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Horatio Herbert Kitchener was born in Ballylongford, Ireland on June 24, 1850, the son of Lt. Col. Henry Kitchener. After attending boarding school in Switzerland, Horatio was admitted to the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, England in 1868. Commissioned as an officer in the Royal Engineers in 1871, he spent most of the next 28 years at British army posts in Africa, rising to the rank of major general. He led part of the British-Egyptian Expeditionary force in the reconquest of the Sudan from 1896 to 1898 against the Dervish Mahdists where at the Battle of Omdurman on September 2, 1898, he defeated the Mahdists and was later given the title Baron Kitchener of Khartoum, later elevated to earl.

During the 1899-1902 Boer War in South Africa, General Kitchener was assigned as chief of staff to the British commander, Lord Roberts. While General Sir Redvers Buller handled operations in the eastern theater of operations, Kitchener served as Roberts' second in command in the western theater, spearheading the British advance into the Boer republics of the Orange Free State and Transvaal in early 1900, leading to the capture of the Boer capital of Pretoria. When Roberts and Buller returned to England in November 1900, Lord Kitchener succeeded Roberts as commander in chief for the drawn-out guerrilla phase of the war. From then on, Lord Kitchener directed the British campaign against General Louis Botha's Boer guerrillas launching hit-and-run raids against British posts everywhere in South Africa. In a long and brutal campaign, Kitchener imposed a "scorched earth" policy of burning crops, destroying Afrikaner farms and villages, and establishing a network of blockhouses across parts of South Africa which slowly tied down the Boers, impairing their commando raids. It was not until May 31, 1902 that the Boer leaders gave in and within months the last of the Boer guerrillas were starved into surrendering. Kitchener was then made commander of the British troops in India and promoted to Field Marshall.

y 1914 at the start of World War I, Kitchener was appointed secretary for war and placed in charge of organizing the British war effort. Unlike most of his contemporaries, Kitchener believed that the war would be long and costly, and accordingly instituted a massive recruiting drive. Almost 2.5 million British and Colonial troops were raised through this effort. In addition to the mass mobilization and supply of his armies, Lord Kitchener personally oversaw the British campaigns from the Near East, to the Western Front in France, to Africa. Kitchener was made a Knight of the Garter, Great Britain's highest honor in June 1915.

Lord Kitchener died in the line of duty on June 5, 1916 when, en route to a conference with the Russian high command in St. Petersburg, the ship he was on, the HMS Hampshire, struck a mine off the Orkney Islands. Kitchener was not among the few dozen survivors. He was then declared missing in action, and later declared dead. Had he survived, some experts believe that World War I would have ended a year earlier than it did.