The Project Gutenberg EBook of Lord Kitchener, by G. K. Chesterton

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Title: Lord Kitchener

Author: G. K. Chesterton

Release Date: June 15, 2008 [EBook #25795]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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LORD KITCHENER

BY

G. K. CHESTERTON

LONDON

1917

[Illustration: LORD KITCHENER

By G. K. Chesterton

_Photo by Elliott & Fry, Ltd., London._]

LORD KITCHENER

Horatio Herbert Kitchener was Irish by birth but English by
extraction, being born in County Kerry, the son of an English colonel.
The fanciful might see in this first and accidental fact the presence
of this simple and practical man amid the more mystical western
problems and dreams which were very distant from his mind, an element
which clings to all his career and gives it an unconscious poetry. He
had many qualities of the epic hero, and especially this--that he was
the last man in the world to be the epic poet. 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.

We find this, for instance, in one of the very first and perhaps one
of the most picturesque of all the facts that are recorded or r