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.