Lord Horatio Herbert Kitchener, Boer War hero, Secretary of State for War in 1915 and the famous face of the recruiting posters, was sometimes thought to have the most commanding, manly, steely, scary face on earth. One hundred years ago this week a columnist with Melbourne's Table Talk thought this reputation justified.
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"Lord Kitchener's 'commanding appearance' is said to have strongly impressed the Greeks. Such twaddle cabled out as news appertaining to a momentous international crisis is laughable but for the real seriousness of the position. Everyone who has seen Kitchener knows that he looks the part of a very fire-eater.
"His eye, particularly, has a caged-eagle expression in peace-time, and no doubt in war it has a terrible aspect."
"A Melbourne reporter recalls that once he was sent to interview the prodigious war-lord. He approached Kitchener, who was surrounded by a staff of then emblooded local militaires and spoke his lines. Kitchener must have heard him, but he gave no sign – simply stared right through the trembling interviewer as if he were not there. A repetition of the request for a few words. 'K' simply glared like a bull seeing red, and finally the scribe felt his braces break and he rushed from the presence bathed in perspiration."
Kitchener, although the Allies "face" of the war did not survive it but was killed on June 5, 1916. He was aboard the armoured cruiser HMS Hampshire en route for Archangelsk when the Hampshire struck a mine and sank west of the Orkney islands.
