He holds that a self-reliant personality is as essential as a profound knowledge of generalship to the modern commander.  French possesses both.  Although profoundly versed in all the doctrines of the schoolmen, he is never afraid to jump over the traces where they would lead to a precipice.  He has never been hampered, as so many soldiers are, by his studies.  Knowledge he has always used as a means to an end, which is its proper vocation.  To this independence of mind, as to nothing else, may be attributed his phenomenal success amid the abnormal conditions of Boer warfare.  Where the books end, French’s active mind begins to construct its own “way out” of the corner.

The Boers were indeed the first to admit his superiority to the other English officers, if not to themselves.  De Wet was once asked in the early stages of the war how long he expected to avoid capture.  He replied, with a smile, that it all depended on which General was dispatched to run him down.  When a certain name was mentioned, the reply was “Till eternity.”  General B——­ was next mentioned.  “About two years,” was the verdict.  “And General French?” “Two weeks,” admitted De Wet.

French has, of course, never accepted social life in this country on its face value.  The young officer who was studying when his friends were at polo or tennis, was under no illusions as to the havoc which an over-accentuation of the sporting and social side of life was playing with the officers’ work.  Nowadays, like Kitchener, he is bent on producing the professional and weeding out the “drawing-room” soldier.  No wonder that his favourite authors are those acutest critics of English social life and English foibles, Dickens and Thackeray.  The former’s “Bleak House” and the latter’s “Book of Snobs” are the two books he places first in his affections.

[Page Heading:  A GREAT REPORTER]

He is himself a writer of parts.  We are, ourselves, so close to the event he describes, that we are perhaps unable to appreciate the literary excellence of the despatches which French has sent us on the operations in France.  A Chicago paper hails him, however, as “a great reporter.”  “No one can read his reports,” the writer remarks, “without being struck with his weighty lucidity, his calm mastery of the important facts, the total absence of any attempt at ‘effect,’ and the remarkably suggestive bits of pertinent description.”

Undoubtedly, the Americans are right—­provided that these dispatches were actually penned by the General himself.

His speeches may be obvious and even trite; his letters may lack any flavour of personality; but these dispatches are literature.  Like his hero Napoleon, like Caesar and Wellington, Sir John French has forged a literary style for himself.  There is nothing amateurish or journalistic about his communications from the front.  The dispatch from Mons, for instance, is a masterpiece of lucid and incisive English.  It might well be printed in our school-histories, not merely as a vivid historic document, but as a model of English prose.