War and the Future | Page 5

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.
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