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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Foch the Man, by Clara E. Laughlin
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Foch the Man
+       A Life of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Armies
+
+
+Author: Clara E. Laughlin
+
+
+
+Release Date: January 14, 2006  [eBook #17511]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FOCH THE MAN***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Al Haines
+
+
+
+Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
+      file which includes the original illustrations.
+      See 17511-h.htm or 17511-h.zip:
+      (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/7/5/1/17511/17511-h/17511-h.htm)
+      or
+      (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/7/5/1/17511/17511-h.zip)
+
+
+
+
+
+FOCH THE MAN
+
+A Life of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Armies
+
+by
+
+CLARA E. LAUGHLIN
+
+With Appreciation by Lieut.-Col. Edouard Requin
+of the French High Commission to the United States
+
+With Illustrations
+
+Revised and Enlarged Edition
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Frontispiece: Marshal Foch at the Peace Conference.]
+
+
+
+
+
+New York -------- Chicago
+Fleming H. Revell Company
+London and Edinburgh
+Copyright, 1918, 1919, by
+Fleming H. Revell Company
+First Printing - November 11, 1918
+Second Printing - November 19, 1918
+Third Printing - November 29, 1918
+Fourth Printing - December 7, 1918
+Fifth Printing - January 9, 1919
+Sixth Printing - May 1, 1919
+
+
+
+
+  DEDICATION
+
+  TO THE MEN WHO HAVE FOUGHT UNDER GENERAL
+  FOCH'S COMMAND.  TO ALL Of THEM, IN ALL
+  GRATITUDE.  BUT IN AN ESPECIAL WAY TO THE MEN
+  OF THE 42D DIVISION, THE SPLENDOR OF
+  WHOSE CONDUCT ON SEPTEMBER 9, 1914,
+  NO PEN WILL EVER BE ABLE
+  ADEQUATELY TO COMMEMORATE.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Hand-written letter from Foch.]
+
+[Illustration: Page 1 of hand-written letter from Lt.-Colonel E. Requin
+to Clara Laughlin.]
+
+[Illustration: Page 2 of hand-written letter from Lt.-Colonel E. Requin
+to Clara Laughlin.]
+
+
+[Transcriber's note: The letter in the second and third illustrations
+is shown translated on the following page.]
+
+
+Dear MADEMOISELLE LAUGHLIN:
+
+I have read with the keenest interest your sketch of the life of
+Marshal Foch.  It is not yet history: we are too close to events to
+write it now, but it is the story of a great leader of men on which I
+felicitate you because of your real understanding of his character.
+
+Christian, Frenchman, soldier, Foch will be held up as an example for
+future generations as much for his high moral standard as for his
+military genius.
+
+It seems that in writing about him the style rises with the noble
+sentiments which inspire him.
+
+Thus in form of presentation as well as in substance you convey
+admirably the great lesson which applies to each one of us from the
+life of Marshal Foch.
+
+Please accept, Mademoiselle, this expression of my respectful regards.
+
+LT.-COLONEL E. REQUIN.
+
+
+
+
+  "THEY SHALL NOT PASS!"
+
+  Three Spirits stood on the mountain peak
+    And gazed on a world of red,--
+  Red with the blood of heroes,
+    The living and the dead;
+  A mighty force of Evil strove
+    With freemen, mass on mass.
+  Three Spirits stood on the mountain peak
+    And cried: "They shall not pass!"
+
+  The Spirits of Love and Sacrifice,
+    The Spirit of Freedom, too,--
+  They called to the men they had dwelt among
+    Of the Old World and the New!
+  And the men came forth at the trumpet call,
+    Yea, every creed and class;
+  And they stood with the Spirits who called to them,
+    And cried: "They shall not pass!"
+
+  Far down the road of the Future Day
+    I see the world of Tomorrow;
+  Men and women at work and play,
+    In the midst of their joy and sorrow.
+  And every night by the red firelight,
+    When the children gather 'round
+  They tell the tale of the men of old.
+  These noble ancestors, grim and bold,
+    Who bravely held their ground.
+  In thrilling accents they often speak
+  Of the Spirits Three on the mountain peak.
+
+        O Freedom, Love and Sacrifice
+          You claimed our men, alas!
+        Yet everlasting peace is theirs
+          Who cried, "They shall not pass!"
+
+  ARTHUR A. PENN.
+
+
+_Reprinted by permission of M. Witmark & Sons, N. Y._
+
+_Publishers of the musical setting to this poem._
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+I. WHERE HE WAS BORN
+
+Stirring traditions and historic scenes which surrounded him in
+childhood.
+
+
+II. BOYHOOD SURROUNDINGS
+
+The horsemarkets at Tarbes.  The school.  Foch at twelve a student of
+Napoleon.
+
+
+III. A YOUNG SOLDIER OF A LOST CAUSE
+
+What Foch suffered in the defeat of France by the Prussians.
+
+
+IV. PARIS AFTER THE GERMANS LEFT
+
+Foch begins his military studies, determined to be ready when France
+should again need defense.
+
+
+V. LEARNING TO BE A ROUGH RIDER
+
+Begins to specialize in cavalry training.  The school at Saumur.
+
+
+VI. FIRST YEARS IN BRITTANY
+
+Seven years at Rennes as artillery captain and always student of war.
+Called to Paris for further training.
+
+
+VII. JOFFRE AND FOCH
+
+Parallels in their careers since their school days together.
+
+
+VIII. THE SUPERIOR SCHOOL OF WAR
+
+Where Foch's great work as teacher prepared hundreds of officers for
+the superb parts they have played in this war.
+
+
+IX. THE GREAT TEACHER
+
+Some of the principles Foch taught.  Why he is not only the greatest
+strategist and tactician of all time, but the ideal leader and
+coordinator of democracy.
+
+
+X. A COLONEL AT FIFTY
+
+Clemenceau's part in giving Foch his opportunity.
+
+
+XI. FORTIFYING FRANCE
+
+How the Superior War Council prepared for the inevitable invasion of
+France.  Foch put in command at Nancy.
+
+
+XII. ON THE EVE OF WAR
+
+True to his belief that "the way to make war is to attack" Foch
+promptly invaded Germany, but was obliged to retire and defend his own
+soil.
+
+
+XIII. THE BATTLE OF LORRAINE
+
+How the brilliant generalship there thwarted the German plan; and how
+Joffre recognized it in reorganizing his army.
+
+
+XIV. THE FIRST VICTORY AT THE MARNE
+
+"The Miracle of the Marne" was Foch.  How he turned defeat to victory.
+
+
+XV. SENT NORTH TO SAVE CHANNEL PORTS
+
+Foch's skill and diplomacy in that crisis show him a great coordinator.
+
+
+XVI. THE SUPREME COMMANDER
+
+How Foch stopped the German drive that nearly separated the French and
+English armies.
+
+
+XVII. BRINGING GERMANY TO ITS KNEES
+
+The completest humiliation ever inflicted on a proud nation.
+
+
+XVIII. DURING THE ARMISTICE--AND AFTER
+
+How Foch carries himself as victor.
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+Marshal Foch at the Peace Conference . . . . . . _Frontispiece_
+
+The room in which Ferdinand Foch was born
+
+The house in Tarbes where Foch was born
+
+Ferdinand Foch as a schoolboy of twelve
+
+The school in Tarbes
+
+Marshall Joffre--General Foch
+
+General Petain--Marshal Haig--General Foch--General Pershing
+
+General Foch--General Pershing
+
+Marshal Foch, Executive head of the allied forces
+
+Ferdinand Foch, Marshal of France
+
+
+
+
+FOREWORD TO REVISED AND ENLARGED EDITION
+
+When the Great War broke out, one military name "led all the rest" in
+world-prominence: Kitchener.  Millions of us were confident that the
+hero of Kartoum would save the world.  It was not so decreed.  Almost
+immediately another name flashed into the ken of every one, until even
+lisping children said _Joffre_ with reverence second only to that
+wherewith they named Omnipotence.  Then the weary years dragged on, and
+so many men were incredibly brave and good that it seemed hard for
+anyone to become pre-eminent.  We began to say that in a war so vast,
+so far-flung, no one man _could_ dominate the scene.
+
+But, after nearly four years of conflict, a name we had heard and seen
+from the first, among many others, began to differentiate itself from
+the rest; and presently the whole wide world was ringing with it: Foch!
+
+He was commanding all the armies of civilization.  Who was he?
+
+Hardly anyone knew.
+
+Up to the very moment when he had compassed the most momentous victory
+in the history of mankind, little was known about him, outside of
+France, beyond the fact that he had been a professor in the Superior
+School of War.
+
+Now and then, as the achievements of his generalship rocked the world,
+someone essayed an account of him.  They said he was a Lorrainer, born
+at Metz; they said his birthday was August 4; they said he was too
+young to serve in the Franco-Prussian war; and they said a great many
+other things of which few happened to be true.
+
+Then, as the summer of 1918 waned, there came to me from France, from
+Intelligence officers of General Foch's staff, authoritative
+information about him.
+
+And also there came those, representing France and her interests in
+this country, who said:
+
+"Won't you put the facts about Foch before your people?"
+
+If I could have fought for France with a sword (or gun) I should have
+been at her service from the first of August, 1914, when I heard her
+tocsin ring, saw her sons march away to fight and die on battlefields
+as familiar to me as my home neighborhood.
+
+Not being permitted that, I have yielded her such service as I could
+with my pen.
+
+And when asked to write, for my countrymen, about General Foch, I felt
+honored in a supreme degree.
+
+In due course we shall have many volumes about him: his life, his
+teachings, his writings, his great deeds will be studied in minutest
+details as long as that civilization endures which he did so much to
+preserve to mankind.
+
+But just now, while all hearts are overflowing with gratefulness to
+him, it may be--I cannot help thinking--as valuable to us to know a
+little about him as it will be for us to know a great deal about him
+later on.
+
+My sources of information are mainly French; and notable among them is
+a work recently published in Paris: "Foch, His Life, His Principles,
+His Work, as a Basis for Faith in Victory," by Rene Puaux, a French
+soldier-author who has served under the supreme commander in a capacity
+which enabled him to study the man as well as the General.
+
+French, English and some few American periodicals have given me bits of
+impression and some information.  French military and other writers
+have also helped.  And noted war correspondents have contributed
+graphic fragments.  The happy fortune which permitted me to know
+France, her history and her people, enabled me to "read into" these
+brief accounts much which does not appear to the reader without that
+acquaintance.  And distinguished Frenchmen, scholars and soldiers,
+including several members of the French High Commission to the United
+States, have helped me greatly; most of them have not only close
+acquaintance with General Foch, having served as staff officers under
+him, but are eminent writers as well, with the highest powers of
+analysis and of expression.
+
+Lieutenant-Colonel Edouard Requin of the French General Staff, who was
+at General Foch's side from the day Foch was made commander of an army,
+has been especially kind to me in this undertaking; I am indebted to
+him, not only for many anecdotes and suggestions, but also for his
+patience in reading my manuscript for verification (or correction) of
+its details and its essential truthfulness.
+
+And I want especially to record my gratefulness to M. Antonin
+Barthelemy, French Consul at Chicago, the extent and quality of whose
+helpfulness, not alone on this but on many occasions, I shall never be
+able to describe.  Through him the Spirit of France has been potent in
+our community.
+
+Thus aided and encouraged, I have done what I could to set before my
+countrymen a sketch of the great, dominant figure of the World War.
+
+The thing about Foch that most impresses us as we come to know him is
+not primarily his greatness as a military genius, but his greatness as
+a spiritual force.
+
+Those identical qualities in him which saved the world in war, will
+serve it no less in peace--if we study them to good purpose.
+
+As a leader of men, his principles need little, if any, adaptation to
+meet the requirements of the re-born world from which, we hope, he has
+banished the sword.
+
+Not to those only who would or who must captain their fellows, but to
+every individual soul fighting alone against weakness and despair and
+other foes, his life-story brings a rising tide of new courage, new
+strength, new faith.
+
+For the young man or woman struggling with the principles of success;
+for the man or woman of middle life, fearful that the time for great
+service has gone by; to the preacher and the teacher and other moulders
+of ideals--to these, and to many more, he speaks at least as
+thrillingly as to the soldier.
+
+This is what I have tried to make clear in my simple sketch here
+offered.
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+WHERE HE WAS BORN
+
+Ferdinand Foch was born at Tarbes on October 2, 1851.
+
+His father, of good old Pyrenean stock and modest fortune, was a
+provincial official whose office corresponded to that of secretary of
+state for one of our commonwealths.  So the family lived in Tarbes, the
+capital of the department called the Upper Pyrenees.
+
+The mother of Ferdinand was Sophie Dupre, born at Argeles, twenty miles
+south of Tarbes, nearer the Spanish border.  Her father had been made a
+chevalier of the empire by Napoleon I for services in the war with
+Spain, and the great Emperor's memory was piously venerated in Sophie
+Dupre's new home as it had been in her old one.  So her first-born son
+may be said to have inherited that passion for Napoleon which has
+characterized his life and played so great a part in making him what he
+is.
+
+There was a little sister in the family which welcomed Ferdinand.  And
+in course of time two other boys came.
+
+[Illustration: The Room in Which Ferdinand Foch was Born.]
+
+[Illustration: The House in Tarbes Where Foch was Born.]
+
+These four children led the ordinary life of happy young folks in
+France.  But there was much in their surroundings that was richly
+colorful, romantic.  Probably they took it all for granted, the way
+children (and many who are not children) take their near and intimate
+world.  But even if they did, it must have had its deep effect upon
+them.
+
+To begin with, there was Tarbes.
+
+Tarbes is a very ancient city.  It is twenty-five miles southeast of
+Pau, where Henry of Navarre made his dramatic entry upon a highly
+dramatic career, and just half that distance northeast of Lourdes,
+whose famous pilgrimages began when Ferdinand Foch was a little boy of
+seven.
+
+He must have heard many soul-stirring tales about little Bernadette,
+the peasant girl to whom the grotto's miraculous qualities were
+revealed by the Virgin, and whose stories were weighed by the Bishop of
+Tarbes before the Catholic Church sponsored them.  The procession of
+sufferers through Tarbes on their way to Lourdes, and the joyful return
+of many, must have been part of the background of Ferdinand Foch's
+young days.
+
+Many important highways converge at Tarbes, which lies in a rich,
+elevated plain on the left bank of the River Adour.
+
+The town now has some 30,000 inhabitants, but when Ferdinand Foch was a
+little boy it had fewer than half that many.
+
+For many centuries of eventful history it has consisted principally of
+one very long street, running east and west over so wide a stretch of
+territory that the town was called Tarbes-the-Long.  Here and there
+this "main street" is crossed by little streets running north and south
+and giving glimpses of mountains, green fields and orchards; and many
+of these are threaded by tiny waterways--small, meandering children of
+the Adour, which take themselves where they will, like the chickens in
+France, and nobody minds having to step over or around them, or
+building his house to humor their vagaries.
+
+Tarbes was a prominent city of Gaul under the Romans.  They, who could
+always be trusted to make the most of anything of the nature of baths,
+seem to have been duly appreciative of the hot springs in which that
+region abounds.
+
+But nothing of stirring importance happened at or near Tarbes until
+after the battle of Poitiers (732), when the Saracens were falling back
+after the terrible defeat dealt them by Charles Martel.
+
+Sullen and vengeful, they were pillaging and destroying as they went,
+and probably none of the communities through which they passed felt
+able to offer resistance to their depredations--until they got to
+Tarbes.  And there a valiant priest named Missolin hastily assembled
+some of the men of the vicinity and gave the infidels a good
+drubbing--killing many and hastening the flight, over the mountains, of
+the rest.
+
+This encounter took place on a plain a little to the south of Tarbes
+which is still called the Heath of the Moors.
+
+When Ferdinand Foch was a little boy, more than eleven hundred years
+after that battle, it was not uncommon for the spade or plowshare of
+some husbandman on the heath to uncover bones of Christian or infidel
+slain in what was probably the last conflict fought on French soil to
+preserve France against the Saracens.  And there may still have been
+living some old, old men or women who could tell Ferdinand stories of
+the 24th of May (anniversary of the battle) as it was observed each
+year until the Revolution of 1789.  At the southern extremity of the
+battlefield there stood for many generations a gigantic equestrian
+statue, of wood, representing the holy warrior, Missolin, rallying his
+flock to rout the unbelievers.  And in the presence of a great
+concourse singing songs of grateful praise to Missolin, his statue was
+crowned with garlands by young maidens wearing the picturesque gala
+dress of that vicinity.
+
+Some forty-odd years after Missolin's victory, Charlemagne went with
+his twelve knights and his great army through Tarbes on his way to
+Spain to fight the Moors.  And when that ill-starred expedition was
+defeated and its warriors bold were fleeing back to France, Roland--so
+the story goes--finding no pass in the Pyrenees where he needed one
+desperately, cleaved one with his sword Durandal.
+
+High up among the clouds (almost 10,000 feet) is that Breach of
+Roland--200 feet wide, 330 feet deep, and 165 feet long.  A good
+slice-out for a single stroke!  And when Roland had cut it, he dashed
+through it and across the chasm, his horse making a clean jump to the
+French side of the mountains.  That no one might ever doubt this, the
+horse thoughtfully left the mark of one iron-shod hoof clearly
+imprinted in the rock just where he cleared it, and where it is still
+shown to the curious and the stout of wind.
+
+It is a pity to remember that, in spite of such prowess of knight and
+devotion of beast.  Roland perished on his flight from Spain.
+
+But, like all brave warriors, he became mightier in death even than he
+had been in life, and furnished an ideal of valor which animated the
+most chivalrous youth of all Europe, throughout many centuries.
+
+With such traditions is the country round about Tarbes impregnated.
+
+It has been suggested that the name Foch (which, by the way, is
+pronounced as if it rhymed with "hush") is derived from Foix--a town
+some sixty miles east of St. Gaudens, near which was the ancestral home
+of the Foch family.
+
+Whatever the relatives of Ferdinand may have thought of this as a
+probability, it is certain that Ferdinand was well nurtured in the
+history of Foix and especially in those phases of it that Froissart
+relates.
+
+Froissart, the genial gossip who first courted the favor of kings and
+princes and then was gently entreated by them so that his writing of
+them might be to their renown, was on his way to Blois when he heard of
+the magnificence of Gaston Phoebus, Count of Foix.  Whereupon the
+chronicler turned him about and jogged on his way to Foix.  Gaston
+Phoebus was not there, but at Orthez--150 miles west and north--and,
+nothing daunted, to Orthez went Froissart, by way of Tarbes, traveling
+in company with a knight named Espaing de Lyon, who was a graphic and
+charmful raconteur thoroughly acquainted with the country through which
+they were journeying.  A fine, "that-reminds-me" gentleman was Espaing,
+and every turn of the road brought to his mind some stirring tale or
+doughty legend.
+
+"Sainte Marie!" Froissart cried.  "How pleasant are your tales, and how
+much do they profit me while you relate them.  They shall all be set
+down in the history I am writing."
+
+So they were!  And of all Froissart's incomparable recitals, none are
+more fascinating than those of the countryside Ferdinand Foch grew up
+in.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+BOYHOOD SURROUNDINGS
+
+The country round about Tarbes has long been famed for its horses of an
+Arabian breed especially suitable for cavalry.
+
+Practically all the farmers of the region raised these fine, fleet
+animals.  There was a great stud-farm on the outskirts of town, and the
+business of breeding mounts for France's soldiers was one of the first
+that little Ferdinand Foch heard a great deal about.
+
+He learned to ride, as a matter of course, when he was very young.  And
+all his life he has been an ardent and intrepid horseman.
+
+A community devoted to the raising of fine saddle horses is all but
+certain to be a community devotedly fond of horse racing.
+
+Love of racing is almost a universal trait in France; and in Tarbes it
+was a feature of the town life in which business went hand-in-hand with
+pleasure.
+
+In an old French book published before Ferdinand Foch was born, I have
+found the following description of the crowds which flocked into Tarbes
+on the days of the horse markets and races:
+
+"On these days all the streets and public squares are flooded with
+streams of curious people come from all corners of the Pyrenees and
+exhibiting in their infinite variety of type and costume all the races
+of the southern provinces and the mountains.
+
+"There one sees the folk of Provence, irascible, hot-headed, of
+vigorous proportions and lusty voice, passionately declaiming about
+something or other, in the midst of small groups of listeners.
+
+"There are men of the Basque province--small, muscular and proud, agile
+of movement and with bodies beautifully trained; plain of speech and
+childlike in deed.
+
+"There are the men of the Bearnais, mostly from towns of size and
+circumstance--educated men, of self-command, tempering the southern
+warmth which burns in their eyes by the calm intelligence born of
+experience in life and also by a natural languor like that of their
+Spanish neighbors.
+
+"There are the old Catalonians, whose features are of savage strength
+under the thick brush of white hair falling about their leather-colored
+faces; the men of Navarre, with braided hair and other evidences of
+primitiveness--vigorous of build and handsome of feature, but withal a
+little subnormal in expression.
+
+"Then, in the midst of all these characteristic types, moving about in
+a pell-mell fashion, making a constantly changing mosaic of vivid hues,
+there are the inhabitants of the innumerable valleys around Tarbes
+itself, each of them with its own peculiarities of costume, manners,
+speech, which make them easily distinguishable one from another."
+
+It was a remarkable crowd for a little boy to wander in.
+
+If Ferdinand Foch had been destined to be a painter or a writer, the
+impressions made upon his childish mind by that medley of strange folk
+might have been passed on to us long ago on brilliant canvas or on
+glowing page.
+
+[Illustration: Ferdinand Foch (center) as a Schoolboy.]
+
+[Illustration: The School in Tarbes Where Foch Prepared for the
+Military Academy.]
+
+But that was not the way it served him.
+
+I want you who are interested to comprehend Ferdinand Foch, to think of
+those old horsefairs and race meets of his Gascony childhood, and the
+crowds of strange types they brought to Tarbes, when we come to the
+great days of his life that began in 1914--the days when his
+comprehension of many types of men, his ability to "get on with" them
+and harmonize them with one another, meant almost as much to the world
+as his military genius.
+
+Tarbes had suffered so much in civil and religious wars, for many
+centuries, that not many of her ancient buildings were left.  The old
+castle, with its associations with the Black Prince and other renowned
+warriors, was a ramshackle prison in Ferdinand Foch's youth.  The old
+palace of the bishops was used as the prefecture, where Ferdinand's
+father had his office.
+
+There were two old churches, much restored and of no great beauty, but
+very dear to the people of Tarbes nevertheless.
+
+Ferdinand and his brothers and sister were very piously reared, and at
+an early age learned to love the church and to seek it for exaltation
+and consolation.
+
+Later on in these chapters we shall see that phase of a little French
+boy's training in its due relation to a marechal of France, directing
+the greatest army the world has ever seen.
+
+The college of Tarbes, where Ferdinand began his school days, was in a
+venerable building over whose portal there was, in Latin, an
+inscription recording the builder's prayer:
+
+"May this house remain standing until the ant has drunk all the waves
+of the sea and the tortoise has crawled round the world."
+
+Ferdinand was a hard student, serious beyond his years, but not
+conspicuous except for his earnestness and diligence.
+
+When he was twelve years old, his fervor for Napoleon led him to read
+Thiers' "History of the Consulate and the Empire."  And about this time
+his professor of mathematics remarked of him that "he has the stuff of
+a polytechnician."
+
+The vacations of the Foch children were passed at the home of their
+paternal grandparents in Valentine, a large village about two miles
+from the town of St. Gaudens in the foothills of the Pyrenees.  There
+they had the country pleasures of children of good circumstances, in a
+big, substantial house and a vicinity rich in tranquil beauty and
+outdoor opportunities.  And there, as in the children's own home at
+Tarbes, one was ashamed not to be a very excellent child, and, so,
+worthy to be descended from a chevalier of the great Napoleon.
+
+In the mid-sixties the family moved from Tarbes to Rodez--almost two
+hundred miles northeast of their old locality in which both parents had
+been born and where their ancestors had long lived.
+
+It was quite an uprooting--due to the father's appointment as paymaster
+of the treasury at Rodez--and took the Foch family into an atmosphere
+very different from that of their old Gascon home, but one which also
+helped to vivify that history which was Ferdinand's passion.
+
+There Ferdinand continued his studies, as also at Saint-Etienne, near
+Lyons, whither the family moved in 1867 when the father was appointed
+tax collector there.
+
+And in 1869 he was sent to Metz, to the Jesuit College of Saint
+Clement, to which students flocked from all parts of Europe.
+
+He had been there a year and had been given, by unanimous vote of his
+fellow students, the grand prize for scholarly qualities, when the
+Franco-Prussian war began.
+
+Immediately Ferdinand Foch enlisted for the duration of the war.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+A YOUNG SOLDIER OF A LOST CAUSE
+
+There is nothing to record of Ferdinand Foch's first soldiering except
+that from the depot of the Fourth Regiment of Infantry, in his home
+city of Saint-Etienne, he was sent to Chalon-sur-Saone, and there was
+discharged in January, 1871, after the capitulation of Paris.
+
+He did not distinguish himself in any way.  He was just one of a
+multitude of youths who rushed to the colors when France called, and
+did what they could in a time of sad confusion, when a weak government
+had paralyzed the effectiveness of the army--of the nation!
+
+Whatever blows Ferdinand Foch struck in 1870 were without weight in
+helping to avert France's catastrophe.  But he was like hundreds of
+thousands of other young Frenchmen similarly powerless in this: In the
+anguish he suffered because of what he could not do to save France from
+humiliation were laid the foundations of all that he has contributed to
+the glory of new France.
+
+At the time when his Fall term should have been beginning at Saint
+Clement's College, Metz was under siege by the German army, and its
+garrison and inhabitants were suffering horribly from hunger and
+disease; Paris was surrounded; the German headquarters were at
+Versailles; and the imperial standards so dear to young Foch because of
+the great Napoleon were forever lowered when the white flag was hoisted
+at Sedan and an Emperor with a whole army passed into captivity.
+
+How much the young soldier-student of the Saone comprehended then of
+the needlessness of the shame and surrender of those inglorious days we
+do not know.  He cannot have been sufficiently versed in military
+understanding to realize how much of the defeat France suffered was due
+to her failure to fight on, at this juncture and that, when a stiffer
+resistance would have turned the course of events.
+
+But if he did not know then, he certainly knew later.  And as soon as
+he got where he could impress his convictions upon other soldiers of
+the new France he began training them in his great maxim: "A battle is
+lost when you admit defeat."
+
+What his devotion to Saint Clement's College was we may know from the
+fact of his return there to resume his interrupted studies under the
+same teachers, but in sadly different circumstances.
+
+He found German troops quartered in parts of the college, and as he
+went to and from his classes the young man who had just laid off the
+uniform of a French soldier was obliged to pass and repass men of the
+victorious army of occupation.
+
+The memory of his shame and suffering on those occasions has never
+faded.  How much France and her allies owe to it we shall never be able
+to estimate.
+
+For the effect on Foch was one of the first acid tests in which were
+revealed the quality of his mind and soul.  Instead of offering himself
+a prey to sullen anger and resentment, or of flaring into fury when one
+time for fury was past and another had not yet come, he used his sorrow
+as a goad to study, and bent his energies to the discovery of why
+France had failed and why Prussia had won.  His analysis of those
+reasons, and his application of what that analysis taught him, is what
+has put him where he is to-day--and _us_ where _we_ are!
+
+From Metz, Foch went to Nancy to take his examination for the
+Polytechnic at Paris.
+
+Just why this should have been deemed necessary I have not seen
+explained.  But it was, like a good many other things of apparent
+inconsequence in this young man's life, destined to leave in him an
+impress which had much to do with what he was to perform.
+
+I have seldom, if ever, studied a life in which events "link up" so
+marvelously and the present is so remarkably an extension of the past.
+
+Nancy had been chosen by General Manteuffel, commander of the First
+German Army Corps, as headquarters, pending the withdrawal of the
+victors on the payment of the last sou in the billion-dollar indemnity
+they exacted of France along with the ceding of Alsace-Lorraine.  (For
+three years France had to endure the insolent victors upon her soil.)
+
+And with the fine feeling and magnanimity in which the German was then
+as now peculiarly gifted General Manteuffel delighted in ordering his
+military bands to play the "Retreat"--to taunt the sad inhabitants with
+this reminder of their army's shame.
+
+Ferdinand Foch listened and thought and wrote his examinations for the
+school of war.
+
+Forty-two years later--in August, 1913--a new commandant came to Nancy
+to take control of the Twentieth Army Corps, whose position there,
+guarding France's Eastern frontier, was considered one of the most
+important--if not _the_ most important--to the safety of the nation.
+
+The first order he gave was one that brought out the full band strength
+of six regiments quartered in the town.  They were to play the "March
+Lorraine" and the "Sambre and Meuse."  They were to fill Nancy with
+these stirring sounds.  The clarion notes carrying these martial airs
+were to reach every cranny of the old town.  It was a veritable tidal
+wave of triumphant sound that he wanted--for it had much to efface.
+
+Nancy will never forget that night!  It was Saturday, the 23d of
+August, 1913.  And the new commandant's name was Ferdinand Foch!
+
+Less than a year later he was fighting to save Nancy, and what lay
+beyond, from the Germans.
+
+And _this_ time there was to be a different story!  Ferdinand Foch was
+foremost of those who assured it.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+PARIS AFTER THE GERMANS LEFT
+
+Ferdinand Foch entered the Polytechnic School at Paris on the 1st of
+November, 1871, just after he had completed his twentieth year.
+
+This school, founded in 1794, is for the technical education of
+military and naval engineers, artillery officers, civil engineers in
+government employ, and telegraphists--not mere operators, of course,
+but telegraph engineers and other specialists in electric
+communication.  It is conducted by a general, on military principles,
+and its students are soldiers on their way to becoming officers.
+
+Its buildings cover a considerable space in the heart of the great
+school quarter of Parts.  The Sorbonne, with its traditions harking
+back to St. Louis (more than six centuries) and its swarming thousands
+of students, is hard by the Polytechnic.  So is the College de France,
+founded by Francis I.  And, indeed, whichever way one turns, there are
+schools, schools, schools--of fine arts and applied arts; of medicine
+in all its branches; of mining and engineering; of war; of theology; of
+languages; of commerce in its higher developments; of pedagogy; and
+what-not.
+
+Nowhere else in the world is there possible to the young student, come
+to advance himself in his chosen field of knowledge, quite such a
+thrill as that which must be his when he matriculates at one of the
+scores of educational institutions in that quarter of Paris to which
+the ardent, aspiring youth of all the western world have been directing
+their eager feet from time immemorial.
+
+Cloistral, scholastic atmosphere, with its grave beauty, as at Oxford
+and Cambridge, he will not find in the Paris Latin Quarter.
+
+Paris does not segregate her students.  Conceiving them to be studying
+for life, she aids them to do it in the midst of life marvelously
+abundant.  They do not go out of the world--so to speak--to learn to
+live and work in the world.  They go, rather, into a life of
+extraordinary variety and fullness, out of which--it is expected--they
+will discover how to choose whatever is most needful to their success
+and well-being.
+
+There is no feeling of being shut in to a term of study.  There is,
+rather, the feeling of being "turned loose" in a place of vast
+opportunity of which one may make as much use as he is able.
+
+To a young man of Ferdinand Foch's naturally serious mind, deeply
+impressed by his country's tragedy, the Latin Quarter of Paris in those
+Fall days of 1871 was a sober place indeed.
+
+Beautiful Paris, that Napoleon III had done so much to make splendid,
+was scarred and seared on every hand by the German bombardment and the
+fury of the communards, who had destroyed nearly two hundred and fifty
+public and other buildings.  The government of France had deserted the
+capital and moved to Versailles--just evacuated by the Germans.
+
+The blight of defeat lay on everything.
+
+In May, preceding Foch's advent, the communards--led by a miserable
+little shoemaker who talked about shooting all the world--took
+possession of the buildings belonging to the Polytechnic, and were
+dislodged only after severe fighting by Marshal MacMahon's Versailles
+troops.
+
+The cannon of the communards, set on the heights of Pere-Lachaise (the
+great city of the dead where the slumber of so many of earth's most
+illustrious imposed no respect upon the "Bolsheviki" of that cataclysm)
+aimed at the Pantheon, shot short and struck the Polytechnic.  One
+shell burst in the midst of an improvised hospital there, gravely
+wounding a nurse.
+
+At last, on May 24, the Polytechnic was taken from the revolutionists
+by assault, and many of the communards were seized.
+
+In the days following, the great recreation court of the school was the
+scene of innumerable executions, as the wretched revolutionists paid
+the penalty of their crimes before the firing squad.  And the students'
+billiard room was turned into a temporary morgue, filled with bodies of
+those who had sought to destroy Paris from within.
+
+The number of Parisians slain in those days after the second siege of
+Paris has been variously estimated at from twenty thousand to
+thirty-six thousand.  And all the while, encamped upon the heights
+round about Paris, were victorious German troops squatting like Semitic
+creditors in Russia, refusing to budge till their account was settled
+to the last farthing of extortion.
+
+The most sacred spot in Paris to young Foch, in all the depression he
+found there, was undoubtedly the great Dome des Invalides, where,
+bathed in an unearthly radiance and surrounded by faded battle flags,
+lies the great porphyry sarcophagus of Napoleon I.
+
+With what bitter reflections must the young man who had been nurtured
+in the adoration of Bonaparte have returned from that majestic tomb to
+the Polytechnic School for Warriors--to which, on the day after his
+coronation as Emperor, Napoleon had given the following motto:
+
+"Science and glory--all for country."
+
+But, also, what must have been the young southerner's thought as he
+lifted his gaze on entering the Polytechnic and read there that
+self-same wish which was inscribed over the door of his first school in
+Tarbes:
+
+"May this house remain standing until the ant has drunk all the waves
+of the sea and the tortoise has crawled round the world."
+
+The edifice in which part of the Polytechnic was housed was the ancient
+College of Navarre, and a Navarrias poet of lang syne had given to the
+Paris school for his countrymen this quaint wish, repeated from the
+inscription he knew at Tarbes.
+
+France had had twelve different governments in fourscore years when
+Ferdinand Foch came to study in that old building which had once been
+the college of Navarre.  Houses of cards rather than houses of
+permanence seemed to characterize her.
+
+Yet she has always had her quota--a larger one, too, than that of any
+other country--of those who look toward far to-morrows and seek to
+build substantially and beautifully for them.
+
+That forward-looking prayer of old Navarre, and recollection of the
+centuries during which it had prevailed against destroying forces, was
+undoubtedly an aid and comfort to the heavy-hearted youth who then and
+there set himself to the study of that art of war wherewith he was to
+serve France.
+
+Among the two hundred and odd fellow-students of Foch at the
+Polytechnic was another young man from the south--almost a neighbor of
+his and his junior by just three months--Jacques Joseph Cesaire Joffre,
+who had entered the school in 1869, interrupted his studies to go to
+war, and resumed them shortly before Ferdinand Foch entered the
+Polytechnic.
+
+Joffre graduated from the Polytechnic on September 21, 1872, and went
+thence to the School of Applied Artillery at Fontainebleau.
+
+Foch left the Polytechnic about six months later, and also went to
+Fontainebleau for the same special training that Joffre was taking.
+
+Both young men were hard students and tremendously in earnest.  Both
+were heavy-hearted for France.  Both hoped the day would come when they
+might serve her and help to restore to her that of which she had been
+despoiled.
+
+But if any one, indulging in the fantastic extravagancies of youth, had
+ventured to forecast, then, even a tithe of what they have been called
+to do for France, he would have been set down as madder than March
+hares know how to be.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+LEARNING TO BE A ROUGH RIDER
+
+When Ferdinand Foch graduated, third in his class, from the artillery
+school at Fontainebleau, instead of seeking to use what influence he
+might have commanded to get an appointment in some garrison where the
+town life or social life was gay for young officers, he asked to be
+sent back to Tarbes.
+
+No one, to my knowledge, has advanced an explanation for this move.
+
+To so earnest and ambitious a student of military art (Foch will not
+permit us to speak of it as "military science") sentimental reasons
+alone would never have been allowed to control so important a choice.
+
+That he always ardently loved the Pyrenean country, we know.  But to a
+young officer of such indomitable purpose as his was, even then, it
+would have been inconceivable that he should elect to spend his first
+years out of school in any other place than that one where he saw the
+maximum opportunity for development.
+
+"Development," mind you--not just "advancement."  For Foch is, and ever
+has been, the kind of man who would most abhor being advanced faster
+than he developed.
+
+He would infinitely rather be prepared for a promotion and fail to get
+it than get a promotion for which he was not thoroughly prepared.
+
+Nor is he the sort of individual who can comfortably deceive himself
+about his fitness.  He sustains himself by no illusions of the variety:
+"If I had so-and-so to do, I'd probably get through as well as
+nine-tenths of commanders would."
+
+He is much more concerned to satisfy himself that his thoroughness is
+as complete as he could possibly have made it, than he is to "get by"
+and satisfy the powers that be!
+
+So we know that it wasn't any mere longing for the scenes of his happy
+childhood which directed his choice of Tarbes garrison when he left the
+enchanting region of Fontainebleau, with its fairy forest, its
+delightful old town, and its many memories of Napoleon.
+
+His mind seems to have been fixed upon a course involving more cavalry
+skill than was his on graduating.  And after two years at Tarbes, with
+much riding of the fine horses of Arabian breed which are the specialty
+of that region, he went to the Cavalry School at Saumur, on the Loire.
+
+King Rene of Anjou, whose chronic poverty does not seem to have
+interfered with his taste for having innumerable castles, had one at
+Saumur, and it still dominates the town and lends it an air of
+medievalism.
+
+Toward the end of the sixteenth century Saumur was one of the chief
+strongholds of Protestantism in France and the seat of a Protestant
+university.
+
+But the revocation of the Edict of Nantes granting tolerance to the
+Huguenots, brought great reverses upon Saumur, whose inhabitants were
+driven into exile.  And thereupon (1685) the town fell into a decline
+which was not arrested until Louis XV, in the latter part of his reign,
+caused this cavalry school to be established there.
+
+It is a large school, with about four hundred soldiers always in
+training as cavalry officers and army riding masters.  And the riding
+exhibitions which used to be given there in the latter part of August
+were brilliant affairs, worth going many miles to see.
+
+There Ferdinand Foch studied cavalry tactics, practiced "rough riding"
+and--by no means least important--learned to know another type of
+Frenchman, the men of old Anjou.
+
+In our own country of magnificent distances and myriad racial strains
+we are apt to think of French people as a single race: "French is
+French."
+
+This is very wide of the truth.  French they all are, in sooth, with an
+intense national unity surpassed nowhere on earth if, indeed, it is
+anywhere equaled.  But almost every one of them is intensely a
+provincial, too, and very "set" in the ways of his own section of
+country--which, usually, has been that of his forbears from time
+immemorial.
+
+In the description I quoted in the second chapter, showing some of the
+types from the vicinity of Tarbes which frequent its horse market, one
+may get some idea of the extraordinary differences in the men of a
+single small region which is bordered by many little "pockets" wherein
+people go on and on, age after age, perpetuating their special traits
+without much admixture of other strains.
+
+Not every part of France has so much variety in such small compass.
+But every province has its distinctive human qualities.  And between
+the Norman and the Gascon, the Breton and the Provencal, the man of
+Picardy and the man of Languedoc, there are greater temperamental
+differences than one can find anywhere else on earth in an equal number
+of square miles--except in some of our American cities.
+
+To the commander of General Foch's type (and as we begin to study his
+principles we shall, I believe, see that they apply to command in civil
+no less than in military life) knowledge of different men's minds and
+the way they work is absolutely fundamental to success.
+
+And his preparation for this mastery was remarkably thorough.
+
+At Saumur he learned not only to direct cavalry operations, but to know
+the Angevin characteristics.
+
+In each school he attended, beginning with Metz, he had close class
+association with men from many provinces, men of many types.  And this
+was valuable to him in preparing him to command under-officers in whom
+a rigorous uniformity of training could not obliterate bred-in-the-bone
+differences.
+
+Many another young officer bent on "getting on" in the army would have
+felt that what he learned among his fellow officers of the provincial
+characteristics was enough.
+
+But not so Ferdinand Foch.
+
+Almost his entire comprehension of war is based upon men and the way
+they act under certain stress--not the way they might be expected to
+act, but the way they actually do act, and the way they can be led to
+act under certain stimulus _of soul_.
+
+For Ferdinand Foch wins victories with men's souls--not just with their
+flesh and blood, nor even with their brains.
+
+And to command men's souls it is necessary to understand them.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+FIRST YEARS IN BRITTANY
+
+Upon leaving the cavalry school at Saumur, in 1878, Ferdinand Foch went,
+with the rank of captain of the Tenth Regiment of Artillery, to Rennes,
+the ancient capital of Brittany and the headquarters of France's tenth
+army corps.
+
+He stayed at Rennes, as an artillery captain, for seven years.
+
+It is not a particularly interesting city from some points of view, but
+it is a very "livable" one, and for a student like Foch it had many
+advantages.  The library is one of the best in provincial France and has
+many valuable manuscripts.  There is also an archaeological museum of
+antiquities found in that vicinity, many of them relating to prehistoric
+warfare.  Some good scientific collections are also treasured there.
+
+What is now known as the University of Rennes was styled merely the
+"college" in the days of Foch's residence there.  But it did
+substantially the same work then as now, and among its faculty Foch
+undoubtedly found many who could give him able aid in his perpetual study
+of the past.
+
+Rennes especially cherishes the memory of Bertrand du Guesclin, the great
+constable of France under King Charles V and the victorious adversary of
+Edward III.  This brilliant warrior, who drove the English, with their
+claims on French sovereignty, out of France, was a native of that
+vicinity.  And we may be sure that whatever special opportunity Rennes
+afforded of studying documents relating to his campaigns was fully
+improved by Captain Foch.
+
+In that time, also, Foch had ample occasion to know the Bretons, who are,
+in some respects, the least French of all French provincials--being much
+more Celtic still than Gallic, although it is a matter of some fifteen
+hundred years since their ancestors, driven out of Britain by the
+Teutonic invasions, came over and settled "Little Britain," or Brittany.
+
+The Bretons maintained their independence of France for a thousand years,
+and only became united with it through the marriage of their last
+sovereign, Duchess Anne, with Charles VIII, in 1491 and--after his
+death--with his successor, Louis XII.
+
+And even to-day, after more than four centuries of political union, the
+people of Brittany are French in name and in spirit rather than in
+speech, customs, or temperament.  Many of them do not speak or understand
+the French language.  Few of them, outside of the cities, have conformed
+appreciably to French customs.  Quaint, sturdy, picturesque folk they
+are--simple, for the most part, superstitious, tenacious of the old,
+suspicious of the new, and governable only by those who understand them.
+
+Foch must have learned, in those seven years, not only to know the
+Bretons, but to like them and their rugged country very well.  For he has
+had, these many years past, his summer home near Morlaix on the north
+coast of Brittany.  It was from there that he was summoned into the great
+war on July 26, 1914.
+
+In 1885 Captain Foch was called to Paris and entered the Superior School
+of War.
+
+This institution, wherein he was destined to play in after years a part
+that profoundly affected the world's destiny, was founded only in 1878 as
+a training school for officers, connected with the military school which
+Louis XV established in 1751 to "educate five hundred young gentlemen in
+all the sciences necessary and useful to an officer."
+
+One of the "young gentlemen" who profited by this instruction was the
+little Corsican whom Ferdinand Foch so ardently venerated.
+
+The building covers an area of twenty-six acres and faces the vast
+Champ-de-Mars, which was laid out about 1770 for the military school's
+use as a field for maneuvers.
+
+This field is eleven hundred yards long and just half that wide.  It
+occupies all the ground between the school buildings and the river.
+
+Across the river is the height called the Trocadero, on which Napoleon
+hoped to build a great palace for the little King of Rome; but whereon,
+many years after he and his son had ceased to need mansions made by
+hands, the French republic built a magnificent palace for the French
+people.  This vast building, with its majestic gardens, was the principal
+feature of the French national exhibition of 1878, which, like its
+predecessor of 1867 and its successors of 1889 and 1900, was held on the
+Champ-de-Mars.
+
+Facing the Trocadero Palace, on the Champ-de-Mars, is the Eiffel Tower
+(nearly a thousand feet high) which was erected for the exposition of
+1889, and has served, since, then-unimaginable purposes during the stress
+and strain of war as a wireless station.  The "Ferris" wheel put up for
+the exposition of 1900 is close by.  And a stone's throw from the
+military school are the Hotel des Invalides, Napoleon's tomb, and the
+magnificent Esplanade des Invalides down which one looks straightway to
+the glinting Seine and over the superb Alexander III bridge toward the
+tree-embowered palaces of arts on the Champs-Elysees.
+
+On the other side of the Hotel des Invalides from that occupied by the
+military school and Champ-de-Mars is the principal diplomatic and
+departmental district of Paris, with many embassies (not ours, however,
+nor the British--which are across the river) and many administrative
+offices of the French nation.
+
+Soldiers and government officials and foreign diplomats dominate the
+quarter--and homes of the old French aristocracy.
+
+The Hotel des Invalides, founded by Louis XIV and designed to
+accommodate, as an old soldiers' home, some seven thousand veterans of
+his unending wars, has latterly served as headquarters for the military
+governor of Paris, and also--principally--as a war museum.
+
+Here are housed collections of priceless worth and transcendent interest.
+The museum of artillery contains ten thousand specimens of weapons and
+armor of all kinds, ancient and modern.  The historical museum, across
+the court of honor, was--in the years when I spent many fascinating hours
+there--extraordinarily rich in personal souvenirs of scores of
+illustrious personages.
+
+What it must be now, after the tragic years of a world war, and what it
+will become as a treasure house for the years to come, is beyond my
+imagination.
+
+It was into this enormously rich atmosphere, pregnant with everything
+that conserves France's most glorious military traditions, that Captain
+Ferdinand Foch was called in 1885 for two years of intensive training and
+study.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+JOFFRE AND FOCH
+
+After quitting the School of War in 1887 (he graduated fourth in his
+class, as he had at Saumur; he was third at Fontainebleau), Ferdinand
+Foch was sent to Montpellier as a probationer for the position of staff
+officer.
+
+He remained at Montpellier for four years--first as a probationer and
+later as a staff officer in the Sixteenth Army Corps, whose headquarters
+are there.
+
+[Illustration: Marshall Joffre, General Foch]
+
+It is a coincidence--without special significance, but interesting--that
+Captain Joseph Joffre had spent several years at the School of
+Engineering in Montpellier; he left there in 1884, after the death of his
+young wife, to bury himself and his grief in Indo-China; so the two men
+did not meet in the southern city.[1]
+
+Joffre returned from Indo-China in 1888, while Foch was at Montpellier,
+and after some time in the military railway service, and a promotion in
+rank (he was captain for thirteen years), received an appointment as
+professor of fortifications at Fontainebleau.
+
+Some persons who claim to have known Joffre at Montpellier have
+manifested surprise at the greatness to which he attained thirty years
+later; he did not impress them as a man of destiny.  That is quite as
+likely to be their fault as his.  And also it is possible that Captain
+Joseph Joffre had not then begun to develop in himself those qualities
+which made him ready for greatness when the opportunity came.
+
+If, however, any one has ever expressed surprise at Ferdinand Foch's
+attainment, I have not heard of it.  He seems always to have impressed
+people with whom he came in contact as a man of tremendous energy,
+application, and thoroughness.
+
+The opportunities for study at Montpellier are excellent, and the region
+is one of extraordinary richness for the lover of history.  The splendor
+of the cities of Transalpine Gaul in this vicinity is attested by remains
+more numerous and in better preservation than Italy affords save in a
+very few places.  And awe-inspiring evidences of medievalism's power
+flank one at every step and turn.  Without doubt, Foch made the most of
+them.
+
+Needless to remark, the commander-in-chief of the allied armies has not
+confided to me what were his favorite excursions during these four years
+at Montpellier.  But I am quite sure that Aigues-Mortes was one of them.
+And I like to think of him, as we know he looked then, pacing those
+battlements and pondering the warfare of those militant ages when this
+vast fortress in the wide salt marshes was one of the most formidable in
+the world.  What fullness of detail there must have been in the mental
+pictures he was able to conjure of St. Louis embarking here on his two
+crusades?  What particularity in his appreciation of those defenses!
+
+The place is, to-day, the very epitome of desolation--much more so than
+if the fortifications were not so perfectly preserved.  For they look as
+if yesterday they might have been bristling with men-at-arms--whereas not
+in centuries has their melancholy majesty served any other purpose than
+that of raising reflections in those to whom the past speaks through her
+monuments.
+
+From Montpellier, Ferdinand Foch returned to Paris, in February, 1891, as
+major on the general army staff.
+
+He and Joffre had now the same rank.  Joffre became lieutenant colonel in
+1894 and colonel in 1897; similar promotions came to Foch in 1896 and
+1903.  He was six years later than Joffre in attaining a colonelcy, and
+exactly that much later in becoming a general.
+
+Neither man had a quick rise but Foch's was (as measurable in grades and
+pay) specially slow.
+
+About the time that Major Joffre went to the Soudan, to superintend the
+building of a railway in the Sahara desert, Major Foch went to Vincennes
+as commander of the mounted group of the Thirteenth Artillery.
+
+Vincennes is on the southeastern skirts of Paris, close by the confluence
+of the Seine and the Marne; about four miles or so from the Bastille,
+which was the city's southeastern gate for three hundred years or
+thereabouts, until the fortified inclosure on that side of the city was
+enlarged under Louis XIV.
+
+The fort of Vincennes was founded in the twelfth century to guard the
+approach to Paris from the Marne valley.  And on account of its pleasant
+situation--close to good hunting and also to their capital--the castle of
+Vincennes was a favorite residence of many early French kings.
+
+It was there that St. Louis is said to have held his famous open-air
+court of justice, which he established so that his subjects might come
+direct to him with their troubles and he, besides settling them, might
+learn at first hand what reforms were needed.
+
+Five Kings of France died there (among them Charles VI, the mad king, and
+Charles IX, haunted by the horrors of the massacre on St. Bartholomew's
+eve), and one King of England, Harry Hotspur.  King Charles V was born
+there.
+
+From the days of Louis XI the castle has been used as a state prison.
+Henry of Navarre was once a prisoner there, and so was the Grand Conde,
+and Diderot, and Mirabeau, and it was there that the young Duc d'Enghien
+was shot by Napoleon's orders and to Napoleon's everlasting regret.
+
+The castle is now (and has been for many years) an arsenal and school of
+musketry, artillery, and other military services.  Before its firing
+squad perish many traitors to France, whose last glimpse of the country
+they have betrayed is in the courtyard of this ancient castle.
+
+The vicinity is very lovely.  The Bois de Vincennes, on the edge of which
+the castle stands, is scarcely inferior to the Bois de Boulogne in charm.
+We used to go out there, not infrequently, for luncheon, which we ate in
+a rustic summerhouse close to the edge of the lake, with many sociable
+ducks and swans bearing us company and clamoring for bits of bread.
+
+It would be hard to imagine anything more idyllic, more sylvan, on the
+edge of a great city--anything more peaceful, restful, anywhere.
+
+Yet the whole locality was, even then, a veritable camp of Mars--forts,
+barracks, fields for maneuvers and for artillery practice, infantry
+butts, rifle ranges, school of explosives; and what not.
+
+France knew her need of protection--and none of us can ever be
+sufficiently grateful that she did!
+
+But she did not obtrude her defensive measures.  She seldom made one
+conscious of her military affairs.
+
+In Germany, for many years before this war, remembrance of the army and
+reverence to the army was exacted of everyone almost at every breath.
+Forever and forever and forever you were being made to bow down before
+the God of War.
+
+In France, on the contrary, it was difficult to think about war--even in
+the very midst of a place like Vincennes--unless you were actually
+engaged in organizing and preparing the country's defenses.
+
+After three years at Vincennes, Ferdinand Foch was recalled to the army
+staff in Paris.  And on the 31st of October, 1895, he was made associate
+professor of military history, strategy, and applied tactics, at the
+Superior School of War.
+
+He had then just entered upon his forty-fifth year; and the thoroughness
+of his training was beginning to make itself felt at military
+headquarters.
+
+
+[1] I have found it interesting to compare the careers of Joffre and Foch
+from the time they were at school together, and I daresay that others
+will like to know what steps forward he was taking who is not the subject
+of these chapters but inseparably bound up with him in many events and
+forever linked with him in glory.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+THE SUPERIOR SCHOOL OF WAR
+
+After a year's service as associate professor of military history,
+strategy, and applied tactics at the Superior School of War in Paris,
+Ferdinand Foch was advanced to head professorship in those branches and
+at the same time he was made lieutenant-colonel.  This was in 1896.  He
+was forty-five years old and had been for exactly a quarter of a century
+a student of the art of warfare.
+
+His old schoolfellow, Joseph Joffre, was then building fortifications in
+northern Madagascar; and his army rank was the same as that of Foch.
+
+It was just twenty years after Foch entered upon his full-fledged
+professorship at the Superior School of War that Marshal Joffre, speaking
+at a dinner assembling the principal leaders of the government and of the
+army, declared that without the Superior School of War the victory of the
+Marne would have been impossible.
+
+All the world knows this now, almost as well as Marshal Joffre knew it
+then.  And all the world knows now as not even Marshal Joffre could have
+known then, how enormous far, far beyond the check of barbarism at the
+first battle of the Marne--is our debt and that of all posterity to the
+Superior School of War and, chiefly, to Ferdinand Foch.
+
+It cannot have been prescience that called him there.  It was just
+Providence, nothing less!
+
+For that was a time when men like Ferdinand Foch (whose whole heart was
+in the army, making it such that nothing like the downfall of 1870 could
+ever again happen to France), were laboring under extreme difficulties.
+The army was unpopular in France.
+
+This was due, partly to the disclosures of the Dreyfus case; partly to a
+wave of internationalism and pacifism; partly to jealousy of the army
+among civil officials.
+
+An unwarranted sense of security was also to blame.  France had worked so
+hard to recoup her fortunes after the disaster of 1870 that her
+people--delighted with their ability as money makers, blinded by the
+glitter of great prosperity--grudged the expanse of keeping up a large
+army, grudged the time that compulsory military training took out of a
+young man's life.  And this preoccupation with success and the arts and
+pleasures of prosperous peace made them incline their ears to the
+apostles of "Brotherhood" and "Federation" and "Arbitration instead of
+Armament."
+
+Little by little legislation went against the army.  The period of
+compulsory service was reduced from three years to two; that cut down the
+size of the army by one-third.  The supreme command of the army was
+vested not in a general, but in a politician--the Minister of War.  The
+generals in the highest commands not only had to yield precedence to the
+prefects of the provinces (like our governors of states), but were
+subject to removal if the prefects did not like their politics and the
+Minister of War wished the support of the prefects.
+
+Even the superior war council of the nation might be politically made up,
+to pay the War Minister's scores rather than to protect the country.
+
+All this can happen to a people lulled by a false sense of security--even
+to a people which has had to defend itself against the savage rapacity of
+its neighbors across the Rhine for two thousand years!
+
+It was against these currents of popular opinion and of government
+opposition that Ferdinand Foch took up his work in the Superior School of
+War--that work which was to make possible the first victory of the Marne,
+to save England from invasion by holding Calais, and to do various other
+things vital to civilization, including the prodigious achievements of
+the days that have since followed.
+
+Foch foresaw that these things would have to be done and, with absolute
+consecration to his task, he set himself not only to train officers for
+France when she should need them, but to inspire them with a unity of
+action which has saved the world.
+
+I have various word-pictures of him as he then appeared to, and
+impressed, his students.
+
+One is by a military writer who uses the pseudonym of "Miles."
+
+"The officers who succeeded one another at the school of war between 1896
+and 1901," he says, referring to the first term of Foch as instructor
+there, "will never forget the impressions made upon them by their
+professor of strategy and of general tactics.  It was this course that
+was looked forward to with the keenest curiosity as the foundational
+instruction given by the school.  It enjoyed the prestige given it by the
+eminent authorities who had held it; and the eighty officers who came to
+the school at each promotion, intensely desirous of developing their
+skill and judgment, were always impatient to see and hear the man who was
+to instruct them in these branches.
+
+"Lieutenant-Colonel Foch did not disappoint their expectations.  Thin,
+elegant, of distinguished bearing, he at once struck the beholder with
+his expression--full of energy, of calm, of rectitude.
+
+"His forehead was high, his nose straight and prominent, his gray-blue
+eyes looked one full in the face.  He spoke without gestures, with an air
+of authority and conviction; his voice serious, harsh, a little
+monotonous; amplifying his phrases to press home in every possible way a
+rigorous reasoning; provoking discussion; always appealing to the logic
+of his hearers; sometimes difficult to follow, because his discourse was
+so rich in ideas; but always holding attention by the penetration of his
+surveys as well as by his tone of sincerity.
+
+"The most profound and the most original of the professors at the school
+of war, which at that time counted in its teaching corps many very
+distinguished minds and brilliant lecturers: such Lieutenant-Colonel Foch
+seemed to his students, all eager from the first to give themselves up to
+the enjoyment of his lessons and the acceptance of his inspiration."
+
+Colonel E. Requin of the French general staff, who has fought under Foch
+in some of the latter's greatest engagements, says:
+
+"Foch has been for forty years the incarnation of the French military
+spirit."  For forty years!  That means ever since he left the cavalry
+school at Saumur and went, as captain of the Tenth regiment of artillery,
+to Rennes.  "Through his teachings and his example," Colonel Requin goes
+on to say, in a 1918 number of the _World's Work_, "he was the moral
+director of the French general staff before becoming the supreme chief of
+the allied armies.  Upon each one of us he has imprinted his strong mark.
+We owe to him in time of peace that unity of doctrine which was our
+strength.  Since the war we owe to him the highest lessons of
+intellectual discipline and moral energy.
+
+"As a professor he applied the method which consists in taking as the
+base of all strategical and tactical instruction the study of history
+completed by the study of military history--that is to say, field
+operations, orders given, actions, results, and criticisms to be made and
+the instructions to be drawn from them.  He also used concrete
+cases--that is to say, problems laid by the director on the map or on the
+actual ground.
+
+"By this intellectual training he accustomed the officers to solving all
+problems, not by giving them ready-made solutions, but by making them
+find the logical solution to each individual case.
+
+"His mind was trained through so many years of study that no war
+situation could disturb him.  In the most difficult ones, he quickly
+pointed out the goal to be reached and the means to employ, and each one
+of us felt that it must be right."
+
+But best of all the things said about Foch in that period of his life, I
+like this, by Charles Dawbarn, in the _Fortnightly Review_:
+
+"Such was"--in spite of many disappointments--"_his fine confidence in
+life, that he communicated to others not his grievances, but his secret
+satisfactions_."
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+THE GREAT TEACHER
+
+Foch made the men who sat under him love their work for the work's sake
+and not for its rewards.  He fired them with an ardor for military art
+which made them feel that in all the world there is nothing so
+fascinating, so worth while, as knowing how to defend one's country
+when she needs defense.
+
+He was able, in peace times when the military spirit was little
+applauded and much decried, to give his students an enthusiasm for
+"preparedness" which flamed as high and burned as pure as that which
+ordinarily is lighted only by a great national rush to arms to save the
+country from ravage.
+
+It was tremendously, incalculably important for France and for all of
+us that Ferdinand Foch was eager and able to impart this enthusiasm for
+military skill.
+
+But also it is immensely important, to-day, when the war is won, and in
+all days and all walks of life, that there be those who can kindle and
+keep alight the enthusiasm of their fellows; who can overlook the
+failure of their own ardor and faithfulness to win its fair reward, and
+convey to others only the alluring glow of their "secret satisfactions."
+
+In the five years, 1895-1901 (his work at the school was interrupted by
+politics in 1901), "many hundreds of officers," as Rene Puaux says,
+"the very elite of the general staffs of our army, followed his
+teaching and were imbued with it; and as they practically all, at the
+beginning of the war, occupied high positions of command, one may
+estimate as he can the profound and far reaching influence of this one
+grand spirit."
+
+Let us try to get some idea of the sort of thing that Foch taught those
+hundreds of French army officers, not only about war but about life.
+
+From all his study, he repeatedly declared, one dominant conviction has
+evolved: Force that is not dominated by spirit is vain force.
+
+Victory, in his belief, goes to those who merit it by the greatest
+strength of will and intelligence.
+
+It was his endeavor, always, to develop in the hundreds of officers who
+were his students, that dual strength in which it seemed to him that
+victory could only lie: moral and intellectual ability to perceive what
+ought to be done, and intellectual and moral ability to do it.
+
+In his mind, it is impossible to be intelligent with the brain alone.
+The Germans do not comprehend this, and therein, to Ferdinand Foch,
+lies the key to all their failures.
+
+He believes that each of us must think with our soul's aid--that is to
+say, with our imagination, our emotions, our aspiration--and employ our
+intelligence to direct our feeling.
+
+And he asks this combination not from higher officers alone, but from
+all their men down to the humblest in the ranks.
+
+He believes in the invincibility of men fighting for a principle dearer
+to them than life--but he knows that ardor without leadership means a
+lost cause; that men must know how to fight for their ideals, their
+principles; but that their officers are charged with the sacred
+responsibility of making the men's ardor and valor count.
+
+At the beginning of his celebrated course of lectures on tactics he
+always admonished his students thus:
+
+"You will be called on later to be the brain of an army.  So I say to
+you to-day: Learn to think."
+
+By this he was far from meaning that officers were to confine thinking
+to themselves, but that they were to teach themselves to think so that
+they might the better hand on intelligence and stimulate their men to
+obey not blindly but comprehendingly.
+
+It was a maxim of Napoleon's, of which Foch is very fond, that "as a
+general rule, the commander-in-chief ought only to indicate the
+direction, determine the ends to be attained; the means of getting
+there ought to be left to the free choice of the mediums of execution,
+without whom success is impossible."
+
+This leaves a great responsibility to officers, but it is the secret of
+that flexibility which makes the French army so effective.
+
+For Foch carries his belief in individual judgment far beyond the
+officers commanding units; he carries it to the privates in the ranks.
+
+An able officer, in Foch's opinion, is one who can take a general
+command to get his men such-and-such a place and accomplish
+such-and-such a thing, and so interpret that command to his men that
+each and every one of them will, while acting in strict obedience to
+orders, use the largest possible amount of personal intelligence in
+accomplishing the thing he was told to do.
+
+It is said that there was probably never before in history a battle
+fought in which every man was a general--so to speak--as at the battle
+of Chateau Thierry, in July, 1918.  That is to say, there was probably
+never before a battle in which so many men comprehended as clearly as
+if they had been generals what it was all about, and acted as if they
+had been generals to attain their objectives.
+
+It was an intelligent democracy, acting under superb leadership that
+vanquished the forces of autocracy.
+
+Foch has worked with a free hand to test the worth of his lifelong
+principles.  And the hundreds of men he trained in those principles
+were ready to carry them out for him.
+
+No wonder his first injunction was: Learn to think!
+
+To him, the leadership of units is not a simple question of
+organization, of careful plans, of strategic and tactical intelligence,
+but a problem involving enormous adaptability.
+
+Battles are not won at headquarters, he contends; they are won in the
+field; and the conditions that may arise in the field cannot be
+foreseen or forestalled--they must be met when they present themselves.
+In large part they are made by the behavior of men in unexpected
+circumstances; therefore, the more a commander knows about human nature
+and its spiritual depressions and exaltations, the better able he is to
+change his plans as new conditions arise.
+
+German power in war, Foch taught his students, lay in the great masses
+of their effective troops and their perfect organization for moving men
+and supplies.  German weakness was in the absolute autocracy of great
+headquarters, building its plans as an architect builds a house and
+unable to modify them if something happens to make a change necessary.
+
+This he deduced from his study of their methods in previous wars,
+especially in that of 1870.
+
+And with this in mind he labored so that when Germany made her next
+assault upon France, France might be equipped with hundreds of officers
+cognizant of Germany's weakness and prepared to turn it to her defeat.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+A COLONEL AT FIFTY
+
+"It was not," Napoleon wrote, "the Roman legions which conquered Gaul,
+but Caesar.  It was not the Carthaginian soldiers who made Rome
+tremble, but Hannibal.  It was not the Macedonian phalanx which
+penetrated India, but Alexander.  It was not the French army which
+reached the Weser and the Inn, but Turenne.  It was not the Prussian
+soldiers who defended their country for seven years against the three
+most formidable powers in Europe; it was Frederick the Great."
+
+And already it has been suggested that historians will write of this
+war: "It was not the allied armies, struggling hopelessly for four
+years, that finally drove the Germans across the Rhine, but Ferdinand
+Foch."
+
+But I am sure that Foch would not wish this said of him in the same
+sense that Napoleon said it of earlier generals.
+
+For Foch has a greater vision of generalship than was possible to any
+commander of long ago.
+
+His strategy is based upon a close study of theirs; for he says that
+though the forms of making war evolve, the directing principles do not
+change, and there is need for every officer to make analyses of
+Xenophon and Caesar and Hannibal as close as those he makes of
+Frederick and Napoleon.
+
+But his conception of military leadership is permeated with the ideals
+of democracy and justice for which he fights.
+
+One of his great lectures to student-officers was that in which he made
+them realize what, besides the route of the Prussians, happened at
+Valmy in September, 1792.
+
+On his big military map of that region (it is on the western edge of
+the Argonne) Foch would show his students how the Prussians, Hessians
+and some Austrian troops; under the Duke of Brunswick, crossed the
+French frontier on August 19 and came swaggering toward Paris,
+braggartly announcing their intentions of "celebrating" in Paris in
+September.
+
+Brunswick and his fellow generals were to banquet with the King of
+Prussia at the Tuileries.  And the soldiers were bent upon the cafes of
+the Palais Royal.
+
+Foch showed his classes how Dumouriez, who had been training his raw
+troops of disorganized France at Valenciennes, dashed with them into
+the Argonne to intercept Brunswick; how this and that happened which I
+will not repeat here because it is merely technical; and then how the
+soldiers of the republic, rallied by the cry, "The country is in
+danger," and thrilled by "The Marseillaise" (written only five months
+before, but already it had changed the beat of nearly every heart in
+France), made such a stand that it not only halted Prussia and her
+allies, but so completely broke their conquering spirit that without
+firing another shot they took themselves off beyond the Rhine.
+
+"We," Foch used to tell his students, "are the successors of the
+revolution and the empire, the inheritors of the art, new-born upon the
+field of Valmy to astonish the old Europe, to surprise in particular
+the Duke of Brunswick, the pupil of Frederick the Great, and to tear
+from Goethe, before the immensity of a fresh horizon, this profound
+cry: 'I tell you, from this place and this day comes a new era in the
+history of the world!'"
+
+It is that new era which Foch typifies--that new era which his
+adversaries, deaf to Goethe's cry and blind to Goethe's vision, have
+not yet realized.
+
+It was "the old Europe" against which Foch fought--the old Europe which
+learned nothing at Valmy and had learned nothing since; the old Europe
+that fought as Frederick the Great fought and that had not yet seen the
+dawn of that new day which our nation and the French nation greeted
+with glad hails much more than a century ago.
+
+In 1792 Prussia measured her military skill and her masses of trained
+men against France's  disorganization--and  overlooked "The
+Marseillaise."
+
+In 1914 she weighed her might against what she knew of the might of
+France--and omitted to weigh certain spiritual differences which she
+could not comprehend, but which she felt at the first battle of the
+Marne, has been feeling ever since, and before which she had to retire,
+beaten but still blind.
+
+In 1918 she estimated the probable force of those "raw recruits" whom
+we were sending overseas--and laughed.  She based her calculations on
+our lack of military tradition, our hastily trained officers, our
+"soft," ease-loving men uneducated in those ideals of blood and iron
+wherein she has reared her youth always.  She overlooked that spiritual
+force which the "new era" develops and which made our men so responsive
+to the command of Foch at Chateau Thierry and later.
+
+"The immensity of a fresh horizon" whereon Goethe saw the new era
+dawning, is still veiled from the vision of his countrymen.  But across
+its roseate reaches unending columns of marching men passed, under the
+leadership of Ferdinand Foch, to liberate the captives the blind brute
+has made and to strike down the strongholds of "old Europe" forever.
+
+For nearly six years Foch taught such principles as these and others
+which I shall recall in connection with great events which they made
+possible later on.
+
+Then came the anti-clerical wave in French politics, and on its crest a
+new commandant to the School of War--a man elevated by the
+anti-clericals and eager to keep his elevation by pleasing those who
+put him there.
+
+Foch adheres devoutly to the religious practices in which he was
+reared, and one of his brothers belongs to the Jesuit order.
+
+These conditions made his continuance at the school under its new head
+impossible.  Whether he resigned because he realized this, or was
+superseded, I do not know.  But he left his post and went as
+lieutenant-colonel to the Twenty-ninth artillery, at Laon.
+
+He was there two years and undoubtedly made a thorough study of the
+country round Laon--which was for more than four years to be the key to
+the German tenure in that part of France.
+
+Ferdinand Foch, with his brilliant knowledge and high ideals of
+soldiering, was now past fifty and not yet a colonel.
+
+Strong though his spirit was, sustained by faith in God and rewarded by
+those "secret satisfactions" which come to the man who loves his work
+and is conscious of having given it his best, he must have had hours,
+days, when he drank deep of the cup of bitterness.  There are, though,
+bitters that shrivel and bitters that tone and invigorate.  Or perhaps
+they are the same and the difference is in us.
+
+At any rate, Foch was not poisoned at the cup of disappointment.
+
+And when the armies under his command encircled the great rock whereon
+Laon is perched high above the surrounding plains I hope Foch was with
+them--in memory of the days when he was "dumped" there, so to speak,
+far away from his sphere of influence at the School of War.
+
+In 1903 he was made colonel and sent to the Thirty-fifth artillery at
+Vannes, in Brittany.
+
+Only two years later he was called to Orleans as chief of staff of the
+Fifth army corps.
+
+On June 20, 1907, he was made Brigadier General and passed to the
+general staff of the French army at Paris.  Soon afterwards, Georges
+Clemenceau became Minister of War, and was seeking a new head for the
+Staff College.  Everyone whose advice he sought said: Foch.  So the
+redoubtable old radical and anti-clerical summoned General Foch.
+
+"I offer you command of the School of War."
+
+"I thank you," Foch replied, "but you are doubtless unaware that one of
+my brothers is a Jesuit."
+
+"I know it very well," was Clemenceau's answer.  "But you make good
+officers, and that is the only thing which counts."
+
+Thus was foreshadowed, in these two great men, that spirit of "all for
+France" which, under the civil leadership of one and the military
+leadership of the other, was to save the country and the world.
+
+In 1911 Foch, at 60, was given command of the Thirteenth division at
+Chaumont, just above the source of the Marne.  On December 17, 1912, he
+was placed at the head of the Eighth Army Corps, at Bourges.  And on
+August 23, 1913, he took command of the Twentieth corps at Nancy.
+
+"When," says Marcel Knecht, "we in Nancy heard that Foch had been
+chosen to command the best troops in France, the Twentieth Army Corps,
+pride of our capital, everybody went wild with enthusiasm."
+
+It is M. Knecht who tells us about the visit to General Foch at Nancy,
+in the spring of 1914, of three British generals whose presence there
+Foch utilized for two purposes:  He showed them what he was doing to
+strengthen Nancy's defensibility, and thereby urged upon them France's
+conviction that an attack by Germany was imminent and unavoidable; and
+he utilized the occasion to show the Lorrainers his warm friendliness
+for England--which Lorraine was inclined still to blame for the death
+of Joan of Arc.  Foch knew that German propagandists were continually
+fanning this resentment against England.  And he made it part of his
+business to overcome that prejudice by showing the honor in which he
+held Great Britain's eminent soldiers.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+FORTIFYING FRANCE WITH GREAT PRINCIPLES
+
+So much has been said about France's unreadiness for the war that it is
+easy for those who do not know what the real situation was to suppose
+that the French were something akin to fools.  For twenty centuries the
+Germans had been swarming over the Rhine in preying, ravaging hordes,
+and France had been beating them back to save her national life.  That
+they would swarm again, more insolent and more rapacious than ever
+after their triumph of 1870, was not to be doubted.  Everyone in France
+who had the slightest knowledge of the spirit that has animated the
+Hohenzollern empire knew its envy of France, its cupidity of France's
+wealth, its hatred of France's attractions for all the world.  Everyone
+who came in contact with the Germans felt the bullet-headed
+belligerence of their attitude which they were never at any pains to
+conceal.
+
+The military men of France knew that Germany had for years been
+preparing for aggression on a large scale.  They knew that she would
+strike when she felt that she was readiest and her opponents of the
+Triple Entente were least ready.
+
+The state of mind of the civilians--busy, prosperous, peace-loving,
+concerned with conversational warfare about a multitude of petty
+internal affairs--is difficult to describe.  But I think it may not be
+impertinent to say of it that it was something like the state of mind
+of a congregation, well fed, comfortable, conscious of many pleasant
+virtues and few corroding sins, before whom a preacher holds up the
+last judgment.  None of them hopes to escape it, none of them can tell
+at what moment he may be called to his account, none of them would wish
+to go in just his present state, and yet none of them does anything
+when he leaves church to put himself more definitely in readiness for
+that great decision which is to determine where he shall spend eternity.
+
+In 1911 it seemed for a brief while that the irruption from the east
+was at hand.  But Germany did not feel quite ready; she "dickered"; and
+things went on seemingly as before.
+
+France seemed to forget.  But she was not so completely abandoned to
+hopefulness as was England--England, who turned her deafest ear to Lord
+Roberts' impassioned pleas for preparedness.
+
+France has an institution called the Superior War Council.  It is the
+supreme organ of military authority and the center of national defense;
+it consists of eleven members supposed to be the ablest commanding
+generals in the nation.  The president of this council is the Minister
+of War; the vice president is known as the generalissimo of the French
+army.
+
+In 1910 General Joseph Joffre became a member of the Superior War
+Council, and in 1911 he became generalissimo.
+
+It was because the Council felt the imminence of war with Germany that
+General Pau--to whom the vice presidency should have gone by right of
+his priority and also of his eminent fitness--patriotically waived the
+honor, because in two years he would be sixty-five and would have to
+retire; he felt that the defense of the country needed a younger man
+who could remain more years in service.  So Joffre was chosen and
+almost immediately he began to justify the choice.
+
+Joffre and his associates of the council not only foresaw the war, but
+they quite clearly previsioned its extent and something of its
+character.  In 1912 Joffre declared "the fighting front will extend
+from four hundred to five hundred miles."  He talked little, but he
+worked prodigiously; and always his insistence was: "We must be
+prepared!"
+
+"With whole nations," he said, "engaged in a mortal combat, disaster is
+certain for those who in time of peace failed to prepare for war."  And
+"To be ready means, to-day, to have mustered in advance all the
+resources of the country, all the intelligence of its citizens, all
+their moral energy, for the purpose of attaining this one aim--victory.
+Getting ready is a duty that devolves not only upon the army, but upon
+all public officials, upon all organizations, upon all societies, upon
+all families, upon all citizens."
+
+This complete readiness was beyond his power to effect.  But in his
+province--the army--he achieved marvels that were almost miracles.
+
+It was France's good fortune (and that of her allies) that in all he
+undertook for the purification and strengthening of the army Joffre
+had, from January, 1912, the complete co-operation of the Minister of
+War, M. Millerand.  Together, these two men, brilliantly supported by
+some of Joffre's colleagues in the Superior Council--notably Pau and
+Castelnau--achieved results that have been pronounced "unparalleled in
+the history of the Third Republic."  They freed the army from the worst
+effects of political influence, made it once more a popular
+institution, and organized it into an effectiveness which needs, now,
+no comment.
+
+When Foch was put in command of the Twentieth army corps at Nancy it
+was in the expectation that Nancy would sustain the first shock of the
+German invasion when it came.  The opinion prevailed that Nancy could
+not be held.  Whether Joffre was of this opinion or not, I do not know.
+If he was, he probably felt that Foch would give it up only after
+harder fighting than any other general.  But Foch believed that Nancy
+could be defended, and so did his immediate superior, the gallant
+General Castelnau, in command of the Second Army of Lorraine.
+
+For nearly a year following upon his appointment to Nancy, Foch labored
+mightily to strengthen Nancy against the attack which was impending.
+He seems never to have doubted that Germany would make her first
+aggression there, only seventeen miles from her own border, and with
+Metz and Strassburg to back the invading army.
+
+But that there were other opinions, even at Nancy, I happen to know.
+For, one day while the war was still new, I chanced in rooting in an
+old bookstall in Paris, to find a book which was written by an officer
+of the Twentieth Corps, in 1911.[1]
+
+The officer was, if I mistake not, of the artillery, and he wrote this
+"forecast" to entertain the members of his mess or battery.
+
+He predicted with amazing accuracy the successive events which happened
+nearly three years later, only he "guessed" the order for mobilization
+in France to fall on August 14, instead of August 1; and all his
+subsequent dates were just about two weeks later than the actualities.
+But he "foresaw" the invasion of Belgium, the resistance at Liege and
+Namur, the fall of Brussels, the invasion of France by her northeastern
+portals.  Almost--at the time I read this book--it might have served as
+history instead of prophecy.  I would that I had it now!  But I clearly
+remember that it located the final battle of the war in Westphalia,
+describing the location exactly.  And that it said the Emperor would
+perish in that downfall of his empire.  And it cited two prophecies
+current in Germany--the long-standing one to the effect that Germany's
+greatest disaster would come to her under an Emperor with a withered
+arm, and one made in Strassburg in 1870, declaring that the new empire
+would dissolve under its third Emperor.
+
+The book was published in January, 1912, if I remember rightly, and was
+almost immediately translated into German.  And I was told that one
+hundred thousand copies were sold in Germany in a very short time, and
+it was made the subject of editorials in nearly every prominent German
+paper.
+
+Probably Foch read it.  He may even have discussed it with the author.
+But he held to the belief that when the attack came it would come
+through Nancy.
+
+He was not, however, expecting it when it came.
+
+
+[1] The reason I cannot give his name, nor quote directly from his
+book, is that a fellow-traveler borrowed the book from me and I have
+never seen it since.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+ON THE EVE OF WAR
+
+In the first days of July, 1914, divisional maneuvers were held as
+usual in Lorraine.  Castelnau and Foch reviewed the troops, known
+throughout the army as "the division of iron."
+
+A young captain, recently assigned from the School of War to a regiment
+of Hussars forming part of the Twentieth army corps, wrote to his
+parents on July 5 an account of the maneuvers in which he had just
+taken part.  He said that "the presence of these two eminent men gave a
+great interest" to the events he described.  And the impression made
+upon him by Foch is so remarkable that his letter is likely to become
+one of the small classics of the war--endlessly reproduced whenever the
+story of Foch is told.
+
+"General Foch," he reminds his parents, "is a former commander of the
+School of War, where he played, on account of his great fitness, a very
+remarkable role.
+
+"He is a man still young [he was almost 63!], slender and supple, and
+rather frail; his powerful head seems like a flower too heavy for a
+stem too slight.
+
+"What first strikes one about him is his clear gaze, penetrating,
+intellectual, but above all and in spite of his tremendous energy,
+luminous.  This light in his eyes spiritualizes a countenance which
+otherwise would be brutal, with its big mustache bristling above a very
+prominent, dominant jaw.
+
+"When he speaks, pointing lessons from the maneuver, he becomes
+animated to the extent of impassionedness, but never expressing himself
+otherwise than with simplicity and purity.
+
+"His speech is sober, direct; he affirms principles, condemns faults,
+appeals to our energies in a brief but comprehensive style.
+
+"He is a priest, who judges, condemns, and instructs in the name of the
+faith which illumines him and to which he has consecrated all the
+powers of his mind and his heart.  General Foch is a prophet whom his
+God transports."
+
+The young officer who wrote thus to his parents was Captain Andre
+Dubarle; and he later laid down his life for his country on the field
+of honor commanded by General Foch.
+
+The letter seems to me as treasurable for what it conveys to us of the
+sort of young man Foch found among his officers and soldiers (there
+were many such!) as for what it tells us of the impression Foch created
+even in those days before men's souls were set on fire with fervor for
+France.
+
+On July 18 General Foch asked and obtained a leave of absence for
+fifteen days, so that he might join the family group gathered at his
+home near Morlaix in Brittany.  His two sons-in-law, Captain Fournier
+and Captain Becourt, also obtained leave.  The former was attached to
+the general army staff at Paris, and was granted seventeen days.  The
+latter was in command of a company of the Twenty-sixth battalion of
+Foot Chasseurs at Pont-a-Mousson.  He was given twenty-five days'
+leave.  The wives and children of both were at Morlaix with Madame Foch.
+
+So little expectation of immediate war had France on July 18 that she
+granted a fortnight's absence to the commander of those troops which
+were expected to bear the first shock of German aggression when it came.
+
+But I happen to know of a French family reunion held at Nancy on July
+14 and the days following, which was incomplete.  One of the women of
+this family was married to a German official at Metz whose job it was
+to be caretaker for three thousand locomotives belonging to the
+imperial government and kept at Metz for "emergencies."  On July 12 (as
+it afterwards transpired) he was ordered to have fires lighted and
+steam got up in those three thousand engines, and to keep them, night
+and day, ready for use at a moment's notice.
+
+Those smoking iron horses in Metz are a small sample of what was going
+on all over Germany while France's frontier-defenders were being given
+permission to visit Brittany.
+
+But for that matter German war-preparations were going on much nearer
+to Nancy than in Metz, while Foch was playing with his grandchildren at
+Morlaix.
+
+Beginning about July 21 and ending about the 25th, twelve thousand
+Germans left Nancy for "points east," and six thousand others left the
+remainder of French Lorraine.
+
+The pretexts they gave were various--vacations, urgent business
+matters, "cures" at German watering places.  They all knew, when they
+left, that Germany was mobilizing for attack upon France.  They had
+known it for some time before they left.
+
+Since the beginning of July they had been working in Nancy to aid the
+German attack.  They had visited the principal buildings, public and
+private, and especially the highest ones, with plans for the
+installation of wireless at the modest price of $34.  "It is so
+interesting," they said, "to get the exact time, every day, from the
+Eiffel Tower!"
+
+They had also some amazingly inexpensive contrivances for heating
+houses, or regulating the heating already installed, or for home
+refrigeration--things which took them into cellars in Nancy--and before
+they left to join their regiments they were exceedingly busy
+demonstrating those things.
+
+They were all gone when General Foch was recalled, on July 26.
+
+On July 30 German under-officers crossed the frontier.
+
+On August 3 Uhlans and infantrymen on motorcycles were shooting and
+pillaging on the French side of the border, although it was not until
+6:45 P.M. that day that Germany declared war on France.
+
+That which France had been unable to suppose even Germany capable of,
+happened: The treaty with Belgium became a scrap of paper and the main
+attack upon France was made by way of the north.
+
+But the expectation that Nancy would be one of the first objectives of
+the Hun-rampant was not without fulfillment.  For the hordes advanced
+in five armies; and the fifth, the German left wing under Crown Prince
+Rupprecht of Bavaria, was ordered to swarm into France south of that of
+the Imperial Crown Prince, spread itself across country behind the
+French armies facing northward, join with Von Kluck's right wing
+somewhere west of Paris, and "bag" the French--armies, capital and
+all--"on or about" September 1.
+
+It was all perfectly practicable--on paper.  The only difficulty was
+that there were so many things the German staff had omitted from its
+careful calculations--omitted, perforce, because it had never guessed
+their existence.  And that spoiled their reckoning.
+
+Foch had, for years, been teaching that fighting demands supreme
+flexibility, adaptability; that war is full of surprises which must be
+met as they arise; that morale, the spiritual force of an army, is
+subject to fluctuations caused by dozens of conditions which cannot be
+foreseen and must be overcome.  The phrase oftenest on his lips was:
+"What have we to do here?"  For, as he conceived warfare, officers and
+even privates must constantly be asking themselves that.  One plan goes
+awry.  Very well! we'll find a better.
+
+But Foch had not trained the German general staff.  They made war
+otherwise.  And well he knew it!  Well he knew what happened to them
+when their "blue prints" would not fit unexpected conditions.
+
+He knew that they expected to take Nancy easily, that they were looking
+for some effort to defend it, but not for a French attack.
+
+They did not know his maxim: "The best means of defense is to attack."
+
+He attacked.  His Twentieth corps fought its way through the center of
+the Bavarian army, into German Lorraine.  Then something happened.
+Just what it was is not clear--but doubtless will be some day.  The
+offensive had to be abandoned and the French troops had to withdraw
+from German soil to defend their own.
+
+How bitter was the disappointment to Foch we may guess but shall never
+know.  But remaking plans in his genius.
+
+"What have we to do here?" he asked himself.
+
+Then, "in the twinkling of an eye," says one military historian,
+"General Foch found the solution to the defense problem wherewith he
+was so suddenly confronted when his offensive failed of support."
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+THE BATTLE OF LORRAINE
+
+What is known as the battle of Lorraine began at the declaration of war
+and lasted till August 26--though the major part of it was fought in
+the last six of those days.
+
+I shall not go into details about it here, except to recall that it was
+in this fighting that General Castelnau lost his oldest son, stricken
+almost at the father's side.
+
+A German military telegram intercepted on August 27 said:
+
+"On no account make known to our armies of the west [that is to say,
+the right wing, in Belgium] the checks sustained by our armies of the
+east [the left wing, in Lorraine]."
+
+So much depended on those plans which Castelnau and Dubail and
+Foch--and very particularly Foch!--had frustrated.
+
+Joffre realized what had been achieved.  And on August 27 he issued the
+following "order of the day":
+
+"The First and Second armies are at this moment giving an example of
+tenacity and of courage which the commander-in-chief is happy to bring
+to the knowledge of the troops under his orders.
+
+"These two armies undertook a general offensive and met with brilliant
+success, until they hurled themselves at a barrier fortified and
+defended by very superior forces.
+
+"After a retreat in perfect order, the two armies resumed the offensive
+and, combining their efforts, retook a great part of the territory they
+had given up.
+
+"The enemy bent before them and his recoil enabled us to establish
+undeniably the very serious losses he had suffered.
+
+"These armies have fought for fourteen days without a moment's respite,
+and with an unshakable confidence in victory as the reward of their
+tenacity.
+
+"The general-in-chief knows that the other armies will be moved to
+follow the example of the First and Second armies."
+
+Now, where were those other armies?  And what were they doing?
+
+France had then eight armies in the field, and was soon to have a
+ninth--commanded by General Foch.
+
+There was the First army, under General Dubail; the Second, under
+General Castelnau; the Third, under General Sarrail; the Fourth, under
+General Langle de Cary; the Fifth, under General Franchet d'Esperey;
+the Sixth, under General Manoury; the Seventh and Eighth armies are not
+mentioned in the Battle of the Marne, and I have not been able to find
+out where they were in service.
+
+The First and Second armies, fighting in Lorraine, we know about.  They
+developed, in that battle, more than one great commander of whose
+abilities Joffre hastened to avail himself.  On the day he issued that
+order commending the First and Second armies, the generalissimo called
+Manoury from the Lorraine front, where he had shown conspicuous
+leadership, and put him in command of the newly-created Sixth army,
+which was to play the leading part in routing Von Kluck.  And on the
+next day (August 28) Joffre called Foch from Lorraine to head the new
+Ninth army, which was to hold the center at the Battle of the Marne and
+deal the smashing, decisive blow.
+
+In two days, while his troops were retreating before an apparently
+irresistible force, Joffre created two new armies, put at the head of
+each a man of magnificent leadership, and intrusted to those two armies
+and their leaders the most vital positions in the great battle he was
+planning.
+
+The German soldiers facing Joffre were acting on general orders printed
+for them eight years before, and under specific orders which had been
+worked out by their high command with the particularity of machine
+specifications.  And all their presumptions were based on the French
+doing what Teutons would do in the same circumstances.  Their
+extra-suspender-button efficiency and preparedness were pitted against
+the flexible genius of a man who could assemble his two "shock" armies
+in two days and put them under the command of men picked not from the
+top of his list of available commanders, but practically from the
+bottom.
+
+The Third, Fourth and Fifth armies of Joffre were those which had
+sustained the terrific onslaught in the north and had been fighting in
+retreat, practically since the beginning.
+
+On August 25 Joffre declared; "We have escaped envelopment"--thanks
+largely to the action in Lorraine, holding back the Bavarians--and,
+clearly seeing that he could not hope for favorable results from a
+great battle fought in the north, he gave the order for retreat which
+meant the abandonment of north-eastern France to the Hunnish hordes.
+
+What anguish that order caused him we shall never know.  He realized to
+the full what the people of that great, prosperous part of France would
+have to suffer.  He was aware what the loss of those resources would
+mean to the French, and also what their gain would mean to the Germans.
+He understood the effect of retreat upon the morale of his men.  And he
+must have been aware of the panic his order would create throughout the
+yet-uninvaded parts of France where no one could know at what point the
+invasion would be checked.  He knew that the nation's faith in him
+would be severely shaken, and that even his army's faith in him would
+be put to a supreme test.
+
+But when a man trains himself to be a commander of men, he trains
+himself to go through, heroically and at any cost, what he believes
+must be done.  To sacrifice one's self comes comparatively easy--given
+compelling circumstances and an obedient soul.  But to sacrifice others
+never becomes easy to a man who respects the rights of others.  And we
+shall never begin to comprehend men like Joffre and Foch until we shake
+ourselves free from any notion we may have that military expediency
+makes it easy for them to order great mental and physical suffering.
+
+General Foch detached himself, on August 29, from his beloved Twentieth
+corps and betook himself to the little village of Machault, about
+twenty miles northeast of Chalons-sur-Marne, where he found assembled
+for his command an army made up of units from other armies.  They were
+all more or less strange to one another and to him.
+
+There was the Ninth army corps, from Tours, made up of Angevins (men
+such as Foch had learned to know when he was at Saumur) and Vendeans
+(the Bretons' south neighbors).  Some of these men had been fighting
+without respite for nine days as they fell back, with the Fourth army,
+from the Belgian border.  With them, since August 22, had been the
+remarkable Moroccan division under General Humbert.
+
+Then there was the Eleventh corps of Bretons and Vendeans, which had
+been through the same terrible retreat.
+
+And--not to enumerate too far--there was that Forty-second division of
+infantry which was destined to play one of the most dramatic,
+thrilling, forever-memorable parts in all warfare.  It had been in the
+Ardennes, and had fallen back, fighting fiercely as it came.
+
+To help him command these weary men whose hearts were heavy with
+forebodings for France, Foch had, as he himself has said, "a general
+staff of five or six officers, gathered in haste to start with, little
+or no working material, our note books and a few maps."
+
+"Those who lived through these tragic hours near him," says Rene Puaux,
+"recall the chief questioning the liaison officers who did not know
+exactly where the different units were, punctuating his questions with:
+'You don't know?  Very well, then go and find out!'; putting together
+in his head the mosaic of which there were still so many pieces
+missing; gradually visioning a plan for bringing them together;
+calculating his effectives; estimating approximately his reserves of
+ammunition; discovering his bases of food supply."
+
+And through all this stress he had the personal anguish of being unable
+to get word of his only son, Germain Foch, or of his son-in-law,
+Captain Becourt, both of whom had been fighting on the Belgian front.
+
+"It was not, however," M. Puaux says, "the time for personal emotions.
+The father effaced himself before the soldier.  There was nothing to be
+thought of save the country."
+
+Thus we see Ferdinand Foch, on the eve of the first Battle of the Marne.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+THE FIRST VICTORY AT THE MARNE
+
+It was Saturday, August 29, 1914, when General Foch went to Machault to
+take command of the various units he was to weld into the Ninth army.
+
+On the Tuesday following (September 1) Joffre was quartered with his
+general staff at the little old town of Bar-sur-Aube, fifty miles south
+of Chalons, and he had then determined the limits to which he would
+permit the retreat of his armies.
+
+If a stand could be taken and an offensive launched further north than
+the Aube River, it should be done; but in no event would the withdrawal
+go beyond the Seine, the Aube and the region north of Bar-le-Duc.
+
+He then placed his armies in the field in the relation in which he
+deemed they would be most effective: the First army, under General
+Dubail, was in the Vosges, and the Second army, under General
+Castelnau, was round about Nancy; the Third army, under General
+Sarrail, east and south of the Argonne in a kind of "elbow," joining
+the Fourth army, under General de Langle de Cary; then the Ninth army,
+under General Foch; then the Fifth army, under General Franchet
+d'Esperey; then the little British army of three corps, under General
+Sir John French; and then the new Sixth army, under General Manoury.
+
+So Foch, on the third day of organizing his new command, received
+orders--at once terrible and immensely flattering--that he was to
+occupy the center of Joffre's battle line and to sustain the onslaught
+of Von Buelow and the famous Prussian Guards.
+
+In the morning of Saturday, September 5, all commanders received from
+Joffre the now historic message:
+
+"The moment has come for the army to advance at all costs and allow
+itself to be slain where it stands rather than give way."
+
+The men to whom this order was relayed by their commanders had,
+five-sixths of them, been ceaselessly engaged, without one single day's
+rest of any kind and much of the time without night rest either, for
+fourteen days, fighting as they fell back, and falling back as they
+fought; the skin was all worn from the soles of their feet, and what
+shoes they had left were stuck to their feet with blood.
+
+"They had marched under a torrid sky," says Louis Madelin, "on
+scorching roads, parched and suffocated with dust.  In reality they
+moved with their hearts rather than with their legs.  According to
+Pierre Lasserre's happy expression, 'Our bodies had beaten a retreat,
+but not our hearts,' . . .  But when, worn out with fatigue, faces
+black with powder, blinded by the chalk of Champagne, almost dying,
+they learned Joffre's order announcing the offensive, then the faces of
+our troops from Paris to Verdun beamed with joy.  They fought with
+tired limbs, and yet no army ever showed such strength, for their
+hearts were filled with faith and hope."
+
+At daybreak on Sunday, the 6th, Foch pitched his headquarters in a
+modern chateau near the little village of Pleurs, which you probably
+will not find on any map except a military one, but it is some six
+miles southeast of Sezanne.  And the front assigned to Foch ran from
+Sezanne to the Camp de Mailly, twenty-five miles east by a little
+south.  The Marne was twenty-five miles to north of him.  Between him
+and its south bank were many towns and villages; the clay pocket (ten
+miles long) called the Marshes of St. Gond, but far from marshy in that
+parching heat; and north of that the forest of Epernay.  His vanguards
+were north of the marshes.  But as that Sunday wore on, the Prussian
+Guards drove Foch's Angevins and Vendeans of the Ninth Corps back and
+occupied the marshes.  The Bretons on the east of Foch's line were
+obliged to dislodge, and the Moroccans and Forty-second Division had to
+yield on Foch's left.
+
+Thus, at nightfall of the first day's fighting, Foch's new army had
+given ground practically everywhere.
+
+The next day the German attack became fiercer, and it seemed that more
+ground must be yielded.
+
+That was the day when Foch made his memorable deduction: "They are
+trying to throw us back with such fury I am sure that means things are
+going badly for them elsewhere and they are seeking compensation."
+
+He was right!  Von Kluck was retiring in a northeasterly direction
+under Manoury's blows; and even Von Buelow (whom Foch faced) was
+withdrawing parts of his troops from the line at Foch's left.
+
+But the attempt to break through the center Foch held, waxed fiercer as
+the Germans realized the strength opposing them on their right.
+
+And on Tuesday, the 8th, Foch was unable to hold--save at certain
+points--and had to move his headquarters eleven miles south, to Plancy.
+
+He had now reached the Aube, beyond which Joffre had decreed that he
+must not retire.  On its north bank his gallant army must, if it could
+not do otherwise, "allow itself to be slain where it stands rather than
+give way."
+
+On that evening he sent Major Requin to the Forty-second Division with
+orders for the morrow.  The most incredible orders!
+
+The enemy had found his point of least resistance--on his right wing.
+He ought to strengthen that wing, but he could not.  All the reserves
+were engaged--and the enemy knew it as well as he did.  And it is a
+fixed principle of war not to withdraw active troops from one part of
+the line to strengthen another.
+
+Only one part of his army had had any success that day: Toward evening
+the Forty-second Division and the Moroccans had made an irresistible
+lunge forward and driven the enemy to the north edge of the marshes.
+
+They were weary--those splendid troops--but they were exalted; they had
+advanced!
+
+Foch believes in the power of the spirit.  He appealed to the
+Forty-second to do an extraordinary thing--to march, weary as it was,
+from left to right of his long line and brace the weak spot.  And to
+cover up the gap their withdrawal would make he asked General Franchet
+d'Esperey to stretch out the front covered by his right wing and
+adjoining Foch's left.
+
+In a letter to me, Lieutenant-Colonel (then Major) Requin gives some
+graphic bits descriptive of that historic errand.  He was a sort of
+liaison officer between General Grossetti, commanding the Forty-second
+Division, and the latter's chief, General Foch, his special duty being
+to carry General Foch's orders to General Grossetti and to keep the
+army chief informed, each evening, how his commands were being carried
+out.
+
+"It was 10 P.M.," he writes, "when I roused General Grossetti from his
+sleep in the straw, in the miserable little shell-riddled farm of
+Chapton.
+
+"The order astonished him; but like a disciplined leader, he started to
+execute it with all the energy of which this legendary soldier was
+capable."
+
+The Forty-second came!  While they were marching to the rescue the
+Prussian Guard in a colossal effort smashed through Foch's right.  They
+were wild with joy.  The French line was pierced.  They at once began
+celebrating, at La Fere-Champenoise.
+
+When this was announced to Foch he telegraphed to general headquarters:
+
+"My center gives way, my right recedes; the situation is excellent.  I
+shall attack."
+
+For this, we must remember, is the man who says: "A battle won is a
+battle in which one is not able to believe one's self vanquished."
+
+He gave the order to attack.  Everything that he cared about in this
+world was at stake.  This desperate maneuver would save it all--or it
+would not.  He gave the order to attack--and then he went for a walk on
+the outskirts of the little village of Plancy.  His companion was one
+of his staff officers, Lieutenant Ferasson of the artillery; and as
+they walked they discussed metallurgy and economics.
+
+There could be nothing more typically French or more diametrically
+opposed to the conceptions of French character which prevailed in other
+countries before this war.  And I hope that if Lieutenant Ferasson
+survives, he will accurately designate (if he can) exactly where Foch
+walked on that Wednesday afternoon, September 9, when, his center
+having given way, his right wing receded, he pronounced the "situation
+excellent," gave the order for attack, and went out to discuss
+metallurgy.
+
+Toward six o'clock on that evening the Germans, celebrating their
+certain victory, saw themselves confronted by a "new" French army
+pouring into the gap they had thought their road to Paris.
+
+The Forty-second Division (more than half dead of fatigue, but their
+eyes blazing with such immensity and intensity of purpose it has been
+said the Germans fled, as before spirits, when they saw these men) had
+not only blocked the roundabout road to Paris; they had broken the
+morale of Von Buelow's crack troops.  Without this brilliant maneuver
+and superb execution the successes of all the other armies must have
+gone for naught.
+
+"To be victorious," said Napoleon, "it is necessary only to be stronger
+than your enemy at a given point and at a given moment."
+
+Foch's preferred way to take advantage of that given point and moment
+is with reserves, which he called the reservoirs of force.  "The art of
+war consists in having them when the enemy has none."
+
+But as there were no reserves available at that first Battle of the
+Marne, he exemplified his other principle that conditions must be met
+as they arise.
+
+"I still seem," says Rene Puaux, "to hear General Foch telling us, one
+evening after dinner at Cassel several months later, about that
+maneuver of September 9.
+
+"He had put matches on the tablecloth"--some red matches which Colonel
+Requin treasures as a souvenir--"and he illustrated with them the
+disposition of the troops engaged.  For the Forty-second Division he
+had only half a match, which he moved here and there with his quick,
+deft fingers as he talked.
+
+"The match representing the Twelfth German Corps (which with the
+Prussian Guard was cutting the gap in Foch's weak spot) was about to
+make a half-turn which would bring it in the rear of the French armies.
+
+"The general, laying down the half-match that was the Forty-second
+Division, made an eloquent gesture with his hand, indicating the move
+that the Forty-second made.
+
+"'It might succeed,' he said, laconically, 'or it might fail.  It
+succeeded.  Those men were exhausted; they won, nevertheless.'"
+
+At nine o'clock the next morning (September 10) the Forty-second
+entered La Fere-Champenoise, where they found officers of the Prussian
+Guard lying, dead drunk, on the floors in the cantonments, surrounded
+by innumerable bottles of stolen champagne wherewith they had been
+celebrating their victory.
+
+Two days later Foch was at Chalons, to direct in person the crossing of
+the Marne by his army in pursuit of the fleeing enemy.
+
+"The cavalry, the artillery, the unending lines of supply wagons," says
+Colonel Requin, "the infantry in two columns on either side of the
+road; all this in close formation descending like a torrent to resume
+its place of battle above the passage on the other side of the river;
+was an unforgettable sight and one that gave all who witnessed it an
+impression of the tremendous energy General Foch has for the command of
+enormous material difficulties."
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+SENT NORTH TO SAVE THE CHANNEL PORTS
+
+Germany's plan to enter France by the east gate, in Lorraine, was
+frustrated with the aid of Foch.
+
+Her plan to smash through the center of the armies on the Marne was
+frustrated, with the very special aid of Foch.
+
+Blocked in both these moves, there was just one other for Germany to
+make, then, on the western front.
+
+And on September 14, Joffre, instead of celebrating the victory on the
+Marne, was deep in plans to forestall an advance upon the Channel
+ports, and began issuing orders for the transfer of his main fighting
+bodies to the north.
+
+All this, of course, had to be done so as to leave no vulnerable spot
+in all that long battle line from Belfort to Calais.
+
+Joffre had clearly foreseen the length of that line.  He predicted it,
+as we have seen, in 1912.  Doubtless he had foreseen also that it would
+be too long a line to direct from one viewpoint, from one general
+headquarters.  What he was too wise to try to foresee before the war
+began was, which one of France's trained fighting men he would call to
+his aid as his second in command.  He waited, and watched, before
+deciding that.
+
+And late in the afternoon of October 4 he telegraphed to General Foch
+at Chalons, telling him that he was appointed first in command under
+the generalissimo, and asking him to leave at once for the north, there
+to coordinate the French, English and Belgian forces that were opposing
+the German march to the sea.
+
+Five weeks previously Foch had been called to the vicinity of Chalons
+to assemble an army just coming into existence.  Now he was called to
+leave Chalons and that army he had come to know--that army of which he
+must have been so very, very proud--and go far away to another task of
+unknown factors.
+
+But in a few hours he had his affairs in order and was ready to leave.
+
+It was ten o'clock that Sunday night when he got into his automobile to
+be whirled from the Marne to the Somme.
+
+At four in the morning he was at Breteuil, where General Castelnau had
+the headquarters of his new army, created on September 20 and
+designated to service on Manoury's left.  General Castelnau had not yet
+heard of the generalissimo's new order.  He was sound asleep when the
+big gray car came to a stop at the door of his headquarters after its
+one-hundred-and-fifty-mile dash through silent towns and dark,
+war-invested country.
+
+Six weeks ago Foch had been his subordinate.  Then they became equals
+in command.  Now the magnificent hero of Lorraine who, before the war,
+had done so much on the Superior War Council to aid Joffre in
+reorganizing the army, rose from his bed in the chill of a fall morning
+not yet dawned, to greet his superior officer.
+
+Some black coffee was heated for them, and for two hours they discussed
+the problems of this new front--Castelnau as eager to serve under Foch,
+for France, as, eight weeks ago, Foch had been to serve under
+Castelnau.  If the sublime unselfishness of such men could have
+communicated itself to some of the minor figures of this war, how much
+more inspiring might be the stories of these civilian commanders!
+
+At six o'clock Foch was under way again--to Amiens, Doullens, St. Pol,
+and then, at nine, to Aubigny, where General Maud'huy had the
+headquarters of his army, holding the line north of Castelnau's.
+
+The difficulties of Foch's new undertaking were not military alone, but
+diplomatic.  He had to take account of the English and Belgian armies,
+each under independent command, and each small.  It was the fitness of
+Foch for the diplomacy needed here, as well as his fitness for the
+great military task of barring the enemy from the Channel ports, that
+determined Joffre in nominating him to the place.
+
+In 1912 General Foch had been the head of the French military
+commission sent to witness the British army maneuvers at Cambridge.
+
+He speaks no English; and not many British generals at that time spoke
+much French.  Yet he somehow managed to get on, with the aid of
+interpreters, so that his relations with the British officers were not
+only cordial, in a superficial social way, but important in their
+results of deepened understanding on his part and of respect on theirs.
+
+His study of what seemed to him the military strength and weakness of
+France's great neighbor and ally was minute and comprehensive.
+
+In his opinion, the soldiers of Britain were excellent; but he was
+fearful that their commanders lacked seasoned skill to direct them
+effectively.  This lack he laid to that apparent inability to believe
+in the imminence of war, which was even more prevalent in Britain, with
+her centuries of inviolate security, than in France.
+
+Two years before the long-suspended sword fell, Foch foresaw clearly
+what would be the difficulties in the way of England when she should
+gird herself for land conflict.  Doubtless he had resolved in his mind
+plans for helping her to meet and to overcome them.
+
+Now he was placed where he could render aid--where he _must_ render aid.
+
+After the Battle of the Marne Sir John French wanted his army moved up
+north, nearer to its channel communications--that is to say, to its
+source of supplies.  And on October 1 Joffre began to facilitate this
+movement.  It was just well under way when Foch arrived in the north.
+
+And on October 9 the gallant Belgian army withdrew from Antwerp and
+made its way to the Yser under cover of French and British troops.
+
+Foch soon saw that an allied offensive would not be possible then; that
+the most they could hope to do was to hold back the invading forces.
+
+Until October 24 he remained at Doullens, twenty miles north of Amiens.
+Then he removed his headquarters to the ancient town of Cassel, about
+eighteen miles west and a little south of Ypres.
+
+From there he was able to reach in a few hours' time any strategic part
+of the north front and from this actual watch-tower (Cassel is on an
+isolated hill more than 500 feet high, and commands views of portions
+of France, Belgium, and even--on a clear day--of the chalky cliffs of
+England; St. Omer, Dunkirk, Ypres, and Ostend are all visible from its
+heights), he was to direct movements affecting the destinies of all
+three nations.
+
+The Belgians, whose sublime stand had thwarted Germany's murderous plan
+against an unready world, were a sad little army when they reached the
+Yser about mid October.  It was not what they had endured that
+contributed most to break their spirit; but what they had been unable
+to prevent.
+
+To those heroic men who had left their beautiful country to the
+arch-fiends of destruction, their parents and wives and children to
+savages who befoul the name of beasts; who no longer had any
+possessions, nor munitions wherewith to make another stand on Belgian
+soil; to them Foch took fresh inspiration with his calm and tremendous
+personality; to them he sent his splendid Forty-second Division to
+swell their ranks so frightfully depleted in Honor's cause; to them he
+gave the suggestion of opening their sluices and drowning out of their
+last little corner of Belgium the enemy they could not otherwise
+dislodge.
+
+This done, the next problem of Foch was to establish relations with Sir
+John French whereby the most cordial and complete cooperation might be
+insured between the British Field Marshal and the French commander of
+the armies in the north.
+
+There are several graphic accounts of interviews which took place
+between these generals.
+
+It was on October 28 that Foch saw the success of the opened sluices
+and the consequent salvation to the heroic Belgians of a corner of
+their own earth whereon to maintain their sovereignty.
+
+On the 30th the English suffered severe reverses in spite of the aid
+lent them by eight battalions of French soldiers and artillery
+reinforcements.  In consequence, they had had to cede considerable
+ground, their line was pierced, and the flank of General Dubois' army,
+adjoining theirs, was menaced.
+
+When word of this disaster reached Foch that night he at once set out
+from Cassel for French's headquarters at Saint Omer.
+
+It was 1 A.M. when he arrived.  Marshal French was asleep.  He was
+waked to receive his visitor.
+
+"Marshal," said Foch, "your line is cracked?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Have you any resources?"
+
+"I have none."
+
+"Then I give you mine; the gap must be stopped at once; if we allow our
+lines to be pierced at a single point we are lost, because of the
+masses our enemy has to pour through it.  I have eight battalions of
+the Thirty-second Division that General Joffre has sent me.  Take them
+and go forward!"
+
+The offer was most gratefully received.  At two o'clock the orders were
+given; the gap was stopped.
+
+Nevertheless, the British despaired of their ability to hold.  Marshal
+French had no reserves, and decided to fall back.
+
+A liaison officer hastened to notify General Dubois that the British
+were about to retire, and General Dubois betook himself in all speed to
+Vlamertinghe, the Belgian headquarters, to notify their commanding
+general.  Foch happened to be with the Belgian general.  And while
+these three were conferring, the liaison officer (Jamet) saw the
+automobile of Marshal French pass by.
+
+Realizing the importance of the British commander's presence at that
+interview, Jamet ventured to stop him and suggest his attendance.
+
+Foch implored French to prevent retreat.  French declared there was
+nothing else for him to do--his men were exhausted, he had no reserves.
+Foch pointed out to him the incalculable consequences of yielding.
+
+"It is necessary to hold in spite of everything!" he cried; "to hold
+until death.  What you propose would mean a catastrophe.  Hold on!
+I'll help you."
+
+And as he talked he wrote his suggestions on a piece of paper he found
+on the table before him, and passed it to the British commander.
+
+Marshal French read what was written, at once added to it, "execute the
+order of General Foch," signed it, and gave it to one of his staff
+officers.
+
+And the Channel ports were saved.
+
+But a greater thing even than that was foreshadowed: Foch had begun to
+demonstrate what was in him before which not only the men of his
+command must bow but the generals of other nations also.
+
+One of the staff officers of General Foch who was closely associated
+with him there in the north in that time of great anxiety, has given us
+a pen-picture of the chief as his aides often saw him then.  Doubtless
+it is a good picture also, except for differences in trifling details,
+of the great commander as he has been on many and many a night since,
+while the destinies of millions hung in the balance of his decisions.
+
+"All is silence.  The little town of Cassel is early asleep.  On the
+rough pavement of the Grande Place, occasional footsteps break the
+stillness.  Now they are those of a staff officer on his way to his
+billet.  Now it is the sentry moving about to warm himself up a bit.
+Then silence again.
+
+"In a little office of the Hotel de Ville, a man is seated at a table.
+His elbows are on a big military map.  A telephone is at his hand.  He
+waits--to hear the results of orders he has given.  And while he waits
+he chews an unlighted cigar and divides his attention between the map
+and the clock--an old Louis XVI timepiece with marble columns, which
+ticks off the minutes almost soundlessly.  How slowly its hands go
+round!  How interminable seems the wait for news!
+
+"Someone knocks, and Colonel Weygand, chief of staff, enters; he has a
+paper in his hand: 'Telephoned from the Ninth army at 1.15 A.M.' . . .
+
+"The general has raised his head; his eyes are shining.
+
+"'Good! good!'
+
+"His plans are working out successfully; the reinforcements he sent for
+have arrived in time.  There is nothing more he can do now; so he will
+go to bed.
+
+"A last look at the map.  Then his eye-glasses, at the end of their
+string, are tucked away in the upper pocket of his coat.  The general
+puts on his black topcoat and his cap.
+
+"In the hall, the gendarme on guard duty gets up, quickly, from the
+chair wherein he is dozing.
+
+"The general salutes him with a brisk gesture, but with it he seems to
+say: 'Sleep on, my good fellow; I'm sorry to have disturbed you.'
+
+"At the foot of the grand staircase, the sentry presents arms; and one
+of the staff officers joins the commander, to accompany him to the
+house of the notary who is extending him hospitality.
+
+"A few hours later, very early in the morning, the general is back
+again at his office."
+
+Thus he was at Cassel, as he directed those operations on the Yser by
+which he checked the German attempt to reach Calais and Dunkirk, and
+revealed to the military world a new strategist of the first order.
+
+By November 15 (six weeks after arriving in the north) Foch had the
+high command of the German army as completely thwarted in its design as
+it had been at the Marne.  It had fallen to Foch to defeat the German
+plan on the east (Lorraine), in the center (Marne) and on the west
+(Ypres).  And the consequences of this frustration that he dealt them
+in Flanders were calculated to be "at least equal to the victory of the
+Marne."  Colonel Requin calls that Battle of the Yser "like a preface
+to the great victory of 1918."
+
+In the spring of 1915 Foch left Cassel and took up headquarters at
+Frevent, between Amiens and Doullens, whence he directed those
+engagements in Artois which demonstrated that though trench warfare was
+not the warfare he had studied and prepared for, and nearly all its
+problems were new, he was master of it not less than he would have been
+of a cavalry warfare.
+
+In the autumn of 1915, Foch moved nearer to Amiens--to the village of
+Dury in the immediate outskirts of the ancient capital of Picardy.  For
+the next chapter in his history was to be the campaign of the Somme
+including the first great offensive of France in the war, which,
+together with the Verdun defense, forced the Germans not only again to
+re-make their calculations, but to withdraw to the Hindenburg line.
+
+On September 30, 1916 (just before his sixty-fifth birthday, on which
+his retirement from active service was due), he was "retained without
+age limit" in the first section of the general staff of the French army.
+
+Honors were beginning to crowd upon him as the debt of France and of
+her allies to his genius began to be realized.  Responsibility vested
+in him became heavier and heavier as he demonstrated his ability to
+bear it.  But always, say those who were nearest him, "a great,
+religious serenity pervaded and illumined his soul."
+
+This is a serenity not of physical calm.  Foch is intensely nervous,
+almost ceaselessly active.  His body is frail, racked with suffering,
+worn down by the enormous strains imposed upon it.  But the
+self-mastery _within_ is always apparent; and it inspires confidence,
+and renewed effort, in all who come in contact with him.
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+THE SUPREME COMMANDER OF THE ALLIED ARMIES
+
+After his position in the first section of the General Staff had been
+made independent of age limits, General Foch was relieved (for the
+autumn and winter at least, during which time no operations of
+importance were expected) of active command of a group of armies; and
+at once began the organization of a bureau devoted to the study of
+great military questions affecting not the French lines alone but those
+of France's allies.
+
+[Illustration: General Petain--Marshal Haig--General Foch--General
+Pershing]
+
+At first the headquarters of this bureau were at Senlis, near Paris.
+Then they were moved close to France's eastern border where Foch and
+his associates studied ways and means of meeting a possible attack
+through Switzerland--if Germany resolved to add that crime to her
+category--or across northern Italy.
+
+So clearly had Foch foreseen what would happen in the Venetian plain,
+that he had his plan of French reinforcement perfected long in advance,
+even to the schedule for dispatching troop trains to the Piave front.
+
+In January, 1917, Marshal Joffre reached the age of retirement (65).
+He was venerated and loved throughout France as few men have ever been.
+Gratitude for his great gifts and great character filled every heart to
+overflowing.  His country had no honor great enough to express its
+sense of his service to France.  Yet it was felt that for the
+operations of the future, the interests of France and of her allies
+would be best furthered with another strategist in command of the
+armies in the field.  Joffre's retirement was therefore effected.
+
+Joffre is an engineer, a master-builder of fortifications, a great
+defense soldier.  But defense would not end the war.  France must look
+to her greatest offensive strategist.
+
+There could be no question who that strategist was.  No one knew it
+quite so well as Marshal Joffre.  And one of the most splendid things
+about that mighty and noble man is the spirit in which he concurred in
+(if, indeed, he did not suggest) the change which meant that another
+should lead the armies of France to victory.
+
+The appointment of General Foch as head of the General Staff was made
+on May 15, 1917, while Marshal Joffre was in the United States to
+confer with our officials regarding our part in the war.  On the same
+date General Philippe Petain, the heroic defender of Verdun, who had
+been Chief of Staff for a month, was appointed Commander-in-Chief of
+all French armies operating on the French front.
+
+General Foch installed himself at the Invalides, and addressed himself
+to the study of all the allies' fronts, the assembling American army,
+and to another task for which he was signally fitted: that of
+coordinating the plans and purposes of the Generalissimo and the
+government.
+
+Wherever General Foch goes, one finds him creating harmony and, through
+harmony, doubling everyone's strength.
+
+He "gets on" with everybody, but not in the way that sort of thing is
+too generally done--not by methods which have come to be called
+diplomatic and which involve a great deal of surface affability, of
+wordy beating about the bush and concealing one's real purposes from
+persons who see his hand and wonder if they are bluffing him about
+theirs.
+
+Foch has no stomach for this sort of thing.  His whole bent is toward
+discovering the right thing to do and then making it so plain to others
+that it is the right thing that they adopt it gladly and cooperate in
+it with ardor.
+
+In council he is still the great teacher striving always not merely to
+make his principles remembered, but to have them shared.
+
+The eminent French painter, Lucien Jonas, who has served in Artois, at
+Verdun, on the Somme and in Italy, and has been appointed painter of
+the Army Museum at Des Invalides, was commissioned to make a picture of
+General Foch holding an allies' council of war at Versailles.
+
+It was, of course, impossible for Jonas to be actually present at a
+council meeting.  But it was arranged that he should sit outside a
+glass door through which he could see all, but hear nothing.
+
+"General Foch," he tells us, "held his auditors in a sort of
+fascination.  One felt that in his explanations there was not a flaw,
+not a hesitancy.  All seemed clear, plain, irresistible."
+
+This power was his in great degree in the years before the war.  But
+now men who listen to him know that his perceptions are not merely
+logical--they are workable.  His performances prove the worth of his
+theories.
+
+On March 21, 1918, Ludendorff launched his great offensive against the
+British army.  The line bent; it cracked.  Amiens seemed doomed; the
+British in France were threatened with severance from their
+allies--with envelopment!
+
+After four days of onrushing disaster a conference was called to meet
+at Doullens--a conference of representatives of the allied governments.
+Something must be done to coordinate the various "fronts," to put them
+under a supreme command.
+
+Foch was hastily empowered to order whatever he deemed advisable to
+prevent the separation of the English and French armies.  It is
+apparent that the wide powers thus hurriedly given to him were bestowed
+with the approval of every member of the conference.  In October, 1918,
+however, in responding to a note of greeting from Lloyd-George on the
+occasion of his sixty-seventh birthday, Foch recognized the weight of
+the British Prime Minister's influence at the conference:
+
+"I am greatly touched," he replied, "by your congratulations and thank
+you sincerely.
+
+"I do not forget that it was to your insistence that I owe the position
+which I occupy to-day."
+
+Foch's new responsibilities were laid upon him on March 26.  By evening
+of the 28th he had the situation so well in hand that he was able to
+hold in check the German onslaught without even employing all the
+troops he had brought up for that purpose.  He had averted what
+threatened to be the worst disaster of the war, and he had reserves in
+readiness against a new and augmented attack.  This in two days!
+
+On the 30th an official announcement told all the world that the
+destinies of the allied armies were by common consent confided to the
+general direction of Ferdinand Foch.
+
+On that same day there was made public, by the French war authorities,
+something which had taken place and had contributed in a degree we are
+not yet able to state, to the investment of Foch with supreme power.
+This was a visit made by General Pershing to Foch.  In the presence of
+Foch, Petain, Clemenceau and Loucheur (Minister of Munitions) Pershing
+made the following declaration:
+
+"I come to tell you that the American people would hold it a great
+honor if our troops were engaged in the present battle.  I ask you this
+in my name and in theirs.  At this moment there is nothing to be
+thought of but combat.  Infantry, artillery, aviation--all that we have
+is yours.  Use them as you will.  There are more to come--as many more
+as shall be needed.  I am here solely to say to you that the American
+people will be proud to be engaged in the greatest and most glorious
+battle in history."
+
+[Illustration: General Foch--General Pershing]
+
+On April 5, a week after his appointment to the supreme command was
+announced, Foch granted an interview to a group of war correspondents.
+Their various accounts differ very slightly.  Instead of quoting any
+one I will make a digest of them.
+
+They found the general installed in a provincial mansion, place not
+named.  The room he occupied was nearly bare; an old table, an
+armchair, a telephone, a huge war map, no profusion of papers, no "air
+of importance."
+
+Foch was writing in a notebook.  He rose, when he had finished his
+entry among those epoch-making memoranda, and received his visitors.
+He had but a few minutes to give, yet he realized the importance of the
+occasion and treated it accordingly.  These men were to send to
+millions of people in the great democracies of France, Britain and
+America their pen pictures of the man just invested with the greatest
+military responsibility any man in the world's history has ever borne.
+Battles must be fought, but also those people had a right to such a
+sense of participation as only their press could give them; it was
+their issue; their attitude toward it was the foundation of their
+nation's morale.  Foch has neither time nor taste for talk about
+himself, but he is no war autocrat; he is, as he constantly reiterates,
+a son of France, defending human liberties.  He might not have much
+time to give journalists, but it is not in him to minimize their place
+in a world where the will of the majority prevails and the press does
+much to shape that will.
+
+His manner on that occasion was calm, unhurried, but very direct, to
+the point.
+
+"Well, gentlemen," said he, "our affairs are not going badly; are they?
+The boche has been halted since March 27.  He has, doubtless,
+encountered some obstacle.  We have stopped him.  Now we shall endeavor
+to do better.  I do not see that there is anything more to say.
+
+"But as to yourselves, keep at your task.  It is a time when everyone
+ought to work steadfastly.  Work with your pens.  We will go on working
+with our arms."
+
+"I regret," wrote Lieutenant d'Entraygues in the Paris _Temps_, "only
+one thing: that all the people of France were not able to see and hear
+this soldier as he spoke to us.  They would know why it is not possible
+to doubt our victory."
+
+It was probably about that time that Major Darnley Stuart-Stephens
+wrote of Foch, for the _English Review_.
+
+"The man who has been consecrated by destiny to the saving from Moloch
+of this globe's civilization, is he who will prove once more that in
+the conflict between the finely tempered sword and the finely tempered
+brain, it is the mental asset that will prevail."
+
+Major Stuart-Stephens had studied the "mental assets" of Ferdinand Foch.
+
+"Now and again at his lectures." he wrote, "I have noticed that
+far-away look of the mystic in his eyes that I remember so well in
+those of that other soldier-saint, Charles Gordon."
+
+It was that spiritual greatness in Foch which everyone felt, on which
+everyone brought into contact with him based his unfaltering faith in
+the outcome.
+
+"We do not know," says an editorial writer in the New York _Evening
+Sun_, "what the judgments of the military critics will be when they
+have carefully studied and sifted the evidence, but to a layman it
+looks as if Foch was not merely a very great general but one of the
+greatest generals of all recorded history . . . as great a general as
+Napoleon or Caesar or Hannibal or Alexander."
+
+But whether they put him, as a military man, on a par with Napoleon, or
+come sapiently to the conclusion that he was no more than a very able
+general fortunate in being in command at the time the Germanic morale
+was breaking, it will never be possible to disprove that he was a
+supreme leader of men in a great war of ideals--an incarnation of all
+those qualities of faith and fervor, of self-mastery and dependence on
+the Divine, of self-realization and with it devotion to the rights and
+progress of others, which are embodied in the Christian democracy for
+whose preservation millions have gladly died.
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+BRINGING GERMANY TO ITS KNEES
+
+Faith in the ability of Foch to lead us all to victory was, however, not
+to endure without its grave tests.
+
+The German drive of March 21 was checked by his co-ordination of Allied
+forces.  But checking the enemy just before he reached the key of the
+Channel ports was not defeating him; preventing him from driving a wedge
+between the British and French armies was only diverting him to another
+point of attack.  He was desperate--that enemy!  He knew that he must win
+a decisive victory soon, or see his own maladies destroy him.
+
+He knew the genius of Foch; he knew the immense increase in strength that
+the Allies had achieved in unifying their command.  He may have
+underestimated the worth in battle of our American fighters; but it is
+scarcely probable that he underestimated the worth, behind the lines, of
+our army of railroad builders, harbor constructors, supply handlers, and
+the like.  He knew that whether we could fight or not, we had money and
+men and were pouring both into France to help win the war.
+
+And he also knew that victory after victory which he had won had not only
+failed to increase his might but had, somehow, weakened him; country
+after country had fallen before his sword or before his
+poison-propaganda--or both!--his plunder was vast, his accessions in
+fighting men available for the Western front were formidable--yet
+something in his vitals was wrong, terribly wrong; he must stop, soon,
+and look to his health, or he would be too far-gone for recovery.  But
+not now! not now!  "They" must be crushed now or never!
+
+So he fought like a maddened beast whose usual cunning has given place to
+frenzied desperation.
+
+Again and again and again he lunged--now here, now there.  And the
+defenders of civilization fell back and back, before him.
+
+Where was that calm, quiet man who had said: "Well, gentlemen, our
+affairs are not going badly; are they?"
+
+"The boche," he had said, "has been halted . . . now we shall endeavor to
+do better."
+
+What had happened?  The boche was _not_ halted!  He was, in fact,
+shelling Paris!
+
+It was in those days that the "soldier-saint," as Major Stuart-Stephens
+has called him, must have had need of all his faith and all his fortitude.
+
+We don't know much, yet, except of a very superficial sort, about those
+days.  We know what happened in them insofar as army movements are
+concerned, and the heartbreaking re-occupation of towns and villages
+where French and American restoration squads were working to make
+habitable those places the Huns had laid waste; and the continued
+shelling of Paris by the "mystery gun"; and the great exodus of civilians
+from the capital as the ravaging hordes drew nearer and always nearer.
+
+These things we know; but not what Foch was thinking--except that he was
+not thinking of defeat.
+
+If there was a true heart in France that ever for a moment doubted the
+outcome of the war, or dreamed of abandoning the conflict before it had
+made the future safe, I have never heard of that one.
+
+Certainly the man who was leading them never doubted.  Nor was it on his
+own skill that his faith was founded.  He knew Who would give his cause
+the victory.
+
+
+In the fifth German drive of 1918 the enemy crossed the Marne!  Paris was
+almost in sight--Paris! where millions of French were celebrating the
+fall of the Bastille and the birth of freedom as if the leering, jeering
+enemies of all freemen were not so close to the gates of the Capital that
+the gleam of their tusks might almost have been seen from the city's
+outermost ramparts.  Certainly the drunken fools within--drunk with their
+deep draughts of liberty--could hear the snarling and snapping of the
+approaching wolves, the baying of Big Bertha, the barking of her smaller
+sisters!  But it would be like those crazy French to dance and sing and
+celebrate the overthrow of autocracy, while an autocracy the like of
+which no French King had ever exercised was on the eve of engulfing them.
+
+So the German General Staff said, sneering, as it laid its plans for the
+final drive on Paris.  They would start that drive on the night of July
+14, while the fools were celebrating, when they were least expecting an
+attack.  Probably most of them would be drunk.  Oh, almost certainly!
+Their resistance would be weak, And for all time thereafter it would make
+an impressive tale for schoolbooks throughout the Pan-Germanized world,
+that democracy was dispatched in her last orgy of exultation.
+
+As clearly as if he were not only present in the councils of German
+Headquarters, but present inside the thick round skulls about the council
+table, this boche attitude and intent was comprehended by the small frail
+man at Mormant, where his Headquarters then were.
+
+On that night of July 14 he began the great offensive which never stopped
+until the whining boche was east of the Rhine!
+
+His Intelligence Department told him that the German drive would probably
+begin at ten minutes past midnight.  They might be quite wrong, but that
+was their guess.  Foch was all-but sure they were not wrong; that it was
+not in German nature to reason other than as I have described.
+
+An hour before midnight the Germans were (doubtless) surprised by some
+lively action of French artillery.  Strange!  But it couldn't mean
+anything, of course!  So the boche came on.  The behavior of the French
+was not quite what he had expected; one thing after another happened that
+was not in his calculations.  But that did not argue aught against the
+calculations!  It was the exasperating habit of the French to do
+unexpected things.  Most annoying!  But not able to affect the outcome,
+of course.
+
+On July 18th they got "more unexpected still"--they and sundry "green"
+troops from the flaccid, fatuous U. S. A.!  Some "hounds of the devil"
+were let loose upon the gray-clad armies of righteousness.  It was
+outrageous the way those sons of Satan fought!  They rushed upon the
+legions of the Lord's anointed as if killing Germans were the noblest
+work a man could be about.
+
+So many things happened that were not down on paper--in the plans of the
+German General Headquarters!  It became distressingly evident that these
+Yanks knew as little, and cared as little, what was expected of them as
+the stupid Britishers or the mercurial French or the suicidal Belgians.
+They didn't know how to fight--they couldn't know--they had never done
+any fighting, and whom had they had to teach them warfare?  They were
+absurd.  They didn't know the simplest rules of war--they didn't know
+enough to surrender when they were surrounded, cut off, outnumbered.
+They fought on!  They didn't know how to fight; but Lord! how they could
+kill Germans.  And then they were such fools that their medical corps
+came out onto the battlefield and when they found a German who wasn't
+dead but was suffering, their doctors bound up his wounds and gave him
+water to quench his raging thirst, and left him for his own comrades to
+carry away and nurse--that, instead of gouging his eyes out with a
+bayonet's end or bashing in his skull with the butt of a gun!  Strange
+people!  They never could become good slaves of Kultur; so the wounded
+Germans whose agonies they had assuaged, rose up on their elbows and shot
+them dead.
+
+
+In six hours the Allies, not only reinforced but recreated by this tide
+of new life, new eagerness, re-took twice as much ground on the
+Soissons-Rheims salient as the Germans had won in six days' desperate
+advance.
+
+When the word to fight came to the men of the American army, it was less
+like a command to them than like a release, a long-desired permission.
+Many, if not most, of them had for nearly four years been straining at
+the leash which held them from the place where their sense of honor told
+them they should be.
+
+[Illustration: Marshal Foch, Executive Head of the Allied Forces]
+
+"They were superb," Marshal Foch has said, paying wholehearted tribute to
+them.  "There is no other word.  Our armies were fatigued by years of
+relentless struggle and the mantle of war lay heavily upon them.  We were
+magnificently comforted by the virility of the Americans.  The youth of
+the United States brought a renewal of the hope that hastened victory.
+Not only was this moral factor of the highest importance, but also the
+enormous material aid placed at our disposal.  Nobody among us will ever
+forget what America did."
+
+Let us hope that neither will any among us ever forget for a single
+instant how much was paid for us in blood and anguish by those who held
+the beast at bay from us for long years before we put forth a stroke in
+our own defense or in friendly help or in support of our ideals.
+
+That our aid arrived in time to help turn the tide, that our men were
+magnificent when their opportunity was given them, is cause not for
+vaunting ourselves, but only for gratefulness that our honor remains to
+us--that we have not had to accept life and liberty at other men's hands
+while our hands stayed in our pockets.
+
+Our fighting men redeemed us in our own eyes; they restored our souls'
+dignity; for this we can never be grateful enough to them.  But we can
+never be braggart about it.  It might so easily have come too late!
+
+
+On August 6, Foch was made Marshal of France.
+
+And two days later, the British, on the Somme, launched the first really
+successful offensive of the war--not stopping a drive, but inaugurating
+one.
+
+At last Foch was able to make war as he had for years contended that war
+should be made: The way to make war is to attack.
+
+It was his plan, now that he had the men to make this possible, to keep
+the enemy busy by striking first at one point of the long line running
+from Belgium to the Piave, and then at another.  And by the first of
+September the Allied line on the Western front was back where it ran in
+the deadlock of 1915-16 while the attack on Verdun was raging.
+
+"General Pershing," Foch has said, "wished to have his army concentrated,
+as far as possible, in an American sector.  The Argonne and the heights
+of the Meuse were a sector hard to tackle.  So I said to him: 'All right;
+your men have the devil's own punch.  They will get away with it.  Go to
+it.'"
+
+And they went!  That was the famous St. Mihiel salient.  The American
+infantry started their advance there on September 26.  They went forward
+with a rush.  On their left, the French advanced as rapidly, and on
+October 1 re-took St. Quentin, which the Germans had held since the
+beginning of the war.  October 2 the British, operating on the left of
+the French, reached Cambrai which also had been in German hands for more
+than four years.
+
+October 4 the Hohenzollern King of Bulgaria deserted his doomed allies
+and his throne and began looking for a place of refuge.
+
+And on that day the Hohenzollern government at Berlin had so little
+relish for the situation on all fronts, that it besought the President of
+the United States "to take in hand the restoration of peace, acquaint all
+the belligerent states with this request and invite them to send
+plenipotentiaries for the purpose of opening negotiations. . . .  With a
+view to avoiding further bloodshed, the German Government requests the
+immediate conclusion of an armistice on land and water and in air."
+
+October 10, Austria and Turkey joined Germany in appealing for peace
+terms.  Notes continued to pass between the Germanic capitals and
+Washington, D. C.
+
+But Foch fought on.
+
+The Americans had cleared the last corner of the Argonne of German
+machine-gun nests and gunners, and were widening their offensive on the
+Meuse.  The French had taken Laon, and were pushing on.  The British had
+taken Lens and Cambrai and were advancing on Douai and Lille.
+
+On the 23rd of October the President of the United States referred the
+matter of the armistice to the Allies.  On the 29th, the Allied War
+Council met at Versailles to fix the armistice conditions.
+
+(Foch meanwhile had launched an offensive against the Austrians on the
+Piave.)
+
+Now, an armistice is supposed to be a cessation of hostilities for an
+agreed period, all combatants to remain as they were; if the parley for
+peace is not successful, the struggle is to resume where it paused,
+neither side having gained or lost, except as delay may or may not have
+been favorable to them.
+
+Foch had not the smallest intention of granting the hard-pushed enemy
+that sort of an armistice--time to recuperate, to parley while Winter
+came on and postponed the resumption of his offensive until Spring.  To
+do that meant to prolong the war probably another year, at enormous cost
+in lives, suffering, materials.
+
+What he would grant would be an armistice in which the enemy, so far from
+keeping his positions would abandon them all and retire far behind the
+Rhine; in which the Allies, so far from keeping their positions, would
+follow the retreating enemy into his own country, and police it; in which
+the enemy, so far from resting on his sword, would hand it over--his
+swords, and his cannon, and his machine-guns, and his fleet and his
+submarines and his aircraft and his locomotives; in which he would
+release all Allied prisoners and not ask the release of any of his
+captured men.
+
+The terms were the most ignominious ever imposed upon a prostrate enemy.
+The sole reason for referring to them as "armistice terms" was that peace
+terms are final and absolute, and these were not final--they would be
+made much worse if the Germans failed to satisfy their conquerors on
+every point.
+
+When the Allied War Council had agreed with Foch on the armistice terms,
+he said:
+
+"Within ten days or a fortnight I can break the German army in three,
+envelop a section of it, and take a million prisoners.  Is there any
+condition which, in the opinion of any of you, could be imposed upon the
+enemy then, more conclusive than those of the armistice?"
+
+No one could think of anything that might add a jot to the completeness
+of Germany's subjugation.
+
+"Then, gentlemen," answered the Commander-in-Chief, "we will proceed with
+the armistice.  When all is won that can be won for the safety and honor
+of France and her Allies, I cannot for the sake of prestige or
+gratification or personal glory, order action that would cost the life of
+any parents' young son, any little child's father.  I am a bereaved
+father.  I think of the fathers and mothers whom further fighting must
+bereave.  The enveloping advance which our armies could make in ten to
+fourteen days would cost us thousands of lives, many maimed men.  If
+those things must be to bring the triumph of Right, we can bear them
+again as we have borne them these years past.  But not for any other
+reason!"
+
+"The German high command," he said later, at Treves, "was not ignorant of
+the fact that it faced a colossal disaster.  When it surrendered,
+everything was prepared for an offensive in which it would infallibly
+have succumbed.  The Germans were lost.  They capitulated.  That is the
+whole story."
+
+The German plenipotentiaries arrived at the French front at nine o'clock
+on the evening of November 7, and were escorted to the Chateau Francfort
+to spend the night.  The next morning they were taken to Rethondes in the
+forest of Compiegne.  There Foch (whose headquarters were at Semis,
+twenty-two miles nearer Paris) awaited them in his special train.
+
+I may be quite wrong about his reason for receiving the German envoys in
+a railway carriage.  But my surmise about it is that he did not want any
+fixed place associated with Germany's humiliation until those empowered
+to act for the defunct empire of William I came to the Gallery of Mirrors
+at Versailles and there, where the German empire had been proclaimed,
+witnessed the formal degradation before the representatives of all
+civilization of their nation that was built on the principle that Might
+is Right.
+
+Next to this in poetic justice would have been to summon those
+plenipotentiaries before him at Senlis where their troops had committed
+such insensate horrors in September, 1914.  But for reasons of his own
+(which we may be sure had nothing to do with courtesy) Foch went part way
+to meet them.
+
+They complained, afterwards, that he received them coldly.  If he was
+able to keep his manner cold, it was only because his self-command is so
+great.  For no other man in the world knows so well as he the extent and
+the enormity of the crimes those men and their masters and their minions
+are guilty of.  A primitive man, or any undisciplined modern man, would
+have leaped at their throats.  Instead, Foch treated them as if they were
+human though not humane beings, and read to them slowly and in a loud
+voice, the terms of the armistice for which they had asked.
+
+Mathias Erzberger, their spokesman, requested a cessation of hostilities
+whilst a courier carried the terms to German General Headquarters at Spa.
+
+There the Kaiser, Hindenburg and others awaited particulars.
+
+Foch declined to cease hostilities.  He knew his enemy too well.
+
+As soon as the Kaiser learned what the terms were, he abdicated his
+throne and fled his country.  When the courier had returned, and the
+German plenipotentiaries once more presented themselves before Foch
+(again in his car) the "War Lord" of all the world was cowering in a
+Holland hiding place, his blubbering heir was in another, and a Social
+Republic had been declared in Berlin.
+
+How the Hohenzollerns knew the terms of the armistice full twenty-four
+hours before the courier's return to German Headquarters at Spa, I have
+not seen explained or heard any one conjecture.
+
+From Rethondes to Spa is a matter of some two hundred and fifty miles, by
+road, and nearly forty-eight hours were consumed by the courier in
+covering that distance; he did not reach German Headquarters until ten
+o'clock Sunday morning, November 10.  But the Kaiser abdicated and the
+Crown Prince renounced his claims to the throne, in Spa on Saturday
+morning, and they were both out of the country when the courier was
+received, his papers were read, and he was sent back with word to the
+plenipotentiaries to get amelioration of some conditions, if possible,
+but in any event to sign.
+
+If the press reports are not in error as to the time the courier arrived
+at Spa, then the terms of the armistice must have been made known to the
+Hohenzollerns by telegraph or other quick communication very early on
+Saturday--probably as soon as the courier recrossed his own lines, which
+he could have done not many hours after quitting Compiegne forest.  And
+Berlin seems to have known the terms at least as soon; for it was "the
+receipt of an urgent telegram" from Berlin, which the Kaiser is reported
+to have read with a shiver, that precipitated the abdication and flight.
+
+These details are significant, even in so brief a sketch of Foch's life
+as this is; for in their very confusion and obscurity they tell a great
+story of what was either realized or feared in the German camps and in
+the German capital.
+
+The magnitude of that which Foch was ready (and was by his enemies known
+to be ready) to do could not be better conveyed to us than by the panicky
+haste of those who knew themselves doomed, to make any concessions but at
+all costs to avert Foch's next move.
+
+Shortly after midnight on Sunday, the German delegation (which had by
+Foch's orders been scrupulously served in the matter of their creature
+comforts) again presented itself before him in his railway car.  Four
+hours were spent discussing the possibility of performing some of the
+conditions exacted, and modifications were made which in no degree
+altered the completeness of Germany's subjugation.
+
+Then the papers were signed.
+
+The Germans were punctiliously escorted to their own lines.  I have not
+heard what Foch did; but it would not surprise me to learn that he went
+back to bed, and to sleep.
+
+Perhaps, after giving orders for notifying his Government and her Allies,
+he sent a message to Madame Foch.  But I am quite sure that otherwise he
+did not "celebrate," except that he gave God thanks for the victory.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+DURING THE ARMISTICE AND AFTER
+
+When the French army rode into Metz, Foch was not at its head.  There
+may or there may not be another man who could and would have foregone
+that satisfaction; but certainly there are not many.
+
+It does not seem probable that he avoided the occasion; although it
+would be like him to take advantage of some good excuse for absence if
+he thought there was one of his generals who specially deserved and
+desired the honor of that triumphant entry into reclaimed Metz.
+
+The attitude of Foch toward praise and plaudits and personal glory is,
+it seems to me, one of the supremely great things about him.  I cannot
+imagine him "ducking" shyly away from any place where he knew he ought
+to for fear of salvos of acclaim; it would be as unsoldierly to him to
+dodge cheers as to flee from battle, if that way his duty lay.  And,
+similarly, I cannot imagine him going anywhere to gratify his personal
+feelings and collect the praises due him, if there was an urgent reason
+for his being somewhere else.
+
+[Illustration: Ferdinand Foch.  Showing His Insignia as a Marshal of
+France, Consisting of Seven Stars on Each Sleeve and Four Rows of Oak
+Leaves on His Cap.]
+
+The business, military and executive, of seeing that the armistice
+terms were fulfilled, was tremendous.  Much of it devolved upon him and
+made inconceivably great requisitions on that genius he has "for the
+command of enormous material difficulties"--a genius he first displayed
+in getting the Ninth Army across the Marne in pursuit of the fleeing
+Germans, in September, 1914; and which he further evidenced in every
+succeeding phase, beginning with the reconstitution of all the forces
+fighting on the Yser.
+
+The armistice period was a period of extreme demands on him.  In it
+there was scant opportunity to go here or there with his triumphant
+armies.  His work in the field, as a commanding general, had
+practically ceased with his removal from the Ninth Army after little
+more than a month of such command.  From the time he took up his
+headquarters on the hill at Cassel, he became "a desk man"; it was no
+longer his function to execute orders; thenceforth he had the far more
+trying duty of issuing orders--a truly awful responsibility and one
+which demands much solitude, much soul-searching as well as
+map-pondering and other weighing of the ponderable which is so easily
+off-set by the imponderable, the unguessable.
+
+There are few situations possible in life in which a man could be set
+apart with his soul and have so much demanded of his communings as was
+demanded of Foch from October, 1914, on to October, 1918.  Every
+decision he made involved lives--hundreds and thousands or hundreds of
+thousands of lives--and not one pang of what must be suffered for each
+life laid down was strange to him; his only son was among the first to
+die for France and human liberties; and one of his daughters was
+widowed; the home he "left in the joyousness of a midsummer Sunday" was
+desolate, and it stood forever to him as a symbol of the homes in
+France and latterly, in the lands of all the Allies, with whose
+best-beloved he made this or that move in the war to preserve
+civilization.  Nor were the lives he staked all that were involved;
+there were all that were incidentally menaced if his strategy
+failed--all that must suffer immediately and all that must suffer
+ultimately under the heel of the brute if the brute were not destroyed.
+
+A man who has lived thus for more than four years, sharing the
+awfulness of his burden only with Almighty God, must needs have passed
+to a spiritual plane whereon such self-considerations as still sway the
+rest of us have ceased to obtrude themselves.
+
+The quest of personal glory is as hard to associate with Ferdinand Foch
+as with the little Maid of France.  Both fought for God and for France
+and for a Cause, as their Voices directed them; that he has one of the
+best brains of modern or of all times, and that she did "not know her
+A, B, C," sets them not so far apart as the materialist might imagine;
+for the thing that made both invincible was the power of their faith to
+create an unconquerable ardor in themselves and in their men.  The
+churches in France wherein Foch knelt seeking guidance, beseeching
+strength, are likely to be doubly-consecrate, for ages, no less than
+those wherein Jeanne d'Arc prayed.  She is venerated not as a military
+leader (though she was that) but as the one who awakened the soul of
+mediaeval, much-partitioned France and made possible the
+nationalization of her country.  He will be venerated (by the great
+majority) not as "the first stategist of Europe," but as the supreme
+incarnation of that spirit which makes modern France transcendent among
+nations vowed to democracy.
+
+It is Foch's "likeness" to the myriad soldiers of France that France
+adores--not his difference from the rest.  Her poilu is her beau ideal
+of faith and courage, of patriotism and devotion to the principles of
+human rights, of cheerfulness and hopefulness, of invincibility in that
+his cause is just.  France is too essentially democratic to esteem one
+set of characteristics in the mass of men and another set in the
+leaders of men.  Foch and Joffre will live always in the hearts of
+their countrymen because, like Jeanne d'Arc, they have so much to say
+to everyone--so much that illumines every path in life wherever it is
+laid.
+
+On the 19th of December, 1918, Joffre took his seat among the Immortals
+of the French Academy.  The vacancy to which he had been elected was
+that made by the death of Jules Claretie who, before his admission to
+the Academy and before his absorption in the affairs of La Comedie
+Francaise, had written several books about the leaders of the French
+Revolution.
+
+It was Ernest Renan who delivered the address of welcome to Claretie
+(in February, 1889) and he said that it was still too soon to know
+whether those leaders of whom Claretie had written were supremely
+justified or were not.
+
+"You are young," Renan said to the new Immortal, "and you will see this
+question solved, . . . some years hence it will be known; if in ten or
+twenty years France is prosperous and free, faithful to right, strong
+in the friendship of the free peoples of the world, then the cause of
+the young Revolutionists is won; the world will enjoy the fruits of
+their endeavor without having had to know their unripe bitterness."
+
+Joffre quoted this part of Renan's address, in taking his seat.
+Claretie had not lived quite long enough to see, save with the eye of
+faith, that day Renan foretold; but Claretie's successor in the French
+Academy had seen it!  And it was like him to say:
+
+"I think, gentlemen, that in doing me the honor of receiving me into
+your august body, your desire is to pay homage to that glorious French
+army which has proved that the soul of France is steadfast for the
+rights of man, even unto death that men may be free."
+
+Accepting the honor as paid through him to the men who had proved the
+worth of that Liberty, Equality and Fraternity the Revolution declared
+and decreed, Joffre asked permission to name those to whom, he deemed,
+the gratitude of France and of France's Immortals was due.  And first
+among them he named Foch.
+
+This was gracious; it was generous; but it was more than that.  And
+though Joffre went on to name many leaders, many armies, many moral
+forces incarnate in many men as co-responsible for victory, no one
+could know quite so well as he how completely the France of which Renan
+dreamed as a glorious possibility, is realized and typified in the man
+whose name leads all the rest as having saved not France only but the
+liberties of mankind.
+
+Bonaparte, although he was not French (save technically) and not a
+democrat, captured the hearts of France in spite of all he cost them;
+because he aggrandized France, made her supreme in many things besides
+extent and power.  It is instinctive in every Frenchman (or woman, or
+child!) to revere anyone who does new credit to the name of France or
+brings new glory to it; for the passionate love of country is the
+primary religion of the French--they may or may not have another, but
+unless they are totally renegade they have that faith, that devotion.
+
+In Ferdinand Foch they have a great leader who is in no sense an
+"accident" (as Bonaparte was), a sporadic development in their midst, a
+spectacular growth on an exotic stem.  They have, rather, a
+quintessential Frenchman of to-day, even more widely representative of
+his countrymen than Lincoln was of ours.
+
+"The fame of one man," says Henri Bordeaux, "is nothing unless its
+represents the obscure deeds of the anonymous multitude."
+
+This is a typically modern idea, and typically French.  France of
+to-day would not deny the worth of any development because it was
+singular, isolate; but what she is particularly interested in is the
+possibilities of development along the lines that are followed by the
+many and are open (broadly speaking) to all.  Guynemer, for a shining
+instance, is the idol of every schoolchild in France, not for his
+daring alone, nor for the number of boche birds of prey he brought
+down; but because wealth and influence were unavailing to get him an
+opportunity beyond what the poorest, humblest youngster might have got
+in the same indomitable way; and because frail health and puny strength
+could not debar him from the sublimest exploits of daring for France.
+His circumstance--physical and material--tended to bind him to the soft
+places of earth.  His desire to serve France gave him wings to fly far
+beyond the eagles.  He has no grave.  He rides the empyrean for all
+time, to tell the youth of France how surmountable is everything to one
+who loves his country and the rights of mankind.
+
+Foch is of less legendary sort, but he, too, epitomizes France; and he
+will be increasingly potent as time goes on, irrespective of whether
+the sword is or is not superseded in the affairs of men.
+
+"The obscure deeds of the anonymous multitude" are much like his own
+obscure deeds prior to the great day when France needed him and found
+him ready.
+
+Every black-smocked schoolboy in France loitering along historic
+highways to his gray-stuccoed school, may feel in himself a Foch of
+to-morrow--and quicken his steps so that he may make himself a little
+more ready for his recitation.
+
+Every youth entering upon his military training must find in Foch a
+comrade whose influence is all toward thoroughness, "Learn to think,"
+was Foch's personal admonition for long years before he thus charged
+his students.
+
+Every teacher toiling to impart not knowledge alone but the thirst for
+knowledge, the zeal to use it nobly, has in Foch such a fellow as the
+annals of that great profession do not duplicate.  Other teachers may
+have influenced more pupils; but no human teacher ever saw such a
+demonstration of his principles--to the saving of mankind.
+
+Every good father in France may see himself in Foch--and especially
+every father who gave his son for France and her ideals.
+
+Every man whose work in life calls him to lead other men, in peace or
+in war, has supreme need of Foch; because Foch embodies those
+principles of leadership to which men are now responsive, those ideals
+toward which they are striving.  Particularly as a coordinator is Foch
+great--and potent for the future.  There is, probably, no other kind of
+service so important to the world's welfare, now, as that of bringing
+men together; making them see that fundamentally they are all, if they
+are right-minded, fighting for the same thing; and that in union there
+is strength.
+
+As a scholar, Foch is brilliant besides being profound.  As a man, he
+is simple--and France admires simplicity; he is elegant--and France
+loves the elegance that is the expression of fine thinking, fine
+feeling; he is modest of his own attainments, and proud of France's
+glory.
+
+For nearly every great commander, victory in arms has led to power in
+the state.
+
+Foch is a statesman as preeminently as he is a warrior.  His counsel
+was as weighty in the peace settlement as his strategy was in winning
+the war.
+
+But one cannot conceive him using his prestige, military or diplomatic,
+to increase his personal power.
+
+He has served God and man; he has served his country and his conviction
+of right.  He is content therewith--just as he hopes millions of men
+are content who have done the same according to their best ability.
+
+"I approach the twilight of my life," he wrote not long ago, "with the
+consciousness of a good servant who will rest in the peace of his Lord.
+Faith in eternal life, in a good and merciful God, has sustained me in
+the hardest hours.  Prayer has illumined my soul."
+
+In presenting to Foch the baton of a Marshal of France, President
+Poincare recalled certain definitions he had often heard Foch
+reiterate: "War is the department of moral force; battle, the struggle
+between two wills; victory, the moral superiority of the conqueror, the
+moral depression of the conquered."
+
+"This moral superiority," said the President of the French Republic to
+the new Marshal of France, "you have tended like a sacred flame."
+
+Always, the tone of tribute to Foch is one of veneration for the
+greatness of his soul and his preeminent ability to represent and to
+lead his people.
+
+"You are not," President Poincare went on, "of those who let themselves
+be downcast by danger; neither are you of those whom victory dazzles.
+You do not believe that we are near the end of our efforts and our
+sacrifices.  You guard against optimism as much as against depression."
+
+This he said to Foch, in the field, on August 23, 1918, when the fruits
+of victory though in sight were not yet within grasp.
+
+Had the presentation been three months later, President Poincare would
+(I think) have spoken not differently; better even than before, he
+would have known that Foch is not "of those whom victory dazzles"; and
+not less clearly than before would he have perceived that Foch does not
+"believe that we are near the end of our efforts and our sacrifices."
+
+Foch may well feel that he has done his utmost for his country and for
+mankind, in the crisis for which he prepared himself and which he met
+with such superb faith in the triumph of Right; but he certainly does
+not feel that he has ushered in the millennium; he knows what other
+demands there are and will be upon the souls of men, on their devotion
+to their country, their perception of truth and honor, and their ardor
+and ability to serve humanity.  He knows that not France alone but
+every nation has need to-day and henceforth of leaders who will do just
+what he did: personify the highest ideals of their people and prepare
+themselves to defend those ideals intelligently, unselfishly, devoutly.
+
+He has established a new standard in leadership.  Far from culminating
+an old order, he has inaugurated a new--an order which everyone may
+join who wills to serve.  Its motto is: "Right is Might; believe in the
+power of Right; learn to uphold it; strengthen others, as they come in
+contact with you, to meet the enemies of Right and to vanquish them;
+never forget that the moving power of the world is _soul_, and the laws
+of the soul were made by God."
+
+Too deep a student of history, too keen an analyst of human nature to
+entertain any illusions about the enemy he has conquered but not
+converted, Foch knows that if what he has been privileged to do for
+France and for her allies is to have any lasting value, there must be a
+league of freedom-loving peoples as strong and as united to preserve
+peace as they were to win it; and that this league must be supported by
+a general morale not one whit less devoted to the end in view than was
+the morale which won the war.
+
+Too wise to feel that the victory is his save as he was the leader who
+re-organized millions and showed them how to make their conviction of
+Right prevail, he is also too wise to wish that his were the power to
+create the world anew.  He knows that not only will the to-morrows of
+mankind be as the multitudes of mankind make them, but that they should
+be not otherwise directed; this, of all things, is what the overthrow
+of autocracy means.
+
+He helped us to shake off the Beast who sought to impose his will on
+all the world.  Briefly, at least, that Menace is restrained--thanks to
+the indomitable will of many nations and to the genius of Ferdinand
+Foch.
+
+It is for us--every one of us!--to say what shall come out of the
+security that Foch and his armies have maintained for us at so great a
+price; how long we shall maintain it and how honorably we shall use it.
+
+And to us, with this sacred obligation on us, Foch would say:
+
+"It is not enough to mean well, to desire that righteousness shall
+prevail; it is not enough even to be willing to give all, should it be
+required of you.  You must _know how_ to serve your ideals, your
+principles.  Victory always goes to those who deserve it by possessing
+the greatest power of will and intelligence."
+
+
+
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