The effect of these French commanders upon me was quite different from my encounter with that last belated adventurer in the effigy line.  I felt indeed that I was a rather idle and flimsy person coming into the presence of a tremendously compact and busy person, but I had none of that unpleasant sensation of a conventional role, of being expected to play the minute worshipper in the presence of the Great Image.  I was so moved by the common humanity of them all that in each case I broke away from the discreet interpretations of de Tessin and talked to them directly in the strange dialect which I have inadvertently made for myself out of French, a disemvowelled speech of epicene substantives and verbs of incalculable moods and temperaments, “Entente Cordiale.” The talked back as if we had met in a club.  General Pelle pulled my leg very gaily with some quotations from an article I had written upon the conclusion of the war.  I think he found my accent and my idioms very refreshing.  I had committed myself to a statement that Bloch has been justified in his theory that under modern conditions the defensive wins.  There were excellent reasons, and General Pelle pointed them out, for doubting the applicability of this to the present war.

Both he and General Castelnau were anxious that I should see a French offensive sector as well as Soissons.  Then I should understand.  And since then I have returned from Italy and I have seen and I do understand.  The Allied offensive was winning; that is to say, it was inflicting far greater losses than it experienced; it was steadily beating the spirit out of the German army and shoving it back towards Germany.  Only peace can, I believe, prevent the western war ending in Germany.  And it is the Frenchmen mainly who have worked out how to do it.

But of that I will write later.  My present concern is with General Joffre as the antithesis of the Effigy.  The effigy,

     “Thou Prince of Peace,
     Thou God of War,”

as Mr. Sylvester Viereck called him, prances on a great horse, wears a Wagnerian cloak, sits on thrones and talks of shining armour and “unser Gott.”  All Germany gloats over his Jovian domesticities; when I was last in Berlin the postcard shops were full of photographs of a sort of procession of himself and his sons, all with long straight noses and sidelong eyes.  It is all dreadfully old-fashioned.  General Joffre sits in a pleasant little sitting-room in a very ordinary little villa conveniently close to Headquarters.  He sits among furniture that has no quality of pose at all, that is neither magnificent nor ostentatiously simple and hardy.  He has dark, rather sleepy eyes under light eyelashes, eyes that glance shyly and a little askance at his interlocutor and then, as he talks, away—­as if he did not want to be preoccupied by your attention.  He has a broad, rather broadly modelled face, a soft voice, the sort of persuasive reasoning voice that many Scotchmen have.  I had a feeling that if he were to talk English he would do so with a Scotch accent.  Perhaps somewhere I have met a Scotchman of his type.  He sat sideways to his table as a man might sit for a gossip in a cafe.