Field Marshal John Denton Pinkstone French 1st Earl of Ypres 1852 1925 Viscount Chief Imperial General Staff Commander-in-Chief
Field Marshal John Denton Pinkstone French, 1st Earl of Ypres, KP, GCB, OM, GCVO, KCMG, ADC, PC (28 September 1852 – 22 May 1925), known as The Viscount French between 1916 and 1922, was a British and Anglo-Irish officer. He distinguished himself commanding the Cavalry Division during the Second Boer War, became Chief of the Imperial General Staff in 1912 but resigned over the Curragh Mutiny, and then served as the first Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force for the first two years of World War I before becoming Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in 1918. French was the natural choice as Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) in August 1914. A man of hot temper, he argued with the Cabinet against Field-Marshal Lord Kitchener and General Sir Douglas Haig that the BEF should be deployed in Belgium, rather than Amiens, where both Haig and Kitchener believed it would be well placed to deliver a vigorous counterattack once the route of German advance was known. Kitchener argued that the placement of the BEF at Mons would result in having to abandon its position and much of its supplies almost immediately, as the Belgian Army would be unable to hold its ground against the Germans; given the solid belief in fortresses at the time, it is not surprising that French and the British cabinet disagreed with Kitchener on this issue.
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