KITCHENER AS ORGANISER

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXIV, 4 July 1931, Page 2

KITCHENER AS ORGANISER

J HISTORIAN’S CRITICISM i ’ Tlie conclusion that Kitchener’s capa- ' c ‘ty for disorganising was beyond ex- '■! aggeration is presented by Sir John j Fortescue, the historian of the British I Army, in an article in “Blackwood’s . Magazine.” “Kitchener’s idea of organ- ■ isation,” he writes, “was rather a spasmodic upheaval to meet an immediate ; exigency. ... By 1916 it had, appar- ; ently, begun to dawn upon him that ! j other people besides himself bad possessed knowledge and brains equal to his own, and he became less Olympian and more open to counsel. The fact did him credit, but it was a thousand pities that he made the discovery no earlier.” While paying tribute to Lord Kitchener’s flashes of vision, Sir John Fortescue holds that his careless disregard for preparation and organisation lay at the root of both tlie Dardanelles and the Mesopotamia failures. “It sounds incredible, but it is a fact that Kitchener ordered the 29th Division to embark without its first line transport They would not want it, lie said, for they would only have to march across the peninsula; and actually the Director of Supplies and Transport was obliged to point out to him that a battalion encamped in Hyde Park would require transport to fetch water from the Serpentine. . . . Never since tlie Crimean War had a military expedition been, despatched in so haphazard a fashion.” He adds that “Kitchener was far ; better as a civil administrator than as I a military chief, and probably better as I a. diplomatist even than as a civil administrator.” If he had lived, he might have played the same moderating role in the peace negotiations that Wellington had done a century earlier, and as he himself had done in South Africa.