British Generalship

I

IT is probable that no war since Bannockburn democratized the battlefield has been so revolutionary in method and resource as that into which Europe was plunged last August. It was forty-four years since Germany and France were last engaged in warfare on any considerable scale; over twelve years since England was at war with the Boer republics, and ten years since Russia was at war with Japan. The echoes of the Balkan wars, it is true, had hardly died away; but those wars, bloody though t hey were, had the character of the wars of the past. The movements were rapid, the decisions swift, and the resources and methods employed were familiar.

Not until the Russo-Japanese war was there any suggestion that the art and conduct of war were on the eve of vital changes, consequent upon the dominating influence which artillery had established in the field. The battle of Mukden was the precursor of the new siege warfare which, with its dullness and its ugliness, was to supersede the old romantic war of swift surprise, crashing blow, and shifting scene. But in the ten years that had succeeded Mukden there had been developments whose effect could be only to differentiate still further modern warfare from that of the past. The conquest of the air, the invention of wireless communication, the improvement in motor traction, were among the most important of the factors which had come into operation; and inasmuch as the practice of warfare, like the practice of anything else, is largely governed by its tools, it was clear that when war on the grand scale came, it would be marked by new possibilities which could be only dimly imagined. What would be the relation of the mobile gun and the bomb-proof fort? Would Lord Sydenham’s view that the fortress was effete and that earthworks were the essential corollary of modem artillery, be justified? What place would the cavalry have in future encounters? Would it be rendered as obsolete by the motor vehicle as the cab-horse had been rendered obsolete by the ‘taxi’? Would its function as the vision of the army be henceforth assumed by the aeroplane? What was the true function of the air in warfare? Would the airship prove to be an effective military instrument, or would the aeroplane, with its superiority in numbers and mobility, reduce it to a clumsy futility?

These were typical of the questions to which only practical experience could furnish decisive answers. But so far as the calculable elements were concerned, the advantage was, of course, decisively with that power which had made preparations for war its supreme function. That advantage was not limited to the specifically military equipment which Germany had organized with such astonishing thoroughness. It extended to the whole field of the national life, every department of which was developed with a view to its effective coöperation in the purposes of war. The contempt, which Germany had for the military potentialities of Great Britain was not altogether unreasonable. It was founded, not merely upon the negligible proportions of the British army, but also upon the fact that the whole conception of the state was non-warlike and its organization entirely industrial and pacific. England relied upon the sea for her protection and still believed in the maxim of Chatham that ‘the standing army of England is the navy,’ — a maxim in which a defensive and not an offensive attitude is implicit. Had the Prussian mind been more open to the teaching of history it would have understood, from such episodes as the American Civil War, that great military resources may be latent in a non-military people; but it has been one of the fatal mistakes of the Prussians to calculate only on the visible and the material and to ignore the human and spiritual forces that they have challenged.

But though, tested by the Continental scale, the British army was negligible, there were two points in which it was incomparable. It was small in numbers, but it was great in experience. It was the only professional army in Europe, and, apart from the Russian, it was the only army that had had the supreme qualification of actual experience of war. It may be said with almost strict truth that when the German and French armies faced each other last August there was hardly a man on either side who had seen a shot fired in battle. The English army, on the other hand, in addition to the qualities of t he professional soldier who had served all over the world, had in it a powerful stiffening of seasoned men who had been through the South African War and had been inured to all the rough vicissitudes of battle.

And the second point was even more vital. The British army was generaled by men all of whom were familiar with the practice of war and whose merits had been discovered,not in manoeuvres, but on the battlefield. The importance of this fact cannot be overestimated. It is one of the paradoxes of Lord Fisher that ‘disobedience is the whole art of war.’ ‘In peace,’ he will say, ‘you want a man who will obey orders. In war you want a man who knows when to disobey them. Nelson disobeyed Jervis at St. Vincent and won the battle; he disobeyed at Copenhagen and bluffed the Danes int o surrender.’

Perhaps it is a perilous maxim; but it is true that war is an art as well as a science and that one may have great success in the pedantries of manoeuvres and be discovered to be a great fool in the presence of realities on the battlefield. Now except for a few men like Hindenburg, Pau, and Castelnau, who as youngsters took part in the campaign of 1870, none of the generals on either the French or the German side had ever been under fire. They were theorists of war. They were the product of manoeuvres and textbooks. They might be good men, but they had to be taken on trust. And the result was what might have been expected. Von Moltke was deposed within two months of the beginning of the war, and on both sides there has been a rapid displacement of inefficient generals. Forty disappeared on the French side alone.

Now the case was different with the English. There was not an officer in high command in the army who had not spent a large part of his life in active service in the field. Many of them bore the witness of old battlefields on their persons; all of them carried on their breasts the symbols of some act of valor or some display of military talent. They had fought in many fields: on the frontiers of India, in Afghanistan, in Burma, in Somaliland, in Egypt, but chiefly in South Africa. In that great struggle they had learned the meaning of war and had tasted all its bitterness. It had humbled them, and in humbling them had made them better students and better soldiers. No one who went through the South African War emerged from it unpurged of military arrogance, — that arrogance that is born in the classroom and dies on the battlefield.

II

The saying that South Africa is the grave of reputations is older than the second Boer War, but it was that war which gave it the significance that attaches to it to-day. Buller’s failure, although most conspicuous, was only typical of what happened in the early stages of the war; and in the later stages Lord Roberts and Lord Kitchener, though more successful, cannot be said to have added to their reputations. There was, however, one conspicuous exception to the depressing rule — one reputation which found in South Africa not a grave but a birthplace. Sir John French went into the war unknown to the world; he emerged from it with the most secure reputation as a fighting general in the British army. This suggests no reflection on Lord Kitchener, whose success has been that of the organizer of war rather than that of the general in the field.

If we ask what was the source of that deep and confident faith in Sir John French which was the product of the war, we shall find that it was not merely the almost unvarying success which attended him, but the sense that in him there worked an original genius of a rare and indisputable kind. Now, originality in any walk of life is hard to achieve. It is most difficult of all to achieve in the military profession, in which the law of discipline makes the free play of the mind seem like the most dangerous of all heresies. Discipline and originality are natural enemies, but they are enemies that have to be reconciled if the highest efficiency of an army is to be realized. It was this necessity which haunted Bernhardi when he was showing Germany how it was to win the next war. Prince von Bülow has said that the spirit of discipline, even without enthusiasm, had enabled Prussia to march to victory in the past; but Bernhardi, like Scharnhorst before him, saw that in the new conditions of war mere reliance upon the unquestioning discipline of the mass was fatal, and he was never tired of preaching that, with discipline, there must be the element of individual initiative.

If this element is important in the case of the man it is vastly more important in the case of the officer. But the sterilizing dominion of precedent and tradition, in his case, is most difficult to attack, because it is founded, not only in the idea of obedience, but in professional pride. It is easy to confuse loyalty to the spirit of the profession, which should be constant, with loyalty to its methods, which should be varying, ‘It’s a way we have in the army,’becomes an easy formula for getting rid of thinking and for treating every one who dares to think as a dangerous person.

Now Sir John French is one of those men who are not terrorized by tradition. He has an independent life of the mind which enables him to shake himself free from conventional thought, and he encourages the same freedom in others. When he was appointed Chief of the Imperial General Staff in 1912, he issued a memorandum inviting officers to contribute to the pages of the new Army Review, and to give expression to original ideas even though they differed from the doctrines of the official textbooks. He has the wisdom to see that war is both a science and an art, — that it is necessary to equip the mind with all the science of war, with all that has been thought and done by the masters in the past, and that it is equally necessary in action to be the master and not the slave of that science.

Sir Evelyn Wood said recently that, when he inspected Major French’s regiment many years ago, he asked a superior his opinion of the major. ‘Forever reading military books,’was the reply. And his sister, Mrs. Despard, — under whose eye he was brought up after the death of his parents, — has borne similar witness to his lifelong concentration upon the one theme that dominates his mind — the theory and practice of war.

For, in spite of an early predilection for preaching, he has been a soldier all his life. It is true that in obedience to the parental example — for his father, Captain French, of Ripple Vale, Kent, had been an officer in the navy — young French, in 1866, at the age of fourteen, joined the senior service and served four years as a naval cadet on the Britannia. But the natural genius of the lad prevailed, and in 1874 he began his military career with a commission in the 19th Hussars. It was here that his independence of mind began to show itself, not in assertive eccentricity (for he is the most modest of men and his genius consists in the possession of common sense in an uncommon measure), but in the fresh and original thought he brought to bear on his profession. His regiment was not in those days a smart affair. It was one of those, formed after the Indian Mutiny, in which only small men were enlisted, and which, in consequence, were known as the ‘Dumpies.’ The atmosphere of the officers’ mess in the 19th Hussars was no better and no worse than the average in those days of dry rot. The military calling was merely a phase of the sporting equipment of a gentleman, and drill and manoeuvres were rather dull and perfunctory incidents in an otherwise agreeable mode of life, while anything like the serious study of the science of war marked a man out as a curiosity, if not as rather a vulgar fellow. Soldiering was a sport which could only be degraded by study. And as for the cavalry, its chief function was to give tone to what would otherwise be a vulgar brawl. It needed a man of strong will and clear ideas to cut across such ingrained habits of thought and set up a new professional standard, and French was the man for the task. His influence prevailed, and the subsequent reputation achieved by the 19th was chiefly due to his efforts.

His success here and always was more enduring because it was won in such a human and unpretentious way. He has not the grim aloofness of commanders like Wellington or Kitchener, nor does he cultivate the Napoleonic arts of flattery. But he is not inferior to any of these men in conveying that impression which is essential to the great general, — the impression that he has the secret of victory in him. Without that assurance an army goes into battle robbed of its most powerful asset. Sir John French conveys the impression, not by enveloping himself in an atmosphere of remoteness and mystery, but by giving the sense of a singularly sane, balanced, daylight mind, firm in its judgments, yet open to convict ion; masterful, yet without the fatal blemish of vanity or ambition; profoundly instructed, yet wholly free from the taint of the doctrinaire. He is, in a word, the ordinary man in an extraordinary degree,—fearless of danger, imperturbable in action, free alike from exaltations and despairs, cool when the temperature is highest and warm when the blast is coldest, and, in all circumstances, human, generous, a little hottempered, and always comprehensible. One would be tempted to say that he was the beau ideal of the Englishman, but for the fact that he is Irish.

But in spite of his high personal qualities and the universal affection with which he is regarded, his path has not been unobstructed. No man who thinks independently and acts on his thinking can expect that, in a world governed by precedent; least of all can he expect it in an institution which, like the army, makes every rut sacred. He became known to the conventional as a man with rather heretical notions about the use of cavalry, — for example, he taught his men that they might have to fight on foot, — and he had the distinction (and, incidentally, the good fortune) to be passed over at a critical moment in his career by the late Duke of Cambridge, to whom a new idea was perdition and the man who entertained it a peril. Even his successes were, to the pedants, gained by means so unorthodox as to rule him out as an unsafe man. Thus when, commanding the cavalry in the manoeuvres of 1897, he achieved a brilliant success, his tactics were severely assailed as unsound and as involving undue risks, and his nomination to the command of the cavalry in the Boer War was opposed on the ground that he was ‘inefficient to command in the field.’ Fortunately, General Buller had had experience with General French in Egypt, at Abu Klea and Metemnch, and he insisted on his appointment to the cavalry command.

Now if one judged war as a science only, as the Germans do, and not as an art, as Napoleon did, there would have been a reasonable case against the selection of French. For though he has been one of the most careful students of war of his time, and though, when at the War Office as Assistant Adjutant-General, he devoted himself daily to working out tactical problems, he is essentially a pragmatist in war. He knows that war is too irrational, too incalculable a thing to be governed by rules, that every situation is unprecedented, is made up of factors, human, material, moral, that have never occurred in the same relation before; that in the last resource it is judgment, inspiration, common sense, informed by science but not controlled by it, which must be in command. To put it in another way, it is not a man’s theories that count, but his personality. It was possible to condemn French on his work in manoeuvres because according to the rules he took too great risks, and manoeuvres having no reality could not demonstrate that those risks were warranted. Only actual war could reveal whether audacity and caution were in due equipoise.

And that was the revelation of the Boer War in regard to Sir John French. It showed that he had the genius for seizing a situation swiftly and truly; that he was always master of the whole sum, — not only the sum of his own resources, but the sum of his enemy’s resources; that the risks he took, though they might ignore rules, never ignored facts.

As an example, take the best known but not the greatest of his achievements in the Boer War, — the relief of Kimberley. When French hurled his cavalry division at the Boer lines he took risks which in manoeuvres would have been denounced as fatal. By every theory of the textbooks he should have been destroyed. Instead, the fury, the unexpectedness, the momentum of the act carried him through the storm unscathed. The clouds of dust flung up by the flying feet of the horses enveloped the charge in obscurity, and the Boers for once lost their heads and fired confusedly. Their line was pierced, they fled in disorder, and Kimberley was relieved. It was the first great success of the war. It was achieved in the teeth of all doctrine, and on the basis of actual present conditions, the meaning and values of which only a swift and sure intuition could reveal.

Or take that still greater, because more complex and sustained, feat at Koodoosrand Drift. French and his cavalry, worn out after the long action at Dronfield, were resting in the evening when news came that Cronje was fleeing to Bloemfontein with all his force, and that French must cut him off at Koodoosrand Drift. On the face of it, so great a task was physically impossible to the exhausted horses and tired men, but French is never overawed by the ‘impossible.’ What does the soldier live for except to prove that the impossible is possible and snatch victory as the reward? ‘Impossible? Is that all? Then the sooner we set about it the better,’ is his attitude.

By midnight he was moving; by nine in the morning his advance patrol came in sight of the enemy crossing the Modder in a confused mass, and never dreaming of danger from the west. The apparition of French across the path was as startling as the descent of Montrose at Inverlochy, or of Stonewall Jackson at Manassas Junction. But Cronje was in overwhelming superiority, and it was only by the most audacious ‘bluff,’ by spreading his little force over a wide front and giving the impression of numbers, that French was able to hold the enemy in check until the panting infantry under Kitchener came up from the east and sealed Cronje’s fate.

This incident disclosed qualities in French not less important than his brilliant daring, — qualities which are proving invaluable in his present gigantic task. I refer to his unquestioning loyalty and his incomparable power of endurance. Without them there would have been disaster in France. The coöperation of allies is always a delicate and perilous operation, and the relations of Sir John French and General Joffre were peculiarly susceptible to strain. Not only is French a field marshal, and therefore Joffre’s superior in rank, but he entered the war with a reputation established on the field of battle, — a reputation second to none in Europe, — while his chief had had no experience of war on a great scale. Nevertheless, the English commander has given the world a supreme example of perfect loyalty, not merely in deed and word, but in spirit, that furnishes one of the most chivalrous object lessons in the history of war.

And his endurance has been no less invaluable. It is not merely physical endurance. That, with his short, unromantic, but very serviceable figure, he possesses in an extraordinary degree. Weariness of body seems unknown to him. But even more important is his mental endurance. There is a touch of habitual depression in Kitchener, just a little sense of impending disaster. But French has the unconquerable cheerfulness of the man who lives in the moment, bends all his faculties to the immediate task, and refuses to be terrorized by what is before him or behind. It is not that he is without imagination, — in the military sense he has abundance of that quality,— but that he is free from the temperamental moods of the artist and has that constancy of mind which is the first essential of the man of action.

It was this sense of stability and balance that marked him out for high command. The brilliant cavalry officer is not often a brilliant commander. His task is incidental rather than constructive, and his success comes from the impetuous rush of the spirit rather than from the steady glow of the mind. French’s rare merit is that he combines the momentary inspiration of the cavalry leader with the power of surveying a large and complex situation from a detached point of view. In a word, he has the power of thought as well as the instinct for action. This was shown in a very decisive way by the operations which he carried out in front of the Colesberg position. From a military standpoint, those operations were the most conspicuous success of the war. It was in them that French found himself, and the military world discovered a leader of original genius. During three months, by every art of finesse and ’bluff,’ by skillful mystification, by caution that suddenly changed to audacity and audacity that changed to caution, by delicate calculations of time, of material values, and of moral factors, he held in check a force often as much as five times greater than his own; a force, moreover, commanded by leaders of the high quality of Delarey and De Wet. It may be said that it was before Colesberg that French learned the art of generalship on the great scale, and served his true apprenticeship for the most momentous task ever imposed upon a British general in the field.

It is here that we first see in operation that very rare combination of qualities which his unassuming personality contains: the steadiness of mind that supported him under the tremendous strain of the retreat from Mons; the calculated daring that made him, when he shifted from the Aisne to Flanders, take the risk, so brilliantly justified, of spreading out his line to a perilous tenuity; the unfailing cheerfulness of one who, dismissing fears of the future or regrets for the past, lives deliberately in the possibilities of the present; the untiring body and the constant, bulldog purpose.

The sense of loyalty which I have emphasized as one of the conspicuous traits of Sir John French’s character is not confined to the professional sphere. His loyalty as a soldier has its counterpart in his loyalty to the civil authority. That was very markedly displayed during the Ulster crisis. It is an open secret that, had his opinion been followed, there would have been short shrift with the potential rebels of Curragh Camp. The final announcement that the soldier whose fine instinct of loyalty to constituted authority was the one redeeming feature of that unhappy business, had found it impossible to reconcile honor with the withdrawal of his resignation, seemed to leave the country face to face with an unprecedented danger. Only Mr. Asquith’s dramatic assumption at that moment of the Secretaryship of War saved the situation.

That episode seemed like the unworthy eclipse of a great career. Five months later, French was saving the liberties of Europe by a retreat that has few parallels in the history of war. When it was known that he was to command the Expeditionary Force there was no dissentient left in all the land. He was not merely the obvious choice: he was the only conceivable choice, and every day that has elapsed since then has deepened the general gratitude that that choice was possible.

III

It would not be easy to find a more striking contrast to Sir John French in externals than that furnished by the general who has been given the command of the Dardanelles expedition. Sir John French does not touch the imagination with any sense of romance. He is, like General Joffre, an entirely prosaic and matter-of-fact figure whose high merit is the possession of common qualities in an uncommon degree and in that equilibrium which, if not genius, is, in practical affairs, often better than genius. He represents the business of war. Sir Ian Hamilton, on the other hand, suggests the romance of war. In temperament and appearance he is the cavalier, and very little effort of the imagination is needed to picture him fighting a forlorn battle for the hopeless Stuart cause. He is without the tragic seriousness of Montrose, perhaps without that depth and intensity that give Montrose so enduring a hold on the imagination; but it is the spirit of Montrose that he recalls in his mingling of the poet and the adventurer, and if there is any distrust of him at all, it proceeds from the pedestrian fear that a man who looks so much like an embodiment of romance cannot at the same time possess the humdrum qualities of the organizer of victory.

The suspicion is natural. The plain man disapproves of wit in his politicians and of poetry in his soldiers. He likes his men of affairs to talk in monosyllables and to preserve a dour and inflexible seriousness. Wellington was trusted all the more because he was so curt and said ‘ Damn ’ with such vehemence; and the enormous prestige of Joffre and Kitchener to-day is largely a tribute to their incomparable gift of silence.

Now Sir Ian Hamilton has not only committed the fatal error of publishing poetry, but he carries in every lineament the impress of the poet and of the man of romantic ancestry and taste. He is the painter’s soldier, and with his tall spare figure, his mobile, aristocratic features and dark eye, gives the impression that his main function in life is to adorn the walls of the Royal Academy and then to die an heroic death on behalf of some mistaken loyalty, and with a cavalier jest upon his lips. And, indeed, there is no doubt that the natural instinct of the man is a chivalrous intrepidity rather than a calculating caution. The withered hand and wrist serve as a reminder of that. For they are a souvenir of that memorable day, thirty years ago, when the young lieutenant of the 92nd Highlanders shared in the disaster on Majuba Hill, and gave the first conspicuous expression of the stuff that was in him. It was not the first occasion on which he had been under fire, for he had served in the Afghan War of 1878-80, and had taken part in the operations at Cabul in 1879. But it was an occasion that for the first time discovered the spirit of the young Highlander. The day was going badly for the English and only desperate remedies could save it. In the duel of marksmanship the Boer farmers were easily superior, and Ian Hamilton, with the Highlander’s passion for the charge surging in his veins, saw that the one hope was the bayonet. With the courage born of a vision denied to the unhappy commander, Hamilton approached Sir George Colley. ‘Forgive my presumption, sir,’ he said, ‘but will you let the Gordon Highlanders charge with the bayonet?’ ‘No presumption, young gentleman,’ replied Colley. ‘We’ll let them charge us; then we’ll give them a volley and charge.’ It is not difficult to conceive the feelings with which Ian Hamilton returned to his men.

But his charge was to come nevertheless. Nearly twenty years had gone by and once more the British were facing the Boers on a hill not far from the scene of the earlier exploit. It was the sixth day of January, 1900, and on that day the fate of Ladysmith and of the British army besieged there was hanging in the balance. In the darkness the Boers had stolen up the sides of Waggon Hill, and on the crest of that hill, amid a thunderstorm of unusual intensity, there was waged a battle not less pregnant with results than that of Majuba, for, had it been lost, South Africa itself could hardly have been saved. Across the plateau the armies faced each other, firing at point-blank range, and often obscured by the torrential rain. As at Majuba the Boers had the advantage with the rifle, but on this occasion they had to deal with the young lieutenant, — a lieutenant no longer, but a general with the power to put his faith in the bayonet into practice. For long the battle was in doubt, but then came the moment for which Ian Hamilton had waited, and the charge of the Devons swept the Boers from the hill and saved Ladysmith and its army.

And though it was not the 92nd who had given him his revenge, there was to come a day later in that war when at Doornkop his favorite Gordons heard his order to charge, and passing amid a rain of bullets across the open veldt, stormed with fixed bayonets the further slope, carried the position, and won as proud a victory as any in all their famous history. And that night, when the stars came out and the camp fires twinkled on the veldt, Ian Hamilton visited his old comrades of the regiment that he was born in and thanked them for the gallantry that would ring through far-away Scotland on the following day.

But though he has the Highlander’s love of the charge, it would be a profound mistake to regard him simply as a brilliant adventurer of the battlefield. He is that, but he is more than that. When Lord Roberts, not long before his death, was asked whom among the generals of the British army he regarded as the ablest commander in the field, he replied, ‘Ian Hamilton.’ The judgment was disputable, but not indefensible; and it was founded, not on Hamilton’s audacity, but on his knowledge and on his coolness in directing the complex movements of the battlefield. Like General French, he has been a serious student of war all his life. He comes of a soldier strain, for his father once commanded the 92nd Highlanders, and an ancestor of his was aide-decamp to the great Marlborough; and his natural aptitude for war has been cultivated, not merely by experience in the field, but by familiarity with Continental methods. As a youth he went to Germany, and from the old Hanoverian, General Dammers, acquired the strategy that had made the Prussians the military masters of Europe. And since then he has learned to apply and qualify that science by the actual experience of war in many fields, — in India, in Egypt, in South Africa.

He has not the imperturbable quality of Sir John French, for his temperament is that of the artist; and he once confessed, half jestingly, but with a certain seriousness, that he had ‘ never gone into battle without being in a blue funk and wondering how on earth he was to get through.’

But that element of nervous tension is often the most dangerous in action. It means intellectual speed and passion; and when, as in the case of Ian Hamilton, that motion is controlled by a cool head, we have the elements of a great general. The operations in Gallipoli are as formidable as any that a military commander has ever had to face. They call for daring, for swift inspiration, but they call also for caution and calm judgment. On the first gate of Busyrane there was inscribed the words ‘ Be bold ’; on the second, ‘ Be bold and ever more bold ’; on the third, ‘Be not too bold.’ These are the invisible inscriptions on the gates of the Dardanelles. There is confidence that Sir Ian Hamilton has the vision to see them and understand their mingled warning and challenge.

IV

One other type of British generalship calls for remark. In many respects the most significant figure in the British army to-day is General Sir William Robertson. He is a man of whom the public hears little, but for sheer intellectual force he has no rival. The measure of his genius may be understood from the fact that he is a ‘ranker.’ It is long since Gladstone abolished purchase in the army; but the abolition of purchase did not mean the democratizing of the commands. It only meant that it was possible for a man of brains to secure a commission when it was too late for his talents to win a field for their exercise. The officering of the British army was still an aristocratic prerogative, safeguarded by the conditions of the service. General Robertson, it is true, is not the first ‘ranker’ to attain the rank of general. Hector Macdonald was also a ‘ ranker ’; but the qualities that brought that tragic hero to greatness were the qualities of the fighting man. The remarkable fact about General Robertson is that he has won his way to distinction by the qualities of his mind. He has brought into the British army the rare element of abstract thinking, — that learning of which we in the past have had too little and the Germans apparently too much. That he is a gallant soldier goes without saying. It is said that, although born in Lincolnshire, he comes of that fighting stock, the Clan Chattan, memorable to every reader of Scott. And he has seen active service in India and in South Africa and was wounded in Chitral.

But it is in the lecture-room and the study, and not in the field, that the youth who enlisted in the 16th Lancers more than thirty years ago has won his unique distinction. He discovered a genius for languages, including Indian dialects, and this paved his way to notice. And when he had once got his foot on the ladder his progress was irresistible, for he revealed an understanding of the science of war t hat, impressed all who came in contact with him, and his ultimate appointment as Commandant of the Staff College at Comberley gave the army the rare experience of an incomparable lecturer. To-day there is no officer in the British army who is listened to with such respect as the former private of the 16th Lancers. As Chief of the Staff to Sir John French he is the power behind the throne.