FRENCH'S SPECIAL STUDY.

Evening Post, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 126, 29 May 1915, Page 10

FRENCH'S SPECIAL STUDY.

In a, recent speech Lord Haldane em- \ phasised the fact that the Allies were I dealing with an enemy who had chosen his own moment to prepare and attack, and who was thus in an a position of enormous advantage. But the time earned after the heroic stand of the Bel- . gians, when the enemy met a British Army, the Commander-in-Chief of which, to his intimate personal knowledge, had been studying the. poesibiliti«# of this position five years before it occurred. They had all hoped It would sot be necessary to send an Expeditionary Force to the Continent, but Sir John French's chief interest, as commander of that force, was the problem he would have to face, and he had given the closest study of his life to it. Sir John had an army of men who had been trained for four or five years— the finest troops in the world— and during that retreat from. Mons nothing but a force in the highest state of discipline, led by a man with a thorough grasp of the situation and knowing what he meant to accomplish, could have brought off that retreat under the extraordinary conditions and in the face of overwhelming number*.