ountless 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 I was 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 I 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 w