Kitchener
The Road to Omdurman and Saviour of the Nation
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
When the Great War broke out, Kitchener, with the foresight lacking in many of his contemporaries, insisted that it would last at least three years and that he must raise an army of 3 million men. This began with an immediate recruitment of 100,000 volunteers, and the familiar poster campaign image of him with the line "Your country needs you".
Major battles and initiatives of the Great War are recreated in a dramatic narrative history which does justice to Kitchener's masterly planning. This superb double volume biography will transform our view of Kitchener and the First World War.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Best known as the brutal muscle behind Britain's late 19th-century participation in the "Scramble for Africa," whereby European powers vied with one another to divide the continent, Kitchener (1850-1916) and his tactics--which included concentration camps and massive scorched-earth policies in the Sudan and during the Boer War--have not fared so well over time. British biographer Pollock (Wilberforce; etc.) uses a trove of family papers, the Royal Archives, contemporary letters and other accounts to rehabilitate his subject painstakingly, painting the victory at Sudan's Omdurman (1898), the peace settlement with the Boers in South Africa (1902), the reform of the Indian Army and other conquests as rightly making him Britain's most respected general at the start of WWI. Pollock shows Kitchener predicting the costly length of the war and remarking that only an impartial peace conference would avoid future war in Europe. Kitchener drowned in June 1916 when a British cruiser struck a German mine and sank en route to Russia, so his participation was cut short. Pollock uses his sources adroitly to bring to life the personal strengths and weaknesses of Britain's then-most-admired general, which is this book's main contribution. Illustrations not seen by PW.
