Kitchener of Khartum
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
HORATIO HERBERT, LORD, a British military_officer; born in 1850. Educated at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, he joined the Royal Engineers, and was employed for some time in and after the Palestine Surveys . He 1874 the Grand Trunk railway, 62 miles W. of Toronto. It has manufactories of furniture, leather, boots and shoes, pianos and organs, buttons, gloves, etc.; excellent sewerage system, water works, street railway, and gas and electric light Roman Catholic college , 22 churches, and several daily, weekly, and periodicals. Pop. (1920 ) monthly 21,052. plants; a on served, having volunteered, as a major of cavalry in the Egyptian army in 1882, with the Nile Expedition in 1884, and became governor of Suakin in 1886. From 1888 till 1892 he held the rank of adjutant-general in the Egyptian army, and in the latter year was appointed Sirdar . After the taking of Dongola, in 1896 , he KITCHENER OF KHARTUM organized the final advance against the Khalifa, which resulted in the latter's utter defeat at Omdurman in September, 1898. For this he was awarded a peerage, as Baron Kitchener of Khartum and of Aspall, in the county of Suffolk. In 1899 he was appointed chief of staff in the South African campaign. Commander-in-chief in India 1907. British resident at Cairo 1911. In 1914 at the outbreak of the Great War he was appointed Secretary for War and through his efforts and the methods he inaugurated the British was raised from 160,000 men to 5,000,000. He lost his life in 1916 when the "Hampshire" which was carrying him to Russia was sunk by a mine.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
The bare facts in Collier's 1921 sketch still hold: Omdurman in 1898, the peerage, the War Office in 1914, and the loss of the cruiser Hampshire off Orkney in June 1916. What has changed utterly is the estimate of the man. Historians now credit the volunteer surge less to "his efforts" alone than to a national mood he happened to embody on the recruiting poster, and they weigh against him the farm-burning and civilian camps of the South African war, in which some 26,000 Boer women and children died of disease, along with his part in the Gallipoli and shell-supply failures. The sinking, treated here as a plain mine-strike, bred a long crop of conspiracy stories, including a notorious 1926 hoax about the return of his body; the mine is generally accepted to have been laid by the German submarine U-75.
Written for this edition, 2026.