iale._" The
talked back as if we had met in a club. General Pelle pulled my leg
very gaily with some quotations from an article I had written upon the
conclusion of the war. I think he found my accent and my idioms very
refreshing. I had committed myself to a statement that Bloch has been
justified in his theory that under modern conditions the defensive wins.
There were excellent reasons, and General Pelle pointed them out, for
doubting the applicability of this to the present war.

Both he and General Castelnau were anxious that I should see a French
offensive sector as well as Soissons. Then I should understand.
And since then I have returned from Italy and I have seen and I do
understand. The Allied offensive was winning; that is to say, it was
inflicting far greater losses than it experienced; it was steadily
beating the spirit out of the German army and shoving it back towards
Germany. Only peace can, I believe, prevent the western war ending in
Germany. And it is the Frenchmen mainly who have worked out how to do
it.

But of that I will write later. My present concern is with General
Joffre as the antithesis of the Effigy. The effigy,

"Thou Prince of Peace,
Thou God of War,"

as Mr. Sylvester Viereck called him, prances on a great horse, wears a
Wagnerian cloak, sits on thrones and talks of shining armour and "unser
Gott." All Germany gloats over his Jovian domesticities; when I was
last in Berlin the postcard shops were full of photographs of a sort
of procession of himself and his sons, all with long straight noses and
sidelong eyes. It is all dreadfully old-fashioned. General Joffre
sits in a pleasant little sitting-room in a very ordinary little villa
conveniently close to Headquarters. He sits among furniture that has no
quality of pose at all, that is neither magnificent nor ostentatiously
simple and hardy. He has dark, rather sleepy eyes under light eyelashes,
eyes that glance shyly and a little askance at his interlocutor and
then, as he talks, away--as if he did not want to be preoccupied by your
attention. He has a broad, rather broadly modelled face, a soft voice,
the sort of persuasive reasoning voice that many Scotchmen have. I had
a feeling that if he were to talk English he would do so with a Scotch
accent. Perhaps somewhere I have met a Scotchman of his type. He sat
sideways to his table as a man might sit for a gossip in a cafe.

He is physically a big man, and in my memory he gr