Horatio Herbert Kitchener

I

Introduction

Horatio Herbert Kitchener (1850-1916), British military officer and statesman, known for his conquest of the Sudan region in Africa and as a symbol of British heroism. As secretary of state for war, he determined British military policy in the early part of World War I (1914-1918).

Kitchener was born June 24, 1850, in Ballylongford, county Kerry, Ireland, and educated at the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich. He was commissioned second lieutenant in the Royal Engineers in 1871 and was promoted to captain in 1883 for distinguished service in Palestine and Cyprus.

II

Exploits in Africa

After the British occupied Egypt in 1882, Kitchener was one of the officers selected to reorganize the Egyptian army. In 1884 and 1885 he was intelligence officer to a force that tried to relieve British general Charles George Gordon, who was besieged at Khartoum in Egyptian Sudan (the area of Sudan conquered by Egypt in 1822) by forces of the Sudanese religious leader Muhammad Ahmad, known as the Mahdi. Gordon was killed in the siege in 1885, and the Mahdists established an Islamic state in the Sudan. It presented a formidable threat to British colonial rule at the very height of the so-called Scramble for Africa, in which European powers seized almost the entire continent of Africa in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Kitchener was appointed sirdar (commander in chief) of the Egyptian army in 1892. In this capacity he set out to defeat the Mahdist state and reestablish British control over Egyptian Sudan. In the Battle of Omdurman in September 1898, Kitchener’s forces annihilated the army of the Mahdi’s successor, Abdullah al-Taashi. Kitchener’s forces soon occupied nearby Khartoum. Under the new title of Baron Kitchener of Khartoum, he established the city as the capital of an Anglo-Egyptian government in the Sudan.

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After defeating the Mahdist forces, Kitchener turned his attention to French forces that had occupied the small outpost of Fashoda on the Upper Nile in the Sudan. The French were claiming the Sudan had been open for conquest with the founding of the Mahdist state, whereas Britain argued that Egyptian (and hence British) authority still held there. Confronting the French force at Fashoda, Kitchener used diplomatic skill to induce French military commander Jean Baptiste Marchand to step down, thus defusing a potentially explosive situation. In an Anglo-French agreement signed in March 1899, France abandoned all claims to the Sudan region.

III

Leadership in the Boer War

In December 1899 Kitchener entered the Boer War in southern Africa, serving as commander in chief of British forces from November 1900 to the end of the war in May 1902. He employed ruthless tactics to stamp out a guerrilla war launched by the Dutch-descended population, known as Afrikaners or Boers, against occupying British forces. Kitchener’s tactics included burning the Afrikaner farms that sustained and sheltered the guerrillas and placing black African and Afrikaner women and children in concentration camps. During peace negotiations to end the Boer War in 1902, Kitchener persuaded the Boers to submit to British colonial rule in the Treaty of Vereeniging. For his achievements, Kitchener was made a viscount and received the Order of Merit in 1902.

IV

Service in India and World War I

Kitchener served as commander in chief of the British forces in India from 1902 to 1909, working to reorganize the army for the possibility of external aggression. Although he greatly strengthened Britain’s power, he was refused the viceroyship of India. Instead, in 1911 he was appointed consul general in Egypt, and until 1914 he ruled both that country and Sudan. For his services he was made earl of Khartoum.

On leave in England at the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Kitchener was appointed secretary of state for war. Using his great prestige, he nearly dictated military policy. He was responsible for recruiting the volunteer British army, and 3 million volunteers joined. Foreseeing a long war, he planned for an army of 70 divisions, which for a time made Britain the world’s leading military power. While on a mission to Russia, Kitchener was lost at sea on June 5, 1916, when the cruiser Hampshire, on which he was traveling, struck a German mine and sank.

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