Joffre

If you can keep your head when all about you   

    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,   

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

    But make allowance for their doubting too;   

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;   

    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;   

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

    And treat those two impostors just the same;   

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

    And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

    To serve your turn long after they are gone,   

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,   

    Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

    If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,   

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,   

    And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

"If", by Rudyard Kipling

There is usually a moment around 3 a.m., when I find myself composing this blog in my head, which certainly makes things easier when I plop down in front of the keyboard as the sun is rising later. This time around my plan had been to write something pedagogical (for me, at least) about applying mediation principles to the political issues now vexing this country. Then I read the headlines on Drudge, gave up, and started thinking about the post-election litigation and the application of Rule 11, which provides for sanctions against lawyers who should know better than to file court papers with no legal or factual basis, for an improper purpose. Nope--too political. Not that it's stopped me before, of course.

Instead, I find myself thinking about the meaning of leadership in crisis and a general whose sublime moment as his world was disintegrating around him goes underappreciated now.

Joseph Joffre's career as a combat officer wasn't much. He served in an artillery battery in the disaster of the Franco-Prussian War, a debacle that haunted those of his generation who led the French military in the decades that followed. He spent most of his time as a military engineer in the colonies, before being selected to lead the French Army in 1911. He was supposed to move on, and maybe retire, around the time the German Army came crashing through Belgium and the Ardennes in August of 1914.

Things did not go well for the French in those first days of the Great War, and Joffre had a lot to do with this misfortune. He had been an author of Plan XVII, the French general staff's brainchild that was meant to rely on French "cran", or guts, by sending waves of infantry in bright red pants (le pantalone rouge) in massive frontal attacks against German positions in the Alsace. The stain of 1870 would finally be erased.

This was not a great idea in the age of the machine gun. The French were thrown back, at times losing tens of thousands of troops in a single day.

And yet, Joffre is remembered as a savior of France.

But he didn't actually look like that, not at all. In fact, his photos give a hint not only that there's no way they could find a horse that would've carried him, but also, in a most unlikely way, as to how he was the man of the hour in those dark first days of the war.

That's our war hero on the left. And yes, he was quite the gourmand, and absolutely massive by the standards of the day.

As the Battle of the Frontiers turned into a dumpster fire, on the French left the Germans swept across the coastal plain through Belgium in the massive counterclockwise wheeling movement that was the linchpin of the Schlieffen Plan. The idea was that the Germans, led by General von Kluck, would drive west and above Paris, them sweep south and envelope the City of Light from the northwest, ending the war in the west before the French could organize their resistance. And in those first few weeks it looked like they would pull it off. The Germans stunned the world by brushing aside the French and the British Expeditionary Force in their path, and it seemed nothing could stop them. It was 1870 all over again, or more accurately an adumbration of the summer of 1940.

So, how did our hero react to this rapidly unfolding disaster? If one believes Barbara Tuchman's account in the Guns of August, Joffre sat under a big tree in the afternoon sun, tunic unbuttoned, studying maps with his staff but then stopping every so often for a glass of wine and a fine meal. The younger officers scurried around the grounds and in and out of the headquarters building behind him, bringing updated maps and news that sounded almost entirely of retreat.

But Joffre mostly just sat there, preternaturally calm, stroking his chin, sipping a little Bordeaux, taking it in. After a while his sanguine air descended over his panicking subordinates. If the old man (he was 63 at the time) is this unperturbed by the whole situation, why should we be in a frenzy?

They gathered around the map with each new development, the rotund general in the middle, studying, waiting for an opportunity, a mistake by the vaunted German general staff.

And in due time, the mistake materialized. Von Kluck started his wheel movement too early, way too early, and exposed his right flank dangling just to the east of Paris when it should have been miles to the west. Worse yet for the Bosch, a gap had formed in the German lines stretching east to west, directly in front of the French forces who were gathering for a last ditch counterattack to save Paris.

Joffre saw his opportunity and pounced. What followed was the Battle of the Marne, a decisive French victory that saved France from repeating the humiliation of the Franco-Prussian War. The Germans retreated and regrouped. Four years of trench warfare would follow.

And that would be the last moment of greatness for General Joffre. His brilliance at the Marne was sandwiched between the disaster of the Battle of Frontiers and his bungled defense of Verdun. He petulantly fired generals who disagreed with his sometimes reckless decisions. He got drunk and mouthed off to his British counterparts. By the time the Germans climbed into the railcar at Versailles to sign the treaty that ended the war, 102 years ago tomorrow, Joffre's career leading men in battle was long over.

We tend to undervalue those isolated moments of courage or of brilliance when we look at the arc of one's life. I imagine before today no one reading this blog except perhaps my stepson had ever heard of Joffre, or the role he played in saving France by not losing his cool as accumulating disaster unwound plans he and the general staff had spent decades developing. At that instant, his country and his troops needed steadiness more than bravado. The rotund Frenchman in the unbuttoned tunic, clearing away the battlefield maps for a little boeuf bourguignon with a nice claret to break up the afternoon, was the man of the hour. And it did not appear to be an act, this stoic epicureanism (there's probably a whole essay buried in that philosophical mash-up), at least in the eyes of the young officers around him who found their nerve because he didn't lose his.

Is that heroism? What does it mean to be a hero, exactly? And does it matter that whatever attribute earns one this label is fleeting, or survives and becomes a liability in another time of crisis?

As I mentioned, tomorrow we remember the Eleventh Hour of the Eleventh Day of the Eleventh Month, the moment the carnage stopped and it was all quiet on the Western Front. And we think of heroes, crawling through barbed wire or holding a hopeless position against overwhelming odds. Gregory Peck defending Porch Chop Hill. But in the midst of all that made-for-Hollywood martial courage, it's worth stopping to ponder the sort of hero who makes his mark on history simply because he abides.