Both he and General Castelnau were anxious that I should see a French offensive sector as well as Soissons.Then I should understand.And since then I have returned from Italy and I have seen and I do understand.The Allied offensive was winning; that is to say, it was inflicting far greater losses than it experienced; it was steadily beating the spirit out of the German army and shoving it back towards Germany.Only peace can, Ibelieve, prevent the western war ending in Germany.And it is the Frenchmen mainly who have worked out how to do it.
But of that I will write later.My present concern is with General Joffre as the antithesis of the Effigy.The effigy, "Thou Prince of Peace, Thou God of War,"as Mr.Sylvester Viereck called him, prances on a great horse, wears a Wagnerian cloak, sits on thrones and talks of shining armour and "unser Gott." All Germany gloats over his Jovian domesticities; when I was last in Berlin the postcard shops were full of photographs of a sort of procession of himself and his sons, all with long straight noses and sidelong eyes.It is all dreadfully old-fashioned.General Joffre sits in a pleasant little sitting-room in a very ordinary little villa conveniently close to Headquarters.He sits among furniture that has no quality of pose at all, that is neither magnificent nor ostentatiously simple and hardy.He has dark, rather sleepy eyes under light eyelashes, eyes that glance shyly and a little askance at his interlocutor and then, as he talks, away--as if he did not want to be preoccupied by your attention.He has a broad, rather broadly modelled face, a soft voice, the sort of persuasive reasoning voice that many Scotchmen have.I had a feeling that if he were to talk English he would do so with a Scotch accent.Perhaps somewhere I have met a Scotchman of his type.He sat sideways to his table as a man might sit for a gossip in a cafe.
He is physically a big man, and in my memory he grows bigger and bigger.He sits now in my memory in a room like the rooms that any decent people might occupy, like that vague room that is the background of so many good portraits, a great blue-coated figure with a soft voice and rather tired eyes, explaining very simply and clearly the difficulties that this vulgar imperialism of Germany, seizing upon modern science and modern appliances, has created for France and the spirit of mankind.
He talked chiefly of the strangeness of this confounded war.It was exactly like a sanitary engineer speaking of the unexpected difficulties of some particularly nasty inundation.He made little stiff horizontal gestures with his hands.First one had to build a dam and stop the rush of it, so; then one had to organise the push that would send it back.He explained the organisation of the push.They had got an organisation now that was working out most satisfactorily.Had I seen a sector? I had seen the sector of Soissons.Yes, but that was not now an offensive sector.I must see an offensive sector; see the whole method.Lieutenant de Tessin must see that that was arranged....
Neither he nor his two colleagues spoke of the Germans with either hostility or humanity.Germany for them is manifestly merely an objectionable Thing.It is not a nation, not a people, but a nuisance.One has to build up this great counter-thrust bigger and stronger until they go back.The war must end in Germany.The French generals have no such delusions about German science or foresight or capacity as dominates the smart dinner chatter of England.One knows so well that detestable type of English folly, and its voice of despair: "They /plan/everything.They foresee everything." This paralysing Germanophobia is not common among the French.The war, the French generals said, might take--well, it certainly looked like taking longer than the winter.Next summer perhaps.Probably, if nothing unforeseen occurred, before a full year has passed the job might be done.Were any surprises in store? They didn't seem to think it was probable that the Germans had any surprises in store....The Germans are not an inventive people; they are merely a thorough people.One never knew for certain.
Is any greater contrast possible than between so implacable, patient, reasonable--and above all things /capable/--a being as General Joffre and the rhetorician of Potsdam, with his talk of German Might, of Hammer Blows and Hacking Through? Can there be any doubt of the ultimate issue between them?
There are stories that sound pleasantly true to me about General Joffre's ambitions after the war.He is tired; then he will be very tired.He will, he declares, spend his first free summer in making a tour of the waterways of France in a barge.So I hope it may be.One imagines him as sitting quietly on the crumpled remains of the last and tawdriest of Imperial traditions, with a fishing line in the placid water and a large buff umbrella overhead, the good ordinary man who does whatever is given to him to do--as well as he can.The power that has taken the great effigy of German imperialism by the throat is something very composite and complex, but if we personify it at all it is something more like General Joffre than any other single human figure I can think of or imagine.
If I were to set a frontispiece to a book about this War I would make General Joffre the frontispiece.
4
As we swung back along the dusty road to Paris at a pace of fifty miles an hour and upwards, driven by a helmeted driver with an aquiline profile fit to go upon a coin, whose merits were a little flawed by a childish and dangerous ambition to run over every cat he saw upon the road, I talked to de Tessin about this big blue-coated figure of Joffre, which is not so much a figure as a great generalisation of certain hitherto rather obscured French qualities, and of the impression he had made upon me.And from that I went on to talk about the Super Man, for this encounter had suddenly crystallised out a set of realisations that had been for some time latent in my mind.
