dragon. Certainly he incarnated for the conscience of mankind the
victory of good over evil, of light over darkness.

Lunatics, simpletons, the half-crazy and the crazy turned their
darkened brains toward him as toward reason itself. I have read the
letter of a person living in Sydney, who begged the General to save
him from his enemies; another, a New Zealander, requested him to send
some soldiers to the house of a gentleman who owed him ten pounds and
would not pay.

Finally, some hundreds of young girls, overcoming the timidity of
their sex, asked for engagements, their families not to know about it;
others wished only to serve him."

This ideal Joffre was compounded out of the victory won by him, his
staff and his troops, the despair of the war, the personal sorrows,
and the hope of future victory. But beside hero-worship there is the
exorcism of devils. By the same mechanism through which heroes are
incarnated, devils are made. If everything good was to come from
Joffre, Foch, Wilson, or Roosevelt, everything evil originated in the
Kaiser Wilhelm, Lenin and Trotsky. They were as omnipotent for evil as
the heroes were omnipotent for good. To many simple and frightened
minds there was no political reverse, no strike, no obstruction, no
mysterious death or mysterious conflagration anywhere in the world of
which the causes did not wind back to these personal sources of evil.

3

Worldwide concentration of this kind on a symbolic personality is rare
enough to be clearly remarkable, and every author has a weakness for