KITCHENER AT HOME

Otago Daily Times, Issue 16537, 10 November 1915, Page 8

KITCHENER AT HOME

AN AMERICAN'S VIEW

It is 5 or 6 o'clock when (says Colliers' Weekly) Kitchener leaves his office to go to York House, where he lives. The King gave him York House as a residence early in the war. "This is no pretentious palace, but a quiet old building tucked away facing a court isolated from the noise of the city. By this time he is pretty tired. He rests a while—that is, he nas a recess from having to impart dynamic force to subordinates. He reads the newspapers. That does not take him long; but, though his eye seems only to run up and down the columns, it is surprising how little he misses, as the press censorship well knows. Then lie goes through reports on important subjects which he must master thoroughly in order to shape a policy— in order to tell others exactly what they must do. And he writes personal letters in his own firm hand—very brief letters. He'takes little exercise. Ho very rarely dines out. Fitzgerald—that military secretary whose name England hardly knows —has a desk in a room adjoining his at York House. Despatch boxes filled with more telegrams arrive before and after dinner, and the secretary sifts them and takes in to his chief those which he thinks his chief will want to see—up to II o'clock, which is .bedtime for Lord Kitchener, if not for the secretary: Thereafter Kitchener is not to be disturbed, though Premzyl fall again. His mind closes to the war and the Empire; for his self-command includes the capacity to sleep at will. -Sleep «fe his real rest, his real holiday. At a quarter after 8 he comes down to breakfast, and at 9 he starts for his office. Such is the routine of his business day. On Saturday afternoons Fitzgerald tries—and succeeds when affairs will permit —to get Kitchener down to his country place. Some Cabinet Ministers usually take all of Saturday and Sunday, sometimes Friday, too. But Kitchener is always back at York House in the course of Sunday. Ho consents to go at »li only because he has another task on hand besides directing the martial forces of the British Empire. With that little fortune which the British Parliament gave him as a grant when he was made a peer, he is remodelling an old Jacobean house to suit his taste. You may be sure he knows exactly how he wants it remodelled, and looks after the details. So his rest from organising armies is another kind of organisation. Put him on a desert island, and he would immediately set about organising things. —He "Feels it in His Fingers."— Perhaps one reason why he has teen called a machine is that he has worked so hard - all his life that he does not know how. to play. As for vanity, no doubt be has it; that of a man of 65, not unmindful of his campaigns and honours and labours, confident in his own abilities; vain as men of 65 are in wanting to hold themselves up to the energy of youth. If he is inhuman, he does not seem so— rather very much of a comrade, when, instead of calling his secretary, he comes out of his room' to give Colonel Fitzgerald some directions. They say that he has broken men ruthlessly. Certainly he can be very impatient with inefficiency. If he finds that a subordinate does not want his work to interfere with his golf, that man may get a chance to play all the golf he wants to and to tell his friends at leisure about his wrongs. However, I could learn of no hard worker under him who had not got his reward: no hard worker who had to suffer the injustice of seeing some fellow with influence get the reward due to himself.

Like many other great leaders, Kitchener acts from intuition at times. This most masculine of figures to the British lias the quality most associated with woman. When all the reasons, all the arguments presented, ■ seem in favour of a certain thing, he will say, "I feel it in my fingers that it is wrong!" and he goes against all other judgments. "I feel it in my fingers!" He uses the 'phrase very often, with a quick nod of decision, and smiling, too. He has usually proved to be right, without, knowing exactly why himself. Psychologists would explain it by speaking of unconscious cerebration, or something like that, as the result of all the experience he had to go by in his long career. Human? If he weren't, why should his closest confidant be an unknown young officer whom he discovered at the Quetta Staff College? He must have some touch with humanity or he could not have advertised for recruits so successfully. He is so busy looking after millions of men that he has no time to be attentive to individuals. He is a man of many parts, even of moods, which accounts for the different impressions of him. It depends upon whom he meets. — Kitchener's Eyes.—

It is his eyes that 'hold attention—: clear, blue, compelling eyes, capable of many changes of expression, but always with command in them; and he ia supremely the one who knows how to command. Certainly he is a phenomenal man—the strong man incarnate.' If the world were full of Kitcheners, we should have no time to play; but when so few of. us go to the hospitals from overwork that sort of a driver may be pretty useful in a time of national emergency. WJien the news is bad his resolution seems adamant. If a stone wall were set across the staircase of the War Office one could imagine it breaking at his approach. The very look of the reassuring certainty of victory.

"As events have developed," said a Cabinet Minister who resents what ho calls Kitchener's arbitrariness, " we find that he and he alone had the great conaeption of how big the job was from the start. That alone was of incalculable service."