Thereafter for several weeks he literally lived in his office night and day. He had at last found a job that measured up to his fullest requirements for hard work, and he revelled in it. Incidentally, he "delivered the goods"--but nobody marvelled at that; it was nothing more than was expected of him! Says an anonymous writer in _The Living Age_: "England never fully understood Lord Kitchener, and perhaps he never fully understood his countrymen. They weaved innumerable myths around this shy and solitary man, who revealed himself to few. To them his figure loomed gigantic and mysterious through the sandstorms of African deserts and the mists of the Himalayas. In their hour of trial he came among them for a space, and then vanished forever in the wild Northern seas. He was a good man to fight for or to fight against, and he found a worthy end." IMPORTANT DATES IN KITCHENER'S LIFE 1850. June 24. Herbert Horatio Kitchener born. 1865. Sent to Switzerland to school. 1868. Entered Royal Military Academy, at Woolwich. 1870. Volunteered in French army against Prussia. 1874. Sent as second-lieutenant to Palestine, with exploration party. 1878. Surveyed Island of Cyprus, for British Government. 1885. Lieutenant-colonel of cavalry in Egypt. 1893. Sirdar, or commander-in-chief, of Egyptian army. 1898. Created a baron. 1900. Chief of staff to Roberts in South Africa. 1902. Made general, and commander-in-chief in India. 1911. Consul-general in Egypt. 1914. Secretary of War. Field marshal. 1916. June 5. Lost his life at sea. HAIG THE MAN WHO LED "THE CONTEMPTIBLES" "There goes young Haig. He says he intends to be a soldier." The speaker was a young student at Oxford University, as he jerked his thumb in the direction of a slight but well-set-up fellow, a classmate, who went cantering past. The chance remark, made more than once during the college days of Field Marshal Haig, struck the keynote of his career. From early boyhood Douglas Haig was going to be a soldier; and he stuck to his guns in a quiet, systematic way until he won out. The story of Haig's life until the time of the Great War, was the opposite of spectacular, and even in it, his personal prowess was kept studiously in the background. With him it has always been: "My men did thus and so." Yet in his quiet way he has always made his presence felt with telling effect. He has been the man behind the man behind the gun. By birth Haig was a "Fifer," which sounds military without being so. He was a native of Cameronbridge, County of Fife, and came of the strictest Presbyterian Scotch. If he had lived a few centuries back he would have been a Covenanter--the kind that carried a Bible in one hand and a gun in the other. He was born, June 19, 1861, the youngest son of John Haig, a local Justice of the Peace. His mother was a Veitch of Midlothian.