Chapter XIII: Joffre

"Give the French a leader and they can do anything." Before the war and since I have heard this thought more than any other expressed in cafés, homes and political assemblies.

Forty-four years before the present war, almost to a day, France discovered that her last Napoleon had only the name of his great ancestor, and none of his genius. During all that time she had prayed for a new leader--not of the name, for Bonaparte princes may not even fight for France--but for genius sufficient to restore her former military prestige among the nations.

General Joffre, at the beginning of the war, had been head of the army for only three years. He had received his supreme command as a compromise between political parties. No one knew anything about him--he had a good military record and was considered "safe." But at the last grand maneuvers he had given the nation a sudden jar by unceremoniously and without comment dismissing five gold-laced generals.

On one of the first days of the war, at four in the morning, I was walking home--all taxis were mobilized--after a night passed in writing cable copy for my newspaper concerning the momentous tragedy that faced the world.

I was accompanied by a journalistic confrère; our route led along the Quai d'Orsay, past the Foreign Office, where the Cabinet of France had been sitting all night in war council. It was just daybreak. The sun was beginning to glint on the waters of the Seine. We walked up the Boulevard des Invalides and halted, without speaking, but in common thought, before the tomb of Napoleon Bonaparte. The sun suddenly broke in splendor over the golden dome.

"It seems like a good omen," I said to my friend.

"Yes--if France had a Napoleon to-day ..." was his reply.

He was a newcomer to Paris.

"Tell me about the Commander-in-Chief," he asked me. "Who is Joffre, anyway?"

I told him what everybody knew, which was almost nothing.

Now let me shift the picture from the tomb of Napoleon on a sunny morning in August. It is a bleak day on the undulating plains of Champagne--a few kilometers to the rear of the battle-lines, where the French had been steadily gaining ground for several weeks. Only the week before they brilliantly stormed the hills where the Germans had entrenched after the battle of the Marne, and they captured every position.

A fine drizzle had been falling since early morning, making the ground soggy and slippery. Along the roads the crowds of peasants and inhabitants of near-by villages are sloshing toward the great open plain. But all the roads are barred by sentries and they are turned back. No civilian eyes except those of a half dozen newspapermen may see what is to happen there. Yes, something _is_ to happen there--something impressive--something soul-stirring--but there are to be no cheering spectators, no heraldry and no pomp.

It is to be a military pageant, without the crowd. It is a change from the ante-bellum military show at Longchamps on the fourteenth of July, when the tricolor waved everywhere, when the President of the Republic and the generals of the army in brilliant uniforms reviewed the troops of France, and all the great world was there to see.

This is to be a review of the troops who took the hills back there a little way, sweeping on and up to victory while a murderous German fire poured into them, dropping them by thousands. Through that clump of trees sticking up in the mud, are little crosses marking the graves of the dead.

Fifteen thousand of the victorious troops will pass in review to-day before the Commander-in-Chief of the Allied armies. Down across the field you can hear the distant notes of a bugle. They are taken up by other buglers at various points. Then across the field comes a regimental band. The players have been in the charge too--with rifles instead of musical instruments. This is their first chance to play in months--and play they do. You hear the martial notes of the Marseillaise floating across the field, played with a force that must have been heard in the German lines.

The regiments take up their positions at one side of the field. General Langle de Carry, commander of the army that did the Champagne fighting, with only a half dozen officers, take positions at the reviewing stand. The reviewing stand is a hillock of mud. Both general and officers wear the long overcoats of the light "horizon blue," the new color of the French army.

A man emerges from the line of trees behind the group and plows his way across the mud. He is large and bulky. He plants his feet firmly at each step--splashing the mud out in all directions. He wears a short jacket of the "horizon blue" and no overcoat. He wears the old red trousers of the beginning of the war. His hat, around which you can see the golden band of oak leaves signifying that he is a general, is pulled low over his eyes. Drops of rain are on his grizzled mustache. A leather belt is about his powerful body, but he wears no sword.

Langle de Carry and his officers whirl about quickly at his approach. Every hand is raised in salute. The bulky man touches the visor of his hat in response--then plants both his large ungloved fists upon his hips. His feet are spread slightly apart. He speaks to de Carry in a low voice. As you have already guessed, this big man is Joffre.

You were told at the beginning of the war that Joffre was a little fat man--like Napoleon. That is not true. Joffre is a big man. He is even a tall man, but does not look so because of his bulk. Few men possess, at his age, such a powerful or so healthy a body. That is why he can cover so many miles of battle front in his racing auto every day. That is why he shows not the slightest sign of the wear and tear of war.

No time is lost in conversation. The bugles blew again and the regiments of heroes began their march past the muddy reviewing stand. Even in their battle-stained uniforms, every regiment looked "smart." When they came abreast of Joffre, stolidly and solidly standing a step in advance of the others, the long line of rifles raised in salute is as straight as ever that of a German regiment on parade at Potsdam, despite deep and slippery mud.

After the infantry came the famous "seventy-fives" with the same machine-like precision that before the war we always associated with Germans. The review ends with a regiment of heavy cavalry--cuirassiers--coming at full charge, rising high in their stirrups, with swords aloft, and breaking into a battle yell when they passed "Father Joffre," as he is called by his soldiers.

Through it all he stands motionless, feet apart, one hand planted on his hip, raising the other to the visor of his hat, peering beneath it straight ahead with unblinking eyes. As the men pass this general without a sword, with no medals, no gold braid, no overcoat--and in old red trousers--the rain pelting upon him, the look on their faces is one of adoration. It matters not to them that there are no cheering crowds, no crashing bands, no gala atmosphere. The one eye in France that they care about is upon them.

The long line then forms facing him, and the men to receive decorations advance. One of them--a private--is to receive the _médaille militaire_, the greatest war decoration in the world, for it can only be given to privates, or to generals commanding armies who have already received the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor. Joffre himself only won it after the battle of the Marne.

The private now to receive the medal is brought before the Commander-in-Chief, who pins it upon his breast. Joffre throws both his great arms about the private's shoulders and kisses him on both cheeks. The long line of soldiers remains perfectly quiet. But in the eyes of many of them are tears.

The program is ended. Father Joffre gets into his low, gray automobile and disappears in a swirl of mud, to some other part of the "zone of operations."

The army now knows it has the real leader that it waited for so long. To the general public of France Joffre is still a mystery. But they are content with their mystery--they have faith in him. That is the spirit of the new France--a quiet faith and determination that certainly has deceived the rest of the world, especially Germany. It is the spirit of a nation that has found itself, and Joffre typifies it.

A few books have appeared giving some information about the Commander-in-Chief. They deal chiefly with his march to Timbuctoo and his career in Indo-China. For the rest, Parisians know that before the war he lived quietly in a little villa in Auteuil, and that next to his love for his family, the things he regarded as best in all the world are peace and fishing. Recently it was learned that he commandeered a barge on one of the rivers near the battle line--and there he sometimes sits and quietly fishes while thinking out new army plans. His only other recreation at the front is reading at night before going to bed from his favorite authors, Balzac, Dumas and Charles Dickens. Joffre understands English and reads it but will not speak it. "It is that he has an accent which he likes not," explained one of his officers.

What Parisians cannot understand is how it was that this quiet, perfectly unemotional man came into being in the Midi--as Southern France is called. From the Midi, as from Corsica, come the hotheads and the firebrands. The crowd certainly expected, when this war came, that the Commander-in-Chief of the army would give Paris a real treat before going forth to battle--that he would parade the boulevards in dress uniform at the head of his troops. Alas! Paris has scarcely heard a band play since the war began.

All the time that Joffre lived in the little villa in Auteuil he was planning and waiting for the day when he should go forth to battle. He was a fatalist to the extent that he felt by reason of his appointment to office three years before that he was the chosen man to administer "the revenge"--that he would lead the armies of France against Germany. He never forgot it for an instant. It was Joffre who did everything that a human being could do before the war, to prepare for _the day_. It was Joffre who perfected the scheme of mobilization, so that France was not caught entirely unprepared.

The word "prepare" was always on his lips. His command of language is forcible, as his "orders of the day" have shown. In one of his early addresses to the students of the École Polytechnique, his closing words, uttered with a vigor that simply burned into the students, were: "May God forgive France if she is not ready."

And so when the war drums indeed began to roll--when a military régime was declared throughout France, and the politicians entered either into retirement or uniform--France suddenly learned that she had a regular czar on the job. The dismissal of five generals at maneuvers was not a patch on what was about to happen to the gold-laced brigade--after the battle of Charleroi, for instance. Joffre has retired so many generals that the public has lost track of the number. Usually he does it with an utterly disconcerting lack of comment or explanation. Only occasionally does he assign that General Blank has been dropped from active service "for reasons of health."

But he is just as quick with promotions. The brilliant de Maud'huy, for instance, who was only a brigade commander in the battle of the Marne, now commands an entire army.

I asked a high officer concerning the war councils at the "Grand Quartier General." His reply was brief. "The war council," he said, "is Joffre. He just tells everybody what to do--and they do it." That is Napoleonic enough, isn't it? Not even the President of France may go to the front without Joffre's permission--and if the Minister of War entered the zone of operations without a _laisser-passer_ from the Grand Quartier General he would very likely be arrested. Only Joffre would call it "detention"--not arrest.

And as for journalists in that forbidden zone of operations--well--has not enough been written already concerning journalists going to jail? But even to journalists Joffre is entirely fair--only journalists must play the game according to Joffre's rules.

I happen to know that Joffre has a thoroughly organized press clipping bureau at the Ministry of War and every week marked papers--particularly those of neutral nations--are presented to him. One of my proud possessions is a letter that I received from an officer of this bureau stating that one of my cables to the _New York Times_ had been favorably commented on by the Commander-in-Chief.

"Is this man a great military genius?" is still a question often asked--despite the fact that he has a hold on the army such as no man has had since Napoleon Bonaparte. The war is not over. The Germans are still in France. Nevertheless all military observers and critics with whom I have talked agree on one point. That is that the two weeks' retreat which culminated in the battle of the Marne showed Joffre to be a strategist of the very highest order. And any man who could direct the retreat of an army, especially a French army, for two weeks and so preserve that army's morale that he could then turn it around to victory, must have great qualities of genius.

Ever since, Joffre has given ample evidence of his quality as a master in the art of war, but he has forsaken the code of war known as the Napoleonic strategy which was in brief: "Go where your enemy does not expect you to go." Joffre knows perfectly well that in modern war, over such a vast front, such tactics are impossible; he knows that ninety-nine times out of one hundred your enemy, through his aeroplanes and spies, will know where you are going.

Joffre indicated his idea of modern strategy some months after the war began when he said, "I am nibbling at them." The nibbles have gradually become mouthfuls.

Joffre thinks all war is too useless for unnecessary sacrifice of men. He saves them all he can. That is why he would not send reenforcements when the Germans attacked in front of Soissons, in the presence of the Kaiser. The Germans were vastly superior in numbers at that point. The weather was frightful. Joffre figured that the French losses would be too heavy in a general battle there. He knew too that the swollen river Aisne would quite as effectively prevent a German advance. And it did. Joffre did not send reenforcements to Soissons in face of both appeals and public opinion.

Nothing moves him, when he is convinced that he is right. And a general of a combination of armies who doggedly does what he wants to do, whatever any one else thinks about it--who dismisses all opposition with a very quiet wave of the hand, as Joffre does, undoubtedly possesses an overpowering personality.

Joffre is the last man on earth to hold his enemy lightly. No man knows better than he how strong the Germans are. But he will keep up that steady hammering, first at this point--then at that point--then simultaneously all along the line, pressing them back one mile here and two miles there, until the German army is beaten and out of France. That is what has been going on now, although a large scale map is necessary to note just how steadily and how gradually the Germans have been pressed back everywhere by the advancing French wall of steel.

Let us go back a moment to that sunny August dawn of the beginning of the war. I said to my friend as we stood looking at the tomb of Napoleon Bonaparte: "I wonder what that man would do if he could come out of that block of granite and command this army?"

My friend replied:

"I think he would shut himself up in a room and read all night the history of all wars from his day to now. Then in the morning he would call in a few generals and hear them talk. After that he would take lunch with some manufacturers of arms and ammunition. He would take tea with some boss mathematicians and scientists. He might then go for a walk alone. By dinner, I believe he would be on to the job of modern military strategy and ready for work."

Whether General Joseph Joffre is the reincarnation of Napoleon Bonaparte, I am unable to even discuss. He is the perfect antithesis of the little Corsican in many ways, and he has tackled a bigger job than Bonaparte ever dreamed of. But the heart of a nation never beat more hopefully than that of the new and united France.

"When the war is over--and if Joffre is the conqueror--what will he do then?"--is another question asked nowadays. I have heard it remarked that private life with comparative oblivion may not be easy for the great military hero who now has both a Belgian king and a British field marshal taking his orders.

And I have already heard comment on what a great show Paris will have when the war is over--how the Grand Army of France headed by Father Joffre will march under the Arch of Triumph and down the Champs-Elysées--while the applauding world looks on.

Perhaps so. I do not know. I have already said that two things Joffre loves best in all the world, next to his family, are peace and fishing. I have a private suspicion that once peace is declared, Father Joffre may turn his back upon Paris and go fishing.