[Page Heading:  AN OPPORTUNITY]

It is said that when news of the war in South Africa reached French, momentarily obeying a natural impulse, he waved his hand and cried, “Hurrah for South Africa.”  If anyone had any right to thank Heaven for that particular campaign, it was certainly French.  But he would have “hurrahed” any campaign that gave opportunity for his powers.  After all, the soldier’s stage is the battlefield.  Without wars he is without an active role, and must spend his years drudging in the rehearsal theatre of the Colonies.  If he be so original and so thorough a soldier as French, his abilities will be at an even graver discount.  For the rehearsal is not the play; and the best Generals, like the ablest actors, are notoriously weak at rehearsal, which does not pluck fully at their energies.  Probably French would have hurrahed for South Africa, however, had he had no special abilities at all.  For nowhere is he happier than on the battlefield.  If the grisly game of war must be played, French plays it with all his heart.  It is the game which destiny put him on the stage to play; the game which he has devoted his life to mastering; and the only game in which he has ever seriously interested himself.

Luck invariably follows the man who is utterly absorbed in his profession, for the simply reason that, being always engrossed in his work, he is always alive to his opportunities.  French’s luck consists solely in the fact that he happens to be a soldier.  Men of Kitchener’s organising genius may be many things; in nothing, not even in the arts, are they likely to seriously fail.  But French is a soldier in the sense quite other than Kitchener.  He is a man made for the endurance of hardship and for the facing of hard practical difficulties in the field.  It is as natural for him to conduct a campaign as it was for Pope to “lisp in numbers, for the numbers came.”  He is the Happy Warrior in being.

FINIS

FOOTNOTES: 

[22] From Sir John French’s Preface to The Defence of Plevna, by Capt.  Frederick von Herbert, by permission of Messrs. Smith, Elder.

[23] From Sir John French’s Preface to The Defence of Plevna, by Capt.  Frederick von Herbert, by permission of Messrs. Smith, Elder.

APPENDIX

THE MONS DESPATCH

To the Secretary of State for War

      September 7, 1914.

  MY LORD,

  I have the honour to report the proceedings of the Field Force
  under my command up to the time of rendering this despatch.