Kitchener: The Road to Omdurman and Saviour of the Nation

by John Charles Pollock

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.

Genres: Nonfiction

818 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

The late John Pollock, an award-winning biographer, had a flair for telling a dramatic story. He used this talent to write many biographies including ones on D. L. Moody and Major General Sir Henry Havelock.

Reviews

[Bas Kreuger · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good and solid biography of Lord Kitchener: K of K. It is the first of two, this one ending after the Boer War and with Kitchener going to India. Hope I can find part two with K in the years leading up to WWI and in those first years of the war.
The central theme of this bio is on K as a warrior without grudges against his enemies. Both in the Sudan and later in South-Africa, K managed to win the war on the battlefield (although SA was difficult, fighting a counter insurgency war against the Boer Commando's) and by drawing up the peace treaties at the end of the war, making sure that the erstwhile adversaries would get on rather well with each other at peace. The writer (John Pollock) wonders what would have happened had Kitchener lived through WWI to be able to make a gracious peace treaty at Versailles in 1919. Could K have nipped WWII in the bud? One wonders.......
Kitchener comes out of this book somewhat larger than life