Lest They Remember

KITCHENER: PORTRAIT OF AN IMPERIALIST (410 pp.)--Philip Magnus--Dutton ($6.50).

"Dear me," said Lord Kitchener of Khartoum, as he moved into the War Office in London in August 1914. "What a place! Not a scrap of army! Not even a pen that will write."

To most people--except Britons of 50 and above--Field Marshal Kitchener is no more than a half-remembered effigy from history's cluttered wardrobe room. Only a generation ago his name was synonymous with valor, duty and heroism, but today Kitchener is almost as forgotten as "Queen" Truganini.*Last year the jubilant Sudanese in the city from which Kitchener took his title made it official and lowered a canvas cowl, like a giant candle snuffer, over the bronze equestrian statue of the imperial torchbearer before taking it to the museum.

History's great captains--Marlborough, Wellington. Washington--were lucky to have played a bull market. It is Kitchener's painful place to symbolize for Englishmen a bearish turn on history's ticker.

White Man's Burden. Biographer Philip Magnus makes clear how Kitchener, son of an undistinguished colonel, became great in the last two or three of Britain's "little wars." In India, the Sudan and South Africa, he won his imperial name. In his day, the era between Waterloo and Mons, an ambitious young officer who wanted quick promotion had to do some quick shopping to find his wars.

Kitchener was on a survey job in Cyprus and riding with the Cypriot foxhounds when there was some trouble in Egypt. He got a week's sick leave and proceeded to Egypt, without orders, to get to the scene of opportunity ahead of the rest. In 1885, to Queen Victoria's outrage. General "Chinese" Gordon was murdered by the Mahdi's dervishes and his command was wiped out at a place in the Egyptian Sudan called Khartoum. Kitchener made a name for himself during the futile attempt to relieve Khartoum, and it was his luck and glory, 13 years later, to avenge Gordon. Having risen to the top military post in Egypt, Kitchener deployed squadrons of camels, cavalry and gunboats like a mad Hollywood producer, finally routed the Mahdists in the famed battle of Omdurman.

Says Historian Magnus: "Kitchener believed in the reality of the white man's burden . . . which God, or providence, had imposed upon the British race." But as commander in chief in India, he "was frequently seen driving furiously on the wrong side of the road, shouting at intervals to other carriages: 'Get to Hell, damn you, out of my way!' '

By the time World War I broke on Europe, there seemed nothing else to do but give the old colonial soldier the task of running the show. It was almost like putting Winfield Scott in charge of the Civil War. The amazing thing is that Kitchener did it so well for so long. Churchill, Asquith and others have recorded the impressions Kitchener made in 1914 when he insisted that the war was no longer a matter of battalions of Redcoats but a huge operation in which a whole industrial nation must lumber to its feet.

Sunken Empire. Author Magnus, biographer of Edmund Burke, Gladstone and Walter Raleigh, has painted in Kitchener the picture of a man as oldfashioned, absurd and honorable as a Royal Academy portrait. It was probably with some relief that Kitchener's colleagues learned that the Royal Navy cruiser H.M.S. Hampshire hit a German mine in the North Sea in 1916 and was lost with nearly all hands. Yet it was as if an empire had sunk with Kitchener.

His memory is dimmed by the bitter fact that the war itself turned out to be the obliterating modern thing he himself had predicted. His Broome Park house, which Bachelor Kitchener had hoped would be another Blenheim for his ducal bones, was sold and became a hotel. As for last year's veiling ceremonies at Khartoum, the Sudanese for whom he had founded a school may have scamped the job. His horse's bronze legs stuck out from under the covering. Thus his true memorial is not an Oxford graduate's biography nor a Kipling's "lest we forget," but a last posting by dark-skinned men in British drill formation, who covered him up lest they remember.

*One of the last survivors of the Tasmanian aborigines. She died in 1876.

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