Even in his prime Lord Kitchener was the most helpless of men without lieutenants he could trust to do his bidding or to improve upon it in the doing.
It will better serve the main purpose of this book to suggest in what particulars the real greatness of this once glorious and finally pathetic figure came to suffer shipwreck at the hands of the politicians.
Lord Kitchener's greatness was the indefinable greatness of personality.
He was not a clever man.

He had no gifts of any kind.

In the society of scholars he was mum and among the lovers of the beautiful he cut an awkward figure.

At certain moments he had curious flashes of inspiration, but they came at long intervals and were seldom to be had in the day of drudgery, when his mind was not excited.

On the whole his intelligence was of a dull order, plodding heavily through experience, mapping the surface of life rather than penetrating any of its mysteries, making slowly quite sure of one or two things rather than grasping the whole problem at a stroke.
But there was one movement in his character which developed greatness and by its power brought him to wonderful success and great honour; this was a deep, an unquestioning, a religious sense of duty.
He started life with a stubborn ambition.