The Silence of K.

A rather brilliant simile allows Mr. Lloyd George to leave the impression that Lord Kitchener was 75 per cent. brilliant and one-quarter stupid. K. is likened to a revolving lighthouse with an opaque side. In his flashing moments his eye and mind penetrated every thing; the rest was blind. K.'s shell economy is described in language which does not help the reader to think well of the great soldier and Lloyd George is not sure whether K. was a great man or not. But the Kitchener phases of the post-war controversy suffer from a great blank in that Kitchener himself went down with the Hampshire, and cannot share in the reminiscences. If he had lived, would he have written a book? President Woodrow Wilson has so far flashed across Mr. Lloyd George's pages through the magic of one word “probably.” With the caution of an editor, he used that word in 1915 to water down a conditional undertaking to enter the war. “Probably” has saved many a newspaper par, but it killed the 1915 negotiations stone dead.