Had defeat for the allies come in 1915, or 1916, the House of Romanov would probably have had to yield to democracy, the rule of the Hohenzollerns would now have reached from Antwerp to the Baltic, the Habsburg writ, plumed, gilded and Danubian, would have retained its hold from Carpathia to the Alps, and the Ottomans' turbulent and bloodied sovereignty would still have run from Anatolia to the Holy Land. We cannot know what alternative evils awaited us, but they would probably not have included Lenin, Stalin and Hitler.
And defeat would certainly have been the allies' certain portion in the first two years of the war if Kitchener of Khartoum had not uniquely realised at its outset that it would last for years, and that Britain must raise a vast continental army, for which it had absolutely no experience. By creating the army which fought the German Grand Army to defeat, he was the inadvertent architect of the 20th century.
In that dismal organ, the popular imagination, Kitchener exists as a slightly comic poster-figure, his eyes fixing us balefully from above the walrus-moustache. Indeed, he is so classically perceived as the donkey-general who brought about the death of so many lion-soliders, and, just as damnably to modern sensibilities, as a heartless warrior-imperialist extending England's dominion over palm and pine, that his reputation as a serious soldier-statesman is almost beyond rescue. Yet rescuing this creature from the amber of caricature is the historically necessary task which John Pollock has set himself.
Kitchener was a complex man, driven by duty, but often guided by common sense. Physically brave, personally honest, he was widely revered, not least for his independence of thought. He was, untypically of the warrior-caste, very much a bells 'n' smells High Church man: he prayed daily and was a regular communicant.
He was also a mason, even inducting the Amir of Afghanistan into his Concorida Lodge in Calcutta, and his respect for native peoples was considerable. "It is just what I expected - the English have come with English ideas in everything and scorn for native habits or knowledge of the country," he once wrote. "The result is fatal - they work hard and achieve nothing absolutely except make mistakes, absurd laws, etc that have to be counter-ordered."
Kitchener was born in Kerry, and his name is listed in Ireland's Memorial Records, but he was not Irish in any real sense, his family moving here to buy cheap land after the famine. His handling of recruitment amongst nationalist Ireland after 1914 was insensitive and clumsy, and ultimately counter-productive, something which John Pollock does not deal with.
Kitchener simply didn't like Irish politicians. "You're a damned clever fellow telling me what I ought to be doing," an exasperated Carson told him. John Dillon of the Irish Parliamentary Party declared: "I see clearly that you do not understand the country or the people." Kitchener's reply was perfection: "Mr Dillon, I understand everything about Ireland."
He certainly didn't understand himself, for he was a thoroughly repressed man: as he needed to be, for the British empire was largely based on private repression and on the elevation of public duty into a personal appetite. In addition to being immensely capable and inspirationally stolid, he was lucky. People who held offices he coveted, very decently died or fell ill, and his rise was almost irresistible.
Thus to him fell the honour of avenging Gordon's death at Khartoum. The battle of Omdurman, in which at least 10,000 Sudanese were slaughtered, turned him into a British national hero. Surveying the field of butchered Dervishes, chopped to pieces by Maxim and airburst artillery gunfire, Kitchener observed: "Well, we have given them a damned good dusting." His brother Walter beside him demurred: "A cruel slaughter of very brave men."
Kitchener is still reviled for his conduct during the Boer war. Though the war itself stands as an unmitigated abomination, it was not of Kitchener's making, and he sought a negotiated peace: "(we should not be) too hard on the boers . . . It will be good policy for the future of this country to treat them fairly and well."
A harder line prevailed, and the war continued, much against his will. It was as vile and murderous as guerilla warfare invariably is, with Kitchener finding himself enacting a strategy he had orginally opposed, the burning of Boer farms. "It is a horrid war," he wrote. "I wish we could get it over, but I have done all I can and do not see how it is to end except by the utter exhaustion on the part of the Boers."
Exhausting the Boers meant concentrating their civilians in camps, where they died in vast numbers, in part because the Boers had no experience of living in communities, and in part because the British army had similarly no experience of housing large numbers of civilians. There was outcry in Britain over the appalling loss of life, though it was truly unintentional, as there also was when Kitchener authorised the public executions of a group of Cape rebels serving with a Boer commando. But he could be impartially ruthless, also sanctioning the execution of two British officers for murdering captured Boers.
After Africa, India; but his greatest days lay ahead with the creation of the New Army of 1914. His fundamental mistake then, born of an imperial ignorance of Britain, and compounded by others with less excuse, was in not using the part-time territorial army as the basis for militarily indoctrinating the new recruits: thus, the almost untrained children blundering to their doom on July 1st, 1916. But three years later, the survivors of the Somme were marching victoriously over the Rhine, led by the tanks Kitchener had so presciently ordered. By then of course he was dead, lost in the chance mining of the vessel taking him to Russia, and thus en route for unceasing misrepresentation and caricature. This splendid biography goes a long way towards undoing that parodic injustice to an extraordinary man.
Kevin Myers is an Irish Times journalist