The daily morning journal and courier., 1898-10-21
LORD KITCHENER.
Pen Pictures of the Victorious English
 Commander in Egypt.

Pen Pictures of the Victorious English
 Commander in Egypt
 Major General Sir Horatio Herbert Kitchener, whose peerage is officially announced in to-days paper, is forty eight years old by the book, but that ia irrelevant. He stands several inches over six feet, straight as a lance, and looks out imperiously above most mems heads; his motions are deliberate and strong; slender but firmly knit he seems built for tireless, steel-wire en- durance, rather than for power or agil- ity; that also is irrelevant.
 Steady, passionless eyes shaded by decisive brows, brick-red, rather full cheeks, long mustache beneath which you divine an immovable mouth; his race is harsh and neither appeals for affection nor stirs dislike. All this is irrelevant, too neither age, nor figure, nor face, nor any accident of person, has any bearing on the essential sir dar.
 You could imagine the character just the same as if all the externals were different He has no age but the prime of life no body but one to carry his mind, no face but one to keep his brain behind. The brain and the will are the essence and the whole of the mana brain perfect and will so perfect in their workings that, in the face of ex- tremest difficulty, they never seem to know what struggle is. You cannot imagine the sirdar otherwise than as seeing the right thing to do and doing it.
 i,;n ;z ;,,1, ,,y,1xr ,ar- ring, he is more like machine than a man. You feel that he ought to be pa tented and shown with pride at the Paris International exposition. British Empire: Exhibit No. 1, hors concours the Soudan Machine.
 It was aptly said of him by one who had closely watched him in his office, and in the field, and at mess, that he is the sort of ''feller'' that ought to be made manager of the army and navy stores. The aphorist's tastes lay per- haps chiefly in the direction of those more genial virtues which the sirdar does not possess, yet it summed him up perfectly He would be splendid man. ager of the army and navy stores There are some who nurse desperate hope that he may some day be appoint ed to sweep out the war office. He would be a splendid manager of the war office. He would be a splendid manager of anything.
 But it so happens that he has turned himself to the management of war in the Soudan, and he is the complete and the only master of that art Beginning life in the Royal Engineers--a soil re- ,+aJ Frx l1J +o l,j, i than to human nature-he early turned to the study of the Levant. He was one of Beaconsfield's military vice con suls in Asia Minor; he was subsequent ly director of the Palestine Exploration Fund. After that he surveyed Cyprus, whence he escaped-some whisper with out leave--to see the bombardment of Alexandria.
 At the beginning of the Soudan trou- bles he appeared. He was one of the original twenty-five officers who set to work on the new Egyptian army. And { in Egypt and the Soudan he has been ever since--on the staff generally, fight ing often, living with natives sometimes mastering the problem of the Soudan always. The ripe harvest of fifteen years is that he knows everything that is to be learned of his subject. He has seen and profited by the errors of oth- CTS as by their successes. He has in herited the wisdom and the achieve , ments of his predecessors. He came at the right hour, and he was the right man.
 In the Egyptian army, captain of Royal Engineers, he began as second of ne In Wolseley's campaign he was intelli- gence officer. During the summer of 1887 he was at Koroslxo, negotiating with the Abadeh sheiks in view of an advance across the desert to Abu Ha- med, and note how characteristically he has now himself bettered the then | abandoned project, by going that way /, to Berber and Khartoum himself-only with a railway!
 l The idea of the advance across the desert he took over from Lord Wolseley, and indeed from the immemorial Arabs. And then from his own stroke of in- sight and resolution, amounting to gen. | jus, he turned raid into an irresistible certain conquest by superseding camels with the railway. Others had thought ! of the desert route; the Sirdar, connect ing Korosko to Halfa, used it. Others had projected desert railways, the sir dar made one. That, summarized in one instance is the working of the Sou dan machine.
 l As intelligence officer Kitchener ac- companied Sir Herbert Stewards desert i column, and you may be sure that the utter breakdown of transport which must in any case have marred that he roic folly was not unnoticed by him. Afterward, through the long decade of little fights that made the Egyptian ar my, Kitchener was fully employed In 1887 and 1888 he commanded Suakim, and it is remarkable that his most im- portant enterprise was half failure. He attacked Osman Digna at Handub, when most of the Emir's men were away raiding; and although he succeed ed in releasing number of captives, he thought it we'll to retire, himself wounded in the face by bullet, with out any decisive success.
 The withdrawal was in no way dis creditable, for his force was a tumble of irregulars and levies without disci- pIine But it is not, perhaps, fanciful to believe that the sirdar, who has nev- CT given battle without making certain
 of ooy1ibiIa tinn Uiptorv has fo,.