That Sir John French, Commander-in-Chief of the British forces in France and Flanders, an army which reduces to comparative insignificance the largest host ever marshaled by Napoleon, comes from fighting stock is plain enough from the fact that his only sister, Mrs. Despard, is a militant suffragette. She herself provides homely evidence that the appointment of her brother (whom she practically "brought up") to lead the British fight against the Germans on land realized a boyhood aspiration. "When we were children," Mrs. Despard relates, "the great province of Schleswig-Holstein was taken from Denmark by what was then Prussia. We were discussing the disgraceful incident of poor little Denmark losing the province, and a certain little boy, then ten or twelve years of age, strutted about and said: ’If I was only a man, I know what I’d do to them.’ He was very indignant. That little boy is now commander of Britain’s great army." It has been said that South Africa is the grave of British military reputations. Sir Redvers Buller’s was buried there, and though those of Roberts and Kitchener emerged from the Boer War, the renown of Botha and Dewet admittedly outshone them. One British General at least was "made" by the three years’ conflict with the Dutch Republics--Sir John French, the cavalryman who relieved Kimberley, and whose escutcheon during the sorry South African campaign was alone untarnished by blunder or reverse. As Kitchener was the logical choice for organizer of Britain’s new armies, Sir John French was the natural selection for their field-commandership. French, following in paternal footsteps, began his fighting career in the navy, but he has been a soldier for the past forty-one years--he was sixty-three in September, 1915. A man whose entire manhood has been lived in the army, who knows it through and through, loves it passionately, has devoted himself to it with the zeal of a student, and fought in all its campaigns for nearly half a century, had an ideal claim upon its supreme honor in the hour of superlative crisis. Doubtless in the Government’s mind when it entrusted "Jack" French with the command of the British Expeditionary Force was the reputation he had won in South Africa as a fighting field-general. Unquestionably the broad sweeping movements his cavalry divisions executed at Elandslaagte, Lombard’s Kop, Bloemfontein, Pretoria and Barberton were operations which contributed, perhaps, more than any other scheme of the brilliantly mismanaged Boer campaign finally to bring it to a victorious end. Neither the British nor the German General Staff realized in August, 1914, that Armageddon was going to develop into a trench or "positional" war, with little or no latitude for those grandiose tactical maneuvers which delighted the heart of Moltke and made a Sedan the ambition of every modern tactician. Yet Sir John French, whose military virtues include adaptability, if not