My talk, our talk with Pétain was the matter of perhaps five
minutes.... 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 remembered those minutes most
clearly of all of my Verdun experience. Just as the photograph does not
reveal the face of the man, the word does not describe the sense of
strength, of responsibility, that he gives.
In a childish sort of way, exactly as one thinks of war as a matter
of dash and color and motion, one thinks of the French general as
the leader of a cavalry charge or of a forlorn hope of infantry. And
the French soldier of this war has not been the man of charge or of
dash--not that he has not charged as well as ever in his history, a
little more bravely, perhaps, for machine guns are new and something
worse than other wars have had. What the French soldier has done has
been to stand, to hold, to die not in the onrush but on the spot.
And Pétain in some curious way has fixed in my mind the impression of
the new Frenchman, if there be a new one, or perhaps better of the
French soldier of to-day, whether he wear the stars of the general or
undecorated "horizon" blue of the Poilu. The look that I saw in his
eyes, the calm, steady, utterly emotionless looking straight forward, I
saw everywhere at the front and at the back of the front. It embodied
for me an enduring impression of the spirit and the poise of the French
soldier of the latest and most terrible of French struggles. And I
confess that, more than all I saw and heard at the front and in Paris,
the look of this man convinced me that Verdun would not fall, that
France herself would not either weary or weaken.
In Paris, where one may hear anything, there are those that will tell
you that Joffre's work is done and that France waits for the man
who will complete the tasks; that the strain of the terrible months
has wearied the general who won the Battle of the Marne and saved
France. They will tell you, perhaps, that Pétain is the man; they will
certainly tell you that they hope that the man has been found in
Pétain. As to the truth of all this I do not pretend to know.
There was a Kitchener legend in Europe, and I do not think it survives
save a little perhaps in corners of England. There was a legend of a
man of ice and of iron, a man who made victory out of human material
as a man makes a wall of mortar and stone, a man to whom his material
was only mortar and stone, even though it were human. This legend has
perished so far as Kitchener is concerned, gone with so much that
England trusted and believed two years ago, but I find myself thinking
now of Pétain as we all thought of Kitchener in his great day.
If I were an officer I should not like to come to the defender of
Verdun with the confession of failure. I think I should rather meet
the Bavarians in the first-line trenches, but I should like to know
that when I was obeying orders I was carrying out a minor detail of
something Pétain had planned; I should expect it to happen, the thing
that he had arranged, and I should feel that those clear, steel-blue
eyes had foreseen all that could occur, foreseen calmly and utterly,
whether it entailed the death of one or a thousand men, of ten thousand
men if necessary, and had willed that it should happen.
I do not believe Napoleon's Old Guard would have followed Pétain as
they followed Ney. I cannot fancy him in the Imperial uniform, and
yet, now that war is a thing of machines, of telephones, of indirect
fire and destruction from unseen weapons at remote ranges, now that
the whole manner and circumstances of conflict have changed, it is but
natural that the general should change, too. Patently, Pétain is of the
new, not the old, but no less patently he was the master of it.