Kitchener, Horatio Herbert Kitchener, Earl, 1850-1916
of the voice of a man. The Ababdeh Arabs, it was said, made a chain
across the desert, which the new and awful faith could not pass. The
Mudir of Dongola was on the point of joining the ever-victorious
Prophet of Omdurman. Kitchener, clad as an Arab, went out almost alone
to speak with him. What passed, perhaps, we can never tell; but
before his guest had even left him the Mudir flew to arms, fell upon
the Prophet's hosts at Korti, and drove them before him.
The second and superficially more solid process of preparation is much
better known. It was the education of the native Egyptian army. It is
not necessary to swallow all the natural jingoism of English
journalism in order to see something truly historic about the English
officer's work with the Fellaheen, or native race of Egypt. For
centuries they had lain as level as the slime of the Nile, and all the
conquerors in the chronicles of men had passed over them like a
pavement. Though professing the challenging creed of the Moslems, they
seem to have reached something like the pessimist patience of the
Hindoos. To have turned this slime once more into a human river, to
have lifted this pavement once more into a human rampart or barricade,
is not a small thing, nor a thing that could possibly be done even by
mere power, still less by mere money--and this Kitchener and his
English companions certainly did. There must have been something much
more than a mere cynical severity in "organisation" in the man who did
it. There must be something more than a mere commercial common-sense
in the nation in whose name it was done. It is easy enough, with
sufficient dulness and greed of detail, to "organise" anything or
anybody. It is easy enough to make people obey a bugle (or a factory
hooter) as the Prussian soldiers obey a bugle. But it is no such
trumpet that makes possible the resurrection of the dead.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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