The whole would have seemed fantastic if it had not been for the sound of the machine guns and the rifles and the deeper-throated chorus of the heavy guns, which proved that this was no mesmeric, fantastic spectacle but a game with death, precise and ordered, with nothing that could be rehearsed left to chance any more than there was in the regulation of the traffic which was pressing forward, column after column, to supply the food which fed the artillery-power and man-power that should crush through frontal positions. IX WHEN THE FRENCH WON A big man's small quarters--General Foch--French capacity for enjoying a victory--Winning quality of French as victors--When the heart of France stood still--The bravery of the race--Germany's mistaken estimate of France--Why the French will fight this war to a finish--French and Germans as different breeds as ever lived neighbor--The democracy of the French--_Elan_--"War of movement." The farther south the better the news. There was another world of victory on the other side of a certain dividing road where French and British transport mingled. That world I was to see next on a day of days--a holiday of elation. A brief note, with its permission to "circulate within the lines," written in a bold hand in the chateau where General Foch directed the Northern Group of French Armies, placed no limitation on freedom of movement for my French friend and myself. Of course, General Foch's chateau was small. All chateaux occupied by big commanders are small, and as a matter of method I am inclined to think. If they have limited quarters there is no room for the intrusion of anyone except their personal staff and they can live with the simplicity which is a soldier's barrack training. Joffre, Castelnau and Foch were the three great names in the French Army which the public knew after the Marne, and of the three Foch has, perhaps, more of the dash which the world associates with the French military type. He simplified victory, which was the result of the same arduous preparation as on the British side, with a single gesture as he swept his pencil across the map from Dompierre to Flaucourt. Thus his army had gone forward and that was all there was to it, which was enough for the French and also for the Germans on this particular front. "It went well! It goes well!" he said, with dramatic brevity. He had made the plans which were so definite in the bold outline to which he held all subordinates in a cooerdinated execution; and I should meet the men who had carried out his plans, from artillerists who had blazed the way to infantry who had stormed the enemy trenches. There was no mistaking his happiness. It was not that of a general, but the common happiness of all France.