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the peak protected his eyes, which resulted in his having to tilt his head slightly to look at one. A bulky, slow-moving, loosely built man, in clothes that would have been the despair of Savile Row, yet unmistakably a soldier.
    But the really outstanding (in more than one sense) physical feature of Joffre was his belly. His appetite was legendary; staff officers often observed him consume a whole chicken at a sitting, and one, explaining his taciturnity at table, remarked that he never left himself time to speak, even had he wanted to. Joffre maintained his appetite to his death bed; in the final coma, when a hospital orderly tried to insert a few drops of milk between his lips, he opened his eyes abruptly, seized the glass and drained it, then went back to sleep. Once when criticising a general he remarked, tapping his own, that the man ‘had no stomach’, and no doubt his own supremacy in this respect helped make him additionally acceptable to democratic politicians suspicious of the Cassius-type.
    Joffre was a true viscerotonic, and this was the source of his principal strengths and weaknesses. He thought from his belly rather than with his mind, with the intuitive shrewdness of a peasant. Evenone of his most loyal associates, and biographer, General Desmazes, comments on his extraordinary lack of intellectualism. Before the war he read little on military theory; afterwards he read not one of the books on the war in which he had played so large a rôle. He was totally lacking in curiosity and imagination. Haig remarked of him, patronisingly: ‘the poor man cannot argue, nor can he easily read a map’. In at least two respects, however, Joffre closely resembled Haig. One was his reserve. (Indeed, it is a mystery how together they ever communicated at all.) But where with Haig this was due to inarticulateness, with Joffre it was more often than not that there was simply nothing in his mind. A Headquarters visited by Joffre, hoping for some vital guidance from him, was generally left still hoping when the great man departed. There was the famous episode of the gunner colonel, who had come to the Generalissimo with a grave problem; after listening for a while, Joffre dismissed him with a pat on the shoulder and a laconic ‘You always loved your guns; that’s excellent.’ Joffre turned this taciturnity to good advantage when assaulted by politicians; like a hedgehog, he ‘rolled himself into a ball’, and his assailants went away, baffled.
    Above all, Joffre’s comfortable frame and healthy appetite provided him with utterly unshakeable nerves and an almost inhuman calm. At Chantilly he lived a life of strictest routine. Nothing, certainly not a national disaster, was allowed to interfere with it. In the morning (not early), the duty officer briefed Joffre on the events of the night. At 11.00 hours, the Major-General presented orders for his signature; 12.00 hours, lunch, any delay in which incurred Joffre’s quiet but terrible rage. Afterwards Joffre, accompanied later by Castelnau (on his appointment as Joffre’s Chief of Staff), would go for a walk in the Forest of Chantilly, hands clasped behind his back, his left leg dragging a little. On reaching one particular bench, they would sit down; Castelnau meditating, Joffre dozing. Later in the afternoon, Joffre would receive visitors; at 1700 hours, the Major-General reappeared with the afternoon’s orders; 1900 hours, dinner, and immediately afterwards the Generalissimo retired to bed. He slept the sound, guileless sleep of a child and, like Montgomery, gave strict orders that on no account, repeat on no account, was he to be disturbed. Joffre loathed the telephone because it was the one thing that could upset the rhythm of his work; even at the crisis of the Marne he had refused to have the President put through to him. Day and night Joffre’s tranquillity was guarded over by two watch-dog orderly officers. One was the devoted Thouzelier, or as he was usually