ness.

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.

It will better serve the main purpose of this book to suggest in what
particulars the real greatness of this once glorious and finally
pathetic figure came to suffer shipwreck at the hands of the
politicians.

Lord Kitchener's greatness was the indefinable greatness of personality.
He was not a clever man. He had no gifts of any kind. In the society of
scholars he was mum and among the lovers of the beautiful he cut an
awkward figure. At certain moments he had curious flashes of
i