Succeeding Joffre as Director of Engineers at the Ministry of War, he became Director of Aeronautics at the moment when France began to realise the military possibilities of the aeroplane. General Roques's spirit of organisation was as potent at the Rue Saint-Dominique as in command of troops. Mounting by the usual stages of Division, Army Corps, and Army, he distinguished himself in the two latter situations on active service, and in the former at manoeuvres one year before the Great War. For his personal bravery and skill in the field he received the War Cross and the Grand Cross of the Legion. With the dust of Verdun still upon him he took charge of Galliéni's portfolio and soon showed a vivid sense of the realities of modern war. His conciliation and tact and his quiet mastery of details earned for him the good-will and confidence of the army and of his subordinates. To that perfect mastery over himself which is necessary to mastery over others, he added a decision of character invaluable in high responsibility. He is of the school of Generals formed overseas. Of such are Joffre and Galliéni, Gouraud and Marchand.
Gouraud resembles Pétain in his judgment and charm as well as in his power over men. He inspires devotion, and carries the secret of command in a splendid face and figure. The empty right sleeve is a touching testimony to his valour, and for months he walked limping with a stick, for his right thigh and left leg had been injured also at the Dardanelles—the place of his dismemberment. It was after a day's bombardment and the Commander-in-Chief was watching the embarkation of wounded on a hospital ship, for there was no place to put them on that rocky shore, searched minutely by the enemy shells. One breaking from a Turkish naval gun threw the General over a wall and inflicted the injuries I have described. On the way home by ship to Marseilles, gangrene supervened in the arm, demanding its amputation.
I saw him just after his recovery when, with a glad note in his voice, he announced his approaching return to the Front. In conversation with him one realised why he was called the "lion of the Argonne." There is something king-like in his looks—the brown beard, and the manly, well-formed features—and you are certain that the khaki tunic covers a lion's heart. His whole career has been of the noble sort: whether tracking Samory, the negro chieftain, into the recesses of his virgin forest, where he captured him after he had waged fitful war with France for seventeen years; or whether he was leading a sortie from Fez and clearing a savage horde from its walls. For this latter feat he gained the three stars at a time of life when most French officers have not reached a colonelcy. When the Great War broke out Gouraud hastened from Morocco to the east of France, where he led Colonial troops in unexampled feats of bravery. He was shot in the shoulder, but bullets cannot stop such a man; he seems to bear a charmed life as he passes heedlessly amidst a storm of flying, shrieking metal. His heroic soul is unmoved by the Inferno of the battle. Even the worst inventions of the devil are powerless against this perfect knight, dressed in the invincible and shining armour of his faith and patriotism.
It was good to hear him speak of his career as simply as if he were relating the banal life of some village attorney. Perhaps an ancestor who served in Napoleon's artillery, or a great-uncle who helped the Duc d'Aumale to conquer Algeria, were in measure responsible for his military tastes. Certainly he did not get them from his father following the pacific profession of a doctor in a Paris hospital. At sixteen or seventeen years of age the Tonking campaign attracted him with its promise of adventure, but his youthful imagination was mainly fired by reading the travels and explorations of Livingstone, of Cameron, Stanley, Brazza and Galliéni. And the Colonies, whatever their bad old reputation in France for forming soldiers who were theatrical and had no notion of modern warfare, since they fought against savages, has proved in this war the nursery of manly virtues. Therein a man learns courage and endurance, self-reliance and a faculty for improvising everything. It has produced men of the type of Marchand, one of the most romantic figures that ever donned the uniform of the Republic. His hold over his men is quite extraordinary; they are ready to follow him into the jaws of death. His exploits in the Soudan recall a time when there was no smile on the face of John Bull as he looked across to France. A poet in his ideality and lyric quality, he has the sublime courage of the Early Christian, the personal sway of the born leader, the heart and tenderness of a woman.
No French general has come into closer contact with the English than Foch, for his army neighboured theirs for long months together, and none has a higher opinion of their qualities or was more sensible of the vast improvement effected in their fighting methods during the progress of the war. Foch is one of the most learned of the chiefs of the army; he directed the War School during a period of his career, and his lectures on the art of leading troops in battle are models of their kind. When war broke out, he was commanding at Nancy the 20th Army Corps, which includes the famous Iron Division. As disciplinarian he offers no excuses for himself or for others for any failure in duty; and there is no soldier, if it is not Pétain, who has adapted his science more successfully to the problems of a twentieth-century war. Looking forty-five, though twenty years older, he is of those who prepared assiduously for the great day of the battle. Alas! his own family were early victims of it, for at Charleroi fell his son and his son-in-law. Amongst his officers at Nancy was General Balfourier in charge of a brigade. Tall and slim and dark until active service had whitened his hair, Balfourier has the perfect manners of a man of the world. You would take him for a courtier if you did not know that he was a soldier and a particularly brave one. The Tsar's congratulations reached him in the midst of the gigantic battle of Verdun, where he had handled the 20th Corps with such skill and daring as to attract universal attention. There was always a perfect union between his infantry and artillery. He and his wife kept open house at Nancy to the officers under his command, and their handsome fortune enabled them to entertain lavishly both here and at their residence at Chantilly. The General's father was as far removed from Gouraud's from the trade of arms, for he followed the unlikely profession of a notary; but both obeyed the call to a soldier's life and achieved an equal distinction.
These, then, are the men who have led France to victory. To-morrow others will spring from her fruitful soil and represent her courage, her hope, and her resourcefulness. The Great War has demonstrated the adaptability of the race. It is perennial in its freshness and inspiration.
CHAPTER XV
CHARACTERISTICS OF THE FIGHTING
When the German horde surged upon Verdun, and was hurled back; when, again and again, they swept to the attack and left their dead piled high before the might and heroism of France—then was it most clearly demonstrated that the days of old-fashioned forts were no more. The fortress of stone crumbles before the mighty guns of to-day, and the hideous machines of war, belching forth tons of metal, grind steel and concrete into dust. Before Verdun it was proved that the fortress of France was the soul of her soldiers: a fortress that the mightiest guns could not shake nor all the horrors of modern warfare humble. To the armed barbarity of science the French soldier opposed his chest, and barbarism was swept back. That is the first lesson of the war of millions. In spite of all the fearful war machines—the huge guns, the gas, the liquid fire, engines of destruction before which man is as puny as a fly—in spite, too, of the impersonal strategy that moves regiments as pieces in a game of chess and seems to take no stock of the little soul of a man, yet, after all, it is the man that counts. Both combatants can pour out money, both can heap up matériel, but the side that can expend the richest store of heroism is the side that will win. This personal element in the battle of to-day was the only factor overlooked by the war expert. Bloch, the great Russian writer on military science, foresaw only one end to fighting, and that was immobilisation, for each side would sit down in trenches and wait for the other; but the strange thing was that this new game of sap and mine, by a curious détour, conducted to the old hand-to-hand encounters, in which the right arm played the determining part and even the bowie-knife was resuscitated as a deadly weapon, so that we seemed to live again in the days of Fenimore Cooper and the Indian fights; and though the Germans sent at our trenches liquid fire, asphyxiating gases, flying torpedoes and all manner of explosives, all this science was accompanied by ambuscades, by acts of treachery and ruses de guerre not unworthy of the Redskin in the most romantic pages of the novelist. Thus modern civilisation and savagery met and shook hands as men of the same family, unconscious of any difference in their mental equipment, unembarrassed certainly by any divergence in Kultur. And perhaps because of this personal factor in the fighting, which it was thought would be blotted out and suppressed in modern warfare, there was developed an individual courage so remarkable and romantic as to be unbelievable in its splendour, its intensity, and its quality of rich lavishness. Never since the world began has there been such an étalage of personal valour, such outpouring of splendid deeds of indomitable and deathless daring. Seemingly in the sombre monotony of modern warfare there could arise no glorious exploit, and yet the trenches were frequently the unlikely frame of the most palpitating and stupendous defiance of man's nervous system. For the weak envelope triumphed by the grace of the soul; and man, though his teeth chattered by the mere brutal concussion of monstrous weapons, yet showed in his moral resistance a wealth and splendour of achievement unknown to the old and picturesque days. Thus, though the nations warred in such incredible masses that there seemed no room for personal bravery, yet never before had it been so richly poured out, so that even the spies were brave and went to their doom with hands untied and eyes unbandaged in utter calmness. Never in the history of warfare has there been a more splendid show of every human quality, whether fighting this desperate affair of the trenches or out in the open, under the pitiless rain of unheard-of bombardments, as at Verdun, where, in one single day, were fired 3,000,000 shells. And if there had never been a greater squandering of metal than in this Titanic conflict of the arsenals, there had never been a greater expenditure of those splendid treasures of sacrifice, or such a vast extravagance of youth and manhood, gold and precious stones from the treasury of all the manly virtues.
But if Bloch had discounted the personal element of modern warfare, his theories otherwise were justified by events. The Germans knew their Bloch and heartily believed his doctrine, but in the opening stages of the battle they made a desperate effort to escape from his conclusions. They began in what Mr. Wells in a famous chapter called the "1900 spirit," that is to say, they were convinced that neither England nor France was alive to the latest trench warfare. Their first methods, the precipitate attack, massed movements and enveloping tactics, were dictated by the thought that their adversaries were old-fashioned fighters who had not learned this doctrine of the squatting war, who had not, in fact, read their Bloch or drawn from him the lessons the Germans had. And so they fought in the open in these first phases of the campaign, trusting by their force and speed, superior leadership and brutal shock tactics to bear down the Allies before they were prepared to meet them. And, of course, they were greatly aided in this traditional method of fighting by the fact that they had been allowed to build unchallenged strategic railways to their frontiers, which enabled them to pour a million men into the country, instead of the 300,000 that the French General Staff expected by the northern route.