Lord Kitchener: His Medals and Military Career Explained

British Military Commander Lord Horatio Herbert Kitchener’s military career spanned some of the British Empire’s most dramatic campaigns — from the epic Sudan Campaign and the battle of Omdurman, where he crushed the Mahdist Army and avenged Gordon of Khartoum, to his leadership in the Boer War and his role as Secretary of State for War in World War 1. Rising from a young Royal Engineer surveying the Holy Land to Commander-in-Chief in India and then Britain’s most famous soldier, Kitchener built the railways that carried his army up the Nile, directed the one-sided battle of Omdurman with modern rifles, Maxims and gunboats, and later created the massive volunteer “Kitchener’s Army” of 1914. Awarded the KCB, and campaign medals from Sudan to South Africa, his life touched the rise of empire, industrial warfare, and the making of modern Britain.