closeness of grain and ruggedness of outline--when he was uprooted
from the Arabian sands and replanted in the remote western island. Yet
the oak not only grew green again and put forth new leaves; it was
almost as if, as in a legend, it could put forth a new kind of leaves.
Kitchener, with all his taciturnity, really began to put forth a new
order of ideas. If a change of opinions is unusual in an elderly man,
it is almost unknown in an elderly military man. If the hardening of
time was felt even by the poetic and emotional Grattan, it would not
have been strange if the hardening had been quite hopeless in the
rigid and reticent Kitchener. Yet it was not hopeless; and the fact
became the spring of much of the national hope. The grizzled martinet
from India and Egypt showed a certain power which is in nearly all
great men, but of which St. Paul has become the traditional type--the
power of being a great convert as well as a great crusader. It is the
real power of re-forming an opinion, which is the very opposite of
that mere formlessness which we call fickleness. Nor is the comparison
to such an example as St. Paul altogether historically disproportionate;
for the point upon which this very typical Englishman changed his mind
was a point which is now the pivot of the whole future and perhaps of
the very existence of Christendom. For many such Englishmen it might
almost be called the discovery of Christendom. It can be called with
greater precision, and indeed with almost complete precision, the
discovery of Russia.

Military bureaucratic systems everywhere have too much tendency to
work upon one idea, and there was a time when the military and
bureaucratic system of the British in the East worked on the idea of
the fear of Russia. It is needless here to explain that sentiment, and
useless to explain it away. It was partly a mere tradition from the
natural jingoism of the Crimean War; it was partly in itself a tribute
to the epic majesty of the Russian march across mysterious Asia to the
legendary Chinese Wall. The point here is that it existed; and where
there exists such an idea in such military rulers, they very seldom
alter their idea. But Kitchener did alter his idea. Not in mere
military obedience, but in genuine human reasonableness, he came late
in life to see the Russian as the friend and the Prussian as the
enemy. In the inevitable division of British ministerial councils
about the distribution of British aid a