Who would have imagined that a man so badly hurt could yet have afterwards become one of the most brilliant and successful generals in the French Army?  The story of his recovery must rank with the most amazing instances of the power of the human will, and there are various touches connected with it in current talk which show the temper of the man, and the love which has been always felt for him.  One of his old masters of the College Stanislas who went to meet him at the station on his arrival at Paris, and had been till then unaware of the extent of the General’s wounds, could not conceal his emotion at seeing him. “Eh, c’est le sort des batailles,” said Gouraud gaily, to his pale and stumbling friend.  “One would have said he was two men in one,” said another old comrade—­“one was betrayed to me by his works; the other spoke to me in his words.”  The legends of him in hospital are many.  He was determined to walk again—­and quickly.  “One has to teach these legs,” he said impatiently, “to walk naturally, not like machines.”  Hence the steeple-chases over all kinds of obstacles—­stools, cushions, chairs—­that his nurses must needs arrange for him in the hospital passages; and later on his determined climbing of any hill that presented itself—­at first leaning on his mother (General Gouraud has never married), then independently.

He was wounded at the end of June, 1915.  At the beginning of November he was sent at the head of a French Military Mission to Italy, and on his return in December was given the command of the Fourth French Army, the Army of Champagne.  There on that famous sector of the French line, where Castelnau and Langle de Cary in the autumn of the same year had all but broken through, he remained through the whole of 1916.  That was the year of Verdun and the Somme.  Neither the Allies nor the enemy had men or energy to spare for important action in Champagne that year; but Gouraud’s watch was never surprised, and again he was able to acquaint himself with every military feature, and every local peculiarity of the desolate chalk-hills where France has buried so many thousands of her sons.  At the end of 1916, his old chief, General Lyautey, now French Minister for War, insisted on his going back to Morocco as Governor; but happily for the Army of Champagne, the interlude was short, and by the month of May, Lyautey was once more in Morocco and Gouraud in Champagne—­to remain there in command of his beloved Fourth Army till the end of the war.

* * * * *

Such then, in brief outline, was the story of the great man whose guests we were proud to be on that January evening.  Dinner was very animated and gay.  The rooms of the huge building was singularly bare, having been stripped by the Germans before their departure of everything portable.  But en revanche the entering French, finding nothing left in the fine old house, even of the mobilier which had been