The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire (34 page)

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Authors: III H. W. Crocker

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Three days later, the victorious armies were drawn up in Khartoum for a memorial service
in honor of the late General Gordon. The band played Gordon's favorite hymn, “Abide with Me,” and the usually brusque, impassive Kitchener of the laser-blue eyes became a Kitchener with choking throat and eyes obscured by tears. With the expedition was William Staveley “Monkey” Gordon, Gordon's nephew and a fellow officer of engineers. He was given the task—or the honor, or the outrage—of blowing up the Mahdi's tomb.
A Most Economical Soldier
“Lord Kitchener won his well-deserved peerage because he was an excellent man of business; he looked after every important detail, and enforced economy.”
 
Lord Cromer, consul-general of Egypt, on a quality that perhaps made him more popular with mandarins than with his fellow officers, quoted in Byron Farwell,
Eminent Victorian Soldiers: Seekers of Glory
(Norton, 1988), p. 327
Because Kitchener was openly contemptuous of the press, the war correspondents were quick to criticize. They alleged he had ordered the slaughter of the dervish wounded (untrue, though as dervish “dead” were famous for shamming and then striking with musket or rifle, sword or spear, there was plenty of after-combat firing, despite Kitchener's imprecations against fearful wastes of ammunition). They said he had desecrated the Mahdi's tomb (well, yes, though the Mahdi had not been too kind to Gordon either). Further, they reported that he had kept the Mahdi's skull as a souvenir, which was true. Kitchener had a famous—and some later asserted, effeminate—taste for collecting
objets d'art
, especially porcelain.
7
The skull might have made a smashing inkstand or even a coffee mug, but given the press controversy it was instead swiftly buried in an unmarked location.
Having dusted off the dervishes, Kitchener opened sealed orders that commanded him to head with all dispatch to the southern Sudan. There he was to head off an expedition by a gallant French officer, Jean-Baptiste Marchand, who had trekked overland, west to east, across the waist of Africa. He had reached Fashoda on the Nile and was claiming it for France. The area in question was, strictly speaking, Egyptian territory, which made
it, well, British, and it was Kitchener's task to get Marchand to withdraw without sparking a war. The Frenchman was plucky—a quality admired by every British officer—and as Kitchener spoke fluent French, they got on in rather gentlemanly fashion, preserving peace at Fashoda and referring the more important questions to their home governments who resolved the “Fashoda crisis” in Britain's favor.
Kitchener came to England a hero and was made a peer—Lord Kitchener of Khartoum and Aspall (or “K of K”)—before returning to the Sudan in December 1898. He raised an endowment to create Gordon Memorial College (now the University of Khartoum), though he seems quickly to have lost interest in it (he was not the academic type).
8
He rebuilt Khartoum and the governor's palace. And as the first governor-general of the newly established Anglo-Egyptian “condominium” over the Sudan, he helped establish what many considered the finest civil service in the British Empire, one that leant heavily on recruiting Oxbridge and public school athletes.
Battling the Boers
In 1899, with the Boer invasion of the Natal, Kitchener was eager to wash his hands of Sudanese affairs and get on with smiting the Boers. He won an appointment as chief of staff to Field Marshal Lord Roberts or “Bobs” as he was called. Roberts took over as commander in chief of the British forces after a series of unnerving setbacks to British arms by the Boer commandos. But Bobs rapidly turned things to rights, relieved the besieged British cities and defeated the major Boer armies (though Kitchener was much criticized in the press for the heavy British casualties suffered under his command at the Battle of Paardeburg). The major operations apparently over, Roberts then left Kitchener in charge (in November 1900) to finish the job. It proved no easy task. The stubborn Boers refused to acknowledge
they were beaten; so Kitchener methodically subdivided the country into blockhouse-guarded, barbed wire sectors, Boer farms were burnt, and the Boers themselves were locked into “concentration camps” where they could no longer provide sustenance for the Boer guerrillas, against whom British troops scoured the countryside. Again Kitchener was reviled in the press, this time for the horrors (eventually largely corrected) that developed in the camps, where disease cut a mortal swath through the poor Boer families.
Though he became tagged as a brute for his methods in crushing the Boer guerrillas, Kitchener wanted a negotiated peace on terms that would appease the Boers. It was his personal diplomacy with the Boer leaders that made the Treaty of Vereeniging (31 May 1902) possible. As General Sir Ian Hamilton observed, the treaty was a great testament to Kitchener:
How is it that the Boer War put an end to feuds, race hatreds, bankruptcies, disorders, and bloodshed which had paralysed South African progress for a generation, whilst the Great War has on the contrary inflicted race hatred, bankruptcy and murder over the best part of the world from Ireland in the West to the Near East.... Lord Kitchener fought the politicians who wanted to make a vindictive peace . . . a peace which would above all things humiliate and wound the feelings of the conquered.... He beat them and made his own peace; a generous soldierly peace. He lent the Boers money; he rebuilt their farms; he rebuilt their dams; he re-stocked their farms.... The war lasted three years; South Africa was more completely ruined than Central Europe; hate was stronger than in Germany:—and yet within one year South Africa was smiling and so were we.
9
Kitchener: The Great Recruiting Poster
Victorious in South Africa, Kitchener was made a viscount. He attempted but failed to get married, and as he seemed unlikely to have any direct heirs, he managed to arrange matters with King Edward VII that the title might pass through Kitchener's elder brother, Colonel Henry Elliott Chevallier Kitchener, the only brother who had in fact married, and who, luckily, had produced a son. Alas, the son, a commander in the Royal Navy, died before he could inherit the title, which eventually went to Colonel Kitchener's grandson.
The Trial of Breaker Morant
In one celebrated (at least in Australia) incident, Kitchener was alleged to have taken appeasement of the Boers too far—that was the trial of Harry “Breaker” Morant. Morant was a colorful character—a British emigrant to Australia where he gained a reputation as an expert horseman, poet, and rascal. He volunteered for service in the Boer War, starting as a corporal in the South Australian Mounted Rifles and ending as a lieutenant in the Bushveldt Carbineers. He was put on trial, along with two comrades, for shooting Boer prisoners (and a pro-Boer German missionary). He was ordered put to death by firing squad (Kitchener commuted the sentence of one of the other defendants). To his defenders, Morant was merely executing Kitchener's order to inflict summary justice on Boer commandos wearing British khaki, and, from a human point of view, was taking justifiable vengeance for the killing of his best friend, Captain Hunt, whose body was found mutilated (though, unknown to Morant, the mutilation was likely done by black witch doctors rather than Boer commandos). Morant's detractors denied that Kitchener ever gave an order to execute prisoners and maintained that Morant had committed a war crime. The case caused an uproar in Australia, where it became widely assumed that Morant had been sacrificed to appease the Boers, but Kitchener's position was a simple and straightforward one: Morant had ordered extra-judicial executions of prisoners and there were no legitimate extenuating circumstances. The trial proceedings are lost and there is no documentary evidence that can be conclusive either way. The film
Breaker Morant
is an outstanding dramatic account of the pro-Morant version.
Kitchener's next post was commander in chief in India (1902–09). The viceroy, Lord Curzon, had requested him, but soon regretted the decision. The two men had very different ideas about military reform. Kitchener eventually won the bureaucratic battle, with Curzon's departure, and did good work in increasing the number of Gurkha battalions, but his time in India was marked chiefly by delegating his responsibilities, which he was not normally wont to do, and dedicating himself to his passion for interior decoration. Hard in so many matters, Kitchener was always vulnerable to the muezzin call of Eastern splendor. Passed over for appointment as viceroy and denied the opportunity to become ambassador to Turkey (he liked the Turks, and some speculate he could have prevented Turkey from becoming a German ally in World War I), he returned to Egypt as consul-general in 1911 and was de factoviceroy of the Anglo-Egyptian condominium over the Sudan.
Dog Quartet
Near the end of his life, Kitchener had four black cocker spaniels. Their names: Shot, Bang, Miss, and Damn.
With the guns of August 1914, he was called home and made secretary of state for war. Many politicians assumed the European war would be short and sharp. Kitchener knew better, predicting a three- or four-year-long campaign of hard slogging with massed armies enduring heavy casualties. Yet initially he was opposed to military conscription and lent his face to the most famous recruiting poster in the world: finger pointing, moustaches bristling, his eyes boring into the viewer, “Your Country Needs YOU.”
10
The recruiting campaign was enormously successful, but as the war dragged on the advocates of conscription gained Kitchener's reluctant consent and achieved their goal with the Military Service Act of 1916.
When Kitchener entered the cabinet he enjoyed the intimidated respect of most of his colleagues, but his ways were not the ways of garrulous politicians. Lloyd George, who succeeded him as secretary of state for war (before becoming prime minister), said of Kitchener: “He was like a great revolving lighthouse. Sometimes the beam of his mind used to shoot out, showing one Europe and the assembled armies in a vast and illimitable perspective, till one felt that one was looking along it into the heart of reality—and then the shutter would turn and for weeks there would be nothing but a blank darkness.”
11
The light went out forever in June 1916 when he sailed on a diplomatic mission to Russia aboard HMS
Hampshire
. The ship struck a mine and went down with nearly all hands. Kitchener, according to the survivors, was resolute to the last.
Chapter 18
IAN DOUGLAS SMITH (1919–2007)
“This man [Smith] has a certain mixture of characteristics of caution, obstinacy, dedication, vision, tenacity and toughness that have evoked rage in some, frustration in others, and admiration and loyalty in most. The plain truth is, I know of no other man who has the physical and mental toughness necessary to have led Rhodesia where it is to-day.”
—Ralph Nilson, party chairman of the Rhodesian Front, 1969
1
 
I
an Smith was in the perverse position of being a British patriot who led his country, Rhodesia, to independence from Britain. Under his leadership Rhodesia exported food, maintained a free press and judiciary, was anti-Communist, and yet was repudiated and boycotted by the rest of the free world. When all Smith's dire predictions about what one man, one vote would bring to Rhodesia came true, he was, bizarrely, blamed for making it so. Ian Smith lived a noble life, and that was its own reward. From the world at large he received no other.
Did you know?
Ian Smith was a World War II RAF fighter pilot whose face required plastic surgery after a fiery crash
He predicted a dire future for Rhodesia under one man, one vote—and then was blamed by his critics when his predictions came true
Though often condemned as a racist by outsiders, Smith stayed in Africa and gloried in his popularity among blacks as the great opponent of the dictator Robert Mugabe

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