h--as the French were
before the war.

Lord Esher, at the request of General Lyautey, then at the head
of the military force of France, took me to see that General. I
had to wait for him some time, as he was appearing before a
committee of the Chamber of the Senate. His inability to agree
with the Chamber caused his resignation not long afterwards.

I was struck in France by the fact that the leaders, civil,
military and naval, seemed older than those in similar positions
in other countries.

The present Premier, Clemenceau, is an example of this fondness
of the French for government by old men. Clemenceau is seventy-six
years old, but is a vigorous fighter.

Mrs. Gerard and I lunched with Gabriel Hanotaux and his
attractive wife at their home. Cambon was there, and Ribot, since
become Premier of France, a good old man; also the Secretary of
the Navy and several learned French philosophers and members of
the Academy and one of the heads of the Credit Lyonnais, perhaps
the greatest financial institution of France.

War, war--who could talk of anything else? Hanotaux said that in
our time we had been unusually fortunate, unusually free from
war, that there was underneath France, underneath even the fair
city of Paris, under the smiling sunlit fields, another France, a
France of caves and catacombs, excavated by the poor people, the
plain people who, during the One Hundred Years' War, had sought
in marching armies, the far-riding plunderers and the depths of
the earth refuge from the harassing, camp followers, the roving
bands of "White Companies," the robber barons who, English and
French, Gascon and Norman, harried the lands of France.

I said that I had heard the statement made, and there seemed no
reason to doubt it, that since the birth of Christ the world has
only in one year out of every thirteen enjoyed a rest from war.

Mr. Fabre-Luce, Vice-President of the Credit Lyonnais, told us of
an interesting book written by a Russian and published before the
war which predicted much that has happened in this war with
almost the foresight of a Cassandra. I was so impressed that I
secured a copy.

This book, "The Future War," by Ivan Stanislavovich Bloch,
counsellor of the Russian Empire, and published in 1892, had so
great an effect on the Czar of Russia that it was the reading of
it which impelled him to call the Peace Conference at The Hague.
In the course of his book the author explains that it is
impossible