ld it with all the unselfish arrogance of a patriot. It
is said that the Frenchman not only welcomed Kitchener in the name of
France, but invited him, with courteous irony, to partake of
vegetables grown on the spot, a symbol of stable occupation. The
story, if it be true, is admirably French; for it reveals at once the
wit and the peasant. But the humour of the Englishman was worthily
equal to the wit of the Frenchman; and it was humour of that sane sort
which we call good humour. Political papers in pacific England and
France raved and ranted over the crisis, responsible journals howled
with jingoism; but through it all, until the moment when the French
agreed to retire, the two most placable and even sociable figures were
the two grim tropical travellers and soldiers who faced each other on
the burning sands of Fashoda. As we see them facing each other, we
have again the vague sense of a sign or a parable which runs through
this story. For they were to meet again long afterwards as allies,
when both were leading their countrymen against the great enemy in the
Great War.

Something of the same shadow of prophecy is perhaps the deepest memory
left by the last war of Kitchener before the greatest. After further
activities in Egypt and the Soudan, of which the attempt to educate
the Fellaheen by the Gordon Memorial College was the most remarkable,
he was abruptly summoned to South Africa to be the right hand of Lord
Roberts in the war then being waged against the Boers. He conducted
the opening of the determining battle of Paardeberg, and was typically
systematic in covering the half-conquered country with a system of
block-houses and enclosures like a diagram of geometry. But to-day,
and for many reasons, Englishmen will think first of the last scene of
that war. When Botha and the Boer Generals surrendered to Kitchener,
there was the same goodwill among the soldiers to contrast with the
ill-will of the journalists. Botha also became almost a friend; and
Botha also was to be in the far future an ally, smiting the German in
Africa as Kitchener smote him in Europe. There was the same hint of
prophecy about the war that ended at Vereeniging as about that other
war that so nearly began at Fashoda. It seemed almost as if God were
pitting his heroes against each other in tournament, before they all
rode together against the heathen pouring upon them out of Germany.

It is with that name of Germany that this mere skeleton of