abandonment of the last factory, he had received the tidings in the light that artillery had never accomplished anything in tactics, anyway, Napoleon to the contrary. When the last rattling wreck of a plane had become a rusting pile of charred metal, he had smiled his relief. What had planes done but attack objectives they could not hold?

From the records which remain of him, it is difficult to get an accurate description of the man himself, as difficult as it is easy to obtain minute accounts of his victories and defeats. His enemies represent him as having an upsetting and even ghoulish way of smiling, an expression of cheerfulness which never left him even when he meted death personally. But enemies have a way of distorting those they fear, and the oft-repeated statement that he took no pleasure in anything but death is probably false.

Such a view seems to be belied by the fact that he took no pleasure in a victory unless it was bloodless so far as his own troops were concerned. This may be accounted as a natural revulsion toward the school of warfare which measured the greatness of a victory in the terms of its largeness of casualty lists. Incredible as it may seem, even at the time of his birth the mass of humanity paid no attention to strategic conquests if they were not attended by many thousands of deaths. But men, alas, had long since ceased to be cheap, and the field officer or staff officer that still held them so generally died of a quiet night with a bayonet in his ribs. And so the question may be argued on both sides. He might or might not be credited with mercy on the score that he conserved his men.

Physically, he seems to have been a little over medium height, blue-gray of eye and blond. Too, he was probably very handsome, though we only touch upon his conquests in another field. The one picture of him is a rather bad thing, done by a soldier of his command after his death with possibly more enthusiasm than accuracy.

He may have had nerves so high-strung that he was half mad in times of stress—and not unlikely, for he was intelligent. He might have educated himself completely out of nerves. As for England herself, he might have loved her passionately and have done those things he did all for her. And, again, it might have been a cold-blooded problem in strategy which it amused him to solve.

These things, just as his name, are not known. He was the lieutenant. But whether he was madman and sadist or gentleman and patriot—this must be solved by another.

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