The famous 19th Century and WWI soldier.

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Kitchener was born in Ballylongford, County Kerry in Ireland, son of Lt. Col. Henry Horatio Kitchener (1805-1894) and Frances Anne Chevallier-Cole (d. 1864; daughter of Rev John Chevallier and his third wife, Elizabeth, née Cole). The family were English, not Anglo-Irish: his father had only recently bought land in Ireland. The year his mother died of tuberculosis, they moved to Switzerland in an effort to improve her condition; the young Kitchener was educated there and at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich. Pro-French and eager to see action, he joined a French field ambulance unit in the Franco-Prussian War; his father took him back to England after he caught pneumonia from ascending in a balloon to see the French Army of the Loire in action. He was commissioned into the Royal Engineers on January 4, 1871. His service in France had violated British neutrality, and he was reprimanded by the Duke of Cambridge, the commander-in-chief. He served in Palestine, Egypt, and Cyprus as a surveyor, learned Arabic, and prepared detailed topographical maps of the areas.

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Survey of Western Palestine
In 1874, at age 24, Kitchener was assigned by the Palestine Exploration Fund to a mapping-survey of the Holy Land, replacing Charles Tyrwhitt-Drake, who had died of malaria (Silberman 1982). Kitchener, then an officer in the Royal Engineers, joined fellow Royal Engineer Claude R. Conder and between 1874 and 1877, they surveyed what is today Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, returning to England only briefly in 1875 after an attack by locals in the Galilee, at Safed (Silberman 1982).
Conder and Kitchener’s expedition became known as the Survey of Western Palestine because it was largely confined to the area west of the Jordan River (Hodson 1997). The survey collected data on the topography and toponymy of the area, as well as local flora and fauna. The results of the survey were published in an eight volume series, with Kitchener’s contribution in the first three tomes (Conder and Kitchener 1881-1885).
This survey has had a lasting effect on the Middle East for several reasons:
• The ordnance survey serves as the basis for the grid system used in the modern maps of Israel and Palestine.
• The collection of data compiled by Conder and Kitchener are still consulted by archaeologists and geographers working in the southern Levant.
• The survey itself effectively delineated and defined the political borders of the southern Levant. For instance, the modern border between Israel and Lebanon is established at the point in the upper Galilee where Conder and Kitchener’s survey stopped (Silberman 1982).

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Egypt, Sudan and Khartoum
Kitchener later served as a Vice-Consul in Anatolia, and in 1883, as a British captain but with the Turkish rank of bimbashi (major), in the occupation of Egypt (which was to be a British puppet state, its army led by British officers, from 1883 until the early 1950s), and the following year as an Aide de Camp during the failed Gordon relief expedition in the Sudan. At this time his fiancée, and possibly the only female love of his life, Hermione Baker, died of typhoid fever in Cairo; he subsequently had no issue. But he raised his young cousin Bertha Chevallier-Boutell, daughter of Kitchener's first-cousin, Sir Francis Hepburn de Chevallier-Boutell.
Kitchener won national fame on his second tour in the Sudan (1886–1899), being made Aide de Camp to Queen Victoria and collecting a Knighthood of the Bath. In the late 1880s he was Governor of the Red Sea Territories (which in practice consisted of little more than the Port of Suakin) - with the rank of Colonel - then after becoming Sirdar of the Egyptian Army in 1892 - with the rank of major-general in the British Army - he headed the victorious Anglo-Egyptian army at the Battle of Omdurman on September 2, 1898, a victory made possible by the massive rail construction program he had instituted in the area.
He quite possibly prevented war between France and Britain when he dealt firmly but non-violently with the French military expedition to claim Fashoda, in what became known as the Fashoda Incident.
He was created Baron Kitchener, of Khartoum and of Aspall in the County of Suffolk, on 18 November 1898 as a victory title commemorating his successes, and began a programme restoring good governance to the Sudan. The programme had a strong foundation based on education, Gordon Memorial College being its centrepiece, and not simply for the children of the local elites - children from anywhere could apply to study.
He ordered the mosques of Khartoum rebuilt and instituted reforms which recognised Friday - the Muslim holy day - as the official day of rest, and guaranteed freedom of religion to all citizens of the Sudan. He went so far as to prevent evangelical Christian missionaries from attempting to convert Muslims to Christianity.
Kitchener rescued a substantial charitable fund which had been diverted into the pockets of the Khedive of Egypt, and put it to use improving the lives of the ordinary Sudanese.
He also reformed the debt laws, preventing rapacious moneylenders from stripping away all assets of impoverished farmers, guaranteeing them five acres (20,000 m?) of land to farm for themselves and the tools to farm with. In 1899 Kitchener was presented with a small island in the Nile at Aswan as in gratitude for his services; the island was renamed Kitchener's Island in his honour.

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The Boer War
During the Second Boer War (1899–1902), Kitchener arrived with Lord Roberts on the RMS Dunottar Castle and the massive British reinforcements of December 1899. Officially holding the title of chief of staff, he was in practice a second-in-command, and commanded a much-criticised frontal assault at the Battle of Paardeberg in February 1900.
Following the defeat of the conventional Boer forces, Kitchener succeeded Roberts as overall commander in November 1900, and after the failure of a reconciliatory peace treaty in February 1901 (due to British cabinet veto) which Kitchener had negotiated with the Boer leaders, Kitchener inherited and expanded the successful strategies devised by Roberts to crush the Boer guerrillas.
In a brutal campaign, these strategies removed civilian support from the Boers with a scorched earth policy of destroying Boer farms, building blockhouses, and moving civilians into concentration camps. Conditions in these camps, which had been conceived by Roberts as a form of humanitarian aid to the families whose farms he had destroyed, began to degenerate rapidly as the large influx of Boers outstripped the minuscule ability of the British to cope. The camps lacked space, food, sanitation, medicine, and medical care, leading to rampant disease and a staggering 34.4% death rate for those Boers who entered. The biggest critic of the camps was Cornish humanitarian and welfare worker Emily Hobhouse. Despite being largely rectified by late 1901, they led to wide opprobrium in Britain and Europe, and especially amongst South Africans.
The Treaty of Vereeniging was signed in 1902 following a tense six months. During this period Kitchener struggled against Sir Alfred Milner, the Governor of the Cape Colony and the British government. Milner was a hardline conservative and wanted to forcibly anglicise the Afrikaners, and Milner and the British government wanted to assert victory by forcing the Boers to sign a relatively humiliating peace treaty, while Kitchener wanted a more generous compromise peace treaty that would recognise certain rights for the Afrikaners and promise future self-government. Eventually the British government decided the war had gone on long enough and sided with Kitchener against Milner. (Louis Botha, the Boer leader with whom Kitchener negotiated his aborted peace treaty in 1901, became the first Prime Minister of the self-governing Union of South Africa in 1910.) The Treaty also agreed to pay for reconstruction following the end of hostilities. Six days later Kitchener, who had risen in rank from major-general to full general during the war, was created Viscount Kitchener, of Khartoum and of the Vaal in the Colony of Transvaal and of Aspall in the County of Suffolk.

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Court martial of Breaker Morant
Main articles: Court martial of Breaker Morant and Breaker Morant
The Boer commandos had no uniforms: they fought in their ordinary civilian attire. On long service, as the state of their clothing became progressively worse, many resorted to taking the clothes of captured troops. This was widely perceived by British commanders as an attempt to masquerade as British soldiers in order to gain a tactical advantage in battle; in response, Kitchener ordered that Boers found wearing British uniforms were to be tried on the spot and the sentence, death, confirmed by the commanding officer.
This order - which Kitchener later denied issuing - led to the famous Breaker Morant case, in which several soldiers, including the celebrated horseman and bush poet Lt. Harry "Breaker" Morant, were arrested and court-martialled for summarily executing Boer prisoners and also for the murder of a German missionary believed to be a Boer sympathiser. Morant and another Australian, Lt. Peter Handcock, were found guilty, sentenced to death and shot by firing squad at Pietersburg on 27 February 1902. Their death warrants were personally signed by Kitchener.

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India and Egypt
Following this, Kitchener was made Commander-in-Chief in India (1902–1909) - his term of office was extended by two years - where he reconstructed the greatly disorganised Indian Army. He clashed with the Viceroy Lord Curzon of Kedleston, who had originally lobbied for Kitchener's appointment but who now became a passionate and lifelong enemy after being forced to resign as Viceroy. Whilst in India Kitchener broke his leg badly in a horseriding accident, leaving him with a slight limp for the rest of his life.
Kitchener was promoted to the highest Army rank, Field Marshal, in 1910 and went on a tour of the world. He aspired to be Viceroy of India, but the Secretary of State for India, John Morley, was not keen and hoped to send him instead to Malta as Commander-in-Chief of British forces in the Mediterranean, even to the point of announcing the appointment in the newspapers. Kitchener pushed hard for the Viceroyalty, returning to London to lobby Cabinet ministers and the dying King Edward VII, from whom, whilst collecting his Field-Marshal's baton, Kitchener obtained permission to refuse the Malta job. However, perhaps in part because he was thought to be a Tory (the Liberals were in office at the time) and perhaps due to a Curzon-inspired whispering campaign, but most importantly because Morley, who was a Gladstonian and thus suspicious of imperialism, felt it inappropriate, after the recent grant of limited self-government under the 1909 Indian Councils Act, for a serving soldier to be Viceroy (in the event no serving soldier was appointed Viceroy until Archibald Wavell in 1943), Morley could not be moved. The Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith, was sympathetic but was unwilling to overule Morley, who threatened resignation, so Kitchener was finally turned down for the post of Viceroy of India in 1911.
Kitchener then returned to Egypt as British Agent and Consul-General in Egypt (the job formerly held by Sir Evelyn Baring, Lord Cromer) and of the so-called Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (1911–1914, during the formal reign of Abbas Hilmi II as Khedive (nominally Ottoman Viceroy) of Egypt, Sovereign of Nubia, of the Sudan, of Kordofan and of Darfur). Whatever the legal niceties, Egypt was in reality a British puppet state and the Sudan a directly-administered British colony, making Kitchener Viceroy of the region in all but name.
Kitchener was created Earl Kitchener, of Khartoum and of Broome in the County of Kent, on 29 June 1914. Unusually, provision was made for the title to be passed on to his brother and nephew, since Kitchener was not married and had no children.

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World War I


The much-imitated 1914 Lord Kitchener Wants You poster.
At the outset of World War I, the Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith, quickly had Lord Kitchener appointed Secretary of State for War; Asquith had been filling the job himself as a stopgap following the resignation of Colonel Seeley over the Curragh Mutiny earlier in 1914, and Kitchener was by chance briefly in Britain on leave when war was declared. Against cabinet opinion, Kitchener correctly predicted a long war that would last at least three years, require huge new armies to defeat Germany, and suffer huge casualties before the end would come. Smelling blood in the wind, Kitchener stated that the conflict would plumb the depths of manpower "to the last million."
A massive recruitment campaign began, which soon featured a distinctive poster of himself, taken from a magazine front cover. It may have encouraged large numbers of volunteers and has proven to be one of the most enduring images of the war, having been copied and parodied many times since.
In an effort to find a way to relieve pressure on the Western front, Lord Kitchener proposed an invasion of ?skenderun with Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC), New Army, and Indian troops. Alexandretta was an area with a large Christian population and was the strategic centre of the Ottoman Empire's railway network - its capture would have cut the empire in two. Yet he was instead eventually persuaded to support Winston Churchill's disastrous Gallipoli campaign in 1915–1916. That failure, combined with the Shell Crisis of 1915, was to deal Kitchener's political reputation a heavy blow; Kitchener was popular with the public, so Asquith retained him in office in the new coalition government, but responsibility for munitions was moved to a new ministry headed by David Lloyd George. Later in 1915 Kitchener was sent on a tour of inspection of Gallipoli and the Near East, in the hope that he could be persuaded to remain in the region as commander-in-chief.
At the end of 1915, the new Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir William Robertson, took office only on condition that he was granted the right to speak for the Army to the Cabinet in matters of strategy, leaving Kitchener solely with responsibility solely for manpower and recruitment. Whereas Kitchener had hoped to hold his armies in reserve to administer the coup de grace to Germany after the other warring nations had exhausted themselves, Robertson was suspicious of efforts in the Balkans and Near East, and was instead committed to major British offensives against Germany on the Western Front - the first of these was to be the Somme in 1916.
In May 1916, preparations were made for Kitchener and Lloyd George to visit Russia on a diplomatic mission. Lloyd George was otherwise engaged with his new Ministry and so it was decided to send Kitchener alone.
A week before his death, Kitchener confided to Lord Derby that he intended to press relentlessly for a peace of reconciliation, regardless of his position, when the war was over, as he feared that the politicians would make a bad peace. [citation needed]
On 4 June 1916, Lord Kitchener personally answered questions asked by politicians about his running of the war effort; at the start of hostilities Kitchener had ordered two million rifles with various US arms manufacturers. Only 480 of these rifles had arrived in the UK by 4 June 1916. The numbers of shells supplied were no less paltry. Kitchener explained the efforts he had made in order to secure alternative supplies. He received a resounding vote of thanks from the 200+ Members of Parliament who had arrived to question him, both for his candour and for his efforts to keep the troops armed; Sir Ivor Herbert, who, a week before, had introduced the failed vote of censure in the House of Commons against Kitchener's running of the War Department, personally seconded the motion.
In addition to his military work, Lord Kitchener contributed to efforts on the home front. The knitted sock patterns of the day used a seam up the toe, that could rub uncomfortably against the toes. Kitchener encouraged British and American women to knit for the war effort, and contributed a sock pattern featuring a new technique for a seamless join of the toe, still known as Kitchener stitch. [1] [2] [3]

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Death


At Scapa Flow, Lord Kitchener embarked aboard the armoured cruiser HMS Hampshire for his diplomatic mission to Russia. On 5 June 1916, while en route to the Russian port of Arkhangelsk, Hampshire struck a mine laid by the newly-launched German U-boat U-75 (commanded by Curt Beitzen) during a Force 9 gale and sank west of the Orkney Islands. Kitchener, his staff, and 643 of the crew of 655 were drowned or died of exposure. His body was never found. The survivors who caught sight of him in those last moments testified to his outward calm and resolution. The same day, the last Division of Kitchener's New Army crossed the channel to take up its positions in Flanders and France where, eventually, and despite numerous setbacks, they helped to defeat Germany in 1918.

Fritz Joubert Duquesne, a Boer and German spy, claimed to have sabotaged and sunk the HMS Hampshire, killing Kitchener and most of the crew. According to German records, Duquesne assumed the identity of Russian Duke Boris Zakrevsky and joined Kitchener in Scotland. On route to Russia, Duquesne signaled a German U-boat to alert them that Kitchener’s ship was approaching. He then escaped on a raft just before the HMS Hampshire was destroyed. Duquesne was awarded the Iron Cross for this act. In the 1930s and 1940s, he ran the famous Duquesne Spy Ring and was captured by the FBI along with 32 other Nazi spies in the largest espionage conviction in U.S. history.

It should be noted that not everyone mourned Kitchener's loss. C. P. Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian is said to have remarked that "as for the old man, he could not have done better than to have gone down, as he was a great impediment lately".

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Conspiracy theories
The suddenness of Kitchener's death, combined with his great fame and the fact that his body was never recovered, almost immediately gave rise to conspiracy theories that have continued almost to this day.
The fact that newly-appointed Minister of Munitions (and future prime minister) David Lloyd George was supposed to accompany Kitchener on the fatal journey, but cancelled at the last moment, has been given great significance by some. This fact, along with the alleged lethargy of the rescue efforts, has led some to claim that Kitchener was assassinated, or, somewhat more plausibly, that his death would have been convenient for a British establishment that had come to see him as figure from the past who was incompetent to wage modern war. Given that Kitchener's death hit Britain like a thunderclap and was widely perceived as a disaster for the war effort, this interpretation seems far-fetched, to say the least.

After the war, there were a number of conspiracy theories put forward, one by Lord Alfred Douglas, positing a connection between Kitchener's death, the recent naval Battle of Jutland, Winston Churchill and a Jewish conspiracy. (Churchill successfully sued Douglas for criminal libel and the latter spent six months in prison.) Another claimed that the Hampshire did not strike a mine at all, but was sunk by explosives secreted in the vessel by Irish Republicans.
Probably the most spectacular Kitchener-related conspiracy was the effort in 1926 by a hoaxer named Frank Power to actually recover and bury Kitchener's body, which he claimed had been found by a Norwegian fisherman. He brought a coffin back from Norway and prepared it for burial in St. Paul's. At this point, however, the authorities intervened and the coffin was opened in the presence of police and a distinguished pathologist. The box was found to contain only tar for weight. There was widespread public outrage at Power, but he was ultimately never prosecuted.[1]
The role of Fritz Joubert Duquesne in Kitchener's death has been hypothesised/documented in several books and movies:
• The man who killed Kitchener; the life of Fritz Joubert Duquesne, 1879-, by Clement Wood. New York, W. Faro, inc., 1932.
• Sabotage! The Secret War Against America, by Michael Sayers & Albert E. Kahn. Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1942.
• The House on 92nd Street, won screenwriter Charles G. Booth an Academy Award for the best original motion picture story, 1945.
• Counterfeit Hero: Fritz Duquesne, Adventurer and Spy, by Art Ronnie. Naval Institute Press, 1995 ISBN 1-55750-733-3
• Fräulein Doktor, a Dino DeLaurentis film "", 1969.
• The life of Fritz Joubert Du Quesne, by Francois Verster, a documentary film won six Stone awards, 1999.