y on their return, Lord Roberts expressed his
high appreciation of French's work and informed him that, while
retaining his cavalry command, he had been appointed to the command of
Johannesburg and district.

At the end of the month Lord Roberts returned to England to take
command of the Home Forces; and several months elapsed before French
was able actively to take up that long rounding-up of the Boers which
Kitchener was now planning in such elaborate detail. During the early
part of 1901 he was able to clear the Boers out of the central
district of Cape Colony. On June 8 he took supreme command of the
operations in that Colony, and by November he had confined the enemy
to its north-eastern and south-western extremities.

Not until Midsummer, 1902, was French able to return home. Before that
he had spent some time recruiting his health in Cape Town. Very eager
were the loyal citizens to fete the most successful of all the British
Generals. But French would have no banqueting on his account. The war,
he characteristically explained, was not yet ended, and so long as it
was in progress he was not inclined to accept any public hospitality.

Anything like show or ostentation is foreign to French's whole nature.
If there are few stories of his exploits in South Africa, there lies
the reason. He is far too modest a man to prepare _bons mots_ or
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