10

A Watery Grave and a Contested Reputation: 1916 and Beyond

As May 1916 came to an end Kitchener anticipated keenly his rapidly approaching secret mission to Russia. ‘Nothing would give me greater pleasure’, he had written to the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Sazanov – who was shortly to be deposed through the machinations of an increasingly desperate Tsarina Alexandra – two weeks earlier.¹ For some in Parliament, Kitchener could not go to Russia soon enough, however. The criticisms and general dyspepsia concerning his handling of the war continued unabated amongst the usual cabal of ministers and MPs. On 31 May, one of the latter, Sir Ivor Herbert, a career soldier who had been General Officer Commanding of the Militia of Canada and would be raised to the peerage as Baron Treowen in the following year, rose in the Commons to move that Kitchener's salary be reduced by L100. Though a political non-entity himself, Herbert's symbolically-weighted motion signalled an attempt by his more powerful allies, such as Lloyd George, to have Kitchener formally censured for his conduct of the war. As their cypher Herbert duly uttered the usual calumnies about the Secretary of War having acted the martinet by holding the direction of the war in an ‘iron grasp’, and that he had conducted the British effort as if he were both blind and stupid, particularly over the issue of compulsory service.² But if Herbert's feeble moment of occupying the attentions of the House amounted to what a later generation would call his ‘15 minutes of fame’, then it was overshadowed quickly by the Prime Minister's powerful and eloquent defence of his terminally embattled minister.

Asquith had been aware that an attempt to censure Kitchener in Parliament was coming. ‘He's going to be abused in the House tomorrow’, he told Lady Kathleen Scott, wife of the late Antarctic explorer and one of his regular female conversation partners, on the evening of 30 May. ‘I suppose I must defend him’, she records him as remarking wearily.³ But Asquith was anything but resigned and weary when he rose from his place on the government's front bench the following day and struck back hard at those who would not rest in their campaign to destroy the reputation of his Secretary of War and, by extension, his own government. ‘The army’, he declared, ‘the country and the Empire are under a debt which cannot be measured in words for the services Lord Kitchener has rendered since the beginning of the war’.⁴ Asquith carried on in the same vein for a few minutes, and then was ably assisted by the similar words of Sir Mark Sykes and others. Having effectively quashed the verbal uprising in this way, it then fell to the diminutive H.J. (Jack) Tennant, Kitchener's long-time friend, Under-Secretary, and Margot Asquith's younger brother, to offer up a surprise to the House by informing it that Kitchener would be happy to discuss his conduct of the war, in-person, with any MPs who cared to come to the War Office two days hence.⁵

Just before noon on the morning of 2 June, therefore, a confident-looking Kitchener strode into a Parliamentary committee room – the event had to be changed from the War Office because over 200 MPs were keen to attend – adjusted his spectacles, and with unusual eloquence declaimed on his own record and that of the War Office generally over the course of the previous two years of unprecedented-in-scope European armed conflict. The session proved an overwhelming triumph for him. Sitting beside Kitchener throughout the meeting was General Robertson, in confirmation of their genuine partnership. Like Gladstone, who was known to be humourless (in public), Kitchener pricked the balloon of his own reputation for over-seriousness by commenting wryly on his lack of ability as a ‘ready debater’, and on his weak facility with the ‘various twists and turns of argument’.⁶ But none of that need preclude, he maintained, an honest assessment of the ‘colossal task’ of a war that continued to be marked by ‘great and terrible’ battle casualties. Despite Lloyd George's serial disloyalty that would extend of course to the writing of his highly critical war memoirs in the 1930s, Kitchener complimented him on his ‘loyal co-operation’ as Minister of Munitions.⁷ He then went on to parry one of Herbert's pointed criticisms of two days earlier that the manpower crisis in the soldiers' ranks could have been staved off by initiating compulsory service at the outset of the war, by stating sensibly that ‘the question of a social change involving the whole country, and running counter to most ancient traditions of the British people’, was best left for the Cabinet to decide and not to a mere department of government. And in due course when the Cabinet did decide, the decision to implement conscription ‘came at the right time and in the right way as a military necessity and for no other reason’.⁸ Altogether, Kitchener gave a bravura performance to the assembled MPs that afternoon. Invariably, not all of those present were impressed, however. The Canadian-born Andrew Bonar Law, then Colonial Secretary but who would later serve briefly as prime minister, had earlier remarked churlishly to Asquith that his chief's rousing speech defending Kitchener in the House would ‘make it harder than ever to get rid of him’.⁹ The Secretary of War's polished remarks and ready handling of the MPs' questions that followed confirmed Law in his opinion, especially when the two-hour long meeting in the packed committee room ended with loud cheers and sustained applause. As Kitchener's unbeknownst last Parliamentary moment the 2 June meeting was a personal high-water mark for him as a member of Asquith's government, and after all the long months of harsh and mostly unfounded criticism from both within and without Westminster, and the concomitant attempts to unseat him, he returned home to York House later that afternoon ‘under an unmistakable glow of satisfaction’.¹⁰

A little later that day at 5:45 p.m. Kitchener had an audience of the King at Buckingham Palace, during which he said his good-byes in anticipation of the imminent Russian trip, and then afterwards proceeded on to Downing Street to do the same thing with the Prime Minister.¹¹ Asquith later remembered that evening's long conversation with Kitchener as being marked by ‘high spirits’ and humour about the successful ‘passages of arms’ earlier that day with hitherto hostile MPs.¹² Margot Asquith remembered her last encounter with Kitchener in much the same way too, later recording (somewhat melodramatically) that while on his way out ‘I looked at his tall, distinguished figure and vigorous face, and taking both hands in mine, bade him God-speed’.¹³

The following morning, Saturday, 3 June, Kitchener went for a penultimate few hours to the War Office and then in the afternoon accompanied by his nephew and heir, Toby, and by his longtime aide, Colonel Oswald FitzGerald, with both of whom he had shared the memorable African tour of 1911, drove down to Broome Park for a hasty weekend visit in anticipation now of departing for Russia the next day. Broome was just about ready for permanent occupancy and Kitchener planned on moving into it on at least a part-time basis soon after his return from Russia, three weeks hence, and then permanently at war's end, whenever that would be. The next day attendance at the early service of Holy Communion at Barham church was followed by a return to London and a brief stop at the War Office. That evening he and his party of some ten others went to King's Cross station to board a special carriage attached to the night train to Scotland. By late the next morning, Monday, 5 June, the Kitchener party had arrived at Thurso via Edinburgh, there to board HMS Oak for the short journey across Pentland Firth to the Royal Navy base at Scapa Flow.¹⁴

Met at Scapa by Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, Commander in Chief of the Grand Fleet – who just a few days earlier had conducted the protractedly victorious Battle of Jutland against the German Navy in the North Sea – Kitchener went aboard his flagship, HMS Iron Duke, where lunch was served and a tour of the vast dreadnought battleship was undertaken. By mid-afternoon, final preparations were complete for Kitchener's departure for Archangel and at 4 o'clock he boarded the nearly 11,000-ton cruiser HMS Hampshire, which had been designated for the purpose. Heavy weather prevailed, however, which was encountered directly upon departure at 4:45. An hour later and fighting gale-force winds, two destroyers, HMS Unity and HMS Victor, converged to accompany the Hampshire, but a short time later in worsening weather and unable to keep up with the much faster cruiser (it was capable of making 22 knots) they were sent back to base, leaving the larger ship alone as it journeyed northwards along the west side of Orkney's Mainland Island. Unbeknownst to Jellicoe, or to the captain of the Hampshire, H.J. Savill, a German U-Boat submarine, U-75, had been active in the area laying mines just a week earlier. After three hours of hard sailing the U-Boat's field of 22 mines was entered and at 7:45 the Hampshire tripped one of them, blowing an enormous hole in the hull of the ship between the bow and the bridge and causing it to heel sharply to starboard. The explosion cut the ship's electrical power immediately, plunging its interior into an inky darkness. Desperate men poured immediately from their stations and out of the mess and congregated on the main deck. Kitchener, who had been given Captain Savill's cabin to use, emerged quickly from it to stand and survey the harrowing scene from the quarterdeck. There was also a report of him having been seen in the Gunroom right after the explosion, possibly on his way from the cabin.¹⁵

Recognizing immediately that the Hampshire was going down, Captain Savill gave the order to abandon ship. However, in the gale-force winds and crashing waves the lifeboats could not be properly deployed, bouncing around like so many corks and smashing up against the sides of the nearly 500-foot-long ship. Savill urged Kitchener to try to get into one of them nonetheless, but his directive seems to have gone unheard amidst the noise of the storm and that of the creaking ship; or perhaps it was ignored. Either way, Kitchener remained on the quarterdeck until the end. About 8:00 p.m. the rapidly sinking ship pitched forward, nearly somersaulting, and sank swiftly out of sight in some 200 feet of water before coming to rest upside down on the seabed, where it lies still, just one and a half miles from shore and near to the promontory of Marwick Head. The loss of men was almost complete: there were only 12 survivors out of a crew of about 650. Kitchener (and all members of his party, including the faithful FitzGerald) went down with the ship, his body disappearing into the depths from which attempts at recovery were fruitless.¹⁶ He died just a few weeks short of his 66th birthday.¹⁷

News of the sinking of the Hampshire, and the assumed death by drowning of Kitchener, was made public around 12 noon on the following day, 6 June. The country was stunned by the report, no less than the government. Having just seen his Secretary of War a few days earlier at Downing Street Asquith especially shared the shock, but found it to be poignant, as he told Margot, that Kitchener ‘had died at the height of his fame, and at the happiest moment of his life’.¹⁸ Later, a retrospective Asquith would write that he believed that if Kitchener's secret journey to Russia had succeeded it just ‘might have deflected the subsequent course of history’.¹⁹ His claim is much too great here, however, and strays firmly into the terrain of counter-factual history, especially as it pertains to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917; what is certain, though, is that Kitchener's wholly unexpected death presented Asquith with the significant problem of who should replace him at the War Office, as well as how to reassure both the country and its allies that the British prosecution of the war would not suffer without the commanding figure of the great warrior Kitchener at the helm.

From 6 June until a memorial service was held nine days later on the 15th at St Paul's Cathedral in London public outpourings of grief over the fact and manner of Kitchener's death were acute and country wide. ‘HE IS DEAD’, shouted the Daily Graphic in London on 7 June, in a cryptically powerful headline that mirrored that of many others.²⁰ His closest senior military colleagues, Generals Robertson and Haig, expressed similar shock and grief. ‘How shall we get on without him?’ the former asked.²¹ Churchill melodramatically quoted Tacitus: ‘Fortunate was he in the hour of his death’, but nevertheless was clearly shaken by the news first heard when shouted by a newsboy in the street outside his home in Kensington.²² Curzon, conversely and true to form, could summon no grace in the hour of his old colleague's passing. ‘The papers and the public have got hold of the wrong end of the stick about K,’ he wrote to his Cabinet ally, Lord Lansdowne. ‘Genius for organisation’, ‘wonderful foresight’ – alas, as we know only too well, the very things he had not got. His death came in a most fortunate hour for his reputation. For he will now always be a national hero'.²³

Curzon's ungracious tone would be matched by that of others. Raymond Asquith, for example, then fighting on the Western Front, wrote to his wife on 9 June complaining that ‘an intolerable thing has happened’ recently, ‘much more deeply felt by the troops than Kitchener's death – leave has been reduced to 6 days or some say to 5’. Again in the same vein a few days later, he criticized his sister Violet (‘Visey’) and step-mother Margot for making such ‘a fuss about Lord K. As if it mattered these old men being killed’. And then to complete the rather heartless triptych of missives, although with a smile at the end, he wrote on 13 June that ‘I share your feelings about the badness of being drowned as compared with being shot, but can't help still suspecting that Kitchener will stroll into the House of Lords combing the seaweed out of his hair as strong and silent as ever’.²⁴

The memorial service at St Paul's for Kitchener which took place two days later was small by national standards, although perhaps the fact that other such services were held at various locations along the Western Front at exactly the same time made its impact widely felt all the same. The King and Queen, along with the Prime Minister and Cabinet were in attendance. Various military worthies were there also, of course, although understandably their number did not include Haig, who remained on operational duty in France, and Robertson, likewise then at St Omer. Toby, raised now to the peerage as Viscount Broome, headed the Kitchener family delegation. ‘Abide with Me’ was sung – as it had been so emotionally in Gordon's honour at his belated memorial service in Khartoum in 1898 – and the Book of Common Prayer's funeral sentences were read. Handel's baroquely solemn ‘Dead March in Saul’ was played (as it would be at Churchill's state funeral almost half-a-century later).²⁵ Kitchener had passed from the scene less than a month before the Somme Offensive would commence, no bad thing in light of its unprecedented charnel house impact on the war. Swiftly, in little more than a week, Kitchener had become a part of history, dying in Arthur Balfour's eulogizing words: ‘as he lived, in work which he was doing for his country’.²⁶

But if Kitchener's physical presence had been removed from the heart of Britain's wartime trials his career-long impact and reputation would prove to be a source of much debate and partisanship both then and for years to come; indeed, even now a century later, Kitchener's life and work – especially that as Secretary of War – can stir not just many historians and biographers to fierce disagreement, but also leading journalists too – most notably recently, for example, Jeremy Paxman.²⁷ The ‘fight for Kitchener’, as it were, commenced almost as soon as his memorial service came to an end, sparked by the Dardanelles Commission, which the government announced in July 1916 and would report three years later. Wrapped up in such considerations, as well as much else as we shall see, was a struggle for reputation, for either blame or exculpation, for the meaning of ‘hero’; indeed, for the nature and impact of the legacy not only of Kitchener himself but of Britain as the world's leading imperial power of the day and what that meant then, and what it continues to mean now, for those parts of the globe over which the ‘Lion Rampant’ once held sway.

In the days and weeks following Kitchener's death encomiums and memorials were published regularly. ‘In that waste of seas’, wrote G.K. Chesterton soaringly, ‘beyond the last northern islets where his ship went down, one might fancy his spirit standing, a figure frustrated yet prophetic and pointing to the East; whence is the light of the world and the reunion of Christian men’.²⁸ A thick volume of remembrance was published quickly, The Lord Kitchener Memorial Book, which contained numerous testimonials, photographs, and illustrations, all in praise of the fallen warrior, though none so theologically fulsome as that offered by Chesterton.²⁹ In addition to the memorial services in London and at the Front, services of remembrance were held in the capitals of empire – 12,000 people gathered in front of the recently completed Union Buildings in Pretoria, for example, to honour Kitchener's memory – and letters and cards of condolence poured into the War and Colonial Offices. ‘Truly Canada's admiration, appreciation and love for Kitchener’, gushed a woman from Toronto, ‘has been a wonderful revelation to me. If ever a man died heroic and glorious to thousands, nay I might say millions of human beings, it was Kitchener’.³⁰

The timing and manner of Kitchener's death, together with his long military and proconsular record, had admitted him immediately to the pantheon of British heroes, about which few in wartime Britain dared then dispute (at least publicly). Indeed, the normative understanding of Kitchener as a hero prevailed for the first decade after his death until the so-called ‘Kitchener Hoax’ broke in 1926 in which a muck-raking journalist who went by the name of Frank Power (his real name was Arthur Freeman) scandalized the country by claiming (falsely) that he had found Kitchener's body buried in an unmarked grave in Norway. In retrospect, this tawdry episode can be pointed to as initiating a long period of contestation and conspiracy (unfounded and ridiculous) over whether or not Kitchener had in fact died when the Hampshire went down, and if not, was he now living secretly abroad somewhere, particularly in the USSR.³¹

The only thing that can be said in praise of the debate that Power began so shoddily is that the ‘Kitchener Hoax’ led gradually to a reappraisal of Kitchener's reputation, and therefore later to a close examination and evaluation of the meaning of hero, at least as the term had been attached to him personally. Prototypically in modern English letters, hero and heroism had been defined by Thomas Carlyle in 1840 in On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic In History.³² Essentially, Carlyle offered a ‘Great Man’ thesis into which a later heroic figure such as Kitchener fit well, if not seamlessly. Certainly, for someone such as Chesterton, as suggested above, Kitchener's heroism lay in his being an agent of the ‘divine will’. In offering this interpretation Chesterton was clearly following closely Carlyle's own prescription for what constituted the hero and heroic behaviour. For most, (although not all) in post-modern society, employing the divine in such a prescription for the heroic of course no longer holds sway; nonetheless, what does remain strongly today is a public desire for identifying and aggrandizing heroes. In this respect our digitized and atomized Western society of 2016 is no different than that of a century ago. Where the two societies do differ in this regard, however, is in the definition and content given to heroes and the heroic, and here the recent work of Max Jones is illuminating. Jones proposes that in seeking to assess heroes of past eras contemporarily, neither aggrandizement nor derision should prevail, but instead what must guide today's scholars (and others) in this pursuit is ‘locating heroic reputations in historical context, and analyzing heroes as sites within which we can find evidence of the cultural beliefs, social practices, political structures and economic systems of the past’.³³ Apart from Jones's oversight in neglecting to include the impact of religious beliefs on a given society as an important feature of this prescription, he is surely right. Indeed, in the example of Kitchener such had been tried already (in part) a few years prior to the publication of Jones's work by Keith Surridge.³⁴

Taking his cue from the cutting remark misattributed to Margot Asquith (in fact, it was uttered by her daughter, Elizabeth Bibesco) that Kitchener ‘was not a great man, but at least he was a great poster’, Surridge probes Kitchener as the embodiment of the British military hero, but uniquely so for the age in which he lived.³⁵ Borrowing from the work of John Mackenzie, Surridge suggests that it was as an ‘imperial hero’ in a new, highly internationally competitive (especially with Germany) and therefore uncertain era that Kitchener resonated deeply with the British public, as Charles Gordon, the hero of Khartoum, had done before him, and as Henry Havelock, of Indian Mutiny fame, had done earlier still.³⁶ In a carefully reasoned and explicated argument Surridge (rightly) concludes that in the late-Victorian and Edwardian age Kitchener was able to fuse together the older traditions of British (Nelsonian) military heroism with the newer strain of chivalrous imperialism – the Victorian moral uplift idea in action – to create a heroic persona. Indeed, as far as Surridge is concerned, in this way Kitchener became ‘the last of the heroic titans’.³⁷ Or did he?

None of this is to say that in his day Kitchener was roundly venerated by all of his contemporaries. Of course, as we have seen earlier, he had many critics and even enemies who viewed his ascension to the pantheon of the heroic as little more than the predictable expression of the low and vulgar tastes inherent in an increasingly mass society. Some of Kitchener's peers had long spoken in critical terms of his Irish birth, his eccentrically severe father, and his own taciturn nature. Later it was his ‘Orientalism’, acquired by having lived for so many years in the East and used pejoratively to suggest that his ‘habits of thought and methods of action … astonished and baffled both his colleagues and subordinates’; or his personal ‘cruelty’; or his ‘mechanistic’ battlefield ways that blotted the Kitchener ledger, all of which evidently fatally hindered a man who might otherwise have attained true greatness and real heroism.³⁸ Most of these latter criticisms especially, however, can be put over to the petty jealousies and score-settling of Kitchener's contemporaries (namely Lloyd George and Churchill) who, with him long in his watery grave, believed themselves free to contrast their own apparent moral and political rectitude with what they argued was lacking in their erstwhile nemesis.

Today however, a century after Kitchener's death, his long career record can be looked at much more dispassionately. If, as Colin Matthew observes, the Victorian era is near to our own chronologically but is not close to ours in just about every other way: ‘We live with its consequences, but we do not live with it itself’, then we need not expend too much psychic energy on categorizing Kitchener as the last of the era's ‘heroic titans’.³⁹ Is he therefore something else? Is he an anti-hero, a typology developed most clearly during the Western cultural ferment of the 1960s? Is he, as has been suggested recently, an ‘anachronistic’ hero, belonging to a Victorian and Edwardian age that celebrated empire, (racial) domination, and militarism in ways that now are at least officially condemned by the West?⁴⁰ Or can Kitchener be seen properly in some other perspective now at the beginning of the twenty-first century that does not consign him merely to the margins as a type representative of an all-too-unfortunate age from which the West has at long-last graduated?

Given that empire-building, the desire to conquer and control, to spread what are considered to be the gifts of light and learning and commerce and good government (or even democracy) are as prevalent today in the world as they have ever been, it seems to me a highly restrictive exercise to attempt to limit Kitchener to simply having been a tribune of his age. He was surely that, yes, but he was not only that. Nor, as this biography has attempted to elaborate, was he an unfathomable enigma, as has sometimes been maintained.⁴¹

The particularities of Kitchener's persona, the age in which he lived, and the nature of the tasks that the British government called upon him to undertake were all understood by society at the time, and the tools of the historian's trade have made such things even clearer since. But the essence of what Kitchener stood for speaks most persuasively to that which has long been archetypically heroic; that is, saving the nation (and, in his case, the Empire) from peril. Whether that meant in Sudan; in South Africa; in India; or in terrestrial Britain itself, the task that fell regularly to Kitchener for the final 20 years of his life was this one, which helps to explain why he generated such immense popularity amongst ordinary Britons, as well as around the Empire, and why especially when World War I rapidly became an unprecedented cataclysm he was seen by his fellow countrymen and –women as their best (and indeed only) hope for victory.

Far from being simply ‘the last of the heroic titans’, as was suggested earlier, Kitchener rather in many ways became the model for the modern (British) national hero, a type that would be embodied again by Churchill a generation later during the even darker days that came with the Battle of Britain in 1940. In both cases neither man ever expressed any doubts or misgivings about the task at hand. For Kitchener, he was singularly untroubled by the arguments of early twentieth-century critics of empire, especially, as suggested elsewhere, those of J.A. Hobson. His critique of the war in South Africa formed a significant part of the conflict's intellectual backdrop but, as we saw, it made no discernible impact on Kitchener's thinking. For Churchill, much more famously of course, it meant his rejection of the British government's prevailing policy of appeasement throughout the 1930s. In this way Kitchener indeed was not anti-heroic – at least not until the post-colonial era – nor simply anachronistically heroic, but rather, it may be argued, he remained traditionally heroic until after World War II. In Kitchener, the British had found a hero who gave corporeal form to what was most required at a given historical moment, regardless of those features of his character, or indeed some of his actions, which might otherwise have repelled them. Just as Nelson's well-known adultery and cruel treatment of his first wife Fanny scandalized many of his contemporaries, his (posthumous) claim as the saving hero – he of the Immortal Memory – whose virtues extended beyond time-bound circumstance became virtually incontestable in Britain. So likewise, to some extent at least, Kitchener. If he had lived and had continued in office as Secretary of War he would have found himself standing over a weary, traumatized, but ultimately victorious Britain in 1918 and therefore it is almost certain that his status as a national hero would not have come under the severe scrutiny that it later did, if only because he would have been physically present to parry the attacks of those who wished to blame him (alone) for the conduct of an exceptionally brutal war fought unavoidably and mainly in the trenches.

The reality of the last years of Kitchener's life was that he – as well as everyone else in both high military command and prominent political office in Britain – was in thrall to a new kind of warfare from which neither he nor they could break free, and over which they had little control. ‘The belief,’ observes Keith Neilson rightly, ‘that Britain was somehow capable of making military moves which would prove decisive simply was not true’.⁴² And here was the rub. In the midst of this cruel wartime conundrum stood the commanding figure of Kitchener, the victor over all the other major British (imperial) military challenges of the preceding 20 years but faced now with the biggest problem yet in military history and – like everyone else – unable to see with clarity through the darkness to its solution, if one even existed. The accretions of heroism accorded him through long imperial service had made him the obvious choice to marshal Britain's war effort from the start. Kitchener wisely, if unpopularly, told the Cabinet and the country in 1914 that the war would be a long one and that Britain would not be fully ready to fight it successfully for three years. In the meantime, he maintained the integrity of the Entente with France, as well as with a habitually shaky and ultimately disastrous Russia for the first two years of the war. He tried to keep the focus of the struggle on the Western Front and away from ‘sideshows’ such as the Dardanelles; he incorporated rather smoothly the substantial contributions of manpower and materiel from the Dominions and India; and gradually built up the men and munitions of the British Army until it was in a position to take on and finally defeat the Germans and their allies, together which constituted the greatest land-based armed force the world had ever seen.

Endorsements of Kitchener's historical record such as the one offered by Harold Temperley, Professor of Modern History at Cambridge in the 1930s, that during World War I Kitchener was ‘the whole Empire's shield in Armageddon’ now come across as badly dated in tone and overly effusive in reach. Chesterton's words of praise, as noted above, now read as similarly anachronistic. Still, as we have seen, the pivotal role Kitchener played both during World War I and for years earlier in maintaining Britain's world position cannot be gainsaid either easily or persuasively.⁴³ Perhaps therefore, now a century after his death, it is finally time to agree that Kitchener's achievements over the course of his long service to the British imperial state and culminating in World War I do indeed constitute a form of enduring heroism. However re-defined or deconstructed the term hero has become today, Kitchener's version of it lived out over almost four decades from the 1880s until his death in 1916 is recognizable in its own time and place. Acknowledging this fact helps therefore to point the way to a fuller and more nuanced understanding of the man both then – as a hero in a world dominated by empire – and now, as an anti-hero in a world defined by empire's anathema.