There was the real spirit of old-world chivalry in a chateau of France
which I visited two days ago. This old building, with its high gables
and pointed roofs, holds the memory of many great chapters in
French history. Attila the Hun came this way with his hordes, checked
and broken at last, as centuries later, not far away, 100,000 Germans
were checked and broken by Dumouriez and the French army of
1792 on the plain of Valmy.

A French officer pointed to a tablet on the wall of the chateau
commemorating that victory, and said: "Perhaps history will be
repeated here by the general whom you will see later on." He stooped
down and rubbed some dust off a stone, revealing a tracing of the
footprint of Henri IV, who once crossed this threshold, and on the way
upstairs pointed to other memorial tablets of kings and princes,
statesmen and soldiers, who had received the hospitality of this old
house.

There are many chateaux of this kind in Champagne, and in one of
them we entered a long, bare room, where a French general stood
with some of his officers, and I knew that the old spirit of France and
its traditions of chivalry have not died. This general, with a silver star
on his breast, seemed to me like one of those nobles who fought in
the wars of the sixteenth century under the Duc de Guise.

He is a man of less than fifty years of age, with a black beard and
steel-blue eyes, extraordinarily keen and piercing, and a fine poise of
the head, which gives him an air of dignity and pride, in spite of the
simplicity and charm of his manners. I sat opposite to him at table,
and in this old room, with stone walls, he seemed to me like the
central figure of some mediaeval painting. Yet there was nothing
mediaeval except the touch of chivalry and the faith of France in the
character of this general and his officers. Men of modern science and
trained in a modern school of thought, their conversation ranged over
many subjects both grave and gay, and, listening to them, I saw the
secret of Germany's failure to strike France to her knees.

With such men as these in command, with that steel-eyed general on
the watch--energy and intellectual force personified in his keen,
vivacious face--the old faults of 1870 could not happen so easily
again, and Germany counted without this renaissance of France.
These men do not minimize the strength of the German defensive,
but there is no fear in their hearts about the final issue of the war,