Anything like show or ostentation is foreign to French’s whole nature.  If there are few stories of his exploits in South Africa, there lies the reason.  He is far too modest a man to prepare bons mots or pretty jeux d’esprit for public consumption.  Also he is by nature a silent man.  His silence is not the detached, Olympian and rather ominous silence of Kitchener.  It proceeds simply from a natural modesty and reticence, which reinforce his habitual tendency to “think things over.”  He is the type of man whom hostesses have to “draw out”; he never talks either on himself, the army or any other subject.  To “do his job” better than anybody else in the world could do it is enough for French; chatter about it he leaves to less busy people.

His habitual taciturnity, curiously enough, is one of the traits which endears him to the army.  For French’s silence has no trait of churlishness.  It is the silence of a man utterly absorbed in the task before him, the man whom Tommy Atkins admires.  “If the British soldier likes one thing in a General more than another,” wrote a soldier who served with French in South Africa, “it is the golden gift of silence, especially when joined to straight action, just to distinguish him from the old women of both sexes.  Whenever French penned a dispatch, or an order, or a proclamation, he wasted no ink and strained no pen nibs; but he never penned anything if there was a way of doing the thing himself."[15]

[Page Heading:  A SHIRT-SLEEVED GENERAL]

In South Africa he earned the title of “the shirt-sleeved General,”—­a soubriquet that conveys a subtle compliment from Tommy’s point of view.  Actually French was often to be seen walking about in camp during his heavy marches in shirt-sleeves.  One afternoon a correspondent rode up to the lines, and seeing a soldier sitting on a bundle of hay, smoking a dilapidated looking old briar pipe, asked where the General was.  “The old man is somewhere about,” coolly replied the soldier.  “Well, just hold my horse while I go and search for him.”  “Certainly, sir,” and the smoker rose obediently and took the bridle.  “Can you tell me where the General is?” inquired the correspondent of a staff officer further down the line.  “General French? oh, he’s somewhere about.  Why, there he is, holding that horse’s head!” And the officer pointed directly to the smoker, still tranquilly pulling at his pipe, and holding the horse!  Needless to say “Uncle French” and his men hugely enjoyed the correspondent’s awakening.

Such a man is bound to be the idol of the ranks.  “What a good leader General French is,” wrote Driver Payne, of the Royal Horse Artillery, to a friend.  “He seems so cool at excitable moments; he does not lose his head and rush his men into danger.  In fact, he always looks before he leaps, and when he does leap, he makes us move—­and the Boers too.”  Perhaps French was best summed-up one day by a trooper whom, in a curt word, he had just sentenced to barracks for some offence.  “The General don’t bark much,” he remarked, “but, crikey, don’t he know how to bite!”