Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Third Supplement.djvu/338

 period of great unrest in the Near East, when Turkey was engaged in two wars, it was uneventful. He succeeded in keeping Egypt quiet, and was able to devote himself almost entirely to social reforms, and to developing the commerce and resources of the country. The British government showed its gratitude by advising the King to confer on him an earldom, which he received in July 1914. He then returned to England for his annual holiday. When, a month later, war with Germany became imminent, he was on the point of returning to his post, but on 3 August he was recalled from Dover by Mr. Asquith in order to take over the seals of the secretary-of-state for war.

There was no other man then alive who, as head of the War Office, could have commanded so much of the confidence of the public, and that was in itself sufficient reason for Kitchener's appointment; nor was there anyone who had such first-hand knowledge of the military resources of the Empire as a whole. Within recent years he had examined on the spot the military problems of Egypt, India, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and East Africa, and from that knowledge the Empire was to reap great benefit. The gaps in his equipment were that he had little experience of the organization of the army at home, and none at all of the methods and machinery of the War Office, or of the system of Cabinet government; but there was more than compensation for these drawbacks in the fact that he entered the War Office fully conscious of the magnitude of the problem before the nation, and of the lamentable deficiencies in the preparations which had been made to meet that problem. Both soldiers and statesmen, in making plans for the event of war with Germany, conceived a struggle in which England should give full naval, but limited military, support to France; and the general conviction was that the complexity of modern international relations, more especially in the realm of finance, made a long war impossible. Of the statesmen and soldiers of Europe Kitchener alone envisaged from the first a war which would last three years, and he alone believed in the possibility of raising and putting in the field large new armies during the War. On entering the War Office he immediately made plans for the expansion of the British army of six regular and fourteen territorial divisions to seventy divisions; and it is not too much to say that this provision not only saved the British Empire from destruction, but Europe from German domination. It is probably true that the expansion of the British army could have been carried through more smoothly and expeditiously by expanding the territorial army than by creating new armies; but Kitchener was not familiar with the effect of Lord Haldane's work upon the territorial army, and his experience in South Africa led him to distrust the influence of county magnates in the formation of new units, while it is also probable that he was to some extent led away by his taste for improvisation. The fact remains that he brought his plans to completion, and in the third year of the War he had seventy divisions either in, or ready for, the field, an achievement which no one in 1914 had believed to be possible. When the public learned in May 1915 that the British forces in France were severely hampered by the lack of high explosive shell, Kitchener was made the target of a bitter attack in a section of the press. The Ministry of Munitions and the systematic mobilization of industry for the manufacture of munitions which resulted therefrom were very necessary additions to the machinery for the conduct of the War; but no arrangements could have made up in the early part of 1915 for the lack of provision for the manufacture of high explosive shells and guns before the War, and until April 1916 the armies in the field were entirely supplied with shell under contracts made by Kitchener in the War Office. Munitions could not be improvised, nor very speedily manufactured, but in all other respects no armies in the field were ever better provided with what was needed both for efficiency and for comfort; this was made possible by Kitchener's immediate anticipation both of the length and of the extent of the War.

The newspaper attacks did not affect the confidence of the public in Kitchener, and the King's action in conferring on him the order of the Garter in June 1915 was widely approved. But at this time the relations of the war minister with some of his colleagues in the Cabinet were becoming strained, and as the difficulties of the war increased these relations did not tend to become more happy. Kitchener had from the first, and retained to the last, the confidence of Mr. Asquith; but, from the formation of the first coalition in May 1915, Mr. Asquith's influence declined, and other members of the government became anxious to know more about the 312