The Allied military arrangement conferred supreme authority on General Joffre, but the British Field Marshal’s character and career were considered a joint guarantee that Sir John French would not be found lacking when called upon to do and dare greatly on his own account. It would be going too far to say that the war has covered French with glory. He would be the first to banish such a thought. Though Britons have fallen laurel-crowned on a score of fields in France and Flanders and irrigated the cock-pit which lies between the Alps and the Channel with as heroic blood as was ever spilled, the British offensives in the West have been little more than brilliant failures. Neuve Chapelle is an undying story of Anglo-Saxon gallantry, as was Ypres before it; but it was nothing else. The "big push" which England hoped had at last begun with the fighting in Artois and the Champagne at the end of September, 1915, turned out to be a victory of distressingly short life and little real effectiveness. Yet when Germany lost the war--when she failed to take Paris--the British army under Sir John French wrote history of which Englishmen will never be ashamed. Who it was that most effectually parried von Kluck and the Crown Prince’s thrust at the French capital will probably, among generations of schoolboys yet unborn, be as fruitful a theme of argument as is the question who won Waterloo--Wellington or Blücher--but whatever the verdict of posterity the smashing of the Germans on the Marne reeked glory for all concerned, and Britain’s share of it is a heritage which will survive with Blenheim, Balaclava, Kandahar and Khartoum.[1] [1] Sir John French returned to England in December, 1915, relinquishing (at his own request, it was officially stated) the commandership-in-chief in France for the command of the Home Defense forces. King George conferred the dignity of a Viscountcy on the Field-Marshal. Another Sir John--Admiral Jellicoe--is commander-in-chief of the British navy. Events still to come must determine whether Anglo-Saxon history is to be enriched with another Nelson. But as far as human prescience could foretell, "Jack" Jellicoe was of all men in the British Fleet preordained by talent, temperament and training to be the admiral in whose keeping could safely be entrusted British destinies more priceless than those which were safeguarded at Trafalgar. Jellicoe was one of the godfathers of the dreadnought, having been summoned by Lord Fisher, the real author of that revolution in naval science, to support and carry into execution the all-big-gun ship idea. Fisher had years before associated young Captain Jellicoe with him as assistant director of naval ordnance, whereupon there ensued an intimacy which friends say will link their names together much as history associated St. Vincent and Nelson as the twin victors of Trafalgar--the one, the far-sighted planner of preparatory reforms; the other, the faithful executor of their purpose.