“I don’t believe in air-tight beards,” was the response.  When I produced a camera, the effect was the same as it always is with soldiers at the front.  They all wanted to be in the photograph, on the chance that the folks at home might see how the absent son or father looked.  Would I send them one?  And the address was like this:  “Monsieur Benevent, Corporal of Infantry 18th Company, 5th Battalion, 299th Regiment of Infantry, Postal Sector No. 121.” by which you will know the rural free delivery methods along the French front.  This address is the one rift in the blank wall of anonymity which hides the individuality of the millions under Joffre.  Only the army knows the sector and the numbers of the regiment in that sector.  By the same kind of a card-index system Joffre might lay his hand on any one of his millions, each a human being with all a human being’s individual emotions, who, to be a good soldier, must be only one of the vast multitude of obedient chessmen.

“We are ready to go after them when Father Joffre says the word,” all agreed.  Joffre has proved himself to the democracy, which means the enthusiastic loyalty of a democracy’s intelligence.

“If there are any homesick ones we should find them among the lot here,” said mon capitaine.

These were the men who had not been long married.  They were not yet past the honeymoon period; they had young children at home; perhaps they had become fathers since they went to war.  The younger men of the first line had the irresponsibility and the ardour of youth which makes comradeship easy.

But the older men, the Territorials as they are called, in the late thirties and early forties, have settled down in life.  Their families are established; their careers settled; some of them, perhaps, may enjoy a vacation from the wife; for you know madame, in France, with all her thrift, can be a little bossy, which is not saying that this is not a proper tonic for her lord.  So the old boys seem the most content in the fellowship of winter quarters.  What they cannot stand are repeated, long, hard marches; their legs give out under the load of rifle and pack.  But their hearts are in the war, and right there is one very practical reason why they will fight well—­and they have fought better as they hardened with time and the old French spirit revived in their blood.  “Allons, messieurs!” said the tall major, who wanted us to see battlefields.  It required no escort to tell us where the battlefield was.  We knew it when we came to it, as you know the point reached by high tide on the sands—­this field where many Gettysburgs were fought in one through that terrible fortnight in late August and early September, when the future of France and the whole world hung in the balance—­as the Germans sought to reach Paris and win a decisive victory over the French army.  Where destruction ended there the German invasion reached its limit.