that was being played on such a dread orchestra.  Slipping and stumbling, cursing and cheering, the Devons crept forward across the sodden grass.  Many of the bravest, among them Chisholme, went down on that plain of death.  Far beyond the level veldt there were something like 800 feet to climb in the face of Mauser and shrapnel.  At length, however, the top of the ridge was reached.  There stood the three guns that had wrought such havoc, now silent among the corpses of the frock-coated burghers who had served them.

[Page Heading:  THE WHITE FLAG TRICK]

The Boers still kept up the fight, however, on the further side of the plateau.  The cheering Gordons, the Manchesters and the Devons now flung themselves at the remnant of the foe.  Suddenly a white flag was seen to flutter defeat from a kopje beyond the laager.  On the instant the soldiers paused at the surprising notes of the “Cease fire,” followed by the “Retire.”  For a moment they wavered between discipline and dismay.  At that instant from a small kopje east of the nek came a violent burst of firing as some fifty of the enemy made a last effort to regain their position.

There was a momentary panic in the British lines.  But a little bugler shouted “Retire be damned,” and sounded the “Advance.”  Gradually the infantry recovered, and the Gordons and Devons, rushing on the enemy, took a fearful revenge for the dastardly trick.

French had scored his first victory within a day of his arrival.  What wonder if men called him “French the lucky?” From now onwards that tradition was to cling to his name.  But a great deal more than luck went to the winning of Elandslaagte.  Had French not advanced his men throughout in open formation, the day might never have been his.  It has been said that he was our only general to master the Boer methods.  He was certainly the first and the most able imitator of those methods.  But he was prepared to meet them before he ever stepped on South African soil.  For his whole theory of cavalry tactics is based on the realisation that massive formations are now hopelessly out of date.

[Page Heading:  LUCK OR BRAINS]

One of the newspaper correspondents[8] happened to run across French twice during the battle.  He tells how at the end of the engagement he met the General, who had come along the ridge in the fighting line of the Manchesters and Gordons, and offered him his congratulations on the day.  He adds:  “Last time I had met him was when the artillery on both sides were hard at it; he appeared then more like a man playing a game of chess than a game of war, and was not too busy to sympathise with me on the badness of the light when he saw me trying to take snap-shots of the Boer shells bursting amid the Imperial Light Horse near us.”

French’s luck lay in his ability to see his opportunities and grasp them.  But the soldier will never be convinced on that point, even if French himself attempt his conversion.  For him the British leader has remained “The luckiest man in the army” ever since Elandslaagte.  Yet in a letter to Lady French after the engagement he had written, “I never thought I would come out alive.”