market gardener bringing his products down the Somme in the morning to
Amiens, or the Parisian clerk, business man and workman--they are France
and the French Army. But the heart-strength and character-strength of
France, I think, is her stubborn, conservative, smiling peasant. It is
repeating a commonplace to say that he always has a few gold pieces in
his stocking. He yields one only on a critical occasion and then a
little grumblingly, with the thrift of the bargainer who means that it
shall be well spent.

The Anglo-Saxon, whose inheritance is particularly evident in Americans
in this respect, when he gives in a crisis turns extravagant whether of
money or life, as England has in this war. The sea is his and new lands
are his, as they are ours. Australians with their dollar and a half a
day, buying out the shops of a village when they were not in the
trenches, were astounding to the natives though not in the least to
themselves. They were acting like normal Anglo-Saxons bred in a rich
island continent. Anglo-Saxons have money to spend and spend it in the
confidence that they will make more.

General Joffre, grounded in the France of the people and the soil, was a
thrifty general. Indeed, from the lips of Frenchmen in high places the
Germans might have learned that the French Army was running short of
men. Joffre seemed never to have any more divisions to spare; yet never
came a crisis that he did not find another division in the toe of his
stocking, which he gave up as grumblingly as the peasant parts with his
gold piece.

A miser of divisions, Father Joffre. He had enough for Verdun as we
know--and more. While he was holding on the defensive there, he was able
to prepare for an offensive elsewhere. He spared the material and the
guns to cooeperate with the British on the Somme and later he sent to
General Foch, commander of the northern group of French Armies, the
unsurpassed Iron Corps from Nancy and the famous Colonial Corps.

It was in March, 1916, when suspense about Verdun was at its height,
that Sir Douglas Haig, Commander-in-Chief of the group of British
Armies, and Sir Henry Rawlinson, who was to be his right-hand man
through the offensive as commander of the Fourth Army, went over the
ground opposite the British front on the Somme and laid the plans for
their attack, and Sir Henry received instructions to begin the elaborate
preparations for what was to become the greatest battle of all time. It
includ