Sir George Arthur

About the Author

SIR GEORGE ARTHUR

Sir George Compton Archibald Arthur, 3rd Baronet (1860–1946), belonged to the military and courtly world whose most formidable soldier he would later chronicle. A former officer of the 2nd Life Guards, he served during the Great War as Lord Kitchener’s personal private secretary at the War Office, observing at close quarters the responsibilities, working habits and political difficulties of the Field Marshal’s final command.

This proximity determines the character of Life of Lord Kitchener. Arthur did not reconstruct his subject entirely from public despatches after the generation had passed. He had heard the voice, watched the working habits, seen the War Office routine and understood the administrative world in which apparently abstract strategic decisions arrived as memoranda, telegrams, appointments and demands upon men.

He also admired Kitchener. That fact is not a defect to be hidden; it is part of the source.

A near-contemporary biography written by a private secretary inevitably differs from the detached synthesis of a later historian. Arthur knew the personal loyalties, assumptions and language of the world he describes, and his three volumes possess precisely the immediacy later scholarship cannot reproduce.

The present AETERNUS edition therefore treats Arthur’s biography as a historical work of its own age. Its imperial vocabulary, standards of judgement and proximity to Kitchener form part of its documentary value. The editorial task is to illuminate the historical setting without altering the character of the original witness.

The reader should hear the age speaking before being told what later ages thought of it.