the École Polytechnique in Paris twelve months younger than was usual with boys.

At Rivesaltes, after 1914, people were ready enough to talk of their illustrious son, of his goodness of heart, and his utter simplicity. Whenever he had been there in later life they would tell how in his country home on the banks of the Alps he would often go himself and make purchases in the market. "Ah! he was a wonderful boy, a phenomenon!" some old inhabitant would say. "He would fight the other lads, in order to be left at peace to work at mathematics!" Joffre's light-colored complexion and his taciturnity. made a French Minister of War once ask questions as to his origin. "You are from Lorraine, mon Général? No! Then perhaps you are Flemish, or Norman ?" "Non plus," Joffre would say. The Minister would look puzzled until Joffre had said simply, "Je suis Catalan," a description that told volumes.19

HORATIO HERBERT, EARL KITCHENER, BRITISH FIELD

MARSHAL

"K. of K.," Kitchener of Khartoum, the most widely celebrated of British soldiers of his period, with the single exception of his old chief, "Bobs" (Lord Roberts), and whose tragic death off the Orkney Islands near the end of the second year of the war all England mourned, was born in the service in 1850, the eldest son of Lieutenant-Colonel H. H. Kitchener, of the Thirteenth Dragoons. Fifty years before the war, on the borders of Normandy and Brittany in the quaint old town of Dinan-the birthplace of DuGuesclin, where the warrior's heart is still kept in the little Church of St. Sauveur Kitchener was living as a lanky English lad, often teased by French boys who, as they followed him, cried out "V'la l'Angliche!" an age-old taunt that fisherfolk had had a habit of flinging in the face of the traditional enemy of France across the "Silver Streak." Young Kitchener was wont to do battle with his enemies under the medieval ramparts of Dinan, and as his tormentors were many, he often reached home with his clothes torn, and the Kitcheners were not rich in clothes.

Of pure English stock Kitchener's father, on half pay, had married the daughter of an old Huguenot family, a Miss Chevallier of Suffolk, and had three children, all boys, of whom the eldest, Horatio Herbert, was born at Ballylongford, in Ireland, while his father's regiment was stationed there. Horatio Herbert got what learning

19 Compiled from The Nouveau Larousse Illustré Supplement (Paris); also from an article by Alexander Harvey in Current Opinion, and from The Times (London) and The Evening Sun (New York).

he could in County Kerry, then attended a school at Villeneuve, in France, and with what coaching his father could give him, managed in 1868 to pass the entrance examinations for the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich. He was in Dinan, waiting to learn the result of his final examinations when, in 1870, Louis Napoleon sur`rendered at Sedan and the French Government of National Defense led by Gambetta called Chanzy from Algiers and gave him command of the Army of the Loire. In the great wave of war-feeling that ensued young Kitchener found himself swept into the ranks of the French Mobiles, and after his British commission arrived, enlisted as a sub-lieutenant of Royal Engineers. Despite the protests of his father who feared the wrath of the British War Office, young Kitchener took the field as a French soldier to fight in the ranks where he learned a lesson that stood him in good stead years afterward in the Sudan and in South Africa, which was-that in modern warfare valor is worth nothing if not backed by a thorough organization.

In that terrible winter campaign of 1870-71, in France, Kitchener saw miles of freight-cars stalled when already loaded with needed war material; soldiers freezing for lack of overcoats that were stored in plenty half a mile away, with no one to release them, and starving for food that was rotting because there was lack of machinery for its distribution. His first campaign ended rather ingloriously in a balloon ascent, in which, his clothes getting wet, he caught cold. Three months after he had left Dinan as a soldier of France, Kitchener found himself back under his father's roof and in bed near death with pleurisy. In 1871, with the Franco-Prussian war ended, he joined the British Engineers and for three years worked at Chatham and Aldershot. He was then detached to work in a semicivil capacity on the Palestine Survey and passed four years measuring land and learning the ways and speech of the people. In Palestine, as afterward in Cyrus and Egypt, he adapted himself to the ways of natives, came to understand the secret workings of their minds, and acquired not only their language but their intonation in speech, until he could live among Arabs almost as safe from detection as Kipling's "Kim" could live in the crowded streets of Lahore.

When England acquired Cyprus in 1878 Kitchener was placed in charge of its exploration. The maps and reports he sent to London were models. In 1880 he was made British Vice-Consul at Erzerum. After the bombardment of Alexandria in 1883, when England had to reorganize the Egyptian army, Kitchener's professional opportunity arrived when he was one of twenty-six men chosen to raise in Egypt a force of 6,000 men for defense of the country, and attached

to the Egyptian Intelligence Department, where he was told to "lick the cavalry into shape." Kitchener found the Egyptian fellah like a bicycle-incapable of standing alone, but very useful in the hands of a skilled master. In ten weeks after the arrival of his first raw recruits, he had 5,600 men who could go through ceremonial parade movements like British guards in Hyde Park, and do it with precision.

Kitchener served in Egypt for fourteen years. He was with the Gordon Relief Expedition in 1884 and stayed in the country till the hero of Khartoum was avenged and a cathedral raised over the spot where he had fallen. Severely wounded at Handoub by a bullet that shattered his jaw and buried itself in his neck, he was invalided back to England, but in 1888 returned to head the First Brigade of Sudanese troops at Toski, where he led the final charge. After serving as Governor-General of the Red Sea Littoral and Commandant of Suakim, he was made Chief of Police at Cairo, and, on Lord Cromer's recommendation, in 1892 was promoted to be Sirdar, altho he was then only Colonel. Four years later Kitchener began the reconquest of the Sudan and in the Dongola expedition won the rank of Major-General.

Next year he started out to avenge Gordon's death. His first step was to plan a railroad from Cairo to Khartoum which from Halfa to Abu Hamed would have to cross 230 miles of sand. Experts scoffed at his idea. In that dry country the entire carrying capacity of a train they said would have to be taken up by the water-supply alone necessary for the locomotive. But Kitchener started his road and as he built it he bored in the sand until, just where he needed it, he struck water. The road was finished in 1897. In the following year Kitchener won the battle of the Atbara, and.caught up with the Mahdi's forces at Omdurman, which sealed .the Khalifa's doom, and avenged Gordon. He cut off the dervishes' retreat, and as they were huddled in a hollow around their standards, played on them with machine-guns, killing about 15,000, and thus wiped out the last trace of Mahdism. The Mahdi's tomb, the great shrine of the dervishes, Kitchener demolished and so scattered the mummy contained therein that no part of it could ever be found and used as a focus of future trouble. Kitchener had given peace to Egypt and was created Baron Kitchener of Khartoum, with the Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath, the thanks of Parliament, and $150,000-the Kaiser telegraphing his congratulations.

Only two weeks after Omdurman, Kitchener's forces, on an historic occasion memorable in all stories of the World War, met at Fashoda the French officer, Marchand, with eight other French officers and 120 Sudanese tirailleurs. After negotiations ending in

the final withdrawal of the French from Fashoda, the whole of the Sudan was in the hands of England, and Kitchener began to build it up. His powers of organization led to the creation there of a new civilization. Within a year the Boer war broke out, with British disasters at Stormberg, Magersfontein, and Colenso. Lord Roberts was sent out and Kitchener, still Sirdar of the Egyptian Army, promoted to be Lieutenant-General and made Roberts' Chief of Staff. He arrived in Cape Town in January, 1900, and in November, after Roberts left for England, took supreme command. Kitchener built across the Transvaal a line of blockhouses con

KITCHENER IN A TRENCH IN GALLIPOLI

During this visit, made late in 1915, Kitchener was frequently within a few yards of Turkish trenches. The withdrawal from Gallipoli was a consequence of Kitchener's observations. He is standing at the extreme left

nected by wires charged with electricity; put sixty mobile columns into the field, and had all women, children and non-combatants taken off farms and placed in concentration camps. By a slow process the Boers were worn down, and in May, 1902, the long struggle ended. It was Kitchener's work-not the work of a dashing soldier, or a brilliant tactician, but the work of a plodding, methodical traffic superintendent with an organization in which nothing was left to chance. Kitchener had trained himself to regard war as an industry.

To him it meant raising, clothing, arming, feeding, and caring for men, and placing them in positions where they could not lose, and placing the enemy in positions where they could not win. An actual battle he looked upon as a necessary, but noisy and rather vulgar, affair. When he fought a battle, however, it was without feeling for the safety of any one. He was personally responsible for the frontal attack at Paardeberg, the bloodiest in the South African War. For this new service Kitchener was made a viscount, advanced to the rank of general "for distinguished service," and given the thanks of Parliament with $250,000, and the Order of Merit.

No sooner was peace signed with the Boers than Kitchener was sent as Commander-in-Chief to India where, in seven years, he revolutionized the army and freed it from red tape. He put an instant end to polo-playing and whisky-and-soda drinking in garrison life, made every one work, and thanked no one for working. Just as in South Africa he had sent back to England more than 400 officers as "useless," so he weeded out incompetents in India. Failures were treated with unbending severity, whether committed by men in high or low places. He never played favorites and never permitted an excuse to prevail. The rank and file loved Kitchener. Women were greatly attracted to him but he never married. There seemed to him an element of chance in matrimony, and no one could imagine Kitchener leaving anything to chance. This tall, handsome man was no woman-hater, however, and yet he did not carry his heart upon his sleeve, being the most undemonstrative of men, unreadable, still-faced, iron-jawed and wordless, with hard gray eyes that looked over other men's heads, and told of a soul of steel fortified by great physical strength. Over a six-foot two inches frame his muscles were stretched like wire rope. At sixty-four he was lithe and wiry. Altho his bearing was dignified and cold, he could display at times the agility of a cat. In an accident in India, where other men might have lost their lives, he escaped with only a broken leg.

After leaving India with the rank of Field-Marshal, Kitchener succeeded the Duke of Connaught as Commander-in-Chief and High Commissioner in the Mediterranean, and made a tour of England's colonies to organize fighting forces. On his way from Australia he visited Japan and the United States, returning to England in 1910. When the war began his latest service had been in Egypt, where he went to continue Lord Cromer's work and succeeded in restoring the fellah to the land. With a grant of $15,000,000 from the British Government, he created a great cotton-raising industry which so changed economic conditions along the Nile that a nationalist movement which had threatened to create trouble almost died out. When the war broke out, Kitchener was in England, having been called