Your Country's Army Needs You

Lord Kitchener, or Field Marshal Horatio Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl Kitchener, was Victorian Britain's most recognizable and lauded military man. So eager was Kitchener to fight that he joined a French ambulance unit during the Franco-Prussian War, earning himself a reprimand from the Duke of Cambridge for violating British neutrality. After returning from France (he picked up pneumonia while in a survey balloon) he received a commission from the Royal Engineers which took him through the Levant and Egypt as a surveyor. It would take forever to run through Kitchener's accomplishments (some of which were less than admirable), so here's a concise list of important things:

*His survey of Western Palestine (that is, Palestine west of the Jordan) is still used by archaeologsits and geographers working in the Levant today

*Led British and Egyptian soldiers up the Nile to create a suppy railway for arms and reinforcements

*Defeated the Sudanese at the Battle of Omdurman in September 1898

*Brutalized the civilian Boer population by destroying their farms, killing their livestock and throwing women, children and the elderly into short-staffed, woefully inadequate concentration camps with high death rates

*For this, and for sucessfully assisting in the establishment of the Treaty of Vereeniging which gave South Africa self-governing powers, he was created Viscount Kitchener

*Was appointed Secretary of State for War by Herbert Asquith immediately after war broke out in Europe; he wisely predicted the war would be protracted and extremely costly, which was not the conventional wisdom at the time

Kitchener was right about the massive numbers of men needed to defeat Germany. A recruitment campaign began and one of the many posters used featured a picture of Kitchener lifted off of a magazine cover. A simple design, it has proved to be one of the most parodied posters of all time.

Kitchener's name is not even necessary. The designers felt it only needed the illustration of him pointing out to the masses. Everyone knew who he was, and that stern look, expertly crafted mustache, and marshal uniform got the point across that Britain needed its young men to volunteer. He was almost a walking flag in a sense.

Kitchener perished in 1916 at age 65 when the vessel he was traveling on, the HMS Hampshire, struck a mine West of the Orkney Islands while en route to Russia. Kitchener was on a diplomatic mission. His body was never recovered.

That he was a brutal fighter is not in doubt, but it cannot be said that Kitchener himself was a brutal man. The domestic policies he instituted in Sudan - making Fridays a holiday, rebuilding destroyed mosques, instituting religious freedom, and keeping Christian evangelists at bay - are those of a man who, while tough and merciless on the battlefield, believed in respecting the cultures of conquered peoples. He fought quite hard against the British Government and the governor of the Cape Colony when it came to guaranteeing the rights of Afrikaners to future self-government, which was not a very popular idea in imperialist circles. At the very least, Kitchener is a man of deeper contrasts than we are used to in military men, a committed, harsh soldier for the empire and a thoughtful administrator.