Lord Roberts dies

On 14 November 1914 Field Marshal Frederick Roberts, 1st Earl Roberts, died at Saint-Omer, where the headquarters of the British Expeditionary Force was located. He was 82. He had come to France a few days earlier to visit the Indian soldiers who since October had been fighting in Flanders. During the visit he caught a chill, which quickly turned into pneumonia. The most famous British soldier of his generation died, as Rudyard Kipling wrote, “in the very smoke of battle”.

Forty years in India

Roberts was born on 30 September 1832 in Cawnpore, today’s Kanpur, into the family of an officer of the East India Company’s army, of Irish origin. In 1851 he joined the Bengal Artillery. During the Indian Mutiny he fought at Delhi and Lucknow, among other places, and for bravery in the action at Khudaganj on 2 January 1858 he received the Victoria Cross, the highest British gallantry award.

Fame came with the Second Anglo-Afghan War. In August 1880 he led about 10,000 soldiers from Kabul to the relief of besieged Kandahar. He covered nearly 500 kilometres through mountains and wilderness in about three weeks, and on 1 September he routed the forces of Ayub Khan at the Battle of Kandahar. The march made him a national hero. In 1885–1893 he was Commander-in-Chief in India. He served there for more than forty years in all, and the soldiers, British and Indian alike, affectionately called him “Bobs”.

The Boer War

In December 1899, after a series of British defeats in the war with the Boers, the government entrusted Roberts with the supreme command in South Africa. A few days earlier his only surviving son, Lieutenant Frederick Roberts, had been mortally wounded at the Battle of Colenso; he was awarded the Victoria Cross posthumously. Roberts’s chief of staff was Herbert Kitchener. Their offensive turned the tide of the war: at Paardeberg at the end of February 1900 the forces of General Piet Cronjé surrendered, on 13 March the British took Bloemfontein, and on 5 June Pretoria. At the end of 1900 Roberts handed over command to Kitchener and returned home. He was made an earl and became the last ever Commander-in-Chief of the Forces of the British Army. The office was abolished in 1904.

Apostle of national service

In retirement Roberts devoted himself to a campaign for universal military training. From 1905 he headed the National Service League, an organisation demanding that every young Briton undergo compulsory training for home defence. He warned of the German threat and argued that a small professional volunteer army would not suffice in a great war on the Continent. Liberal governments rejected his demands, and many politicians regarded him as an alarmist.

When war broke out in 1914, many concluded that he had been right. Britain had to raise Kitchener’s New Armies from volunteers in haste, and in January 1916 it introduced conscription. Roberts did not live to see it.

The funeral

The field marshal’s body was taken to England. On 19 November 1914, after a state ceremony, he was buried in the crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral in London, where the Duke of Wellington and Admiral Nelson also lie. The same day the Daily Telegraph published Kipling’s poem “Lord Roberts” dedicated to him. By a special remainder the earldom passed to his daughter.