1914 French, the back of his tunic wet with sweat from riding hard to reach the meeting, was "one of the coolest and calmest people at GHQ". This was at the time when he had decided that the BEF would have to retreat behind the Seine to refit. French was severely criticised by those close to Haig, including General Sir Hubert Gough, who thought him "an ignorant little fool" (in a letter of 29 January 1916; he was more charitable in his 1954 memoirs Soldiering On (p. 127)) and Duff Cooper in Haig's official biography. The Official Historian Edmonds called him "only '' of the old fashioned sort—a vain, ignorant and vindictive old man with an unsavoury society backing" and claimed that French once borrowed Sir Edward Hamley's Operations of War from the War Office library but could not understand it. His admiring biographer Cecil Chisholm (1914) claimed that as a young officer French had had a reputation as a reader of military books (Jomini, von Schmidt), a claim treated with some scepticism by Holmes, although Beckett uses it to cast doubt on Edmonds' "magnificently malicious" story, pointing out that he remembered enough of Hamley's doctrines not to take shelter in Maubeuge after the Battle of Mons, although Spears later wrote that had Hamley not employed such a penetrating metaphor it might not have lodged in French's mind. During his time in command in France his subordinates recognized him as a poor worker with a constant stream of guests, while General Smith-Dorrien remarked that there were "Too many whores around your headquarters, Field-Marshal!" General Macready (in 1919) thought French "one of the most lovable men I have ever met ... one of the most loyal and true-hearted individuals you are ever likely to come across". Field Marshal Chetwode, reflecting on the hostility between Haig and his former patron French, wrote that "French was a man who loved life, laughter and women ... a man who might have done big things in open warfare. He was a lucky general and inspired the greatest confidence in his troops" and that Haig was his opposite in most of these respects. Churchill (in Great Contemporaries) wrote that French was "a natural soldier" who lacked Haig's attention to detail and endurance, but who had "deeper military insight" and "would never have run the British army into the same long drawn-out slaughters". Seely and Esher thought