was only mortar and stone, even though it were human. This legend has
perished so far as Kitchener is concerned, gone with so much that
England trusted and believed two years ago, but I find myself thinking
now of Petain as we all thought of Kitchener in his great day.

If I were an officer I should not like to come to the defender of
Verdun with the confession of failure. I think I should rather meet
the Bavarians in the first line trenches, but I should like to know
that when I was obeying orders I was carrying out a minor detail of
something Petain had planned; I should expect it to happen, the thing
that he had arranged, and I should feel that those clear, steel-blue
eyes had foreseen all that could occur, foreseen calmly and utterly,
whether it entailed the death of one or a thousand men, of ten
thousand men if necessary, and had willed that it should happen.

I do not believe Napoleon's Old Guard would have followed Petain as
they followed Ney. I cannot fancy him in the Imperial uniform, and
yet, now that war is a thing of machines, of telephones, of indirect
fire and destruction from unseen weapons at remote ranges, now that
the whole manner and circumstance of conflict have changed, it is but
natural that the General should change, too. Patently Petain is of the
new, not the old, but no less patently he was the master of it.

We left the little Mairie, entered our machines and slid out swiftly
for the last miles, climbed and curved over the final hill and
suddenly looked down on a deep, trenchlike valley marching from east
to west and carrying the Paris-Verdun-Metz Railroad, no longer
available for traffic. And as we coasted down the hill we heard the
guns at last, not steadily, but only from time to time, a distant
boom, a faint billowing up of musketry fire. Some three or four miles
straight ahead there were the lines of fire beyond the brown hills
that flanked the valley.

At the bottom of the valley we turned east, moved on for a mile, and
stopped abruptly. The guns were sounding more clearly, and suddenly
there was a sense not of soldiers, but of an army. On one side of the
road a column was coming toward us, a column of men who were leaving
the trenches for a rest, the men who for the recent days had held the
first line. Wearily but steadily they streamed by; the mud of the
trenches covered their tunics; here and there a man had lost his steel
helmet and wore a handkerchief about his head, probably to c