He was a lad of eighteen, a cadet at a military school, when the Franco-German War broke out. At once he was promoted second lieutenant and attached to a regiment of artillery. During the siege of Paris he fought his gun bravely against the Germans. Since that time he has seen much fighting, and his countrymen know him to be strong and silent--"a great soldier and a great man." He now commands the armies of France against the foe with whom he fought as a boy of eighteen. France and her soldiers have laid to heart the lessons of those terrible days, and the present war sees them no less brave, but far better prepared to meet their old enemy. When the war began, an English boy of twenty, a cadet of the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, was staying with his father in Brittany. Without waiting to consult his father or his masters at Woolwich, he enlisted in the French army as a private, and joined the 2nd Army of the Loire. An attack of pneumonia put an end to his services, but not before he had realized the terrible peril which a nation runs when unprepared for war. One of his experiences with the French army was a perilous ascent in a war balloon; forty-three years later he made his first aeroplane flight. That boy is now Field-Marshal Earl Kitchener,[138] the British Secretary of State for War, the man whom we all regard as our organizer of victory. Since the days when he fought against the Germans in France he has seen warfare in many lands, especially in Africa. In 1898 he overcame the Mahdi[139] in the Sudan, and it was largely due to him that the Boers were forced to make peace after the long war of 1899-1902. A German general who was with him in the Sudan said: "Lord Kitchener was cool and perfectly calm; he gave his orders without in the least raising his voice; he always made the right arrangements at the right moment. He seemed to be absolutely indifferent to personal danger, and never did anything out of bravado. Acting is out of the question with him; he is always perfectly natural." Such is the man who is the Secretary for War at this time of national stress and anxiety. The Germans were his first foes. Let us hope that they will be his last. * * * * *