briefly acted as Commanding Officer when Colonel Barrow died, but French was considered too young for the position, and Colonel Boyce Combe was transferred in from the 10th Hussars. From June 1886 to April 1888 French was stationed at Norwich with the regiment. He became Commanding Officer of the 19th Hussars—still aged only 36—on 27 September 1888. He impressed Evelyn Wood by his initiative in organising his regiment into squadrons commanded by majors. India and divorce scandal He was promoted brevet colonel (7 February 1889), and was posted to India in September 1891. There, at cavalry camp during an exercise in November 1891, he first met Captain Douglas Haig, with whose career his own was to be entwined for the next 25 years. French became Assistant Adjutant-General of Cavalry in 1893. In India serving initially at Secunderabad and Bangalore, French worked as a staff officer under Sir George Luck, a noted trainer of cavalry, albeit with perhaps an excessive emphasis on parade-ground drill. French commanded a brigade of Indian Cavalry on manoeuvres near Lahore in January 1893. He seems not to have acquired the deep affection for India common in officers who served there. French's wife did not accompany him to India (they seem to have lived apart for a while after his return from Egypt, although if so they must have been reconciled as his daughter Essex was conceived in 1886). When commanding the 19th Hussars in India, French was cited for adultery with the wife of a brother officer during his leave (inevitably christened "French leave" by his colleagues) in the Indian hills; he was lucky this did not terminate his career. There were also unsubstantiated rumours that French had had affairs with the daughter of an Anglo-Indian railway official and also, earlier in his career, with his commanding officer's wife. A later tale, that he had once been the lover of the Irish nationalist Maud Gonne, appeared in Mary Colum's Life and the Dream (1947), although his biographer comments that it "lacks firm evidence". He was on half-pay in 1893–1895, possibly as a result of the Indian divorce scandal, and reduced to bicycling with his sons as he could not afford to keep horses. According to his son Gerald he would hop alongside the bicycle as he never mastered the art of mounting it. A career saved twice Two years on half pay would normally have meant