Thousands of such compact bodies on as many roads, each seemingly a force by itself and each a part of the whole, which could be a dependable whole only when every part was ready, alert, and up where it belonged! Nothing can be left to chance in a battle-line three hundred miles long. The general must know what to depend on, mile by mile, in his plans. Millions of human units are grouped in increasingly larger units, harmonised according to set forms. The most complex of all machines is that of a vast army, which yet must be kept most simple. No unit acts without regard to the others; every one must know how to do his part. The parts of the machine are standardised. One is like the other in training, uniform, and every detail, so that one can replace another. Oldest of all trades this of war; old experts the French. What one saw was like manœuvres. It must be like manœuvres or the army would not hold together. Manœuvres are to teach armies coherence; war tries out that coherence, which you may not have if some one does not know just what to do; if he is uncertain in his rôle. Haste leads to confusion; haste is only for supreme moments. In order to know how to hasten when the hurry call comes, the mighty organism must move in its routine with the smoothness of a well-rehearsed play. Joffre and the others who directed the machine must know more than the mechanics of staff-control. They must know the character of the man-material in the machine. It was their duty as real Frenchmen to understand Frenchmen, their verve, their restlessness for the offensive, their individualism, their democratic intelligence, the value of their elation, the drawback of their tendency to depression and to think for themselves. Indeed, the leader must counteract the faults of his people and make the most of their virtues. Thus, we had a French army’s historical part reversed: a French army falling back and concentrating on the Marne to receive the enemy blow. Equally alive to German racial traits, the German Staff had organised in their mass offensive the _élan_ which means fast marching and hard blows. Thus, we found the supposedly excitable French digging in to receive the onslaught of the supposedly phlegmatic German. When the time came for the charge--ah, you can always depend on a Frenchman to charge! Those reserves were pawns on a chessboard. They appeared like it; one thought that they realised it. Their individual intelligence and democracy had reasoned out the value of obedience and homogeneity, rather than accepted the dictum of any war lord. Difficult to think that each had left a vacancy at a family board; difficult to think that they were not automatons in a process of endless routine of war; but not difficult to learn that they were Frenchmen once we had thrown our bombs in the midst of the group.