They are one in that goodly fellowship of great soldiers who have come through the fire of the fiercest battles in the world's history. We can glimpse their metal in their actions. We have recently seen how potent still is the skill which directs in the face of all scientific and mechanical development of the war. It is natural for us who read daily the record of our soldiers to be more conscious of their small failures, than of their great success. But trace the broad lines of the war, retread those trampled roads of northern France once more behind the armies these men led, remember their mastery in the darkest days and their record becomes luminous with the assurance of final victory.
I
FIELD-MARSHAL VISCOUNT FRENCH OF YPRES, K.P., G.C.B., O.M., G.C.V.O., K.C.M.G.
LORD FRENCH'S name will descend to posterity as the leader of the British Expeditionary Force. Were all his other great services to his country reckoned as naught, his name would live for ever by reason of the German Emperor's vainglorious allusion to "French's contemptible little army." For, as long as the British Empire shall endure, men will hold in honour "the old Contemptibles," who shattered for ever an Emperor's dreams of world supremacy and made his boast recoil upon his head.
John Denton Pinkstone French comes of one of the most ancient Irish families, the Frenches of Galway and Roscommon, of whom Lord French of French Park, Roscommon, is the head. The Field-Marshal is fifth in descent from John French, M.P., who fought in the army of William III. and commanded a troop of Enniskillen Dragoons at Aughrim in 1689. His grandfather left Ireland at the beginning of the XIXth century and settled in Kent at Ripple Vale, near Deal, where, on September 28th, 1852, Lord French of Ypres was born.
Lord French's father was Captain John French, R.N., who retired from the service with the rank of Post Captain and died when the boy, his only son, was but two years old. Upon his mother, a Scottish lady, a Miss Eccles from the neighbourhood of Glasgow, devolved the upbringing of the infant son and his five sisters. After a brief sojourn at Harrow, the boy was sent to Eastman's School at Portsmouth to prepare for the Navy. In 1866, in his fourteenth year, he entered the "Britannia," and thence passed out as a midshipman.
At the age of 18, young John French sought the advice of a family friend and decided to make the change which was destined to alter the whole course of his life. He entered the militia and spent two years in the Garrison Artillery at Ipswich (1871 to 1873). Then he passed into the regular army, being gazetted, at the age of 21, to the 8th Hussars, with whom, however, he remained only a short time, transferring, after a few weeks, to the 19th Hussars, the regiment with which he passed the first half of his life as a soldier.
In 1880 Captain French became Adjutant of the Northumberland Yeomanry, and was thus, to his great disappointment, prevented from accompanying his regiment, the 19th, to Egypt in 1882. However, his chance came two years later when he went out as second in command of the 19th to join Wolseley's Nile Expedition. French was at Abu Klea and in the subsequent desperate fighting, and he was actually the first man of the column to learn, from the lips of Stuart Wortley, of the fall of Khartum and the death of Gordon. For his good work in Egypt French was mentioned in despatches and returned to England as Lieutenant-Colonel.
