which compulsion would be made government policy. As Margot made clear to Kitchener that summer, as far as she was concerned, ‘I know for a fact what is happening. Northcliffe, George Curzon & co. are running this campaign for conscription to put you in a hole. You must show pluck and beat them. It is for you to say to the Prime Minister when you want conscription’.¹⁰³

In June, Kitchener made plans to go over to France in order to meet once again with Allied High Command. Accordingly, on 6 July in Calais he huddled with Marshal Joffre and Sir John French. The two Allied commanders had agreed that a new offensive to commence that summer would make excellent use of the New Armies, just then starting to enter the line in high numbers. Kitchener resisted the plan, however, thinking that delaying their deployment until full strength could be reached was the wiser course of action. But Joffre in particular was insistent that it should happen immediately and for the following few weeks upon his return to London Kitchener ruminated over the best course of action to take. Late in August he met again with Joffre and Sir John. They implored him that an offensive should be attempted, bolstered by fresh British troops. He rejected their reasoning, but believed that without his endorsement of the plan the Anglo-French alliance faced potential rupture, unfortunately now a recurring feature of the war. On 20 August, therefore, Kitchener reported to the Cabinet that despite some misgivings as to its military utility he was of the opinion that an offensive along the western part of the Front Line should shortly be undertaken. Questions were raised immediately by some of his colleagues: ‘the drawbacks and even dangers of the proposed operation were pointed out with great force by Mr Churchill and other members of the Cabinet’, Asquith reported to the King, ‘but after much consideration the Cabinet adopted Lord Kitchener's view and the necessary steps will be taken’.¹⁰⁴ Some five weeks later the offensive began. For the British the ensuing Battle of Loos, as the offensive was called, brought very little by way of territorial gains or mobility, as Kitchener had predicted. Meanwhile, for the French at nearby Champagne, the story was much the same. Similar too was the exceedingly high cost in soldiers lost during the offensive. The British suffered about 60,000 casualties, while the French staggered under the weight of almost 150,000.¹⁰⁵ Altogether, the offensive achieved next to nothing and merely put a rueful exclamation point beside the escalating human cost of the war while deepening the gathering crisis over the potential move to full conscription.

If the outcome at Loos was not bad enough, the Dardanelles-Gallipoli Expedition had been renewed unsuccessfully on 6 August with a second landing, this time at Suvla Bay. Kitchener was keen to try and overcome the failed naval bombardment of April and in a long memo written for the Committee of Imperial Defence sent on 28 May he had concluded that the right course of action now was ‘to continue to push on and make such progress as is possible’.¹⁰⁶ Ultimately, this recommendation, along with Churchill's assessment from a visit to the region in July, was followed.¹⁰⁷ Under the continuing command of General Hamilton and of Lieutenant General William Birdwood (‘Birdie’ to Kitchener, another of his old India and South Africa comrades), the mostly Anzac force stormed the heights of Suvla Bay in an attempt to take the Sari Bair ridge and scatter its Turkish defenders. But once again a vigorous attempt by the Anzacs was beaten off by the equally-determined Turks at an extremely high cost. Over the two weeks that the offensive lasted Anzac and British casualties together reached some 20,000. Again, stalemate ensued and an ultimate decision to reinforce and continue the expedition now lay in wait. To Asquith, the futility of this latest attempt at Gallipoli to change the whole course of the war was a disappointment unequalled in the conflict's duration thus far.¹⁰⁸ To Kitchener, similarly disappointed, the ‘Dardanelles incubus’ now had become almost a lost cause, as he wrote to Asquith on 17 August, because ‘to send such reinforcements as those asked for would be a very serious step to take at the present moment when an offensive in France is necessary to relieve pressure on Russia and keep the French Army and people steady’.¹⁰⁹

As Kitchener's words quoted above would suggest, his map of World War I – to borrow from Bismarck's famous dictum on Germany's (nineteenth-century) interests in Africa – lay always in Europe. Kitchener remained a ‘Westerner’ throughout the war, in the sense that he believed success along the Western Front was paramount in ensuring Britain's safety and as such fulfilled one of his two key strategies for the war. But, as has been suggested elsewhere, vital to ensuring Britain's safety too was the place of Russia and the Eastern Front in the war. To Kitchener, therefore, whatever assistance could be accorded her both through provision of materiel and by success in the Dardanelles, meant a necessary widening of the war effort. Equally, routing the Ottoman Turks in the Middle East through a sponsored rising of the Arabs, and driving the Germans out of their recently acquired colonies in Africa as well, were all of a piece for Kitchener in safeguarding Britain's empire of rule, bound up as it was in the even broader international trading and balance of power interests that comprised Britain's prevailing ‘world system’.¹¹⁰

This broader imperial and international strategy also contained of course the stellar contributions made by the Dominions and India, all of whom supplied manpower at very high levels proportionate to their population (India being the obvious exception in this particular calculus), and some of whom did likewise in terms of equipment, foodstuffs, and munitions. The enthusiasm that had greeted the outbreak of war back in August 1914 in Toronto, Sydney, Wellington, Cape Town, and Delhi was matched by the almost immediate raising, equipping, and sending of tens of thousands of soldiers. The 30,000 Anzac troops at Gallipoli, by British standards an unruly band at the beginning, but whose physique ‘could not be improved upon’, had become soldiers that ‘understand now that an order is something more than a mild suggestion to be acted upon or not as they think proper’, wrote Hamilton to Kitchener in March 1915, was a celebrated case in point.¹¹¹ But, so too the Canadians, who had begun to arrive in Britain in the autumn of 1914, where unsurprisingly there had been ‘practically immune from the ‘chilled feet’ trouble’ of the first winter at the Front. They had duly entered the line at Ypres in April 1915, in the face of the inaugural use of chlorine gas by the Germans, had acquitted themselves exceedingly well, in the report to Kitchener saying that they had ‘held intact’ while the ‘Belgians and French fell back’.¹¹² Indeed, the Canadians had done much more than that; they had, in fact, overrun the Germans, which marked the first time a British colonial force had defeated a European one in conventional warfare.¹¹³

But the advent of the use of ‘asphyxiating gas’ by the Germans under General Erich von Falkenhayn on the Western Front in blatant contravention of the Hague Conventions of 1907 had changed the nature of the war significantly. In a memo written just after the devastating and terrifying Second Battle of Ypres – the gas cloud was reported to have risen to over 40 feet high – by Lord Dundonald, another veteran of Sudan and South Africa then serving as Chairman of the Admiralty Committee on Smoke Screens, suggested, ‘if we are not to suffer grave disadvantages, we must give equal or more thought to the preparation of our plans for retaliation by the same effective means’.¹¹⁴ Regretfully, and partially to ward off the possibility of a ‘gas scandal’ that would ‘eclipse the munitions scandal’, Kitchener agreed.¹¹⁵ But, as he subsequently wrote to Sir John French, ‘before … we fall to the level of the degraded Germans I must submit the matter to the government’.¹¹⁶ He did, approval was duly granted, and the British used chlorine gas for the first time against the Germans at the Battle of Loos in the following September. The grim calculus of death by poison gas had now been made mutual and by later that autumn War Office suppliers had shipped to France over a million respirators and almost 200,000 gas helmets.¹¹⁷

In the Middle East and Africa, much of the climactic military activity would take place after Kitchener's death in 1916. But throughout the first two years of the war he was kept steadily informed of British actions taken in each theatre and in the case of the Middle East especially his voice was a prominent one in setting and executing British policy.¹¹⁸ German Southwest Africa (today's Namibia), German East Africa (modern Tanzania), and the Cameroons were all ultimately to fall under British control. But in ‘German East’ the serial success of Lieutenant Colonel Paul von Lettow Vorbeck kept the British on the defensive for the entire length of the war.¹¹⁹ Indeed, recalling the hard-driving enemy in the South African War prompted Kitchener to opine to Balfour at the Admiralty in the summer of 1915, that ‘I hope we shall have some Boers at work in East Africa before long but it requires careful handling’.¹²⁰ By the next year, after just such ‘careful handling’ ensued, Boer soldiers indeed had arrived, although they and others would not succeed in defeating Vorbeck. Indeed, he did not surrender until two weeks after the war in Europe had ended in November of 1918.

In the Middle East, on the other hand, and under the command of General Edmund Allenby, British military operations allied with the Arab rising succeeded in pushing out the Turks, symbolized by his capture of and triumphant entrance into Jerusalem in December 1917.¹²¹ By that time, T.E. Lawrence's signal role in helping to inspire and lead the Arab Revolt had succeeded, only to be undercut later by the secret Sykes-Picot Note of early 1916, the outcome of which would effectively divide up the former Ottoman-controlled Middle East between Britain and France. As we shall see, Kitchener was privy to both the Note's planning and its drafting.

In early October 1915, in the aftermath of the failure of the Battle of Loos and another long butcher's bill of casualties, Kitchener was at a low ebb over the state of the war. Compounding the grim news from the Western Front was the fact that having stalled again, the Gallipoli Expedition now, as suggested earlier, required a decision as to its future. Moreover, conscription continued to vex as an issue that likewise would soon demand resolution. While ever ‘the hero of the man in the street’, as the Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson, had said of Kitchener in reference to his public standing, the War Council and Cabinet battles had taken their toll, both on Kitchener and on the man charged with the duty of somehow engendering executive consensus, Prime Minister Asquith.¹²² The Secretary of War still had powerful champions, none more so than the King himself who, while taking tea at Buckingham Palace on 6 October, had enjoined Kitchener to put any thoughts of resigning out of his mind because ‘I had every confidence in him’.¹²³

Kingly confidence was one thing; that of the Cabinet, however, was another. This commodity now was distinctly lacking among many of Kitchener's colleagues. The Secretary of War had taken a number of hits over the preceding few months, none harder than the Lloyd George-Northcliffe campaign to discredit him over munitions production, and together with the challenging news from all war fronts, Asquith was seeking to reinvigorate his Cabinet's execution of the war within its new coalition iteration. Kitchener was tired, yes, but despite Lloyd George's petulant demands that as long as he remained at the War Office nothing would work – exactly the kind of exaggerated claim that his long-suffering colleagues had come to expect from the ‘Welsh Wizard’ – the system nevertheless continued to work, but of course could stand to be improved. One such improvement that Asquith envisaged was a new, smaller War Council (the original had expanded into the ‘Dardanelles Committee’ with a 12-person membership). Initially, the Cabinet as a whole balked at this suggestion, but certain members of it who believed that they might potentially be part of a smaller group of chosen men pressed for its creation nonetheless. On 11 November therefore a new War Council was duly struck with a membership of just five ministers. Chaired by Asquith, it included Lloyd George and three others, none of whom was Kitchener (nor, unsurprisingly, Churchill, who took this pointed exclusion from it as an opportunity to resign from his lowly Cabinet post as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and go off to the Western Front near Ploegsteert, south of Ypres, in January 1916 for a bracing two-month stint as an infantry lieutenant colonel).

The Cabinet's deliberations in this regard had been undertaken while Kitchener was out of the country. Earlier, he had agreed with Asquith that he should travel to the Dardanelles and see firsthand the nature of the prevailing situation preparatory to making a final decision about the Gallipoli Expedition's future. Kitchener's absence – he departed London on 4 November – brought with it the whiff of an impending coup inasmuch as Lloyd George had written an ‘odious’ letter to Asquith just four days earlier, as Margot described it, ‘threatening all kinds of things if K. remained’ at the War Office.¹²⁴ Perhaps, as one of Asquith's biographers suggests, the Prime Minister himself ‘was determined to get his hands on the War Office for at least a period’.¹²⁵ More likely, however, is that Asquith needed time to keep the hard-charging Lloyd George at bay in order to conjure a softer way of reducing Kitchener's control of the War Office, which, of course, had already been demonstrated by having hived off munitions from his purview and creating it as a new and separate ministry.

Kitchener was hardly in the dark about these machinations, and of course Asquith was well aware that another public crisis over the popular and heroic Secretary of War's status in Cabinet could well bring his government to its knees. Roy Jenkins suggests bluntly – in strong and dated language in reference to Kitchener's Irish birthplace – that he left for the Dardanelles ‘taking with him, with a suspicious peasant's misplaced sense of cunning, his seals of office’.¹²⁶ The unfortunate prejudice of such a remark is obvious, but more to the point there is no evidence that a ‘cunning’ Kitchener packed his seals of office along for the trip. In any event, after passing through Paris Kitchener arrived in-theatre on 10 November and for the next week he was able to take a close look at the military situation at Gallipoli and what he believed should be the correct course of action to be taken there by the British in the immediate future. Upon embarking for the Dardanelles, Kitchener's view of Gallipoli had been that the campaign should continue to be waged, despite its miserable results thus far and the regrettable prospect of ongoing ‘frightful loss’, as he informed Balfour at the Admiralty.¹²⁷ Initially, on site, General Birdwood agreed nominally with Kitchener, telling him that ‘I consider evacuation would be considered by Turks as complete victory’.¹²⁸ Birdwood's colleague, General Sir Charles Monro, however, having just succeeded the ever-loyal Hamilton as Commander in Chief, was firm in advising that evacuation indeed should be undertaken.¹²⁹ ‘The Turks’, he had pointed out to Kitchener in a letter of 2 November, just prior to the latter's leaving London, ‘[are] in very formidable entrenchments, with all the advantages of position and power of observation of our movements …. I am therefore of opinion that another attempt to carry the Turkish lines would not offer any hope of success. Hence I think loss of prestige caused by withdrawal would be compensated for in a few months by increased efficiency’.¹³⁰

Kitchener's main rationale for maintaining the Anzac and British forces in position at the Dardanelles was that if they were withdrawn, it would, as he pointed out to Asquith, release ‘the Turkish army now held up to act elsewhere’.¹³¹ For Kitchener, however, loss of prestige was of no account. What really mattered to him was where, when, and how the freed-up Turks might assist the Germans. But the more he travelled throughout the region, especially his visit to Anzac Cove, site of some of the campaign's worst defeats, the more he could see that hanging on against the entrenched and strong Turkish resistance – which had proven itself impervious to what earlier had been at least the ‘moral’ value of the ‘guns of the navy’, as Hamilton had written – was futile.¹³² ‘Here, at present, Gallipoli looks a much tougher nut to crack than it did on the map in my office?. Though they were Hamilton’s words to describe what he had seen upon first entering the forward zone in March, they might just as well have been Kitchener’s in November.¹³³

In light of what he was able to see while visiting Gallipoli, Kitchener made the final decision to evacuate. Given his initial reluctance to wage the campaign, it caused him little distress.¹³⁴ He wrote his report to this end for the Cabinet and telegraphed it to London on 22 November.¹³⁵ Kitchener's recommendation for a two-stage withdrawal: Suvla and Anzac, and then (eventually) Cape Helles, was debated on the 23rd by the War Council, endorsed, and then brought to Cabinet the next day. Some around the table, notably Curzon, objected to withdrawal, fearful of the ignominy that would accrue to Britain should it be seen to be fleeing (especially by Indians) from anywhere in the East. Nursing still, it would seem, his anger over having been bested by Kitchener in India, Curzon wrote a long and occasionally purple memo in defence of his position, that should Gallipoli be given up it would be followed by ‘the crowding into the boats of thousands of half-crazy men, the swamping of craft, the nocturnal panic, the agony of the wounded, the hecatombs of the slain’.¹³⁶ One wonders at what must have been Curzon's great surprise that when evacuation duly came first in December, and then secondarily in January of 1916, not a single Anzac or British life was lost in the process.

Having arrived back in London on 30 November, the last month of the year brought with it for Kitchener a pair of substantial changes in the conduct of the war, one with which he agreed, and the other about which initially, at least, he was highly suspicious. The first was the decision taken by Asquith during Kitchener's almost month-long absence, to replace Sir John French as Commander in Chief of the BEF in France with General Haig, Commander of the 1st Army. Margot, always a revealing source about her husband's political decisions, could not see the reason for the change, although to her it had nothing to do with professional competence. As she complained after entertaining Haig and his wife to lunch at Downing Street: he was ‘handsome and Scotch’ and ‘a very fine soldier’, but he was ‘a remarkably stupid man to talk to’.¹³⁷ As usual the Prime Minister's settled views in a case of this sort were not swayed by the fluttering criticism of his wife and on 8 December Haig was formally offered command, taking over at British headquarters at St Omer ten days later. Sir John, who had remained stolidly unperturbed throughout the change, returned to Britain as Commander in Chief of the Home Forces. In some respects a long time in coming given his protracted inability to work well with French Marshals Foch and Joffre, not to mention Kitchener, relieving Sir John of command became inevitable after the disaster at Loos. (Contributing to it perhaps also was his complicity in the Lloyd-George and Northcliffe campaign to unseat Kitchener.) In any case, Kitchener took the change in command in stride, relieved that he would no longer have to deal with Sir John in the manner that had characterized the preceding 17 months.¹³⁸

The second significant change that came at the end of 1915 had a more direct, but ultimately no less positive, impact on Kitchener than did Sir John's demotion. As part of Asquith's intention to exert greater control over the War Office he resurrected the old idea of establishing an Imperial General Staff with a chief of his own choosing. The Prime Minister had two possible candidates in mind for the job of chief. The first was Sir Henry Wilson, who, given their mutual animosity, would never have been agreed to by Kitchener. The other possible choice, Major General Sir William Robertson, however, was much more amenable and, arguably, able than the crusty Wilson. A decade younger than Kitchener, the two men knew one another from South Africa where Robertson had been deputy assistant adjutant general to Lord Roberts. Before that, Robertson had spent considerable time in India, including being present at the Siege of Malakand in 1897 along with Churchill, who, it may be recalled, made the siege the subject of his first book.¹³⁹ Most recently, Robertson had been serving as Sir John's Chief of Staff in France. He was a strong supporter of the Western Front school of thinking, going so far as to say that the Dardanelles campaign had been a sad and ‘ridiculous farce’.¹⁴⁰ Most important, however, was the fact that Kitchener liked and respected Robertson and was willing to work with him in what quickly became a marked devolution of power and control away from the War Secretary and toward the new Chief of the Imperial General Staff.

Asquith's plan for Robertson's appointment was presented to Kitchener immediately upon his arrival back in London from Gallipoli. Initially and naturally, given the chronic disquiet in Cabinet epitomized by that ‘little beast’ Lloyd George, as Kitchener had called him to Margot, about his remaining as War Secretary, he was suspicious that Asquith's proposal was merely a sleight of hand to undercut his position and force him to resign.¹⁴¹ Indeed, when first presented with the plan by Asquith, Kitchener promptly offered him his resignation on the spot. But having the heroic ‘symbol of the nation's will to victory’ out of office was never the Prime Minister's intention.¹⁴² Rather, bringing in Robertson as CIGS was to Asquith the best means by which to inject fresh vigour and administrative expertise into the vast and complicated machinery that comprised the War Office, while at the same time retaining the prestige and inspiration that Kitchener as the nation's first soldier brought to the execution of the war. By this point Kitchener may not have been any longer the largely unalloyed hero of victorious Imperial wars, but he still represented winning, and that is what Asquith wished to emphasize in realigning command.

Explained to him in this way, Kitchener's agreement in principle was then won almost immediately. Indeed, Kitchener had Robertson to dine with him that same evening at York House where they began discussions about the proposed change, and then a short time later in Paris while staying at the Hotel de Crillon, negotiations, over the precise nature of the devolution of power away from the Secretary of War. These talks were cordial: ‘I am not the K they think I am’, said Kitchener at their outset and over the next ten days on both sides of the Channel the two men worked out their ‘bargain’.¹⁴³ The centerpiece of their agreement – about which Asquith insisted – was that Robertson should have control over strategy, the content of which he alone would present to the Cabinet. Meanwhile, Kitchener would retain control over recruiting and supply. Mutual agreement was duly reached on 10 December and on the 23rd it was formalized, with Robertson assuming the position of CIGS. Both men were highly pleased, even relieved, that this unexpected but welcome partnership had come to pass.¹⁴⁴ ‘For myself’, Robertson later wrote, ‘I never had occasion to give it another thought, and I shall always regret that the unfounded gossip [about Kitchener] … caused me to misjudge him, even though temporarily’.¹⁴⁵ Thus for the weary and hitherto embattled Secretary of War a long and brutal year had come to an end on an optimistic note, with the festivities of Christmas 1915 at Broome adding a moment's levity to the unrelenting pressures of what had been the first full year of the conflict.

The New Year 1916 opened with Kitchener feeling considerable relief at having passed on much of the burden of guiding Britain's war effort to the obliging Robertson. They worked well together, which came as a surprise – even a disappointment – to some of Kitchener's old enemies in Cabinet who hoped that the appointment of the new CIGS would mark the effective removal of what they considered to be Kitchener's baleful influence on the conduct of the war.¹⁴⁶ He made another visit to France in February, spending time with Haig at his St Omer headquarters and mingling with the troops going up the line. Haig, as the new British Commander in Chief, was strategizing with his French counterparts about the prospect of an enormous summertime offensive taking place at the River Somme, located south of Arras. Kitchener, however, thought such an offensive was probably premature as he believed 1917 would be the war's critical year, both from the standpoint of the projected size by then of the New Armies, and from that of the relative weakening of the field strength of the Central powers.

Linked to Kitchener's initial reluctance to endorse an imminent big offensive in 1916 was his resistance to compulsory service in order to bolster British troop strength. On the issue of conscription he had always been a gradualist, whereas Robertson, conversely, had not. ‘Don't try to hurry things so’, was Kitchener's usual stance when discussing conscription with the CIGS¹⁴⁷ But in taking this position Kitchener was increasingly out of step with his colleagues, especially Robertson. Asquith had long resisted conscription too, but on 5 January he had relented and introduced a conscription bill in the House of Commons, which, as the National Service Act, would go fully into force in May. All able-bodied British males aged 18 to 41, thereafter, were liable for service in the armed forces.

Meanwhile, in early February, Kitchener attended a demonstration of the potential usefulness of the so-called ‘tank’ to alter the static nature of the Western Front when ‘Big Willie’ was put through its paces in the mud and barbed wire of a battlefield simulation at Hatfield Park in Hertfordshire. Unlike a year earlier when a modified tractor had been unsuccessfully tested, the latest iteration of the tank by its Royal Engineer creator, Colonel Ernest Swinton, impressed everyone – especially its persistent sponsor, Churchill – and 100 of them were ordered. Tank training for the men in ‘Heavy Section, Machine-Gun Corps’ began soon thereafter.¹⁴⁸

Both the prospective Somme offensive that Haig and his French counterparts were considering, and the possibility of British conscripts being called up, were put into even sharper relief on 21 February when unexpectedly the Germans unleashed a ferocious attack on the ancient French fortress city of Verdun. Initially, the assault on Verdun was intended by the Germans under their commander, von Falkenhayn, who was now well into the job having had replaced Helmuth von Moltke as Chief of the German General Staff after the Marne, ‘to bleed the French white’ in a prolonged battle of attrition. Accordingly, Fort Douaumont fell swiftly to the Germans four days later, a prelude to what fast developed into a battle not so much of attrition as of mutual slaughter. By 1 March the British Military Attaché in France, Colonel Henry Yarde-Buller, was reporting to Kitchener that ‘Verdun has been evacuated since the early days of the fighting and has suffered considerably’.¹⁴⁹

Meanwhile, General Philippe Petain, in command of the city, issued the order that ‘They shall not pass’, and the galvanized French threw themselves into ensuring that under no account would Verdun fall, which it did not.¹⁵⁰ Inspired in this way, into the breach were flung 1.1-million French troops, while the Germans offered up in excess of 1.2-million of their own. The battle would go on until December, by which time some 300,000 men from both sides had been killed. Altogether French casualties would number some 400,000 at Verdun, a devastatingly high figure to those shepherding the Anglo-French alliance, and one that provided clinching logic to the need for British conscription.

For Kitchener, meanwhile, the German attack at Verdun changed his calculation for the prospective Somme offensive. France's dire situation there made it clear that should the Somme offensive be undertaken it would have to be primarily a British enterprise since more and more French troops were being poured into saving Verdun and, perhaps, France altogether. If the Somme was going to have to become an essentially British operation, therefore Kitchener was less than keen. The ongoing mutual annihilation at Verdun had only one potentially positive outcome for him, which was that it might so weaken the Germans that in response to their crippling a concerted, but limited-in-scope, British attack on them in its aftermath, might actually achieve a signal breakthrough and finally put paid to the most overused field report of World War I: ‘The situation on our front remains unchanged’.¹⁵¹ In this way, as a deliberate but measured attack, Kitchener came to agree with the planned Somme offensive, which of course he would not live to see. Had he lived there is no doubt that he would have been rightly appalled that Haig – who in March had written to him, blaming the failure of the French at Verdun on mere ‘carelessness’ – had decided to turn the Somme into a massive undertaking, the name of which became the supreme byword for the futile slaughter characteristic of the Western Front during World War I.¹⁵² Indeed, for some, the 1st of July 1916, the day battle was joined, came to be ‘understood as a holocaust moment’.¹⁵³

Kitchener's February visit to France was followed in late March by his attendance at the Allied war conference in Paris. In addition to the Western Front, the other theatres of action were discussed, especially the crisis that had developed in Mesopotamia (today's Iraq) where the British garrison at Kut lay under siege by the Turks. Beginning in December 1915, the siege had intensified quickly. By the end of January 1916, Major General Charles Townshend's 6th (Poona) Division of the Indian Army was significantly understrength, trapped, and desperately short of supplies. Attempts at relief had failed in January and then did so again in March, and in April the new Royal Flying Corps would drop food and ammunition to the defenders of Kut, the first such aerial operation in history. All to no avail. After a rejected attempt at ransom undertaken by Kitchener by using the Arab Bureau's T.E. Lawrence as conduit – the British offered the Turks L2-million – the garrison surrendered on 29 April. Some scholars, such as Eugene Rogan, have criticized this attempt by Kitchener to purchase the liberation of the garrison with cash, commenting on its apparent crudity and assuming therefore that he held to the view ‘of the inherent corruption of Turkish officialdom’.¹⁵⁴ But in criticizing Kitchener for what Rogan regards as a ham-fisted action that traded upon racial stereotype, he displays a somewhat patronizing attitude toward the Turks themselves. Were they not perfectly capable of negotiating their own deals in wartime? In Egypt and Sudan, as well as much earlier during his diplomatic stint in the Turkish town of Kastamonu, or even before that in Palestine, Kitchener had had ample opportunity to engage in (financial) negotiations with the Turks. Why not again? In offering to ransom the garrison in the midst of a tension-wracked wartime siege he did so as a studied last resort and therefore as a reasonable and conventional course of action given the desperate circumstances that prevailed at Kut.

During the war conference in Paris which Kitchener was attending, the last part of these events was underway. Since February the Indian Army's Iraq operations had come under War Office direction, which meant that Kitchener was closely involved in their execution. For the British, the Kut situation had become irredeemably bad, with 30,000 troops killed or wounded and 13,000 taken prisoner at the time of surrender – some of whom would end up later convalescing at the wartime ‘Kitchener Indian Hospital’ in Brighton.¹⁵⁵ In the aftermath of Kut's fall, which came as a shock to the British public, unused to defeats at the hands of non-European foes, Kitchener gave a speech in the House of Lords which reinforced Asquith's own comment that the British people ‘were sore and depressed at a deplorable incident, though not one of serious military significance, like the surrender last week of the heroic garrison of Kut’.¹⁵⁶ Both men, in fact, underplayed Kut's ignominious symbolism, although they were right in stating that militarily it was not of the first importance. Indeed, within 11 months of Kut's surrender Baghdad would be taken by the British in a preliminary act in the ensuing reconstruction of Iraq to which much of the credit would go to Sir Percy Cox, Chief Political Officer to the governor, and posthumously in a celebrated though not uncontroversial way, to the British Oriental Secretary, Gertrude Bell.¹⁵⁷

The Gallipoli Expedition and the Siege of Kut had worked to draw Kitchener ever more closely into wartime Middle Eastern affairs; one more event would complete a troika, that of the Sykes-Picot Note negotiated secretly in 1915–16 between the British and the French with Russian concurrence to divide up the region between themselves come the successful defeat of the Ottomans and the conclusion of the war. Today, the supposed ramifications of Sykes-Picot are bitterly contested by many as having sown the seeds of ongoing regional strife, even though the map of the contemporary Middle East bears almost no resemblance to what Sykes and Picot negotiated. Yet, the Sykes-Picot myth continues to offer a powerful motivation to the jihadists of the current Islamic State to re-draw what they argue is the deeply-flawed European- and Zionist-designed map of the Middle East. At the time of its negotiation, attempts by the Anglo-French alliance to configure prospective spheres of influence in the post-war Middle East were seen entirely as natural extensions of the longstanding Eastern Question in British affairs, one part of which was France's historic link with Egypt, as well as elsewhere in the region, originally stemming from Napoleon's invasion of 1798. In addition, strong pressure had been put on the British government by insistent Zionists such as Chaim Weizmann that it use the occasion of the war and the potential dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire as an opportunity to bring about a long-desired Jewish homeland in Palestine. In Lloyd George especially they had found a readily sympathetic ear for the previous decade, and he remained keenly committed to the Zionist cause throughout the war years.¹⁵⁸

Sir Mark Sykes, a seasoned traveler, and patrician diplomat, had also served briefly in an infantry regiment during the war in South Africa. He was elected as a Conservative MP in 1911 and with his social connections and traveler's expertise soon became known at Westminster as a figure of depth on Middle Eastern affairs, so much so that when war broke out in 1914 he was duly placed on the Parliamentary de Bunsen Committee charged with advising the Cabinet in this regard. Kitchener came to know Sykes as a member of the committee, and upon the latter's recommendation the creation of the Arab Bureau was agreed to by the Asquith government in January of 1916. Once established, the Bureau's mandate was to advise the government on policy making in the Middle East, with, as we have seen both in this chapter and earlier in the book, the active participation of Ronald Storrs and Lawrence. In the meantime, Sykes had undertaken earnest discussions with his French counterpart, Georges Picot, over the future of the region in light of the anticipated fall of the Ottoman Empire, whose existence had been the fulcrum of prevailing Anglo-French policy since at least the mid-Victorian era and the epic debates it had engendered between Gladstone and Disraeli especially.¹⁵⁹ But now, an early twentieth-century policy vacuum loomed in the Middle East and Sykes was determined to fill it.¹⁶⁰

The path to final negotiations in January 1916 had been uneven, however, with the first attempt at an Anglo-French agreement foundering under the tepid leadership of Sir Arthur Nicolson, Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office. The well-placed Sykes – with his ‘ebullient orientalism’, a comment, when made later by the colourless colonial administrator of Mesopotamia, Sir Arnold Wilson, was not intended as a compliment – was then asked to step in as Nicolson's replacement, which meant that Kitchener was similarly a close participant in the weeks leading up to the final agreement.¹⁶¹ Sykes was charged with day to day negotiations, while Kitchener remained in the background offering advice and superintendence. ‘He inspired’ is the way Sykes described Kitchener's part in the month-long talks.¹⁶² Essential to Kitchener's ‘inspiration’ was his strongly-held view that the Middle East was an integral part of Britain's general strategic plan; that is, as always, at the centre of such a plan was India, with spokes shooting out from it in various directions, the most vulnerable of which, he believed, towards the northeast and Russia. If France could have its regional aspirations fulfilled by a sphere of influence that would come to include northern Mesopotamia (containing the oil-rich area centred on the city of Mosul), south-eastern Turkey, Syria, and Lebanon, then, it was believed by the British, Russia could be held at bay. Throughout the talks the Russians were an assenting partner and therefore they were granted their own concessions of Istanbul and the Dardanelles, so that when the negotiations were concluded and the draft agreement approved by the Foreign Office on 4 February 1916, the Sykes-Picot Note – known officially as the Asia Minor Agreement – was effectively a tripartite pact. For Britain, Sykes's work had yielded much of Palestine, Jordan, and southern Mesopotamia. Although the lines were drawn in secret they would later be exposed in the glare of revolutionary light in the autumn of 1917 when the new Bolshevik government in Russia first discovered, and then published the agreement as a way to embarrass the Western powers who were unified in their opposition to its Marxist-inspired success. In conjunction with the Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917, which announced the British government's support of the establishment of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine, Sykes-Picot was seen by the Arabs as a betrayal of their cooperation – engendered in considerable measure by the inspiring words and actions of Lawrence – in battling the Turks. The Turks themselves, meanwhile, used it as a provocation which stiffened their waning resistance against the Anglo-French enemy, if only for a short time.¹⁶³

Kitchener's death in June of 1916 of course precluded his witnessing either the immediate outcome of Sykes-Picot, or any of its longer-term implications. As for ‘betraying’ the nationalist aspirations of the Arabs by privileging Anglo-French war aims, Kitchener – had he lived – doubtless would have seen British regional security as of preeminent importance to any such agreement. Accordingly, promises made to Arab leaders, principally Sharif Hussein of Mecca, about the potential for post-war statehood would have been conditional upon both events and further negotiations.¹⁶⁴ As for the principal author of the agreement, Sykes himself, he did not survive long enough to see the impact of his controversial diplomatic handiwork, succumbing to the Spanish Flu in February 1919 while in Paris attending the peace conference. He was just 39 years of age at the time of his death.

More important to Kitchener, of course, even than the destruction of the Ottoman Empire and its implications for the post-war map of the Middle East, however, was Britain's wartime relationship with Imperial Russia. By the middle of 1915 the Eastern Front had become a fast-collapsing house of cards with the Russians in full, if not panicked, retreat in the face of the relentless onslaught of the Austro-Germans. Their desperation was symbolized on 5 September of that year when Tsar Nicholas took command of the Russian Army by relieving the incumbent, his uncle, the Grand Duke Nicholas, of his position at its head, an event not welcomed by Kitchener among many others.¹⁶⁵ Fortunately for the Russians the approaching winter proved once again to be their ally and early that autumn the German commander, General Falkenhayn, called a halt to the season's campaign. The immediate result was a fair degree of stability along the over 500-mile- long Eastern Front, and for the Germans, no chance of an impending Napoleon-like debacle in the face of the hard Russian winter.

All through this period Kitchener, as he had always done, kept a close eye on events in Russia. As the eastern counterweight to the Western Front, Russian success in the war continued as a key strategic plank for him and that meant helping to ensure that all manner of available war materiel was sent there. British, American, and Canadian factories were at almost full capacity producing for British needs alone, however, and this meant that Russia could only ever expect marginal assistance from Britain itself.¹⁶⁶ Still, by the spring of 1916 the British had been able to extend war credits to Russia of just over L100-million, with little hope of re-payment.¹⁶⁷ Fears of a rejuvenated German campaign along the Eastern Front arrived with the new fighting season, and along with Russia's perpetual shortage of munitions, its ongoing financial crisis, and the unclear strategic aims of its High Command, the Stavka, the War Council discussed the idea that a special mission to Russia should be undertaken as a means to more closely discern the prevailing situation of its embattled ally. At the beginning of May, therefore, Reginald McKenna, Lloyd George's successor as Chancellor of the Exchequer, nominated Kitchener for the task. McKenna, long in sympathy with Lloyd George, despised Kitchener every bit as much as the voluble Welshman and his action in this regard may have carried with it yet another attempt to remove Kitchener from the heart of the conduct of the war. Still, the prospect of the mission and being able to speak directly to the Stavka about all aspects of the Russian war effort was highly enticing to Kitchener, and thus regardless of the prevailing circumstances he was keen to go. Within two weeks of the War Council's consideration of the mission the Russians – having easily discovered the Cabinet's deliberations in this regard from their network of London informants – made plain that they were equally keen to have him visit. Indeed, on 14 May Kitchener duly received a formal invitation from the Tsar to visit Russia, via the King's Private Secretary, Lord Stamfordham.¹⁶⁸ Effectively, the mission was on.

Events now moved very quickly. The Cabinet met quickly to consider the Tsar's invitation, the refusal of which was never really an option. For a time it was thought that Lloyd George might accompany Kitchener in order to deal directly with Russia's requests for munitions. But just then the Easter Rising in Dublin and the subsequent (short-lived) Irish rebellion were preoccupying the government, and Asquith had tapped Lloyd George to work as his Chief Secretary for Ireland in order to resolve the crisis.¹⁶⁹ ‘It is a unique opportunity’, the Prime Minister wrote flatteringly to Lloyd George, ‘and there is no-one else who could do so much to bring about a permanent solution’.¹⁷⁰ On 26 May, therefore, the Cabinet duly approved of what would now be Kitchener's solo mission to Russia.¹⁷¹ Naturally, Kitchener was happy to be going alone and without the otherwise occupied Lloyd George, and immediately requested that the Admiralty arrange his journey, which was to commence within two weeks. What would prove shortly to be Kitchener's last days of life, were now at hand.