Foch tells us what he thinks Napoleon might have said to the Allied commands if he could have risen in our black times from the dead. "What cards you people have!" he would have said, "and how little you do with them! Look!" And then, Foch thinks, within a month or two he "would have rearranged everything, gone about it all in some new way, thrown out the enemy's plans and quite crushed him." That "some new way" was not fated to come. The spark refused to fall, the divine accident would not happen. How could it? you ask with some reason. Had not trench warfare reached an impasse? Yes; there is always an impasse before genius shows a way through. Music on keyboards had reached an impasse before a person of genius thought of using his thumb as well as his fingers. Well, that was an obvious dodge, you may say, but in Flanders what way through could there have been? The dodge found by genius is always an obvious dodge, afterwards. Till it is found it can as little be stated by us common people as can the words of the poems that Keats might have written if he had lived longer. You would have to become a Keats to do that, and a Napoleon to say how Napoleon would have got through to Bruges in the autumn that seemed so autumnal to us. All that the army knew, as it decreased in the mud, was that no such uncovenanted mercy came to transmute its casualties into the swiftly and richly fruitful ones of a Napoleon, the incidental expenses of some miraculous draught of victory. Nothing to grouse at in that. The winds of inspiration have to blow the best way they can. Prospero himself could not raise them; how could the likes of us hope to? And yet there had been that illogical hope, almost reliance--part of the high unreason of faith that could move mountains in 1914 and seems to be scarcely able to shift an ant-hill to-day. CHAPTER X AUTUMN TINTS IN CHIVALRY I In either of two opposite tempers you may carry on war. In one of the two you will want to rate your enemy, all round, as high as you can. You may pursue him down a trench, or he you; but in neither case do you care to have him described by somebody far, far away as a fat little short-sighted scrub. Better let him pass for a paladin. This may at bottom be vanity, sentimentality, all sorts of contemptible things. Let him who knows the heart of man be dogmatic about it. Anyhow, this temper comes, as they would say in Ireland, of decent people. It spoke in Porsena of Clusium's whimsical prayer that Horatius might swim the Tiber safely; it animates Velasquez' knightly _Surrender of Breda_; it prompted Lord Roberts's first words to Cronje when Paardeberg fell--"Sir, you have made a very gallant defence"; it is avowed in a popular descant of Newboldt's-- To honour, while you strike him down, The foe who comes with eager eyes.