LORD KITCHENER AS SECRETARY OF STATE FOR WAR.
ORD KITCHENER'S great asset was that he had J the complete confidence of the country. He had been, on the whole, very successful in his wars and in his administrative work. Further, he had a very good Press. He had always been written up as " the great organizer " of the British Empire. Therefore, when he was made Secretary of State for War every one expected enormous results. But, alas ! Kitchener was, in the first place, not the man he was supposed to be. In the second place, as Lord Esher shows, he was too old. In the third place, the machine of war in Europe was so different from that to which he was accustomed that he was immediately beset with all sorts of unnecessary difficulties. He had laboriously to study the nature of the machinery before he could start it, and, unfortunately, he was a man very slow in the uptake. But, worst of all, he did not understand the English people, though he thought he did and they thought he did. A man who really understood them would never have hesitated about applying conscription. His instinct would have told him what to do, even if he had forgotten what Cromwell did, what Pitt and Lord Liverpool's Government did, and what Lincoln did. He wanted conscription, he longed for it, but he thought the British people might not stand it, and he could not bear to take the responsibility of demanding it. To be quite frank, what he seems to have wanted was that the statesmen should order him to impose it upon the country. If there was great opposition, as he expected there would be, he wanted to be able to put the responsi- bility where he considered it ought to be put—i.e., upon the shoulders of the politicians, as he was wont to call them, the men who had refused to face the problem of German aggression and to prepare for the inevitable war by making us an armed nation.
That was a capital error in Lord Kitchener's attitude of mind, but an excusable one. It is much less easy to excuse the extraordinarily stupid and muddled way in which he dealt with the great rush of recruits which overwhelmed him after his first appeal. What all sane people wanted him to do, and what the Cabinet ought to have forced him to do, but what they had not the pluck to undertake—at that time they were afraid of him—can be stated in a very few words. Lord Kitchener put up the physical standard for privates to that of the Guards in peace and so turned away hundreds of thousands of recruits. What he should have done was to copy the excellent plan adopted in the case of the horses. All the commandeered horses were not wanted at once, though it was quite clear that all horses would be wanted sooner or later. Therefore, when the horses were commandeered, they were registered as having passed into the hands of the Government. The purchase money was paid for them, and then " the late owner " was asked to keep them till they were actually required, which might not be for a month or six weeks. What, then, Lord Kitchener should have done was to have accepted every single man who offered himself and was physically fit. These men, for whom, of course, there were at the moment no uniforms and no barracks, should have had their names and addresses registered. What is more, they should have been attested. Then they should have been asked to remain at home and go on with their work till they were called up. At the same time—and this would have been a most popular move—they should have begun to get their army pay at once. If Lord Kitchener had done this he would have had the Derby Scheme, as it were, one and a-half years before it was actually put into operation, and would probably have shortened the war by a year. As it was, the slamming of the doors of the recruiting offices in the faces of the men in the first fervour of their patriotism had an exceedingly bad effect upon the spirit of the nation. In a word, Lord Kitchener, in spite of the ardour with which he no doubt inspired the men chosen, made a hideous blunder in not allowing free recruiting.
We shall not go into the question of Antwerp, or of the Dardanelles, or of the shells and other munitions.
They are all ably dealt with by Lord Esher, whose book on Lord Kitchener we notice elsewhere, as are, indeed, practically all the salient points. Nihil tangit pod non ornat.
We have noticed only one omission in the story of Lord Kitchener's tragedy, and very possibly this one oversight may in reality be not an accident but an example of the blind eye with a purpose. Lord Esher does not deal with one of the most terrible of the early dangers of the war. That was the deficiency of rifles. When wo had mobilized the Expeditionary Force and called up the Territorials, we had literally no extra or reserve rifles in the country. Worse, we had no machinery for making them. Though the utterly inadequate rifle factories which we did possess worked all day and all night, and every day and every night including Sundays, we were incapable of turning out enough rifles to meet the wastage of war. This was quite as serious a matter as the want of munitions. Indeed, it was so serious that nobody dared to speak of it. Possibly it was one of the facts which prevented the Government from adopting conscription earlier, It was not only that it was no good to take men for training when you had no rifles to put into their hands, and could not have any for another year ; there was also the spectacle of thousands of drilled men, perfectly equipped in other ways, standing about- doing nothing because they could not be furnished with rifles. What makes it the more curious that Lord Esher does not note this terrible failure in our preparations is the fact that, in the letters of Queen Victoria edited by him, he gives much prominence to a very excellent letter written by the Queen to the Duke of Newcastle on the outbreak of the Crimean War. She at once asked the Duke of Newcastle, the Secretary of State for War, how many rifles there were in the country, and added that she did not want the paper states, but the real states. The result was that her Ministers,- after a good deal of shuffling, had to admit that there were no rifles. We wish very much that Lord Esher, who must know all the facts, had dealt with this point and given us Lord Kitchener's opinion thereon. We are not going to bore our readers by quoting the articles in the Spectator four years before the war in which we dealt with the Queen's letter and the need for keeping an extra res:Tve of a million rifles always in this country, but the matter must have been noticed by a man so much behind the scenes as Lord Esher, and we are curious to know what ho and also the subject of his memoir thought on the subject. Though we have dwelt so largely on the personal side of the tragedy of Lord Kitchener both here and in the review which appears in another column, we feel that we cannot but return to it at the end of this article. The fascination of the man was largely in the fact that he was unique. There was never anyone quite like him in history. Ile cannot be classified. He was no Napoleon, no Cromwell—not even a Marlborough, a Wellington, or a Clive. Perhaps the nearest way of describing_ him by analogy would be to say that if Washington habeen brought up in Bengal the product might have been not unlike Lord Kitchener.
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