The Indianapolis journal. [volume] (Indianapolis [Ind.]) 1867-1904, 1902-06-08
A PORTRAIT OF KITCHENER.
The British General as He Appeared
in the Campaign in the Soudan.

The British General as He Appeared
i'm the Campaign in the SOudan.
The successful ending of the war in South
Africa under the direction of Lord kitch-
ener and the consequent prominence of that
officer gives a new interest to the pen pic
ture made of him while he was conducting
the campaign in Egypt by the correspond
ent G.. w. Stevens, who later, following
the army to the Transvaal. lost his life
there. 1t is a vivid portraiture and makes
plain the force and character of the man as
few other sketches have done. Stevens
writes in his book ["With Kitchener to
Khartum''J:
Maj. Gen. Sir Horatio Herbert Kitch-
ener is forty-eight years old by the book:
but that is 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 endur-
ance rather than for power or agility; 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
face is harsh and neither appeals for af-
lection nor stirs dislike. All this is irrele-
want, too. Neither age, nor figure, nor face,
nor any accident of person has any bearing
on the essential sirdar You could imagine
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 and a will so perfect in their work
ings that in the face of EXTREMIST 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. His precision is so inhumanly un-
erring he is more like a machine than
v0Qn hot ~ -
patented and shown with pride at the Paris
international exhibition. British empire,
exhibit No. 1, hors concours, the Sudan ma
chine.
1T 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
Teller that ought to be made manager of
the army and navy stores. The aphorists
tastes lay perhaps in the direction of those
more genial virtues which the sirdar does
not possess, yet the Judgment summed him
up perfectly. He would be a splendid man.
ager or the army and navy stores. There
are some who nurse desperate hope that
he may some day be appointed to sweep
cut the War Office
He would be splendid manager of the
war once. He would be splendid man
aser> of anything. But it so happens that
he has turned himself TO the management
of war in the Sudan. and he is the COM
plete and the only master of that art. Be
ginning life in the Royal Engineers-a soil
reputed to be more favorable to machinery
than to human nature-he early turned 10
the study of the Levant He was one of
Beaconsfield's military vice consuls in Asia
Minor; he was subsequently director of the
Palestine Exploration Fund. At the be-
ginning of the Sudan troubles he appeared
He was one Of the original twenty-five Off
GERS who set TO work on the new Egyptian
army. And in Egypt and the Sudan he has
been ever since, mastering the problem of
the Sudan always. The ripe harvest of
| fifteen years is that he knows everything
that is to be learned of his subject He has
seen and protited by the errors of others
as by their successes. He has inherited the
| wisdom and the achievements of his predc-
! cessors. He came at the right hour and
! he was the right man.
Captain r. E, he began in the Egyptian
army as second in command of a regiment
| OF cavalry. In WOlseley's campaign he was
! intelligence officer. During the summer of
| 1884 he was at KoroSko, negotiating with
the Ababdeh shieks in view of an advance
/ across the desert to Abu Hamed: and note
| how enthusiastically he has now bettered
the then abandoned project by going that
way TO Berber and Khartum himself only
| with railway The idea of the advance
across the desert he took over from Lord
! Wolseley, and, indeed, from innumerable
Arab caravans; and then, for his own
| stroke or insight and resolution amounting
! &c genius, he turned a raid into an ire
! sistibe certain conquest by superseding
camels with the railway: Others had
correcting Korosko to Halfa, used it. 9th
ers had projected desert railways; the sir
! dar made one That, summarized in one in
stance, is the working of the Sudan ma
| chine.
'As intelligence officer Kitchener accom-
| panied Sir Herbert Stewards desert col
umn, and you may be sure that the utter
breakdown of transport which must in any
case have marred that heroic folly was not
unnoticed by him. Afterwards. through the
long decade of little fights that made the
| Egyptian army, Kitchener was fully en-
| ployed In 1887 and 1883 he commanded at
Suakim, and it is remarkable that his most
! important enterprise was half failure He
| attacked Osman Digna at Handful when
most of the Emir's men were away raiding
| and although he succeeded in releasing n
| number Of captives he thought il well ID
retire, himself wounded in the face by n
! bullet, without any decisive success. The
withdrawal was in no way discredtable
| for his force was a tumble of irregulars
and levies without discipline. But it is not
! perhaps fanciful to believe that the sirdar,
| who has never given battle without making
certain of an annihlating victory, has not
| forgotten his experience of haphazard
! misunderstanding al HANDFUL. He had his
| revenge before the end of 1888, when he led
| a brigade of Sudanese over Osman s
| trenches at GamaZieh. Next year at Toski
| he again commanded brigade. In 1890 he
| succeeded Sir Francis Grenfell as sirdar
That he meant to be sirdar in fact as well
as name he showed in 1894 The young
| Khedive travelled south to the frontier and
took the occasion to insult every British
officer he came across. Kitchener promptly
gave battle; he resigned. a crisis came and
the Khedive was obliged to do public pen
ance by issuing general order in praise
Of the discipline of the army and it's British
officers. Two years later he began the re-
conquest OF the Sudan. Without single
| throwback the work has gone forward
since-but not without intervals.
THE sirdar is never in hurry. With
immovable self-control he holds back from
each step till the ground is consolidated
under the last. The real fighting power OF
the Sudan lies in the country itself, in its
barrenness which refuses food. and its
vastness which paralyZes transport.
THE Sudan machine obviates barrennes:
4 and vastness; the bayonet action stand:
still until the railway action has piled the