The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 1909. THE COMING OF KITCHENER

New Zealand Tablet, 10 February 1910, Page 221

The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 1909. THE COMING OF KITCHENER

(WEEK to-day Lord, Kitchener is due to arrive at the Bluff, and the man and his mission will he the main subject of public interest for the brief, fortnight over which his New Zealand tour extends. With the life and career of the man, the great mass of the people are already .thoroughly familiar. Born and brought up in County Kerry, Ireland, and educated at the Royal Military College, Woolwich, his severest critics must admit that from the time when he offered his services to the French authorities in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 up to the day of appointment to his present position of British Military High Commissioner and Commander-in-Chief in the Mediterranean, Kitchener’s career has been a strenuous one, and such

greatness and reputation as he has now attained have been entirely of Ins own achievement. Thanks to the illustrated papers, even his personal appearance is now quite familiar to the public, and we have the additional good fortune of having available a thumb-nail sketch of him by no less skilful a hand than that of Mr. T. P. O’Connor.' Just after being raised to the peerage, during the debate on the proposed Parliamentary grant of £30,000 Lord Kitchener was seen in the Peers’ Gallery by the well-known Irish journalist, who describes him in these terms: ‘ The large, strong mouth, heavily .covered with the typical military and brush-like moustache; the strong, square jaw; the tremendously heavy brows; the strange, glittering eyes; and even the brick-red complexion—the complexion that told so many tales of hard rides for many hundreds of miles under blazing Egyptian suns, through wild and trackless Egyptian sands all the features of a strong, fierce, dominant nature were really brought out into greater relief by that occasional smile. . . Through it all the face seemed strangely familiar to me. . . In the end it all at once Struck me why—it was the typical face of the Irish resident magistrate.’ * Regarding the personality of the man, the public have also gob rightly or wronglya very clear and definite impression. The Kitchener that is known to the public the Kitchener of the press and of the war correspondent—is cold, calculating, grim, inflexible, almost dour. It is true that there has been an occasional protest against this delineation as not being strictly just, and some of his admirers have made strenuous efforts to present the hero of Omdurman in a somewhat more human light. Thus a distinguished Anglo-Indian officer, who had met Kitchener at a shooting party in India not so long ago, attempts to depict the difference between Kitchener as he is imagined and Kitchener as he is in these words ‘I remember vividly,’ he says, £ how completely my preconceived idea of him from the social point of view was upset. ' All I had heard or read of him had led me to expect an extremely austere man, given to silence rather than to speech, and a determined misogynist. My v experience of him during the time we were in the same house and in the same shooting party presented him in quite a different light. He had plenty of bonhomie and pleasant chat. He laid himself out to be agreeable to any member of the party of either sex with whom he happened to be thrown; talked as freely to the last-joined subaltern as to officers of the highest rank; and, unless appearances belied him, so far from being averse from ladies’ society, he seemed rather pleased than otherwise to find himself.in their company, especially if they had their share of good looks, and kept the conversational ball rolling in animated fashion. As a shot, he seemed to me to be rather below than above the average, but he was a genial and pleasant fellowsportsman.’ The popular and traditional impression, however, is not so easily displaced. Eleven years ago George Steevens, the brilliant war correspondent, in a sort of flash-light photograph of the then Sirdar of the Egyptian Army, described him as * the man who has cut out his human heart and made himself a machine to retake Khartoum.’ Kitchener as a machine is the impression that lives in the hearts and minds of the people to-day. * ... Of Kitchener’s special characteristics as a general, it is hardly necessary to speak. It has been said that 1 opportunity has been denied him to give evidence of that bullheaded valor in action which r ' will ever, in the minds of Britons, be associated with their conception of a great soldier.’ His.peculiar qualities have been-) not dashing, dare-devil fighting, but rather ‘ slow and cautious preparation ’ —making every step good before the next was taken—never engaging the enemy till victory was a moral certainty. He is par excellence an organiser and an administrator. His present mission to Australasia is twofold —■ general and special—and both arise out of his position as High Commissioner and Commander-in-Chief in the Mediterranean. By virtue of that position he is to have authority not only over the British regular troops in garrison at Malta and Gibraltar and in Egypt, the Mauritius, and South Africa, but also over the native forces employed in East,’Central, and West Africa. This will not be his last visit to the Dominion, for it is part of the duties of his new position from time to time to inspect and advise upon the militia of the self-governing States of South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. In addition, it will be part of his work to standardise all the available troops in Great Britain and in Greater Britain, and to advise upon the training, equipment, and organisation of the local troops of the Commonwealth of Australia, the Dominion of New Zealand, and, the new State of United South Africa on lines which will make them available for service in line with the other troops of the Empire. In,. a word. Kitchener’s special mission to New Zealand is. to inspect and

advise upon our local militia with a view to their increased efficiency, and his general mission to Australasia is part of nothing less than the gigantic task of making all the heterogeneous troops ' of the scattered dominions under his charge available for the service of the Empire in the 5 event of war. * ' The immediate effect of \ Lord Kitchener’s visit must be wholly good. The Government, by the introduction last year of a modified form of compulsory service, made at least a beginning towards laying the foundation of an effective scheme of national defence, and the expert advice of an organiser of Kitchener’s calibre regarding the improvement and development of existing means of defence should be invaluable. And unresponsive as Kitchener may be to the softer sentiments of ordinary humanity, he is credited with being -passionately devoted to the military art, and our officers must be dull indeed if they do not catch some stimulus of inspiration or enthusiasm from contact with such a man. Regarding Kitchener’s general mission project of the unification of all the forces of the Empire is nothing official or authoritative before the public, and the scheme, so far as it has been at present made known, is too vague and indefinite to afford fit material for practical discussion. The nearest approach which we have come across to a precise statement of what is contemplated is that contained in the following remarks of’fehe Sydney Daily Telegraph: . ‘ln theory the troops are to be made interchangeable, all obedient to the same words of command, and all to be counted upon to do soldiers’ work in the same soldierly way. Whether troops are to leave any given dominion or dependency for active service elsewhere in the Empire will depend upon themselves and upon their Government. But if readiness to serve abroad can be counted uponand the brief history of the Commonwealth has already shown that it —then, in theory, the Imperial General Staff, of which Lord Kitchener is the first Chief, will control a world-wide military organisation from which, as long as the British navy keeps the highway of all the seas open and secure, troops can be concentrated in the shortest possible time at whatever point an enemy attempts to break down the defences of the Empire. Much laborious work is yet to be done before the task is achieved. But the work that Lord Kitchener has already done in reorganising the army in India is an earnest of his patience and determination, not less than of his wisdom and profound military capacity. Whatever scheme he recommends will go before the Federal Government as the plan best calculated', in the. opinion of the greatest British military authority of the day, to secure the integrity of Australia, and also to enable the fighting strength of Australia to be employed in emergency, for the defence of the Empire.’ The Daily Telegraph does not profess to bespeaking authoritatively, and it is dealing with what it expressly describes as a theoretical ideal. Any proposals that will help to convert our local militia into more effective fighting units or to give us an efficient citizen army for home defence will be received with almost universal approval.- But an attempt to rope us in to an Imperial organisation, in the control and disposal of which we would have no sort of say, or to draw us into the maelstrom of Old World militarism, is the last thing that would be likely to commend itself to the democracies of these free southern lands. -As we have said, nobody knows precisely what the proposals are, and the question is not now definitely before us. ' But we are a democratic and self-governing community, and when the problem arises we will know how to face it.