pretty _jeux d'esprit_ for public consumption. Also he is by nature a
silent man. His silence is not the detached, Olympian and rather
ominous silence of Kitchener. It proceeds simply from a natural
modesty and reticence, which reinforce his habitual tendency to "think
things over." He is the type of man whom hostesses have to "draw out";
he never talks either on himself, the army or any other subject. To
"do his job" better than anybody else in the world could do it is
enough for French; chatter about it he leaves to less busy people.

His habitual taciturnity, curiously enough, is one of the traits which
endears him to the army. For French's silence has no trait of
churlishness. It is the silence of a man utterly absorbed in the task
before him, the man whom Tommy Atkins admires. "If the British soldier
likes one thing in a General more than another," wrote a soldier who
served with French in South Africa, "it is the golden gift of silence,
especially when joined to straight action, just to distinguish him
from the old women of both sexes. Whenever French penned a dispatch,
or an order, or a proclamation, he wasted no ink and strained no pen
nibs; but he never penned anything if there was a way of doing the
thing himself."[15]

[Page Heading: A SHIRT-SLEEVED GENERAL]

In South Africa he earned the title of "the shirt-sleeved General,"--a
soubriquet that conveys a subtle compliment from Tommy's point of
view. Actually French was often to be seen walking about in camp
during his heavy marches in shirt-sleeves. One afternoon a
correspondent rode up to the lines, and seeing a soldier sitting on a
bundle of hay, smoking a dilapidated looking old briar pipe, asked
where the General was. "The old man is somewhere about," coolly