KITCHENER AS ORGANISER.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20901, 17 June 1931, Page 8

KITCHENER AS ORGANISER.

The conclusion that Kitchener's capacity for disorganising was beyond exaggeration is presented by Sir John Fortescue, the historian of the British Army, in an article in Blackwood's Magazine. ''Kitchener's idea of organisation," he writes, "was rather a spasmodic upheaval to meet an immediate exigency. . By 1916 it had, apparently, begun to dawn upon him that other people besides himself had possessed knowledge and brains equal to his own, and he became less Olympian and more open to counsel. The fact did him cx - edit, but it was a thousand pities that he made tho discovery no earlier." While paying tribuCe 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 the Dardanelles and tho 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, ho 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 tho Serpentine. . . . Never since tho Crimean War had a military expedition been despatched in so haphazard a fashion." Ho adds that "Kitchener was far better as a civil administrator than as a military chief, and probably better as a diplomatist even than as a civil administrator." If he had lived he might have played the same moderating role in tho peace negotiations that Wellington had done a century earlier, and as he himself had done in South Africa,.