y appearance of physical strength, a clear blue eye, looking
straight forward and beyond.

My French companion, M. Le Roux, spoke with Petain. He had just come
from Joffre and he told an interesting circumstance. Petain listened.
He said now and then "yes" or "no." Nothing more. Watching him
narrowly you saw that occasionally his eyes twitched a little, the
single sign of fatigue that the long strain of weeks of responsibility
had brought.

It was hard to believe, looking at this quiet, calm, silent man, that
you were in the presence of the soldier who had won the Battle of
Champagne, the man whom the war had surprised in the last of his
fifties, a Colonel, a teacher of war rather than a soldier, a
professor like Foch.

No one of Napoleon's marshals had commanded as many men as obeyed this
Frenchman, who was as lacking in the distinction of military
circumstance as our own Grant. Napoleon had won all his famous
victories with far fewer troops than were directed from the telephone
on the table yonder.

Every impression of modern war that comes to one actually in touch
with it is a destruction of illusion: this thing is a thing of
mechanism rather than of brilliance; perhaps Petain has led a
regiment, a brigade, or a division to the charge. You knew
instinctively in seeing the man that you would go or come, as he said,
but there was neither dash nor fire, nothing of the suggestion of
elan; rather there was the suggestion of the commander of a great
ocean liner, the man responsible for the lives, this time of hundreds
of thousands, not scores, for the safety of France, not of a ship, but
the man of machinery and the master of the wisdom of the tides and
the weather, not the Ney, or the Murat, not the Napoleon of Arcola.
The impression was of a strong man whose life was a life beaten upon
by storms; the man on the bridge, to keep to the rather ridiculously
inadequate figure, but not by any chance the man on horseback.

My talk, our talk with Petain was the matter of perhaps five minutes.
The time was consumed by the words of M. Le Roux, who spoke very
earnestly urging that more American correspondents be permitted to
visit Verdun, and Petain heard him patiently, but said just nothing.
Once he had greeted us his face settled into that grim expression that
never changed until he smiled his word of good wishes as we left. Yet
I have since found that apart from one circumstance which I shall
mention in a moment I have re