One of the larger singularities of the great war is its failure to produce great and imposing personalities, mighty leaders, Napoleons, Caesars.I would indeed make that the essential thing in my reckoning of the war.It is a drama without a hero;without countless incidental heroes no doubt, but no star part.
Even the Germans, with a national predisposition for hero-cults and living still in an atmosphere of Victorian humbug, can produce nothing better than that timber image, Hindenburg.
It is not that the war has failed to produce heroes so much as that it has produced heroism in a torrent.The great man of this war is the common man.It becomes ridiculous to pick out particular names.There are too many true stories of splendid acts in the past two years ever to be properly set down.The V.C.'s and the palms do but indicate samples.One would need an encyclopaedia, a row of volumes, of the gloriousness of human impulses.The acts of the small men in this war dwarf all the pretensions of the Great Man.Imperatively these multitudinous heroes forbid the setting up of effigies.When Iwas a young man I imitated Swift and posed for cynicism; I will confess that now at fifty and greatly helped by this war, I have fallen in love with mankind.
But if I had to pick out a single figure to stand for the finest quality of the Allies' war, I should I think choose the figure of General Joffre.He is something new in history.He is leadership without vulgar ambition.He is the extreme antithesis to the Imperial boomster of Berlin.He is as it were the ordinary common sense of men, incarnate.He is the antithesis of the effigy.
By great good luck I was able to see him.I was delayed in Paris on my way to Italy, and my friend Captain Millet arranged for a visit to the French front at Soissons and put me in charge of Lieutenant de Tessin, whom ii had met in England studying British social questions long before this war.Afterwards Lieutenant de Tessin took me to the great hotel--it still proclaims "/Restaurant/" in big black letters on the garden wall--which shelters the General Headquarters of France, and here I was able to 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 Icould 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.
