Over in his office in the municipal building where we went after dinner the general took something wrapped in tissue paper out of a drawer and from his manner, had he been a collector, I should have known that it was some rare treasure. When he undid the paper I saw a photograph of General Joffre autographed with a sentiment for the occasion. "He gave it to me for Douaumont!" said General Nivelle, a touch of pride in his voice--the only sign of pride that I noticed. There spoke the soldier to whom praise from his chief was the best praise and more valued than any other encomium. When I spoke of Douaumont he drew out the map and showed me his order of the day, which had a soldierly brevity that made words keen-edged tools. The attacking force rushed up overnight and appeared as a regulated tidal wave of men, their pace timed under cover of curtains of fire which they hugged close, then over the German trenches and on into the fort. Six thousand prisoners and forty-five hundred French casualties! It was this dramatic, this complete and unequivocal success that had captured the imagination of France, but he was not dramatic in telling it. He made it a military evolution on a piece of paper; though when he put his pencil down on Douaumont and held it fast there for a moment, saying, "And that is all for the present!" the pencil seemed to turn into steel. All for the present! And the future? That of the army of France was to be in his hands. He had the supreme task. He would approach it as he had approached all other tasks. * * * * * You had only to look at General Mangin commanding the corps before Verdun to know that attack was not alone a system but a gospel with him. Five stripes on his arm for wounds, all won in colonial work, sun-browned, swart, with a strong, abutting chin which might have been a fit point for Nivelle's pencil, an eye that said "Attack!" and could twinkle with the wisdom of many campaigns! "General Joffre sat in that chair two hours before the advance," he said, with the same respectful awe that other generals had exhibited toward the Commander-in-Chief. The time had come for the old leader, grown weary, to go; for the younger men of the school which the war has produced, with its curtains of fire and wave attacks, to take his place. But the younger ones in the confidence of their system could look on the old leader while he lived as the great, indomitable figure of the critical stages of the war.