radiance; while the whole noise of timorous and flocking birds, with those also that love the twilight, flutter about, amazed at what she means." Ypres promised to remain for the British and the Canadians the greatest fact thus far in their experience of the war. Australians who came to Flanders in 1917 and in the last days of September rewon Zonnebeke and its surrounding woods, might in their history rank Ypres with Gallipoli. Ypres thus seemed assured of a place in British imperial history above all other battlefields. The solidarity of the empire Germany had sought to destroy was demonstrated at Ypres by sons from all the British lands in the Seven Seas. Beside Hill 304, or Dead Man's Hill, or the Douaumont plateau at Verdun, the Flemish ridges as ridges were nothing. Wytschaete, the highest, was barely 250 feet high, against 1,000 feet for Dead Man's Hill, and 1,300 for Douaumont; yet the Verdun hills were not more bitterly contested, or lost with more regret or recaptured with more satisfaction. With the close of the year, as matters looked in later months when seen from afar, the Allied achievements of 1917 had been wanting in what could be called real success, except as to attrition. Germany had unquestionably suffered more heavily than the French and British—that is, she had lost more of what she could not so well afford to lose, in men, munitions, and the raw material from which munitions are made; but the French were showing weariness, if not a somewhat hopeless state of mind-temporary it might prove to be, but still existing-as to the ability of the Entente ever actually to win the war. The result was a change of ministry, by which on November 11 Georges Clemenceau became Prime Minister. Clemenceau was then approaching the octogenarian's age, and yet this old man "of the battered hat, the baggy clothes, the straggling moustache, of countenance as seamed as the trenched landscape of Picardy," almost as plain as Lincoln, but as hickory of fiber as Andrew Jackson was, in the last great crisis of his country had been called to lead, if not to become the prophet of his people, and to inspire them to sacrifice their bodies in order to keep their souls alive. Clemenceau had long been filled with the wrath that stirs all righteous men when they face a gigantic wrong, and he knew, as none better knew, that on France had been laid the greatest burden. Geography and history had assigned to her the duty of opposing for 2,000 years a barbarism beyond the Rhine that had shown itself intractable even to primary education. Between the Alps, the Rhine and the sea lies a basin in which has occurred from time immemorial a fusion of the empiricism of the north and the idealism of the south; its population engaged in a never-ceasing duel, and always feeling the first blows delivered upon it by organized violence. Not the least eloquent of this man's war speeches to his countrymen contained the following passage: "They are attempting a death-blow against my right to existence, against the virtue of the blood in my race, against my irrepressible need to advance through the course of ages, following the traditions and the principles of a history in which, through my fathers, I have had a part—a history which is not the least noble portion, perhaps, of the deeds of the human race. "They are attempting a death-blow to the most radiant of the hopes that guide men through the perilous mazes of a destiny, the riddle of which is possibly in the fact that it is only what it is, but which is the more precious to me, nevertheless, on account of my attempts to honor it." Once Clemenceau had taken office, and when politics had at times come to the surface to distract him, he was heard to cry out words that echoed through all France and were cabled across the Atlantic: "There must now be no politics for me; I make war." More to Clemenceau probably than to any other man, more to him certainly than to any other Frenchman, was due the elevation, four months later, of Ferdinand Foch to command the armies of all the Entente Allies.20 20 Principal Sources: "Nelson's History of the War" by John Buchan, the "Military Expert" of The New York Times, Hugh B. C. Pollard's "Story of Ypres" (Robert M. McBride & Co.), The Journal of Commerce (New York), Associated Press dispatches; The Evening Post, The World, New York. WHERE CLEMENCEAU LIVED IN NEW YORK In this building on 12th Street, in the neighborhood now known as Greenwich Village, Clemenceau, as a young physician, opened an office in the late sixties. From this house he wrote letters to French newspapers, but went afterward to Stamford, Conn., where he taught in a ladies' seminary and was married |