The Mirrors of Downing Street Part 5

He discovered at the War Office that preparations had been made for just such an emergency as had now occurred. The thoughtfulness and thoroughness of this work struck him with surprise, and he inquired the name of its author. He was told that Lord Haldane had made these preparations. "Haldane!" he exclaimed; "but isn't he the man who is being attacked by the newspapers?"

A chivalrous feeling which does not seem to have visited the bosoms of any of Lord Haldane's colleagues visited the bosom of this honest soldier. Someone about him who had enjoyed personal relations with various editors was dispatched to one of the most offending editors conducting the campaign against Lord Haldane with the object of stopping this infamous vendetta.

"I know what you say is true," replied this editor, "and I regret the attack as much as Lord Kitchener does; but I have received my orders and they come from so important a quarter that I dare not disobey them." He gave Lord Kitchener's emissary the name of a much respected leader of the Unionist Party.

Thus early in his career at the War Office Lord Kitchener learnt that the spirit of the public school does not operate in Westminster and that politics are a dirty business.

At no time in his life was Lord Kitchener "a racehorse amongst cows,"

as the Greeks put it, being, even in his greatest period, of a slow, heavy, and laborious turn of mind; but when he entered Mr. Asquith's Cabinet he was at least an honest man amongst lawyers. He was a great man; wherever he sat, to borrow a useful phrase, was the head of the table; but this greatness of his, not being the full greatness of a complete man, and having neither the support of a keen intellect nor the foundations of a strong moral character, wilted in the atmosphere of politics, and in the end left him with little but the frayed cloak of his former reputation.

There is no doubt that his administration of the War Office was not a success. In all important matters of strategy he s.h.i.+fted his ground from obstinacy to sulkiness, yielding where he should not have yielded at all, and yielding grudgingly where to yield without the whole heart was fatal to success: in the end he was among the drifters, "something between a hindrance and a help," and the efforts to get rid of him were perhaps justified, although Mr. Asquith's policy of curtailing his autocracy on the occasions when he was abroad had the greater wisdom.

I shall not trouble to correct the popular idea of Lord Kitchener's character beyond saying that he was the last man in the world to be called a machine, and that he solemnly distrusted the mechanism of all organizations. He was first and last an out-and-out individualist, a believer in men, a hater of all systems. As Sir Ian Hamilton has said, wherever he saw organization his first instinct was to smash it. I think his autocracy at the War Office might have been of greater service to the country if all the trained thinkers of the Army, that small body of brilliant men, had not been in France. Even in his prime Lord Kitchener was the most helpless of men without lieutenants he could trust to do his bidding or to improve upon it in the doing.

It will better serve the main purpose of this book to suggest in what particulars the real greatness of this once glorious and finally pathetic figure came to suffer s.h.i.+pwreck at the hands of the politicians.

Lord Kitchener's greatness was the indefinable greatness of personality.

He was not a clever man. He had no gifts of any kind. In the society of scholars he was mum and among the lovers of the beautiful he cut an awkward figure. At certain moments he had curious flashes of inspiration, but they came at long intervals and were seldom to be had in the day of drudgery, when his mind was not excited. On the whole his intelligence was of a dull order, plodding heavily through experience, mapping the surface of life rather than penetrating any of its mysteries, making slowly quite sure of one or two things rather than grasping the whole problem at a stroke.

But there was one movement in his character which developed greatness and by its power brought him to wonderful success and great honour; this was a deep, an unquestioning, a religious sense of duty.

He started life with a stubborn ambition. As he went along he felt the lightness of duty, and married his ambition to this Spartan virtue. He remained in most respects as selfish a man as ever lived, as selfish as a greedy schoolboy; nevertheless by the power of his single virtue, to which he was faithful up to his last moments on this earth, he was able to sacrifice his absorbing self-interest to the national welfare even in a political atmosphere which sickened him at every turn.

You may see what I mean by considering that while he longed for nothing so much in later life as the possession of Broome Park, and that while his selfishness stopped hardly at anything to enrich that house with pictures, china, and furniture, and that while he would shamelessly hint for things in the houses of the people who were entertaining him, even in the houses of his own subordinates, until the weaker or the more timorous gave him the object of his covetousness, nevertheless for the sake of his country he clung to the uncongenial chair in Whitehall, not merely working like a cart-horse for what he considered to be his nation's good, but suffering without public complaint of any kind, and scarcely a private grumble, all the numerous humiliations that came his way either from his own colleagues in the Cabinet or from a powerful section of the newspapers outside.

I remember hearing from the late Mr. John Bonner, a most admirable artist in many fields, an amusing account of an interview with Lord Kitchener which ill.u.s.trates the Field-Marshal's pa.s.sion for his Kentish home, and also sheds a telling light on the aesthetic side of his character.

Mr. Bonner had been recommended to Lord Kitchener, who wanted amorini scattered about the leafy gardens at Broome. Drawings were made and approved: a few months afterwards the amorini were set up in the gardens.

Soon came a summons to the presence of the great man. Mr. Bonner found him a terrible object in a terrible rage. In his late years, be it remembered, Lord Kitchener was not good to look upon. He appeared a coa.r.s.e, a top-heavy person; and in anger, his cross-eyes could be painfully disconcerting.

Lord Kitchener forgot that Mr. Bonner was not only an artist of a singularly beautiful spirit, but a gentleman. He blazed at him. What did he mean by sticking up those ridiculous little figures in Broome?--what did he mean by it?--with an unpleasant reference to the account.

The poor artist, terribly affrighted, said that he thought Lord Kitchener had seen his drawings and approved of them. "Yes, the drawings!--but you can't see the figures when they're up! What's the good of something you can't see?"

The great man, it appeared at last, wanted amorini the size of giants; a rather Rosherville taste.

"He had knowledge," said Lady Sackville, from whose beautiful house he borrowed many ideas for Broome, and would have liked to have carried off many of its possessions, particularly a William the Fourth drum which he found in his bedroom as a waste-paper receptacle; "he had knowledge but no taste."

Her daughter said to me on one occasion, "Every chair he sits in becomes a throne," referring to the atmosphere of power and dignity which surrounded him.

It is instructive, I think, to remark how a single virtue pa.s.sionately held--held, I mean, with a religious sense of its seriousness--can carry even a second-cla.s.s mind to genuine greatness, a greatness that can be felt if not defined. In every sense of the word greatness, as we apply it to a saint, a poet, or a statesman, Lord Kitchener was a second-cla.s.s and even a third-cla.s.s person; but so driving was his sense of duty that it carried him to the very forefront of national life, and but for the political atmosphere in which he had to work for the last few years of his distinguished service to the State he might have easily become one of the great and s.h.i.+ning heroes of British history. He had no taste; but the impression he made on those who had was the impression of a great character.

How was it that his greatness, that is to say his greatness of personality, made so pitiable an end? What was lacking that this indubitable greatness should have been so easily brayed in the mortar of politics?

The answer I think is this: a single virtue can bestow greatness, and the greatness may never fail when it has time and s.p.a.ce in which to express itself; but many virtues of intellect and character are necessary when time is of the essence of the contract, and more especially in a situation of shared responsibility.

Lord Kitchener knew many of his own failings. He was by no means a vain man. Indeed he suffered considerable pain from the knowledge that he was not the tremendous person of the popular imagination. This knowledge robbed him of self-a.s.surance. He tried to live up to the legendary Kitchener, and so long as he could find men as brave as himself, but of swifter and more adaptable intelligence, to do his bidding, he succeeded: many of the public, indeed, believed in the legendary Kitchener up to the day of his tragic death--death, that unmistakable reality, meeting him on a journey, the object of which was to impress Russia with the legendary Kitchener. But more and more, particularly in consultation with the quick wits of politicians, he found it impossible to impersonate his reputation.

I have been told by more than one Cabinet Minister that it was impressive to see how the lightning intellects of Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Winston Churchill again and again reduced the gigantic soldier to a stupefied and sulking silence.

A proposal would be made by a minister, and Mr. Asquith would turn to Lord Kitchener for his opinion. Lord Kitchener would say, "It's impossible," and close his lips firmly. At this Mr. Lloyd George would attack him, pointing out the reasonableness of this proposal in swift and persuasive phrases. Lord Kitchener, s.h.i.+fting on his chair, would repeat, "It's impossible." Then in question after question Mr. Churchill would ask why it was impossible. "It's impossible," Lord Kitchener would mumble at the end of these questions. Finally, when nearly everybody had attempted to extract from him the reason for his refusal to countenance this proposal, he would make an impatient side movement of his head, unfold his arms, bend over the papers on the table before him, and grunt out, sometimes with a boyish smile of relief, "Oh, all right, have it your own way."

He lacked almost every grace of the spirit. There was nothing amiable in his character. Very few men liked him a great deal, and none I should say loved him. I do not think he was brutal by nature, although his nature was not refined; but he cultivated a brutal manner. He had the happiness of three or four friends.h.i.+ps with cultivated and good women, but the beautiful creature whom he loved hungrily and doggedly, and to whom he proposed several times, could never bring herself to marry him.

I think there was no holy of holies in his character, no sanctuaries for the finer intimacies of human life. As Sainte-Beuve said of Rousseau, "he has at times a little goitre in his voice." One sees the fulness of his limitations by comparing him with such great figures of Indian history as the Lawrences and Nicholson: in that comparison he shrinks at once to the dimensions of a colour-sergeant.

But in attempting to study a man of this nature, for our own learning, we should rather observe how notable a victory he achieved in making so much of so little than vociferate that he was not this thing or that.

He began life with no gifts from the G.o.ds; it was not in his horoscope to be either a saint or a hero; no one was less likely to create enthusiasm or to become a legend; and yet by resolutely following the road of duty, by earnestly and stubbornly striving to serve his country's interests, and by never for one moment considering in that service the safety of his own life or the making of his own fortune, this rough and ordinary man bred in himself a greatness which, magnified by the legend itself created, helped his country in one of the darkest hours, perhaps the very darkest, of its long history.

One could wish that behind this formidable greatness of personality there had been greatness of mind, greatness of character, greatness of heart, so that he might have been capable of directing the whole war and holding the politicians in leash to the conclusion of a righteous peace.

But these things he lacked, and the end was what it was.

"Character," says Epicharmus, "is destiny to man." Lord Kitchener, let us a.s.sert, was faithful to his destiny. And he was something more than faithful, for he sanctified this loyalty to his own character by a devotion to his country which was pure and incorruptible. Certainly he can never be styled "the son of Cronos and Double-dealing."

LORD ROBERT CECIL

LORD ROBERT CECIL

(EDGAR ALGERNON CECIL)

Born, 1864. Educ.: at Eton and Oxford. Private Secretary to his father, the late Marquis of Salisbury, 1886-88; called to the Bar, 1887; M.P. for East Marylebone, 1906-10; for Hitchin Division of Herts, 1912; Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs, 1915-16; a.s.sistant Secretary for Foreign Affairs, 1918; Manager of Blockade, 1916-18. Author of _Principles of Commercial Law_ and _Our National Church_.

[Ill.u.s.tration: LORD ROBERT CECIL]

CHAPTER VIII

LORD ROBERT CECIL

_"Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm."_--EMERSON.

If a novelist take for his hero an educated gentleman who expresses contempt for the licence and indecencies of modern life, it is ten to one that the critics, who confess themselves on other occasions as sick of prurient tales, will p.r.o.nounce this hero to be a prig. In like manner, let a politician evince concern for the moral character of the nation and it is ten to one his colleagues in the House of Commons and his critics in the Press, and everywhere the very men most in despair of politics, will declare him to be a fanatic.

This has been the unfortunate fate of Lord Robert Cecil. He is regarded by his countrymen as unpractical. Men speak well of him, and confess willingly that he is vastly superior in character and intellect to the ruck of politicians, but nevertheless wind up their panegyrics with the regretful judgment that, alas, he is a fanatic.

It is a thousand pities, I think, that he is not a fanatic. It is for the very reason he is not fanatical that his progress in politics has been in the suburbs of the second rank. He has every quality for the first rank, and for the foremost place in that rank, save the one urging pa.s.sion of enthusiasm. It is a sense of humour, an engaging sense of diffidence, a continual deviation towards a mild and gentle cynicism, it is this spirit--the very ant.i.thesis of a fanatical temper--which keeps him from leaders.h.i.+p.

The nation has reason on its side for suspecting Lord Robert Cecil. In the mind of the British people nothing is more settled than the conviction that the conquering qualities of a great captain are courage and confidence. He has given no sign of these qualities. Nature, it would seem, has fas.h.i.+oned him neither pachydermatous nor pugilistic. He appears upon the platform as a gentleman makes his entrance into a drawing-room, not as a toreador leaps into the bull ring. He expresses his opinions as a gentleman expresses his views at a dinner-table, not as an ale-house politician airs his dogmatisms in the tap-room. The very qualities which give such a grace and power to his personality, being spiritual qualities, prevent him from capturing the loud and grateful loyalty of a political party.