eported
of him. As a youth, tall, very shy and quiet, he was only notable for
intellectual interests of the soberest and most methodical sort,
especially for the close study of mathematics. This also,
incidentally, was typical enough, for his work in Egypt and the
Soudan, by which his fame was established, was based wholly upon such
calculations. It was not merely mathematical but literally
geometrical. His work bore the same relation to Gordon's that a rigid
mathematical diagram bears to a rough pencil sketch on which it is
based. Yet the student thus bent on the strictest side of his
profession, studying it at Woolwich and entering the Engineers as the
most severely scientific branch of the army, had as a first experience
of war something so romantic that it has been counted incredible, yet
something so relevant to the great reality of to-day that it might
have been made up centuries after his death, as a myth is made up
about a god. He happened to be in France in the most tragic hour that
France has ever known or, please God, will ever know. She was bearing
alone the weight of that alien tyranny, of that hopeless and almost
lifeless violence, which the other nations have since found to be the
worst of all the terrors which God tolerates in this world. She trod
that winepress alone; and of the peoples there were none to help her.
In 1870 the Prussian had already encircled Paris, and General Chanzy
was fighting against enormous odds to push northwards to its relief,
when his army was joined by the young and silent traveller from
England. All that was in Kitchener's mind or motives will perhaps
never be known. France was still something of an ideal of civilisation
for many of the more generous English gentry. Prussia was never really
an ideal for anybody, even the Prussians, and mere success, which
could not make her an ideal, had not yet calamitously made her a
model. There was in it also, no doubt, a touch of the schoolboy who
runs away to sea--that touch of the schoolboy without the sense of
which the staidest Englishman will always be inexplicable. But
considered historically there is something strangely moving about the
incident--the fact that Kitchener was a French soldier almost before
he was an English one. As Hannibal was dedicated in boyhood to war
against the eagles of Rome, Kitchener was dedicated, almost in
boyhood, to war against the eagles of Germany. Romance came to this
realist, whether by impulse or by