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This picture has been reproduced for The Outlook from the portrait of Gordon in colors which hangs on the wall of Whittier's "garden room" at Amesbury, and was retained there after John Bright's remonstrance referred to in this article. over

Osman's trenches at Gemaizeh. Next year at Toski he again commanded a brigade. In 1890 he succeeded Sir Francis Grenfell as Sirdar. That he meant to be Sirdar in fact as well as name he showed in 1394. The young Khedive traveled south to the frontier, and took the occasion to insult every British officer he came across. Kitchener promptly gave battle: he resigned, a crisis came, and the Khedive was obliged to do public penance by issuing a General Order in praise of the discipline of the army and of its British officers. Two years later he began the reconquest of

the Soudan. Without a single throw-back the work has gone forward since-but not without intervals. The Sirdar is never in a hurry. With immovable self-control he holds back from each step till the ground is consolidated under the last. The real fighting power of the Soudan lies in the country itself-in its barrenness which refuses food, and its vastness which paralyzes transport. The Soudan machine obviates barrenness and vastness; the bayonet action stands still until the railway action has piled the camp with supplies or the steamer action can run with a full Nile. Fighting men may

chafe and go down with typhoid and cholera: they are in the iron grip of the machine, and they must wait the turn of its wheels. Dervishes wait and wonder, passing from apprehension to security. The Turks are not coming; the Turks are afraid. Then suddenly at daybreak one morning they see the Sirdar advancing upon them from all sides together, and by noon they are dead. Patient and swift, certain and relentless, the Soudan machine rolls conquering southward.

In the meantime, during all the years of preparation and achievement, the man has disappeared. The man Herbert Kitchener owns the affection of private friends in England and of old comrades of fifteen years' standing; for the rest of the world there is no man Herbert Kitchener, but only the Sirdar, neither asking affection nor giving it. His officers and men are wheels in the machine; he feeds them enough to make them efficient, and works them as mercilessly as he works He will have no married officers in his army-marriage interferes with work. Any officer who breaks down from the climate goes on sick leave once; next time he goes, and the Egyptian army bears him on its strength no more. Asked once why he did not let his officers come down to Cairo during the season, he replied: "If it were to go home, where they would get fit and I could get more work out of them, I would. But why should I let them down to Cairo?" It is unamiable, but it is war, and it has a severe magnificence. And if you suppose, therefore, that the Sirdar is unpopular, he is not. No general is unpopular who always beats the enemy. When the columns move out of camp in the evening to march all night through the dark, they know not whither, and fight at dawn with an enemy they have never seen, every man goes forth with a tranquil mind. He may personally come back and he may

not; but about the general result there is not a doubt. You bet your boots the Sirdar knows; he wouldn't fight if he weren't going to win. Other generals have been better loved; none was ever better trusted.

For of one human weakness the Sirdar is believed not to have purged himself— ambition. He is on his promotion, a man who cannot afford to make a mistake. Homilies against ambition may be left to those who have failed in their own: the Sirdar's, if apparently purely personal, is legitimate and even lofty. He has attained eminent distinction at an exceptionally early age: he has commanded victorious armies at an age when most men are hoping to command regiments. Even now a junior Major-General, he has been intrusted with an army of six brigades, a command such as few of his seniors have ever led in the field. Finally, he has been charged with a mission such as almost every one of them would have greedily accepted the crowning triumph of half a generation's war. Naturally he has awakened jealousies, and he has bought permission to take each step on the way only by brilliant success in the last. If in this case he be not so stiffly unbending to the high as he is to the low, who shall blame him? He has climbed too high not to take every precaution against a fall.

But he will not fall, just yet at any rate. So far as Egypt is concerned he is the man of destiny-the man who has been preparing himself sixteen years for one great purpose. For Anglo-Egypt he is the Mahdi, the expected; the man who has sifted experience and corrected error; who has worked at small things and waited for great; marble to sit still and fire to smite'; steadfast, cold, and inflexible; the man who has cut out his human heart and made himself a machine to retake Khartoum.

Charles George Gordon

Tennyson's tribute, inscribed on Gordon's monument

Warrior of God, man's friend, not here below, But somewhere dead far in the waste Soudan; Thou livest in all hearts, for all men know

This earth hath borne no simpler, nobler man.

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From the portrait by the Hon John Collier. By courtesy of "McClure's Magazine;" copyrighted, 1896, the S. S. McClure Co.

English author- born ins Bombay, India, 1865. Depicts in novels Anglo-Indian & Military life. His works the Ligh "It failed". "Kim" "Soldiers Three". "Jungle Books" "Recessional " is among the best of his poetry.

KIPLING

By Robert Bridges ("Droch ")

"M"

TEN live there," is the emphatic verdict which Rudyard Kipling passes on the Channel Squadron after he has spent "a blissful fortnight" among the battleships and cruisers. "When you have been shown lovingly over a torpedo by an artificer skilled in the working of its tricky bowels, torpedoes have a meaning and a reality for you to the end of your days." To find out how the men live who are doing the world's work and how they do itwhether the instrument is a spade, a gun, or a great machine-is almost the end and aim of Kipling's literary endeavor. It is not what the man has, but what he does, that interests him. The Admiral on the after-bridge "moving some £10,000,000 worth of iron and steel at his pleasure" is for Kipling a character of intense and dramatic interest-but not more so than Mulvaney, whose highest achievement is to make good soldiers out of raw recruits. A great machine, as the product of the ingenious mind of man, is full of romance for Kipling; it is one of the measures of man's imagination-a dream made visible. If it does well the work that it was contrived to do, it possesses something of the beauty that accompanies perfect adaptation of means to end. "Do not believe what people tell you of the ugliness of steam," he says, and then describes with enthusiasm a battle-ship in motion: "Swaying a little in her gait, drunk with sheer delight of movement, perfectly apt for the work in hand, and in every line of her rejoicing that she is doing it, she shows, to these eyes at least, a miracle of grace and beauty." This coincides with a recent expression by Captain "Bob" Evans that he never expected to see a sight so majestic and beautiful as the Oregon when she pushed past the Iowa in full chase of the Colon.

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O' that warld-liftin' joy no after-fall could vex

Ye've left a glimmer still to cheer the Man-the Arrtifex!

The greatest thing in the world for Kipling is Power at work-whether it is exhibited by a humble man, a huge engine, or an empire. That is why he has made such a deep impression upon strong men everywhere. The age is one of great schemes, industrial, commercial, and political; the achievements of science are marvelous and yet until Kipling came the people who write were saying that it was an unromantic age; that poetry had been killed the world over by steam, and that romance was dead because republicanism had leveled all men to a common pattern. Kipling had the advantage of living in his impressionable youth where the new civilization was imposing itself upon one that was old and worn out. He saw part of the empire in making. He was looking at the raw edges of the work, and he grasped the full meaning of the new forces behind it. Never has the executive power of man so revealed itself as in the nineteenth century. Instead of looking upon it as prosaic, and turning back to other times and countries for a field of romance, Kipling

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