He discovered at the War Office that preparations had been made for just such an emergency as had now occurred.  The thoughtfulness and thoroughness of this work struck him with surprise, and he inquired the name of its author.  He was told that Lord Haldane had made these preparations.  “Haldane!” he exclaimed; “but isn’t he the man who is being attacked by the newspapers?”

A chivalrous feeling which does not seem to have visited the bosoms of any of Lord Haldane’s colleagues visited the bosom of this honest soldier.  Someone about him who had enjoyed personal relations with various editors was dispatched to one of the most offending editors conducting the campaign against Lord Haldane with the object of stopping this infamous vendetta.

“I know what you say is true,” replied this editor, “and I regret the attack as much as Lord Kitchener does; but I have received my orders and they come from so important a quarter that I dare not disobey them.”  He gave Lord Kitchener’s emissary the name of a much respected leader of the Unionist Party.

Thus early in his career at the War Office Lord Kitchener learnt that the spirit of the public school does not operate in Westminster and that politics are a dirty business.

At no time in his life was Lord Kitchener “a racehorse amongst cows,” as the Greeks put it, being, even in his greatest period, of a slow, heavy, and laborious turn of mind; but when he entered Mr. Asquith’s Cabinet he was at least an honest man amongst lawyers.  He was a great man; wherever he sat, to borrow a useful phrase, was the head of the table; but this greatness of his, not being the full greatness of a complete man, and having neither the support of a keen intellect nor the foundations of a strong moral character, wilted in the atmosphere of politics, and in the end left him with little but the frayed cloak of his former reputation.

There is no doubt that his administration of the War Office was not a success.  In all important matters of strategy he shifted his ground from obstinacy to sulkiness, yielding where he should not have yielded at all, and yielding grudgingly where to yield without the whole heart was fatal to success:  in the end he was among the drifters, “something between a hindrance and a help,” and the efforts to get rid of him were perhaps justified, although Mr. Asquith’s policy of curtailing his autocracy on the occasions when he was abroad had the greater wisdom.

I shall not trouble to correct the popular idea of Lord Kitchener’s character beyond saying that he was the last man in the world to be called a machine, and that he solemnly distrusted the mechanism of all organizations.  He was first and last an out-and-out individualist, a believer in men, a hater of all systems.  As Sir Ian Hamilton has said, wherever he saw organization his first instinct was to smash it.  I think his autocracy at the War Office might have been of greater service to the country if all the trained thinkers of the Army, that small body of brilliant men, had not been in France.  Even in his prime Lord Kitchener was the most helpless of men without lieutenants he could trust to do his bidding or to improve upon it in the doing.