Told in gallant deeds

by Marie Belloc Lowndes

He is what is called a great cavalry leader, and it has been said that what Murat was to Napoleon, French proved himself to be to Roberts and to Kitchener during the South African War. If a service of great hazard and peril had to be performed, it was always French and his men who were asked to do it.

But what I want you to remember about Sir John French is, not only that he is a great soldier and a very brave man, but also that he is a singularly modest man. In each and all of his despatches during this great war he has always under-estimated his victories, in this setting an example which has not been followed by the enemy.

Sir John French has another very rare quality, and one which some famous military commanders have lacked, I mean the quality of generosity. There is not in his nature a touch of envy, or of that feeling which has sometimes made even very great men dislike and deplore any kind of rivalry. He has paid noble tributes to the officers working under him, and his commendation of his gallant army must have filled every man of them with a glow of pride and pleasure. Among the rank and file, who call him among themselves simply “Johnny,” he is almost worshipped, and they have the most absolute belief in his powers of leadership.

Like all great cavalry leaders, Sir John French is exceedingly fond of horses. He felt bitterly the death of a favourite charger which had carried him through the whole of the South African campaign, and which wore a medal round its neck recording its services. Sir John French had this good horse buried at Aldershot, and a memorial now marks the gallant charger’s grave.

You may be interested to learn that Napoleon’s charger, a small, thick-set barb, lives in many a noble painting. He spent his old age at the Jardin des Plantes, the “Zoo” of Paris, and used to be regularly visited by the members of his master’s Old Guard.

As for the Duke of Wellington’s famous horse, Copenhagen, familiar in many pictures, he was remarkable for his endurance, and however hard a day he had gone through—on one occasion Copenhagen carried the Iron Duke for sixteen hours at a stretch—he never refused his corn, which he used to eat very oddly, lying down. When he died of old age at Strathfieldsaye, he was buried with military honours.

Crimean Bob was for a long time the oldest horse in the British Army. He was a pretty, chestnut-coloured horse, and joined as a four-year-old in 1833. In 1842, he went on foreign service for the first time. He came back without a scratch, and embarked for the Crimea in 1854. He was ridden in the Charge of the Light Brigade—the story of which you know from Tennyson’s famous poem, “Half a league, half a league, half a league onward”—as well as all through the battles of the Alma and Inkerman. During the whole of the campaign he was never once struck off duty through sickness. On his return home he was carefully looked after at Cahir Barracks in Ireland till his death, which took place at an extraordinary old age.

Perhaps the thing which first made many of the country people in peaceful England understand that we were really at war, was what is called the “requisitioning” of horses. Supposing one of you had been leading a horse along a lane near home, you might, and almost certainly would, have been suddenly ordered to hand it over to be used for army purposes, of course at a fair price.

I heard of one venerable lady who was taking a nice drive, as she always did for an hour every afternoon. Her two fat horses were being driven, as always, by her fat old coachman, when suddenly an officer jumped out of a wood at the side of the road and politely requested her to hand them over!

The old lady was very much agitated, and the coachman pleaded that he might at least take his mistress home. “Yes, if you give me your word to have the horses back here within an hour.” “And what is to happen to me? It’s my living you’re taking away, sir!” “Oh, you can come too, and look after your horses!”