Not a gay and debonair officer, born with title and fortune, he is the son of a working man, who has planned his own career and risen by merit to the top. I do not propose to catalogue Joffre’s virtues, or to offer an estimate of his strategy—that must be left to other pens, equipped with the knowledge that staff histories bring, but his career possesses contours that, in their flowing curves, express the beauty and harmony of his life. A "masterpiece of will power and equilibrium," he has known how to inspire the devotion of his soldiers, and this is not the least of his claims. His ability to extract to the utmost the allegiance of those who serve and to make appeal to their secret sympathies is one of his most precious talents. His character, laborious and unobtrusive, free from ambition, solicitous for the common welfare, has given him an irresistible hold upon hearts, so that men’s hands stretch out at the moment of action and he is surrounded and enveloped by an atmosphere of good-will incalculably precious for concerted action. And the women, who Joffre says, are sublime, give him stoically their husbands and sons, rivalling in courage those who lay down their lives. And Joffre, by a mysterious predestination, became the instrument of that sacrifice, limitless during the war. And he never called in vain, for, at his first demand, up rose valiant youth ready and joyous to die for the sweet sake of France. He seems to have the art of communicating that secret vibration of the soul, which moves crowds, without so much as opening his lips. It is a southern gift, belonging to the sunny lands where life runs richly and deeply. And for this reason, perhaps, the south has become the region of great generals. By their inventions and manoeuvres they express that species of brimming talent which turns some into poets and plastic workers, others into men of action, statesmen, or charmers of the public ear upon stage and platform. His even temper that takes no umbrage at rival reputations, that seeks in everything only the good of the cause and its strict utility, is the right armour for the martial figure. His silence, like his calm, has its positive and its negative side. It does not spring from lack of thought, but from seriousness and contemplation, just as the other is a proof not of insensibility, but of a considered system of control. Nor is his unshakable determination the sign of obstinacy or a purblind view, but a bright weapon forged in the recesses of the heart as a defence against adversity and as the ready instrument of achievement. Rarely has a man by such simple means, with no eloquence or artifice, with no advertisement, pose, or pretension, reached such a pinnacle of authority at once subtle and conceded and giving confidence to every one.