At that time French differed from his fellow officers probably rather in degree than in temperament.  Although a very keen sportsman he did not put sport first.  Colonel C.E.  Warde, one of his closest friends, gives the following description of the man.  “Although he never attempted to go to the Staff College he was continually studying military works, and often, when his brother subalterns were at polo or other afternoon amusements, he would remain in his room reading Von Schmidt, Jomini, or other books on strategy.  I recollect once travelling by rail with him in our subaltern days, when after observing the country for some time, he broke out:  ’There is where I should put my artillery.’  ‘There is where I should put my cavalry’ and so on to the journey’s end.”

In spite of these evidences of a soldier’s eye for country, there is nothing to show that French had developed any abnormal devotion for his work.  He was interested but not absorbed.  In 1880 a captaincy and his marriage probably did something to make him take his career more seriously.  His wife, Lady French, was a daughter of Mr. R.W.  Selby-Lowndes, of Bletchley, Bucks.  They have two sons and a daughter.

A few months after his marriage he accepted an adjutancy in the Northumberland Yeomanry.  For four uneventful years he was stationed at Newcastle, where the work was monotonous and the opportunities almost nil.

[Page Heading:  THE WAITING GAME]

Naturally the young man fretted very much at being left behind with the Yeomanry when his regiment was ordered to embark for Egypt in 1882.  And he never rested until he was allowed to follow it out in 1884.  It was in many ways a new 19th which the young officer re-joined in Egypt.  The regiment hurried out in 1882 had at last come under a commander of real genius in Colonel Percy Barrow, C.B., and in that commander French was to find his first real military inspiration.  It is difficult to judge what his future might have been but for this one man and the Nile Expedition, which proved the turning point in French’s career as it did in that of his regiment.

Then, as ever, French was a man who had to wait for his opportunities.  He was thirty-two years of age before he saw this, his first piece of active service.  Where Kitchener found, or made, opportunities for military experience, French was content to wait the turn of events.  So it has been all through his life.  He has never forestalled Destiny; he has simply accepted its call.  But when an opportunity presented itself he always seized it, and the Nile Expedition was no exception to the rule.  Major French, without Staff College training, without the usual diplomas, was to prove himself once and for all a master tactician.

CHAPTER II

WITH THE NILE EXPEDITION

    A Forlorn Hope—­Scouting in the Desert—­The Battle of Abu
    Klea—­Metammeh—­The Death of Gordon—­A Dangerous
    Retreat—­“Major French and His Thirteen Troopers.”