But the popular version does less than justice to the modern cavalry leader in general and to French in particular.  We have seen him as a subaltern poring over his books before his colleagues were out of bed.  We have seen him varying the monotony of War Office administration by solving problems in tactics.  Indubitably he is a student:  incidentally he is an innovator.  This fact of mental duality raises him in a moment out of the ruck of mere cavalry experts—­of both sorts.  On the one hand he is not a competent machine working out other people’s ideas in the field of battle:  on the other he is no blundering theorist whose ideas crumple into ineffectual dust under the stress of actual warfare.  He can carry out with the ardour of the soldier the schemes which he has formulated with the cold cunning of the strategist.  It is difficult indeed to say in which field of cavalry work he more greatly excels—­that of theory or practice.  We shall see later that he possesses qualities altogether apart from those of the theoriser or the man of action.  Suffice it now to glance at the astonishingly complete theory of cavalry on which his marvellous execution is founded.

One reaches the bedrock of French’s curiously sane conception of war when one asks him to define war.  In dealing with those gentlemen who tell us that the Boer War was fought under such abnormal conditions that it is useless as a ground-work for conclusions as to future wars, he uttered a memorable retort.  “All wars are abnormal,” he observed, “because there is no such thing as normal war."[16] There we have one of the axioms both of his theory and of his practice.  There can be no fixed conditions, and so there can be no final theories as to the conduct of warfare.  Theory is simply a means to an end.  And the successful general is he who most ably adapts the general body of theory suitable for all cases to the particular campaign on which he is engaged.

[Page Heading:  A VEXED QUESTION]

Broadly, however, French has very clearly defined what he considers to be the use and the abuse of cavalry.  After the Boer War, as is well known, opinion on the subject of the future of the mounted arm was bitterly divided.  There were those who saw in French’s success a justification for the cavalrymen of the old school, armed cap a pie.  There were others who, like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, saw the end of their day approaching.  The author of The Great Boer War says of the charge before Kimberley:  “It appears to have been one of the very few occasions during the campaign when that obsolete and absurd weapon the sword was anything but a dead weight to its bearer.”  And again:  “The war has been a cruel one for the cavalry....  It is difficult to say that cavalry, as cavalry, have justified their existence.  In the opinion of many the tendency of the future will be to convert the whole forces into mounted infantry....  A little training in taking cover, leggings instead