TWO GENERATIONS OF VITAL CHANGE

Evening Post, Volume CXXX, Issue 156, 30 December 1940, Page 6

TWO GENERATIONS OF VITAL CHANGE

Toasting Mr. Winston Churchill in the Khartoum (Sudan) fort where he stood forty-two years ago, a lieutenant in the 21st Lancers, soldiers of the Empire must have marvelled —as all the world marvels—a,t the changes that have occurred in world politics in a little less than two generations. The year 1898 saw the late Lord Kitchener's Nile campaign prove decisive at Khartoum (Omdurman), where the Mahdi^s forces were I destroyed; and there was a sequel in the same year at Fashoda, higher up the Nile, where Major Marchand's French force from the French Congo, after a vain attempt to assert French sovereignty on the Upper Nile, surrendered to Kitchener. A few years later came the Anglo-French Entente and the World War, won by the Allies, including France and Italy. People then used to say that Fashoda in 1898 marked "the last dying spark of Anglo-French animosity." People had come to look on the Anglo-French Entente as eternal, and little did they look forward to a day when France, failing to produce a second "Miracle of the Marne," should lie at Hitler's feet, and listen to his insistent whisper: "Make war on England!"

Italy, too, has undergone a political revolution. She has in Abyssinia an army that fights us for the very Sudan that Britain and France, in 1898, agreed not to fight about. Britain's obstacles on the Nile were, first, the Mahdi's dervishes. at whose hand General Gordon me! his death in the eighties; secondly, for a brief space, France; thirdly, Italy. If Hitler has his way, the French now will join the Italians in general war as well as in African war against the ally with whom they both triumphed in 1914-18. From and including 1898 r Mr. Churchill has figured in at least three British wars, Sudan campaign, Boer War, and the Great War. He was some time Minister and some time soldier in the Great War, being given a commission in France after he retired from the post of First Lord of the Admiralty in May, 1915; later he returned to the Ministry as Minister of Munitions. In 1898 he was not in the favour of Lord Kitchener, having previously figured more as a writer than as a soldier, and Kitchener endeavoured to prevent his coming to the Sudan campaign. Their first actual meeting Avas on the field of battle at Omdurman, when Lieutenant Churchill (21st Lancers) was sent back to report verbally to the C.-in-C. the position of the advancing dervish army. Later their estrangement was forgotten, and Mr. Churchill writes

gratefully of Lord Kitchener's friendly help in the War Cabinet of 1914-15. Winston Churchill is one of the few links with the army of last century still in harness; and it is no wonder that, as Prime Minister, he was the subject of the special Christmas toast of the soldiers at Khartoum. His kaleidoscopic career, as soldier, statesman, and man of letters, is without precedent.