The classic instance of this is General Pétain, who, when the war broke out, was a colonel, and rose with breathless rapidity to take supreme command of the armies at Verdun during that terrific fight which occupied many weeks of the Spring of 1916. Romantic as such a rise may seem to be, it is as well to remember that the new commander was eminently qualified by reason of his long preparation to occupy such a position. He possesses one of the finest brains in the army—which in France for long has been an intellectual profession—and had so trained it that he was able at once to take advantage of the new conditions of warfare which have so materially changed since the area of war was charted for the guidance of commanders. When the war broke out, France was not ready. We in England have been often accused of our lack of foresight; but the fact that France, living under the shadow of war, at least since the Agadir incident, was unprepared seems to have been incredible folly. How is it to be explained? The explanation is politics, and the pleasant, but alas! entirely false, atmosphere created by the dreams of pacifists. Whilst Germany planned war and prepared for it in the most cold-blooded manner, France was dreaming of peace and behaving as if war were a thing of the past. All her preoccupations were pacific; to her purblind politicians, the real danger was either a struggle between Capital and Labour—and there were not wanting signs that this was probable—or else a largely imaginary conflict between the dispossessed Church and the State. And, again, there was a large party in the nation led by the persuasive eloquence of Jaurès which urged that universal peace was a practical reality. France herself did not want to fight, England showed no bellicosity; Germany, it was true, through her governing classes, displayed a disquieting tendency to bully, but the heart of the people—was not that pacific? Had not Socialism, and the doctrine of the brotherhood of man, taken firm root? The French Socialists were convinced that it had. And so they argued war was a practical impossibility; for, certainly, this great mass of German opinion, penetrated with Socialism and with the ultra-pacific doctrines which go with it, would never permit the nation to be drawn into war for the benefit of the fire-eaters and directors of the great war machine. The wish was father to the thought, and these misguided but well-meaning people were always seeing across the Vosges evidence of the same beneficent principles that manifested themselves at home. The French Socialists were, indeed, to a great extent anti-militarist: did it not take two to make a quarrel? Was it likely that they would be wantonly attacked when they had not the least intention of attacking anybody? Very naturally, I think, they argued in that strain—and the great fault was that the directors of opinion in France, as in England, made no