What Parisians cannot understand is how it was that this quiet, perfectly unemotional man came into being in the Midi--as Southern France is called. From the Midi, as from Corsica, come the hotheads and the firebrands. The crowd certainly expected, when this war came, that the Commander-in-Chief of the army would give Paris a real treat before going forth to battle--that he would parade the boulevards in dress uniform at the head of his troops. Alas! Paris has scarcely heard a band play since the war began. All the time that Joffre lived in the little villa in Auteuil he was planning and waiting for the day when he should go forth to battle. He was a fatalist to the extent that he felt by reason of his appointment to office three years before that he was the chosen man to administer "the revenge"--that he would lead the armies of France against Germany. He never forgot it for an instant. It was Joffre who did everything that a human being could do before the war, to prepare for _the day_. It was Joffre who perfected the scheme of mobilization, so that France was not caught entirely unprepared. The word "prepare" was always on his lips. His command of language is forcible, as his "orders of the day" have shown. In one of his early addresses to the students of the École Polytechnique, his closing words, uttered with a vigor that simply burned into the students, were: "May God forgive France if she is not ready." And so when the war drums indeed began to roll--when a military régime was declared throughout France, and the politicians entered either into retirement or uniform--France suddenly learned that she had a regular czar on the job. The dismissal of five generals at maneuvers was not a patch on what was about to happen to the gold-laced brigade--after the battle of Charleroi, for instance. Joffre has retired so many generals that the public has lost track of the number. Usually he does it with an utterly disconcerting lack of comment or explanation. Only occasionally does he assign that General Blank has been dropped from active service "for reasons of health." But he is just as quick with promotions. The brilliant de Maud'huy, for instance, who was only a brigade commander in the battle of the Marne, now commands an entire army. I asked a high officer concerning the war councils at the "Grand Quartier General." His reply was brief. "The war council," he said, "is Joffre. He just tells everybody what to do--and they do it." That is Napoleonic enough, isn't it? Not even the President of France may go to the front without Joffre's permission--and if the Minister of War entered the zone of operations without a _laisser-passer_ from the Grand Quartier General he would very likely be arrested. Only Joffre would call it "detention"--not arrest.