Kitchener
John Pollock
598pp, Constable, £20
Buy it at a discount at BOL
Horatio Kitchener was brutal and sensitive, shy and domineering; ferociously unforgiving in battle, but acquisitive of porcelain to the point of kleptomania. He was a tower of masculinity, the Empire's hard man, but his letters show him sidling up to matriarchal women to be stroked, at which he would purr with deep satisfaction.
The new part of this biography covers his life from 1902-1916 and is issued with a reprint of John Pollock's book on Kitchener's earlier life, in which he reconquered Sudan with overwhelming fire-power and laid waste to South Africa with a scorched-earth and concentration-camp policy. It was in an appendix to this first book that Pollock dealt with the controversial subject of Kitchener's sexuality, declaring him not to have been homosexual and rejecting the (more probable) explanation that he had homosexual inclinations but chose to be celibate.
Kitchener was a man built on a heroic scale, with immense powers of determination and self-control; but big people have big faults, and he was always in the thrall of petty jealousies and doubts. Occasionally his beloved young aide, Frank "the brat" Maxwell - Patroclus to his Achilles - would correct him with remarks such as "it seems such a pity that a big man like he is should make an idiot of himself".
The hero's reward for his African victories was to become Jang I Lat Sahib , Lord of War in India. Yet the position had a small flaw: his power was not absolute, but constrained by the constitutional check of a "Military Member" of the Viceroy's council. Kitchener determined his task in India would be to reorganise the army to accumulate all authority under himself.
He was "a molten mass of devouring energy", according to Lord Curzon, the Viceroy, whose thankless task it was to rein in his ferocious subordinate. They were two arrogant, powerful men, both supremely gifted and both twisted out of shape by abusive childhoods. While Curzon showed him every courtesy, Kitchener treated his willingness to compromise as weakness. He would "outmanoeuvre the enemy or leave the field", according to Pollock - his approach to any obstacle in his path, whether military, social or political.
Kitchener despised politics and open argument but took a feline pleasure in conspiracy, dripping poison in unattributable briefings to people close to the prime minister, with the warning to be "careful that nothing comes from me and that my name is never used". Finally he got his way by threatening to resign. Curzon found this bad form, and Kitchener helpfully sug gested that he square the scales by "throwing in your own resignation as a counterbalance". Of course, it was Curzon who went, his brilliant career in tatters. Kitchener went on to set up an over-centralised administration which failed at its first test, the disastrous Mesopotamian campaign of 1915, where the Indian Army was doomed by the inefficiency of his system. He lived to see the disaster, but not the royal commission which condemned his reorganisation as the cause of it.
Kitchener's great service to his country took place in the initial weeks of the first world war, most importantly in his understanding of the nature of the conflict and his statement to the stunned war council that, contrary to common belief, the war would not be over in six weeks: it would last three years and to wage it he needed a million-man army. Always at his best as a field commander, he crossed the Channel when British leadership in France was weakening, to order his army not to make a run for it when the going looked bad.
After September 1914, however, it was downhill all the way. He believed that the day-by-day plans for an industrialised nation's war machine could be kept in his head, and his colleagues viewed his utter failure to manage the power he had accrued to himself with deepening horror. When he died in 1916, his ship hitting a mine in the North Sea, amid the grief of the nation a small sigh of relief went up in Whitehall: the lumbering behemoth would impede them no longer. Yet he was a big man in every sense, and deserves at least this one big, sympathetic biography.
