One of the few to foresee a long war, lasting for at least three years, and having the authority to act effectively on that perception, he organised the largest volunteer army that Britain had seen, and oversaw a significant expansion of material production to fight on the Western Front.

Despite having warned of the difficulty of provisioning for a long war, he was blamed for the shortage of shells in the spring of 1915 – one of the events leading to the formation of a coalition government – and stripped of his control over munitions and strategy.

On 5 June 1916, Kitchener was making his way to Russia on HMS Hampshire to attend negotiations with Tsar Nicholas II when in bad weather the ship struck a German mine 1.5 miles (2.4 km) west of Orkney, Scotland, and sank.

[6] In later life Kitchener only once revisited his childhood home, in the summer of 1910 at the invitation of Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, 5th Marquess of Lansdowne; he astonished the estate's owners by recalling the Irish names of many of the fields.

[3][19] He became Governor of the Egyptian Provinces of Eastern Sudan and Red Sea Littoral (which in practice consisted of little more than the Port of Suakin) in September 1886, also Pasha the same year,[3] and led his forces in action against the followers of the Mahdi at Handub in January 1888, when he was injured in the jaw.

[49] Kitchener was a Francophile who spoke fluent French, and despite his reputation for brusque rudeness was very diplomatic and tactful in his talks with Marchand; for example, congratulating him on his achievement in crossing the Sahara in an epic trek from Dakar to the Nile.

[53] During the Second Boer War, Kitchener arrived in South Africa with Field Marshal Lord Roberts on the RMS Dunottar Castle along with massive British reinforcements in December 1899.

[20] Officially holding the title of chief of staff,[54] he was in practice a second-in-command and was present at the relief of Kimberley before leading an unsuccessful frontal assault at the Battle of Paardeberg in February 1900.

[20] Conditions in the concentration camps, which had been conceived by Roberts as a form of control of the families whose farms he had destroyed, began to degenerate rapidly as the large influx of Boers outstripped the ability of the minuscule British force to cope.

He even entertained a peace treaty proposed by Louis Botha and the other Boer leaders, although he knew the British government would reject the offer; their proposal would have maintained the sovereignty of the South African Republic and the Orange Free State while requiring them to sign a perpetual treaty of alliance with the UK and grant major concessions to the British, such as equal language rights for English with Dutch in their countries, voting rights for Uitlanders, and a customs and railway union with the Cape Colony and the Natal.

In London, he was met at the train station by the Prince of Wales, drove in a procession through streets lined by military personnel from 70 different units and watched by thousands of people, and received a formal welcome at St James's Palace.

He also visited King Edward VII, who was confined to his room recovering from his recent operation for appendicitis, but wanted to meet the general on his arrival and to personally bestow on him the insignia of the Order of Merit (OM).

The celebrated horseman and bush poet Lt. Harry "Breaker" Morant and Lt. Peter Handcock were found guilty, sentenced to death, and shot by firing squad at Pietersburg on 27 February 1902.

After what Curzon's most recent biographer described as "prolonged intrigue" and "deceitful methods", including correspondence which Kitchener asked the recipients to destroy after reading, the commander-in-chief won the crucial support of the government in London, and the viceroy had no option but to resign.

[77] At the time of the Agadir Crisis (summer 1911), Kitchener told the Committee of Imperial Defence that he expected the Germans to walk through the French "like partridges" and he informed Lord Esher "that if they imagined that he was going to command the Army in France he would see them damned first".

Kitchener was in Britain on his annual summer leave, between 23 June and 3 August 1914, and had boarded a cross-Channel steamer to commence his return trip to Cairo when he was recalled to London to meet with Asquith.

[86] At the War Council (5 August) Kitchener and Lieutenant General Sir Douglas Haig argued that the BEF should be deployed at Amiens, where it could deliver a vigorous counterattack once the route of German advance was known.

[87] Kitchener, believing Britain should husband her resources for a long war, decided at Cabinet (6 August) that the initial BEF would consist of only 4 infantry divisions (and 1 cavalry), not the 5 or 6 promised.

[90] The BEF commander in France, Sir John French, concerned by heavy British losses at the Battle of Le Cateau, was considering withdrawing his forces from the Allied line.

[94] Kitchener warned French in January 1915 that the Western Front was a siege line that could not be breached, in the context of Cabinet discussions about amphibious landings on the Baltic or North Sea Coast, or against Turkey.

[103] By autumn 1915, with Asquith's Coalition close to breaking up over conscription, he was blamed for his opposition to that measure (which would eventually be introduced for single men in January 1916) and for the excessive influence which civilians like Churchill and Richard Haldane had come to exert over strategy, allowing ad hoc campaigns to develop in Sinai, Mesopotamia and Salonika.

[107] Archibald Murray (Chief of the Imperial General Staff) later recorded that Kitchener was "quite unfit for the position of secretary of state" and "impossible", claiming that he never assembled the Army Council as a body, but instead gave them orders separately, and was usually exhausted by Friday.

He had lunch with Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, commander-in-chief of the Grand Fleet, on board his flagship HMS Iron Duke; Kitchener was keen to discuss the recent Battle of Jutland and stated that he was looking forward to his three-week diplomatic mission to Russia as a break from domestic pressures.

[119] Shortly before 7:30 pm that same day, while steaming for the Russian port of Arkhangelsk during a force 9 gale, Hampshire struck a mine laid by the newly launched German U-boat U-75 (commanded by Kurt Beitzen) and sank west of the Orkney Islands.

Now we've lost the war"; and a nurse wrote home to her family that she knew Britain would win as long as Kitchener lived, and now that he was gone: "How awful it is – a far worse blow than many German victories.

One in particular was posited by Lord Alfred Douglas (of Oscar Wilde fame), suggesting a connection between Kitchener's death, the recent naval Battle of Jutland, Winston Churchill, and a Jewish conspiracy.

[130] He was arrested and court-martialled in Cape Town and sent to the penal colony of Bermuda, but managed to escape to the U.S.[131] MI5 confirmed that Duquesne was "a German intelligence officer ... involved in a series of acts of sabotage against British shipping in South American waters during the [First World] war";[132] he was wanted for: "murder on the high seas, the sinking and burning of British ships, the burning of military stores, warehouses, coaling stations, conspiracy, and the falsification of Admiralty documents".

[143] Some historians now praise his strategic vision in the First World War, especially his laying the groundwork for the expansion of munitions production and his central role in the raising of the British army in 1914 and 1915, providing a force capable of meeting Britain's continental commitment.

From his time in Egypt in 1892, he gathered around him a cadre of eager young and unmarried officers nicknamed "Kitchener's band of boys",[168] who included Captain Oswald Fitzgerald, his aide-de-camp and "constant and inseparable companion", who died with him on their voyage to Russia.

[170] Contradicting such speculation, in 2001 it was revealed that Lady Astor's son Robert Gould Shaw III told David Somerset, 11th Duke of Beaufort that Kitchener had been his first seducer.