" All Germany gloats over his Jovian domesticities; when I was
last in Berlin the postcard shops were full of photographs of a sort
of procession of himself and his sons, all with long straight noses and
sidelong eyes. It is all dreadfully old-fashioned. General Joffre
sits in a pleasant little sitting-room in a very ordinary little villa
conveniently close to Headquarters. He sits among furniture that has no
quality of pose at all, that is neither magnificent nor ostentatiously
simple and hardy. He has dark, rather sleepy eyes under light eyelashes,
eyes that glance shyly and a little askance at his interlocutor and
then, as he talks, away--as if he did not want to be preoccupied by your
attention. He has a broad, rather broadly modelled face, a soft voice,
the sort of persuasive reasoning voice that many Scotchmen have. I had
a feeling that if he were to talk English he would do so with a Scotch
accent. Perhaps somewhere I have met a Scotchman of his type. He sat
sideways to his table as a man might sit for a gossip in a cafe.
He is physically a big man, and in my memory he grows bigger and bigger.
He sits now in my memory in a room like the rooms that any decent people
might occupy, like that vague room that is the background of so many
good portraits, a great blue-coated figure with a soft voice and rather
tired eyes, explaining very simply and clearly the difficulties that
this vulgar imperialism of Germany, seizing upon modern science and
modern appliances, has created for France and the spirit of mankind.
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