Lord Kitchener

Biography

Horatio Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl Kitchener, was born on June 24, 1850, in County Kerry, Ireland. He was one of the most celebrated and most controversial soldiers in British imperial history — the man who avenged Gordon at Khartoum, organized the British Army at the outbreak of World War I, and conducted the scorched-earth campaign in South Africa that finally ended the Boer Wars while permanently staining his reputation. He was hard, methodical, supremely competent within limits, and apparently incapable of understanding why anyone should object to his methods. Kitchener arrived in South Africa in January 1900 as Lord Roberts's chief of staff — the operational brain behind Roberts's sweeping advance that captured Bloemfontein and Pretoria. When Roberts returned to Britain in triumph in November 1900, Kitchener inherited what was supposed to be a mopping-up operation and found himself facing two more years of guerrilla war against opponents he had systematically underestimated. His initial responses — offering amnesty, conducting drives — produced nothing. His eventual solution was systematic and brutal: farm burning to deny guerrillas supplies, barbed-wire barriers and block houses to restrict movement, and the concentration of Boer women, children, and the Black African populations who supported them into camps. The concentration camp policy was not, in Kitchener's mind, a policy of deliberate killing — it was a logistical solution to the problem of what to do with civilian populations displaced by farm burning. But his systematic indifference to the welfare of the people in those camps — inadequate rations, no medical provision, contaminated water — produced mortality rates of 20 to 30 percent per year among Boer women and children. Emily Hobhouse's exposure of conditions and the subsequent parliamentary crisis forced reforms, but Kitchener's reputation never fully recovered from the association. After South Africa, Kitchener served as Commander-in-Chief India, British Agent in Egypt, and finally Secretary of State for War at the outbreak of World War I in 1914 — where his face on the famous recruiting poster ('Your Country Needs YOU') became one of the most iconic images of the twentieth century. He died on June 5, 1916, when HMS Hampshire struck a German mine off Orkney. The ship went down in minutes, and Kitchener drowned.

Key Battles