By great good luck I was able to see him.  I was delayed in Paris on my way to Italy, and my friend Captain Millet arranged for a visit to the French front at Soissons and put me in charge of Lieutenant de Tessin, whom I had met in England studying British social questions long before this war.  Afterwards Lieutenant de Tessin took me to the great hotel—­it still proclaims “Restaurant” in big black letters on the garden wall—­which shelters the General Headquarters of France, and here I was able to see and talk to Generals Pelle and Castelnau as well as to General Joffre.  They are three very remarkable and very different men.  They have at least one thing in common; it is clear that not one of them has spent ten minutes in all his life in thinking of himself as a Personage or Great Man.  They all have the effect of being active and able men doing an extremely complicated and difficult but extremely interesting job to the very best of their ability.  With me they had all one quality in common.  They thought I was interested in what they were doing, and they were quite prepared to treat me as an intelligent man of a different sort, and to show me as much as I could understand....

Let me confess that de Tessin had had to persuade me to go to Headquarters.  Partly that was because I didn’t want to use up even ten minutes of the time of the French commanders, but much more was it because I have a dread of Personages.

There is something about these encounters with personages—­as if one was dealing with an effigy, with something tremendous put up to be seen.  As one approaches they become remoter; great unsuspected crevasses are discovered.  Across these gulfs one makes ineffective gestures.  They do not meet you, they pose at you enormously.  Sometimes there is something more terrible than dignity; there is condescension.  They are affable.  I had but recently had an encounter with an imported Colonial statesman, who was being advertised like a soap as the coming saviour of England.  I was curious to meet him.  I wanted to talk to him about all sorts of things that would have been profoundly interesting, as for example his impressions of the Anglican bishops.  But I met a hoarding.  I met a thing like a mask, something surrounded by touts, that was dully trying—­as we say in London—­to “come it” over me.  He said he had heard of me.  He had read Kipps. I intimated that though I had written Kipps I had continued to exist—­but he did not see the point of that.  I said certain things to him about the difference in complexity between political life in Great Britain and the colonies, that he was manifestly totally capable of understanding.  But one could as soon have talked with one of the statesmen at Madame Tussaud’s.  An antiquated figure.