significance, sinister for religion, of this claim to absolute ethical autonomy on the part of these secular interests. These men have organized the Federal Council of Churches and the National Catholic Welfare Council to give expression to religious ideals in public relationships. They are feeling their way amid a world of infinite moral complexity, but they know what they are about. They are aware that religion must be good for the whole of life if it is to be good for any part of it.

What if this doctrine of the union of Church and State is an ancient landmark surviving all the tramplings of a secular age, marking a way to a view of the world in which religion and life will have overcome their disastrous dichotomy? It is a rather safe guess that only a religion which is the companion of man through all the vicissitudes of his experience has any future in Western civilization. For a timid, apologetic religion, fawning on our secular prosperity for sustenance, humanity will ultimately have little use. It may tolerate such a religion for a while, paying it tribute out of consideration for a sturdy Catholic and Puritan ancestry which compelled respect, but in the end such a religion will be thrown out of its own house. Only a religion which troubles our modern secular world with the thought of 'judgment' can heal it.

Before Catholics yield their ancient doctrine to the final ravages of a triumphant secularism, it seems to the writer,

accordingly, that in all fairness they may ask us Protestants such questions as the following.

Has contemporary Protestantism a vital conception of a supernational moral order, and does it accept as a religious obligation the task of establishing institutions which will symbolize and interpret that order to average men?

Has contemporary Protestantism a social philosophy, and, if it has, how does that philosophy differ from the Catholic view of society as a spiritual organism?

Has contemporary Protestantism thought through the meaning of this process of paring down the realm of spiritual sovereignty? Business, politics, and education claim emancipation from that sovereignty now. Ethics seeks autonomy. To-morrow the mystical energies of religion will be secularized by psychiatry. In fine, over what area of human interest is religion to remain sovereign, after it has given up its claim to a vision of the whole of life, public as well as private, in a divine perspective?

Before we secure adequate answers to these questions, we may discover that it is no slight achievement to build a structure of thought which enables man to live through the entire range of his associated life in the presence of God. Yet, such was the achievement in the days of its prime of the now apparently discredited doctrine of the union of Church and State.

SON of a village cooper to Marshal of France such was the record of Joseph Jacques Césaire Joffre, who was born on January 12, 1852, at Rivesaltes on the eastern edge of the Pyrenees. A man from the people and of the people, plain in character as in origin, here was surely the ideal representative of the 'war to save democracy,' and by him the capacity of democracy may fairly be judged.

It was a family tradition that the Joffres were originally Spanish, their name Gouffre, and that the greatgrandfather of the future Marshal had crossed the Pyrenees as a political exile. He was a merchant, but the business decayed, and Marshal Joffre's father, as soon as he was old enough to work, took up the trade of a cooper. He remained a simple workman until his marriage, when he inherited a modest competence from his mother, which enabled him to become a master cooper. Joseph was one of eleven children, and was helped up the first rungs of the ladder by the system of State-aided education. Showing a leaning for mathematics and science while at the College of Perpignan, he was encouraged to try for the École Polytechnique, and, after eighteen months' final preparation in Paris, passed into the Polytechnique at Polytechnique at seventeen, fourteenth on a list of one

hundred and thirty-two, although the youngest of his 'promotion.'

This was in 1869, and the outbreak of the Franco-German War the next year interrupted his course. Like his comrades, Joffre was called to active service as a sous-lieutenant and took part in the siege of Paris - serving in one of the forts. At the close of that disastrous war he returned to finish his studies, but, passing out too low to have the option of a civil-service post, he took a commission in the Engineers.

That same year the youth who was destined to be the other great legendary figure of the World War entered the Engineers also- but in the army of France's future ally. The parallel between Kitchener and Joffre was soon strengthened, for the loss of his wife led Joffre in 1885 to seek distraction in colonial service, where so many of the leading soldiers of France, as also of England, have done their military apprenticeship—a service, moreover, which is a forge of character and leaves also its peculiar stamp on the mind. His reputation already, among his comrades, was that of a reserved and silent man, one who, although a staunch comrade, was neither easy to approach nor easy to move. These tendencies the desert naturally developed.

His first service, however, was in

Indo-China; he took part in the Formosa campaign, and later spent three years at Hanoi as chief engineer in organizing the defense of Upper Tonkin. General Mensier, who appreciated his value, brought him back to Paris in 1888 to a post in the directorate of engineer services. The following year he was promoted chef de bataillon in the railway regiment, and later became professor of fortification at Fontainebleau.

In 1892 he was sent out to West Africa, where he was entrusted with the task of building the railway from Kayes to Bafulabe. If the duty seemed prosaic, it was to prove the path to glory. For it was late in 1893 that Colonel Bonnier's expedition set out to extend French influence to Timbuktu, and Joffre was taken from his railway work to command a supplementary column of one thousand men two thirds of whom were carriers and followers. Passing up the left bank of the Niger, he joined Bonnier at Timbuktu. His account of this march, afterward published, has no literary or narrative power, but it at least shows infinite care to ensure the supplies of the column and its protection from Touareg raiders. But the five-hundred-mile march would hardly have won him fame but for the disaster which befell Bonnier, whose force was surprised and cut to pieces by the Touaregs. The remnant joined Joffre, who imperturbably decided to continue his march. Such calm disregard of their efforts seems to have nonplused the Touaregs, for he was allowed to reach Timbuktu without serious interference. Here he received orders for recall to his railway building, but disregarded them and, after making his garrison assaultproof, secured the submission of the whole territory. The disaster to Bonnier had caused a sensation in France, so that the news of the way in which

Joffre had promptly retrieved it created the greater reaction, and he was promoted lieutenant-colonel and officer of the Legion of Honor.

Recalled to France in 1896 to be secretary of the Commission of Inventions, he was soon sent abroad again— to construct the defenses of DiegoSuarez, in Madagascar, the new French naval base in the Indian Ocean. Here he was under the command of Gallieni, and the contact thus established between the two men was to have a farreaching influence on the destiny of Joffre and of France. In 1900 Joffre was promoted general of brigade, and quitted Madagascar on his appointment to command the 19th Artillery Brigade at Vincennes, whence he moved to the Ministry of War as Director of Engineers. Promoted general of division in 1905, he remained at the Ministry of War for another year, when he was given command of the 6th Infantry Division, and later of the 2nd Army Corps at Amiens.

In 1910, while holding this post, he was nominated to the Conseil Supérieur de la Guerre, whose members are the official advisers of the Minister in peace and the higher commanders designate in case of war. Joffre's prospective war appointment was that of head of the lines of communication, a post for which his previous career and technical knowledge clearly fitted him. Fate, however, intervened to cast him for a very different rôle, and one for which his qualifications outwardly seemed to be that he had none. He had come to fifty-eight years of age with hardly any experience in command of troops and no higher study of war. He was suddenly to be raised to chief of a general staff which had only one rival in its intensive if not extensive — research into the conduct of large-scale operations of war. His equipment was the experience of a single little colonial

expedition in early life and a technical knowledge of fortification and railway construction. If he had been able to bring the minds of this staff down out of the clouds, from their philosophical contemplation of the offensive spirit, to the solid groundwork of material conditions, the surprising experiment might have been justified. But in fact he proved merely a solid shield behind which subtler brains could direct French military policy on the path to a crevasse which they had not perceived

- because they were too absorbed in military occultism to watch the ground over which their steps were taking them.

II

How did this astonishing appointment come about? Through a military revolt, none the less powerful because it was waged by tongues instead of arms. It found its leader and prophet in Colonel Grandmaison, chief of the Operations branch of the General Staff. In the existing plan of campaign in case of war against Germany the French Army was distributed in a strategic formation in depth, roughly diamondshaped, which could be manœuvred 'against the enemy according to the line of invasion that he took. Its strategy was thus of an offensive-defensive nature, letting the enemy make the first move and then, through the elasticity of the French dispositions, concentrating a powerful mass of manœuvre for a counteroffensive against his advance. But to Colonel Grandmaison this plan was contrary to the French spirit and constituted 'an almost complete atrophy of the idea of the offensive.' Instead of waiting for the enemy to disclose his hand, it is the quickness with which we engage the enemy that guarantees us against surprise, and the power of the attack which secures us against the enemy's manœuvres.' Grandmaison

summed up his theory by saying, 'We must not recoil before this principle, of which only the form seems paradoxical: in the offensive, imprudence is the best of safeguards.' The conclusion was that, whatever the rôle of a force, there was only one mode of action-attack, which meant a headlong assault.

This theory certainly simplified the rôle of the leader, for directly an enemy was sighted he had merely to give the order 'Forward!' As General Boucher has told us, if on manœuvres any officer did not thus charge like a bull with lowered head, he was thought to be lacking in 'nerve.' The very simplicity of this theory combined with its appeal to the French temperament an implicit tribute to the irresistible spirit of Frenchmen - to capture the imagination of the army. In the young who would have to stake their own lives the folly was at least tempered with a certain superb audacity, but in generals responsible for others' lives it was wholly culpable, and the only excuse is that they were afraid of being thought to be failing in nerve through increasing years.

General Michel, Vice President of the Conseil Supérieur de la Guerre, and therefore commander in chief designate, almost alone stood out against the tide, but under the existing system his prospective office did not give him power to control the doctrine of the General Staff. This dissociation of those who formed the doctrine — and the plan - in peace from the man who would have to carry it out in war caused a military crisis. As Michel was in a minority of one, the 'Young Turks' carried the day, for, dominating the General Staff, they were firmly entrenched in the Ministry of War, where the political chief was a bird of passage, and the vice president of the council an outsider.

Michel was relieved of his post. Gallieni, who had opposed his views, had the good taste to decline, on the score of age and an experience mainly colonial, the succession to the man he had helped to displace. Pau was offered the post, but stipulated that he must be given powers which the Government was unwilling to grant, more especially as his clerical opinions made him suspect to politicians ever haunted by the bogey of a military coup d'état. Gallieni then proposed Joffre; the new Minister accepted the suggestion and, addressing an audience of journalists, declared: 'With General Joffre . . . I shall strive to develop the doctrine of the offensive with which our army is beginning to be impregnated.' Joffre was known to be such a good Republican and so devoid of political attachments that the Government did not hesitate to give him the combined functions of Vice President of the Conseil Supérieur and Chief of the General Staff, a duality which endowed him with control in peace and command in war. Heavy in body and intellect, he was obviously no Cassius. (Strange how stoutness inspires the politician with trust.) Screened by his massive frame, and under cover of his all-powerful authority, the 'Young Turks' radically refashioned the official doctrine.

"The French Army, returning to its traditions, no longer knows any other law than the offensive. . . . All attacks are to be pushed to the extreme with the firm resolution to charge the enemy with the bayonet, in order to destroy him. . . . This result can only be obtained at the price of bloody sacrifices. Any other conception ought to be rejected as contrary to the very nature of war.' To this end the training reverted to the Frederician, aiming at a discipline of the muscles, not of the intelligence, sacrificing initiative, in

But the delusive basis of the new tactical doctrine was solid in comparison with the foundations on which the new plan of campaign was built. This, the notorious Plan XVII, was based on a double miscalculation. The initial strength of the German Army was estimated at not more than forty to forty-two infantry divisions-whereas there were seventy-two- and, although the possibility of a German move through Belgium was recognized, the wideness of its sweep was utterly misjudged. The Germans were expected complaisantly to take the difficult route through the Ardennes in order that the French might conveniently smite their communications! Based on the idea of an immediate and general offensive, Plan XVII ordained a main thrust by the First and Second Armies toward the Saar into Lorraine. On their left were the Third Army, opposite Metz, and the Fifth Army, facing the Ardennes, which were either to take up the offensive between Metz and Thionville or - if the Germans came through Luxemburg and Belgium -to strike northeast through the Ardennes at their flank. The Fourth Army was held temporarily in reserve near the centre, ready to combine with either the right or the left thrust, and two groups of reserve divisions were disposed in rear of each flank — relegation to such a passive rôle expressing