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