e 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.

Not that Sir John French's style is an accident. Like most of the
other successes of his career, it is the result of design. The man who
laboriously "crammed" tactics laboured equally hard over the art of
writing. The many prefaces which he has written to famous books on
strategy and war bear traces of the most careful preparation.

Apart from his dispatches, however, French has written some virile,
telling English in his prefaces to several books on cavalry and on
military history. The most interesting is that which he wrote for
Captain Frederick von Herbert's _The Defence of Plevna_. He prefaces
it with a dramatic little coincidence of war capitally told. "During
the last year of the South African War, while directing the operations
in Cape Colony, I found myself, late one afternoon in February, 1902,
at the north end of the railway bridge over the Orange River at
Bethulie, strangely attracted by the appearance of a well-constructed
and cleverly hidden covered field work, which formed an important part
of the 'Bridge head.' Being somewhat pressed for time I rode on and
directed my aide-de-camp to go down into the fort, look round it, and
then catch me up. He shortly overtook me with an urgent request to
return and inspect it myself. I did so, and was very much struck, not
only with the construction of the work and its excellent siting, but
also with all the defence arrangements at that point of the river.
Whilst I was in the fort the officer in charge arrived and reported
himself. Expressing my strong approval of all I had seen, I remarked
that it brought back to my mind a book I had read and re-read, and
indeed studied with great care and assiduity--a book called _The
Defence of Plevna_, by a certain Lieutenant von Herbert, whom, to my
regret, I had never met. 'I am von Herbert, and I wrote the book you
speak of,' was the reply of the officer to whom I spoke."[22]

[Pa