LORD KITCHENER

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 74, Issue 142, 18 June 1931, Page 7

LORD KITCHENER

A STRONG INDICTMENT. HISTORIAN’S ATTITUDE. LONDON, May 1. Sir John Fortescue, tho famous historian of the British Army, in. “Blackwood’s Magazine” for May, contributes a remarkable indictment of Lord Kitchener, whom he describes as a man whose capacity for disorganising was beyond exaggeration. “Kitchener’s idea of organisation,” ho 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 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 the Dardanelles and the Mesopotamia failures. ‘ ‘lt 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, he 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 the Crimean War had a military expedition been dispatched in so haphazard a fashion.” Sir John Fortescue implies that Kitchener took no interest in the preparation of the .Mesopotamian campaign, although he knew from experience the bad record of the Indian Government in such expeditions. The truth is 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 the peace negotiations that Wellington had done a century earlier, and as he him self had done in South Africa. In that war, also, however, writes Sir John: “ His organisation of the transport system had been little short of disastrous. . . . He gave one order at Bloemfontein which, if executed, would have resulted in the death, within twentyfour hours, of some thousands of mules. He was furious when it was called in question by the Army Service Corps, but yielded to the protest of the veterinary surgeon.” Sir John states that when Kitchener became Commander in Chief he tried to control all the columns himself from Pretoria. “The result was inevitably confusion and failure; and, in fact, wise commanders of bitterly declin ed to pick up any signals from headquarters.”