the facts
must end. After the South African War Kitchener had been made
Commander-in-Chief in India, where he effected several vital changes,
notably the emancipation of that office from the veto of the Military
Member of the Council of the Viceroy, and where he showed once more,
in his dealings with the Sepoys, that obscure yet powerful sympathy
with the mysterious intellect of the East. Thence he had been again
shifted to Egypt; but the next summons that came to him swallowed up
all these things. A short time after war broke out with Germany he was
made Minister of War, and held that post until the dark season when he
set out on a mission to Russia, which never reached its goal. But when
his ship went down he had already done a work and registered a change
in England, with some words about which this sketch may well conclude.
Journalistic attacks were indeed made upon him, but in writing for a
foreign reader I pass them by. In such a place I will not say even of
the meanest of Englishmen what they were not ashamed to say of one of
the greatest. In his new work he was not only a very great man, but
one dealing with very great things; and perhaps his most historic
moment was when he broke his customary silence about the deeper
emotions of life, and became the mouthpiece of the national horror at
the German fashion of fighting, which he declared to have left a stain
upon the whole profession of arms. For, by a movement unusually and
unconsciously dramatic, he chose that moment to salute across the long
stretch of years the comparative chivalry and nobility of his dead
enemies of the Soudan, and to announce that in the heart of Europe, in
learned academies and ordered government offices, there had appeared a
lunacy so cruel and unclean that the maddest dervish dead in the
desert had a right to disdain it where he lay.

Kitchener, like other Englishmen of his type, made his name outside
England and even outside Europe. But it was in England, and after his
return to England, that he did what will perhaps make his name most
permanent in history. That return to England was indeed as symbolic as
his last and tragic journey to Russia. Both will stand as symbols of
the deepest things which are moving mankind in the Great War. In truth
the whole of that great European movement which we call the cause of
the Allies is in itself a homeward journey. It is a return to native
and historic ideals, after an exile in the howling wilderne