e corps before
Verdun to know that attack was not alone a system but a gospel with him.
Five stripes on his arm for wounds, all won in colonial work,
sun-browned, swart, with a strong, abutting chin which might have been a
fit point for Nivelle's pencil, an eye that said "Attack!" and could
twinkle with the wisdom of many campaigns!

"General Joffre sat in that chair two hours before the advance," he
said, with the same respectful awe that other generals had exhibited
toward the Commander-in-Chief.

The time had come for the old leader, grown weary, to go; for the
younger men of the school which the war has produced, with its curtains
of fire and wave attacks, to take his place. But the younger ones in the
confidence of their system could look on the old leader while he lived
as the great, indomitable figure of the critical stages of the war.

A man of iron, Mangin, with a breadth of chest in keeping with his chin,
who could bear the strain of command which had brought down many
generals from sheer physical incapacity. Month after month this chin had
stood out against German drives, all the while wanting to be in its
natural element of the offensive. His resolute, outright solution of
problems by human ratios would fit him into any age or any climate. He
was at home leading a punitive expedition or in the complicated business
of Verdun. Whether he was using a broadsword or a curtain of fire he
proposed to strike his enemy early and hard and keep on striking. In the
course of talking with him I spoke of the contention that in some cases
in modern war men could be too brave.

"Rarely!" he replied, a single word which had the emphasis of both that
jaw and that shrewd, piercing eye.

"What is the best time to go out to the front?" I asked the general.

"Five o'clock in the morning!"

The officer who escorted me did not think anything of getting up at that
hour. Mangin's is a five-o'clock-in-the-morning corps.

Shall I describe that town on the banks of the Meuse which has been
described many times? Or that citadel built by Vauban, with dynamos and
electric light in its underground chambers and passages, its hospitals,
shops, stores and barrack room, so safe under its walls and roof of
masonry that the Germans presciently did not waste their shells on it
but turned them with particular vengeance on the picturesque old houses
along the river bank, neglecting the barracks purposely in view of their
usefulness to the c