membered those minutes most clearly of
all of my Verdun experience. Just as the photograph does not reveal
the face of the man, the word does not describe the sense of
strength, of responsibility, that he gives.

In a childish sort of way, exactly as one thinks of war as a matter of
dash and color and motion, one thinks of the French general as the
leader of a cavalry charge or of a forlorn hope of infantry. And the
French soldier of this war has not been the man of charge or of
dash--not that he has not charged as well as ever in his history, a
little more bravely, perhaps, for machine guns are new and something
worse than other wars have had. What the French soldier has done has
been to stand, to hold, to die not in the onrush but on the spot.

And Petain in some curious way has fixed in my mind the impression of
the new Frenchman, if there be a new one, or perhaps better of the
French soldier of to-day, whether he wear the stars of the general or
undecorated "horizon" blue of the Poilu. The look that I saw in his
eyes, the calm, steady, utterly emotionless looking straight forward,
I saw everywhere at the front and at the back of the front. It
embodied for me an enduring impression of the spirit and the poise of
the French soldier of the latest and most terrible of French
struggles. And I confess that, more than all I saw and heard at the
front and in Paris, the look of this man convinced me that Verdun
would not fall, that France herself would not either weary or weaken.

In Paris, where one may hear anything, there are those that will tell
you that Joffre's work is done and that France waits for the man who
will complete the task; that the strain of the terrible months has
wearied the general who won the Battle of the Marne and saved France.
They will tell you, perhaps, that Petain is the man; they will
certainly tell you that they hope that the man has been found in
Petain. As to the truth of all this I do not pretend to know. I did
not see Joffre, but all that I have read of Joffre suggests that
Petain is of his sort, the same quiet, silent man, with a certain
coldness of the North, a grimness of manner that is lacking in his
chief.

There was a Kitchener legend in Europe, and I do not think it survives
save a little perhaps in corners of England. There was a legend of a
man of ice and of iron, a man who made victory out of human material
as a man makes a wall of mortar and stone, a man to whom his material