admitted De Wet.

French has, of course, never accepted social life in this country on
its face value. The young officer who was studying when his friends
were at polo or tennis, was under no illusions as to the havoc which
an over-accentuation of the sporting and social side of life was
playing with the officers' work. Nowadays, like Kitchener, he is bent
on producing the professional and weeding out the "drawing-room"
soldier. No wonder that his favourite authors are those acutest
critics of English social life and English foibles, Dickens and
Thackeray. The former's "Bleak House" and the latter's "Book of
Snobs" are the two books he places first in his affections.

[Page Heading: A GREAT REPORTER]

He is himself a writer of parts. We are, ourselves, so close to the
event he describes, that we are perhaps unable to appreciate the
literary excellence of the despatches which French has sent us on the
operations in France. A Chicago paper hails him, however, as "a great
reporter." "No one can read his reports," the writer remarks, "without
being struck with his weighty lucidity, his calm mastery of the
important facts, the total absence of any attempt at 'effect,' and the
remarkably suggestive bits of pertinent description."

Undoubtedly, the Americans are right--provided that these dispatches
were actually penned by the General himself.

His speeches may be obvious and even trite; his letters may lack any
flavour of personality; but these dispatches are literature. Like his
hero Napoleon, like Cæsar and Wellington, Sir John French has forged a