, 1915. At the beginning of November
he was sent at the head of a French Military Mission to Italy, and on
his return in December was given the command of the Fourth French
Army, the Army of Champagne. There on that famous sector of the French
line, where Castelnau and Langle de Cary in the autumn of the same
year had all but broken through, he remained through the whole of
1916. That was the year of Verdun and the Somme. Neither the Allies
nor the enemy had men or energy to spare for important action in
Champagne that year; but Gouraud's watch was never surprised, and
again he was able to acquaint himself with every military feature, and
every local peculiarity of the desolate chalk-hills where France has
buried so many thousands of her sons. At the end of 1916, his old
chief, General Lyautey, now French Minister for War, insisted on his
going back to Morocco as Governor; but happily for the Army of
Champagne, the interlude was short, and by the month of May, Lyautey
was once more in Morocco and Gouraud in Champagne--to remain there in
command of his beloved Fourth Army till the end of the war.

* * * * *

Such then, in brief outline, was the story of the great man whose
guests we were proud to be on that January evening. Dinner was very
animated and gay. The rooms of the huge building was singularly bare,
having been stripped by the Germans before their departure of
everything portable. But _en revanche_ the entering French, finding
nothing left in the fine old house, even of the _mobilier_ which had
been left there in 1871, discovered a _chateau_ belonging to the Kaiser
close by, and requisitioned from it some of the necessaries of life.
Bordeaux drunk out of a glass marked with the Kaiser's monogram had a
taste of its own. In the same way, when on the British front we drew
up one afternoon, north of St. Omer, at a level crossing to let a
goods train go by, I watched the interminable string of German trucks,
labelled Magdeburg, Essen, Duesseldorf, and saw in them, with a bitter
satisfaction, the first visible signs of the Reparation and
Restitution to be.

The relations between the General and his Staff were very pleasant to
watch; and after dinner there was some interesting talk of the war. I
asked the General what had seemed to him the most critical moment of
the struggle. He and his Chief of the Staff looked at each other
gravely an instant and then the General said: "I have no do