I finished my article about Lord Kitchener. In it, I tried to frame his life in terms of the images that made him famous. I figure it was the pictures of him, recurring in the media along with his many exploits, that made him into the icon he was even before the famous "Wants YOU" posters of August 1914.
I admit that I had Kitchener wrong. Of course, I knew the reality was a little more complicated, but I'd kind of conflated him with Stephen Fry's "General Melchett" character from Blackadder Goes Forth. It turns out that Kitchener was one of the only people who could see that WWI would be a horrible long bloody slog, and could basically only be won by a war of attrition against Germany.
Original Caption: Kitchener, in charge of recruitment, tells Lloyd George and Asquith that things aren't as bad as they look ...
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