20th Corps with such skill and daring as to attract universal attention. There was always a perfect union between his infantry and artillery. He and his wife kept open house at Nancy to the officers under his command, and their handsome fortune enabled them to entertain lavishly both here and at their residence at Chantilly. The General’s father was as far removed from Gouraud’s from the trade of arms, for he followed the unlikely profession of a notary; but both obeyed the call to a soldier’s life and achieved an equal distinction. These, then, are the men who have led France to victory. To-morrow others will spring from her fruitful soil and represent her courage, her hope, and her resourcefulness. The Great War has demonstrated the adaptability of the race. It is perennial in its freshness and inspiration. *CHAPTER XV* *CHARACTERISTICS OF THE FIGHTING* When the German horde surged upon Verdun, and was hurled back; when, again and again, they swept to the attack and left their dead piled high before the might and heroism of France—then was it most clearly demonstrated that the days of old-fashioned forts were no more. The fortress of stone crumbles before the mighty guns of to-day, and the hideous machines of war, belching forth tons of metal, grind steel and concrete into dust. Before Verdun it was proved that the fortress of France was the soul of her soldiers: a fortress that the mightiest guns could not shake nor all the horrors of modern warfare humble. To the armed barbarity of science the French soldier opposed his chest, and barbarism was swept back. That is the first lesson of the war of millions. In spite of all the fearful war machines—the huge guns, the gas, the liquid fire, engines of destruction before which man is as puny as a fly—in spite, too, of the impersonal strategy that moves regiments as pieces in a game of chess and seems to take no stock of the little soul of a man, yet, after all, it is the man that counts. Both combatants can pour out money, both can heap up _matériel_, but the side that can expend the richest store of heroism is the side that will win. This personal element in the battle of to-day was the only factor overlooked by the war expert. Bloch, the great Russian writer on military science, foresaw only one end to fighting, and that was immobilisation, for each side would sit down in trenches and wait for the other; but the strange thing was that this new game of sap and mine, by a curious détour, conducted to the old hand-to-hand encounters, in which the right arm played the determining part and even the bowie-knife was resuscitated as a deadly weapon, so that we seemed to live again in the days of Fenimore Cooper and the Indian fights; and though the Germans sent at our trenches liquid fire, asphyxiating gases, flying torpedoes and all manner of explosives, all this science was accompanied