This exploit brought him the thanks of parliament and the title of baron, with a grant of 30,000 pounds and a sword of honor. In 1899 he went with Lord Roberts to South Africa as chief of staff, and on Lord Roberts’ return in 1900 he succeeded him as commander-in-chief and brought the Boer War to a successful conclusion. He was now made full general, with the rank of viscount, and subsequently served as commander-in-chief in India. A FORCEFUL CHARACTER In an illuminating article in COLLIER’S WEEKLY, the well-known Irish journalist, T. P. O’Connor, thus brought out the character of the hero of Khartoum: “I attribute something of the Lord Kitchener we know to the fact that, though English by blood, he spent the first years of his life in wandering over the hills and looking down on the sea-tossed shores of County Kerry. That tact which enabled him to settle the issue with Marchand, the French explorer, at Fashoda, suggests some of the lessons in the soft answer which Ireland can teach. You remember how, when it was possible that a collision between him and Marchand might mean a war between England and France, Lord Kitchener sent some fresh vegetables and champagne to the daring French explorer, who had gone through the hunger, thirst, and hardship of the desert for months. Marchand had to go from Fashoda all the same, but he went with no personal grievance. “If I look for the roots of Lord Kitchener’s greatness, I trace them to intense ambition to succeed, to make the most of his opportunities—above all, to the incessant desire to work and fill every hour of his days with something done. He is sent as a youngster to Palestine, through peril to life, through great privation, through heart-breaking drudgery, he pursues his work until he has completed a map of all western Palestine to the amazement and delight of his employers. And he values this experience so largely because he learns Arabic, and, above all, he learns the Arabic character. One of the chroniclers of his career makes the apt observation that, while the baton of the marshal is in every French soldier’s knapsack, Kitchener found his coronet in the Arab grammar. But how many soldiers or men of any class would have devoted the leisure hours of a fiercely active task like Kitchener’s in Palestine to the study of one of the most difficult of languages?