The Little Field Marshal A Life of Sir John French

Sir John French is a figure who has always aroused controversy. unsurpassed. Despite being the most capable cavalry leader of his generation, posterity has judged him an unfeeling butcher, responsible for more deaths in the first two hours of the battle of Loos than all the casualties on both sides in the 1944 D-Day landings. But there was another side to French, which is only revealed in his private papers. scandalous: he courted dismissal after an affair with a fellow officer's wife, and had a string of beautiful and well-connected mistresses. tormented by what he termed 'glory and her twin sister murder'. as he envisaged his room at GHQ filled with the 'silent army' of the dead. In the writing of this book, the first and only comprehensive biography of the Field Marshal, Richard Holmes was granted unrestricted access to Sir John French's private papers. of the most important military events of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.