it must be difficult to write biography at all if you are entirely out of sympathy with your subject. Hence Philip Magnus passes few judgments on Kitchener and is, to some extent his apologist. This, however, does not matter much. The real brute does not merely peep, but marches clangingly out of the pages. However much Philip Magnus explains away the South African concentration camps, jibes at Morley and the pro-Boers, tries to make of the Sudan campaign more than the efficient massacre it was (at the battle of Omdurman forty-eight Anglo-Egyptians to eleven thousand Dervishes), the great tin war-god emerges fully into the light as efficient, utterly unimaginative, a cruel, lonely bully, with an ego monstrously inflated by cheap victories against virtually mediaeval armies. When it came to confronting a foe that was any way equal in size or skill, he failed disastrously. The only time when he had to take a quick military decision before 1914 at the battle of Paadeburg he was thoroughly trounced. His completely autocratic conduct of the military direction of the First World War led to the bloody chaos of the Dardanelles. And it was with sighs of secret relief that his Cabinet colleagues heard that the North Sea had claimed him.

Kitchener’s career raises several interesting questions. And the first of these is whether there is not something in the whole code of military discipline and self-discipline that does not lead to dehumanisation. This is clearly not always the case—one recalls Cromwell or even Wellington. But a kind of amnesia of ordinary human fellow feeling does seem implicit in warfare itself—and this is as much true for revolutionary as for professional armies. In the case of colonial wars, this tendency is greatly enhanced. The ties with customary decencies of the homeland are severed. Someone like Kitchener is supreme autocrat, almost a kind of Caesar, a law unto himself. This partly explains why Kitchener was always so unwilling to return to England except as a conquering hero. In Egypt, South Africa and India he could in turn be Sultan, Dictator and almost Emperor (in fact it was Morley who kept him from the Viceroyship), whereas in Britain itself he had to face a radical press and scrutiny from a not entirely moribund Parliament. Thus despite the wave of public applause and official junketing, there was still Morley and fifty other MPs willing to stand up and oppose the money-grant bestowed on Kitchener on his return from the Sudan.