Note 67 — Chapter XV · ANTWERP
Reading edition
But see Lord Esher: ‘One night he (Kitchener) was in bed asleep, when Mr. Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, bursting into the room, pleaded for the War Minister’s permission to leave at once for Antwerp. In spite of the late hour, Sir Edward Grey arrived in the middle of the discussion, and while he was engaging Lord Kitchener’s attention, Mr. Churchill slipped away. He was next heard of when a telegram from Antwerp was put into Lord K.’s hands, in which his impetuous colleague asked bravely to be allowed to resign his great office, to be given command of a Naval Brigade, and pleading that reinforcements should be hurried out to those “forlorn and lonely men,” as he called them, who were vainly trying to hold on to the Antwerp lines. Lord K. was not upset, but he was not unmoved, etc....’—The Tragedy of Lord Kitchener, p. 67.
It is remarkable that Lord Esher should be so much astray; for during the war I showed him the text of the telegrams printed in this chapter and now made public for the first time. We must conclude that an uncontrollable fondness forbade him to forsake fiction for fact. Such constancy is a defect in an historian.
W. S. C.