Lord Kitchener

by G.K. Chesterton

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Genres: History, Biography, Ebooks, Biography Memoir, Christian

26 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 6, 2008

About the author

Gilbert Keith Chesterton was an English writer, philosopher, lay theologian, and literary and art critic.

He was educated at St. Paul’s, and went to art school at University College London. In 1900, he was asked to contribute a few magazine articles on art criticism, and went on to become one of the most prolific writers of all time. He wrote a hundred books, contributions to 200 more, hundreds of poems, including the epic Ballad of the White Horse, five plays, five novels, and some two hundred short stories, including a popular series featuring the priest-detective, Father Brown. In spite of his literary accomplishments, he considered himself primarily a journalist. He wrote over 4000 newspaper essays, including 30 years worth of weekly columns for the Illustrated London News, and 13 years of weekly columns for the Daily News. He also edited his own newspaper, G.K.’s Weekly.

Chesterton was equally at ease with literary and social criticism, history, politics, economics, philosophy, and theology.

Reviews

[Jim · Rating 3 out of 5]

A hundred years after his death in the early days of World War I -- his transport ship to Russia was sunk by a German mine -- Lord Herbert Horatio Kitchener is seen as a representative of the fusty Colonel Blimp British officer. Writing shortly after Kitchener's death, G. K. Chesterton attempted to evaluate the military leader's career more as a succession of triumphs, from the defeat of the Mahdi at Omdurman to the defusing of a potential war with France at Fashoda to victories in South Africa's Boer War, to diplomatic and military leadership in India.

But it was the war in Europe that saw Kitchener at his best. He was able to raise and train a large army from England's civilian-minded population, and he was able to come to terms with British trade unionists at a time when most general officers were more intent on opposing them.

This short biography in the form of a long eulogy makes for interesting reading, though it is not GKC at his best. One section I liked was the author's view of Islam, which struck me as still being applicable in our world:

There is in Islam a paradox which is perhaps a permanent menace. The great creed born in the desert creates a kind of ecstasy out of the very emptiness of its own land, and even, one may say, out of the emptiness of its own theology. It affirms, with no little sublimity, something that is not merely the singleness but rather the solitude of God. There is the same extreme simplification in the solitary figure of the Prophet; and yet this isolation perpetually reacts into its own opposite. A void is made in the heart of Islam which has to be filled up again and again by a mere repetition of the revolution that founded it. There are no sacraments; the only thing that can happen is a sort of apocalypse, as unique as the end of the world; so the apocalypse can only be repeated and the world end again and again. There are no priests; and yet this equality can only breed a multitude of lawless prophets almost as numerous as priests. The very dogma that there is only one Mahomet produces an endless procession of Mahomets.

[Jesse Broussard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yet one more time, reviewing Chesterton seems entirely pointless. Still, I shall make an attempt.

This book is, you may have foreseen, about a man named Lord Kitchener. He was a military man that was a contemporary of Chesterton's, and he seems to have practiced war in much the same way that Edward the First of England did upon Llywelyn Ein Llyw Olaf, or Llywelyn ap Gruffydd of Wales if you prefer (sorry Brits, I side with the consonantally enriched): that of superior force and minimal risk, entrenching every victory before moving an inch beyond the ground that was conquered, his army seemingly shoved on from behind by the impetus of his supply train. Slow yet inexorable, Chesterton compares him to a giant snail threatening the lightning Arabs that he was attacking. In his later years, he was involved in the Great War.

More than anything else, this book is fascinating in the fascination that Chesterton had with Lord Kitchener, primarily as a unique individual and secondarily as a sample of the English race as a whole. It is another example of Lewis' maxim that love bestows loveliness: in Chesterton's exuberant praise and hesitant censure, we find ourselves unable to resist developing a similar affection for the man that otherwise would have been largely or entirely unknown to us.

I have long read Chesterton with a certain awe, the type of awe I feel in Ivanhoe when Christopher Lee's paralyzing voice commands "Pray!" or when listening to Joss Ackland read The Screwtape Letters or when watching Anderson Silva deliver a flying knee, and I have come to the conviction that Chesterton never spent a great deal of time revising what he wrote. Not because it is poor, but quite the opposite: it is of such a uniform magnificence that it seems impossible to me that it is the result of "many hours of labour or nights devoid of ease:" there would be a greater variance in it. No, I think he simply wrote in his great, childish wonder, bemused by the absurdity of the world and in imitation of the Mind from which so great an offense to reason as a hippopotamus could proceed, and then, even as his creation was on to the printer he was on to the next item that happened to catch his enormous eye that viewed the world with the mind at once of a philosopher and a child. After all, "philosophers ask the most important questions, save only children." I feel that he is the type of man that one could never quite catch: even as you would grasp one point, he would have made the next three and then gone on to the next topic.

Whether or not this is true I shan't know for some time yet (at least two months, judging from the size of my bag of oatmeal), but I am quite certain that he didn't spend more than an hour or two on this little book. I tend to read fast, though not as fast as N.T. Wright can write, but I think that most Chesterton enthusiasts would find this book entirely suitable for a single pipe and no more than a finger or two of rum, as in "I don't care where the water runs if it doesn't run into the rum."

[Matthew Turner · Rating 3 out of 5]

In Chesterton’s inimitable style, he eulogizes one of Britain’s last great military men. This fascinating artifact of British opinion and concerns in 1917 left me with a sense of just how transformative the Great War was upon the evolution of Britain. Indeed, the most startling aspect of this book is how alien the world of Chesterton and Kitchener seems to our own.

This is not one of G.K. Chesterton’s best works, and I was disappointed he does not discuss his thoughts on the First World War at length. Instead, he remains focused on Kitchener, offering us reflections on the spirit of the man, and the symbolism of his life.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

A short biographical sketch done in true Chestertonian fashion. As you'd expect, Chesterton isn't as concerned with imparting factoid after factoid about Kitchener's life as he is with nailing down the essential nature of the man and what his life meant in the grander scheme of things.

[Miles Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Essay and eulogy

Chesterton' essay on Kitchener focuses mainly on the generals life as a soldier in the Near East and in East Africa.

[Chad · Rating 3 out of 5]

To continue the Chesterton mood, I picked up another one of his biographies of a lesser-known individual, at least among Americans. Lord Kitchener. Again, to comment on Chesterton's unique approach to biographies, rather than stick tot he chronological narrative of his subject's life, Chesterton tries to capture the "spirit" of Kitchener, or the spirit of Aquinas. And he usually is also very positive about it, picking out traits that he admires. Almost like he's picking out the saints of his own life.

Kitchener's public life, or at least his rise in fame, began in 1898 when he secured control of Sudan (or the Soudan, as it was referred to throughout Chesterton's biography). For the typical American high school student, British history ends with the War of 1812 and picks up again during World War I-- at least, once the Americans decided to enter the war. I will admit that these events were unfamiliar to me. Also influential in the Boer war-- but I didn't even know who the Boer's were! I had only heard references to it in shows like The Crown.

What traits did Chesterton find admirable in Lord Kitchener? He seems an odd choice for Chesterton, considering his usual spiritual and literary bent. Kitchener was a military man. But Chesterton uses him as a heroic symbol of the Englishman:

There is something almost provocative to superstition in the way in which he stands at every turn as the symbol of the special trials and the modern transfiguration of England; from this moment when he was born among the peasants of Ireland to the moment when he died upon the sea, seeking at the other end of the world the other great peasant civilisation of Russia. Yet at each of these symbolic moments he is, if not as unconscious as a symbol, then as silent as a symbol; he is speechless and supremely significant, like an ensign or a flag. The superficial picturesqueness of his life, at least, lies very much in this — that he was like a hero condemned by fate to act an allegory.

He was one of the best peacemakers, always finding a way to be friends, or at least friendly to the perceived enemy and a talent for resolving conflicts:

He could not only take counsel with his friends, but he was abnormally successful in taking counsel with his foes. It is notable that whenever he came in personal contact with a great captain actually or potentially in arms against him, the result was not a mere collision but a mutual comprehension. He established the friendliest relations with the chivalrous and adventurous Marchand, standing on the deadly debatable land of Fashoda. He established equally friendly relations with the Boer generals, gathered under the dark cloud of national disappointment and defeat. In all such instances, so far as his individuality could count, it is clear that he acted as a moderate and, in the universal sense, as a liberal.

The other unique trait in Kitchener was that he didn't harden in his prejudices with age. His opinions changed and matured, and when put in new situations, he didn't resort to old habits to solve them:

Though the reverse of vivacious, Kitchener was very vital; and he had one unique mark of vitality — that he had not stopped growing. “An oak should not be transplanted at sixty,” said the great orator Grattan when he was transferred from the Parliament of Dublin to the Parliament of Westminster. Kitchener was sixty-four when he turned his face westward to the problem of his own country. There clung to him already all the traditional attributes of the oak — its toughness, its angularity, its closeness of grain and ruggedness of outline — when he was uprooted from the Arabian sands and replanted in the remote western island. Yet the oak not only grew green again and put forth new leaves; it was almost as if, as in a legend, it could put forth a new kind of leaves. Kitchener, with all his taciturnity, really began to put forth a new order of ideas. If a change of opinions is unusual in an elderly man, it is almost unknown in an elderly military man. If the hardening of time was felt even by the poetic and emotional Grattan, it would not have been strange if the hardening had been quite hopeless in the rigid and reticent Kitchener. Yet it was not hopeless; and the fact became the spring of much of the national hope. The grizzled martinet from India and Egypt showed a certain power which is in nearly all great men, but of which St. Paul has become the traditional type — the power of being a great convert as well as a great crusader.

I'm going to try to hit the remaining biographies of Chesterton, namely, Charles Dickens, William Cobbett, and Robert Louis Stevenson.

[Madeline · Rating 4 out of 5]

More of an essay than a biography, this sketch of Kitchener's life attempted to explain his successes in places where his predecessors failed. Chesterton reviewed his career as a military leader in showing how he was able to not only communicate with enemies in different parts of the world and opposition at home, but learn from them such that he could advance England's interests successfully and turn these enemies into colleagues later when he needed their cooperation. He specifically referred to the French in Sudan, the Boers in South Africa, and the Trade Unions in England. Chesterton praised Lord Kitchener's ability to be flexible, a characteristic unusual in a senior military officer.
To understand the references, one needs to know the history of this period and have some knowledge of Kitchener's life story. He was an exceptional man and military leader.

[William Corrin · Rating 1 out of 5]

Unfortunately, this book doesnt accomplish anything G.K. set out to do and, if anything, is more useful as a revelation as to how successful the British war propaganda of WW1 was. Chesterton makes two assertions in the book:
1. That Prussia was more evil than the entirety of Islam (an interesting assertion as his book starts with Kitcheners campaigns against radical sects of Islam and also interesting as this claim comes from a famous Christian Theologian defaming a Christian nation while raising up the historic enemy to Christianity)
2. That the Russian Empire was a bastion of Christianity...this claim was made on the eve of the Communist revolution, when Christianity was banned thereafter

both of these claims are clearly the result of the British propaganda campaign of the first World War.

[Elissa Miller]

Quite old and therefore quite biased in its representation of Kitchener - "legends," "heroes," "like gods," "perhaps the only person in the government classes who understood..." "great Englishman," "all the toughness of the oak...it was almost as if in a legend it [he could put forth new leaves]" etc.
Not to mention the language used to describe Muslims and Islam when outlining Kitchener's actions in Egypt, quite hard to swallow but representative of the historical view.

[Bert Young · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not Recommended

Flowery and inauthentic, this can't really be considered a biography. It is simply wartime propaganda passed off as the true story of a much more complex and controversial man

[William · Rating 3 out of 5]

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[جلجامش Nabeel · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was a good reading.

[Frank Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was surprised to find this short little ode to Lord Kitchener by Chesterton. History has been somewhat mixed - confused? - by Kitchner's role in the Britsh Empire. By turns it's strongest advocate and then military enforcer, Kitchener was the emodiement - quite literally - of what a Man of the British Empire should be and should look like (the recruiting posters featuring Kitchener are true classics).

Chesterton's prose is superbly Chestertonian. Where else would you find paragraphs like this? Who could write them like this?:

“And it is this that lends an epic and almost primeval symbolism to the tragedy of Kitchener's end. Somehow the very fact that it was incomplete as an action makes it more complete as an allegory. English in his very limitations, English in his late emancipation from them, he was setting forth on an eastward journey different indeed from the many eastward journeys of his life. There are many such noble tragedies of travel in the records of his country; it was so, silently without a trace, that the track of Franklin faded in the polar snows or the track of Gordon in the desert sands. But this was an adventure new for such adventurous men—the finding not of strange foes but of friends yet stranger. Many men of his blood and type—simple, strenuous, somewhat prosaic—had threaded their way through some dark continent to add some treasure or territory to the English name. He was seeking what for us his countrymen has long been a dark continent—but which contains a much more noble treasure. The glory of a great people, long hidden from the English by accidents and by lies, lay before him at his journey's end. That journey was never ended. It remains like a mighty bridge, the mightier for being broken, pointing across a chasm, and promising a mightier thoroughfare between the east and west. In that waste of seas beyond the last northern islets where his ship went down one might fancy his spirit standing, a figure frustrated yet prophetic and pointing to the East, whence are the light of the world and the reunion of Christian men.”

A marvelous quick read that does more to explain the man and his missions than most anything else I've read on him

[Walter · Rating 4 out of 5]

This short biography, written shortly after the tragic death of Lord Kitchener, is interesting for a number of reasons. Firstly, it is one of the few biographies of a military man that was written by a non-military man. Given the unique characteristics of a military life, it is often hard for a non-military man to relate to such a life, especially to a life spent almost exclusively in military occupations for decades. But this essay, written by GK Chesterton, works in that it focused on the formation of Kitchener and his contributions, not just as a soldier, but as a statesman as well.

Kitchener began his career as a soldier in the French army during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. This was fortuitous, as his own nation would enter into a deadly war against this same Germany 44 years later, when Kitchener was still serving in the Army. Most of Kitchener's career was spent in the colonial wars of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He saw service in Palestine, with Chinese Gordon in the Sudan, in Egypt, and in the Boer Wars of South Africa, not to mention in India. All of this exposure to foreign cultures, and specifically to Islamic culture, gave him a perspective that uniquely served him in positions of high command. He was a mathematician by training and inclination, which is actually not uncommon for Army officers who succeed at high levels of command. He also had a good understanding of the trials of the working man, given his extensive interactions with British soldiers who hailed from the working classes. His death in 1917 was tragic, not just for the British war effort, but for the peace process that followed it.

I would highly recommend this essay to anyone with an interest in Lord Kitchener, the First World War, the history of the British Army in the last half of the 19th Century, and of course, for fans of GK Chesterton.