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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Foch the Man, by Clara E. Laughlin
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<h1>
The Project Gutenberg eBook, Foch the Man, by Clara E. Laughlin
</h1>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
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 <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a></pre>
<p>
Title: Foch the Man
</p>
<p>
A Life of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Armies
</p>
<p>
Author: Clara E. Laughlin
</p>
<p>
Release Date: January 14, 2006 [eBook #17511]
</p>
<p>
Language: English
</p>
<p>
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
</p>
<p>
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FOCH THE MAN***
</p>
<p>
<br /><br />
</p>
<h3>
E-text prepared by Al Haines
</h3>
<p>
<br /><br />
</p>
<hr class="full" />
<p>
<br /> <br /> <br /> <a name="img-front"></a> <img src="images/img-front.jpg"
alt="Marshal Foch at the Peace Conference." width="350" height="591" />
</p>
<h4>
[Frontispiece: Marshal Foch at the Peace Conference.]
</h4>
<p>
<br /><br />
</p>
<h1>
FOCH THE MAN
</h1>
<p>
<br />
</p>
<h2>
A Life of <br /> The Supreme Commander <br /> of the <br /> Allied Armies
</h2>
<p>
<br /><br /><br />
</p>
<h4>
BY
</h4>
<h3>
CLARA E. LAUGHLIN
</h3>
<p>
<br /><br /><br />
</p>
<h4>
WITH APPRECIATION BY
</h4>
<h3>
LIEUT.-COL. EDOUARD RÉQUIN
</h3>
<h4>
of the French High Commission to the United States
</h4>
<p>
<br /><br />
</p>
<h4>
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
</h4>
<p>
<br /><br />
</p>
<h4>
REVISED AND ENLARGED EDITION
</h4>
<p>
<br /><br /><br />
</p>
<h4>
NEW YORK ———— CHICAGO <br /><br /> Fleming H. Revell
Company <br /><br /> LONDON AND EDINBURGH
</h4>
<p>
<br /><br /><br />
</p>
<h5>
Copyright, 1918, 1919, by <br /><br /> FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY
</h5>
<p>
<br /><br /><br />
</p>
<h5>
First Printing - November 11, 1918<br /> Second Printing - November 19,
1918<br /> Third Printing - November 29, 1918<br /> Fourth Printing -
December 7, 1918<br /> Fifth Printing - January 9, 1919<br /> Sixth Printing
- May 1, 1919
</h5>
<p>
<br /><br /><br />
</p>
<h3>
DEDICATION<br />
</h3>
<h3>
TO THE MEN WHO HAVE FOUGHT UNDER GENERAL<br /> FOCH'S COMMAND. TO ALL Of
THEM, IN ALL<br /> GRATITUDE. BUT IN AN ESPECIAL WAY TO THE MEN<br /> OF THE
42D DIVISION, THE SPLENDOR OF<br /> WHOSE CONDUCT ON SEPTEMBER 9, 1914,<br />
NO PEN WILL EVER BE ABLE<br /> ADEQUATELY TO COMMEMORATE.
</h3>
<p>
<br /><br /><br /> <a name="img-002"></a> <img src="images/img-002.jpg"
alt="Hand-written letter from Foch." width="360" height="442" />
</p>
<h4>
[Illustration: Hand-written letter from Foch.]
</h4>
<p>
<br /> <a name="img-003"></a> <img src="images/img-003.jpg"
alt="Page 1 of hand-written letter from Lt.-Colonel E. Réquin to Clara Laughlin.]"
width="357" height="546" />
</p>
<h4>
[Illustration: Page 1 of hand-written letter from Lt.-Colonel E. Réquin to
Clara Laughlin.]
</h4>
<p>
<br /> <a name="img-004"></a> <img src="images/img-004.jpg"
alt="Page 2 of hand-written letter from Lt.-Colonel E. Réquin to Clara Laughlin.]"
width="363" height="529" />
</p>
<h4>
[Illustration: Page 2 of hand-written letter from Lt.-Colonel E. Réquin to
Clara Laughlin.]
</h4>
<p>
<br /><br />
</p>
<p class="noindent">
[Transcriber's note: The letter in the second and third illustrations is
shown translated on the following page.]
</p>
<p>
<br /><br /><br />
</p>
<p class="noindent">
Dear MADEMOISELLE LAUGHLIN:
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
It seems that in writing about him the style rises with the noble
sentiments which inspire him.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
Please accept, Mademoiselle, this expression of my respectful regards.
</p>
<p class="noindent">
LT.-COLONEL E. RÉQUIN.
</p>
<p>
<br /><br /><br />
</p>
<h3>
"THEY SHALL NOT PASS!"
</h3>
<p class="poem">
Three Spirits stood on the mountain peak<br /> And
gazed on a world of red,--<br /> Red with the blood of heroes,<br /> The
living and the dead;<br /> A mighty force of Evil strove<br /> With
freemen, mass on mass.<br /> Three Spirits stood on the mountain peak<br />
And cried: "They shall not
pass!"<br />
</p>
<p class="poem">
The Spirits of Love and Sacrifice,<br /> The
Spirit of Freedom, too,--<br /> They called to the men they had dwelt among<br />
Of the Old World and the
New!<br /> And the men came forth at the trumpet call,<br /> Yea,
every creed and class;<br /> And they stood with the Spirits who called to
them,<br /> And cried:
"They shall not pass!"<br />
</p>
<p class="poem">
Far down the road of the Future Day<br /> I
see the world of Tomorrow;<br /> Men and women at work and play,<br />
In the midst of their joy
and sorrow.<br /> And every night by the red firelight,<br /> When
the children gather 'round<br /> They tell the tale of the men of old.<br />
These noble ancestors, grim and bold,<br /> Who
bravely held their ground.<br /> In thrilling accents they often speak<br />
Of the Spirits Three on the mountain peak.<br />
</p>
<p class="poem">
O
Freedom, Love and Sacrifice<br /> You
claimed our men, alas!<br /> Yet
everlasting peace is theirs<br /> Who
cried, "They shall not pass!"<br />
</p>
<p class="poem">
ARTHUR A. PENN.<br />
</p>
<h5>
<i>Reprinted by permission of M. Witmark & Sons, N. Y.</i> <br /> <i>Publishers
of the musical setting to this poem.</i>
</h5>
<p>
<br /><br /><br />
</p>
<h3>
CONTENTS
</h3>
<p>
<br />
</p>
<h3>
<a href="#chap00b"> FOREWORD TO REVISED AND ENLARGED EDITION </a>
</h3>
<p>
<br />
</p>
<h3>
<a href="#chap01"> I. WHERE HE WAS BORN </a>
</h3>
<p class="noindent">
Stirring traditions and historic scenes which surrounded him in childhood.
</p>
<p>
<br />
</p>
<h3>
<a href="#chap02"> II. BOYHOOD SURROUNDINGS </a>
</h3>
<p class="noindent">
The horsemarkets at Tarbes. The school. Foch at twelve a student of
Napoleon.
</p>
<p>
<br />
</p>
<h3>
<a href="#chap03"> III. A YOUNG SOLDIER OF A LOST CAUSE </a>
</h3>
<p class="noindent">
What Foch suffered in the defeat of France by the Prussians.
</p>
<p>
<br />
</p>
<h3>
<a href="#chap04"> IV. PARIS AFTER THE GERMANS LEFT </a>
</h3>
<p class="noindent">
Foch begins his military studies, determined to be ready when France
should again need defense.
</p>
<p>
<br />
</p>
<h3>
<a href="#chap05"> V. LEARNING TO BE A ROUGH RIDER </a>
</h3>
<p class="noindent">
Begins to specialize in cavalry training. The school at Saumur.
</p>
<p>
<br />
</p>
<h3>
<a href="#chap06"> VI. FIRST YEARS IN BRITTANY </a>
</h3>
<p class="noindent">
Seven years at Rennes as artillery captain and always student of war.
Called to Paris for further training.
</p>
<p>
<br />
</p>
<h3>
<a href="#chap07"> VII. JOFFRE AND FOCH </a>
</h3>
<p class="noindent">
Parallels in their careers since their school days together.
</p>
<p>
<br />
</p>
<h3>
<a href="#chap08"> VIII. THE SUPERIOR SCHOOL OF WAR </a>
</h3>
<p class="noindent">
Where Foch's great work as teacher prepared hundreds of officers for the
superb parts they have played in this war.
</p>
<p>
<br />
</p>
<h3>
<a href="#chap09"> IX. THE GREAT TEACHER </a>
</h3>
<p class="noindent">
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.
</p>
<p>
<br />
</p>
<h3>
<a href="#chap10"> X. A COLONEL AT FIFTY </a>
</h3>
<p class="noindent">
Clemenceau's part in giving Foch his opportunity.
</p>
<p>
<br />
</p>
<h3>
<a href="#chap11"> XI. FORTIFYING FRANCE </a>
</h3>
<p class="noindent">
How the Superior War Council prepared for the inevitable invasion of
France. Foch put in command at Nancy.
</p>
<p>
<br />
</p>
<h3>
<a href="#chap12"> XII. ON THE EVE OF WAR </a>
</h3>
<p class="noindent">
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.
</p>
<p>
<br />
</p>
<h3>
<a href="#chap13"> XIII. THE BATTLE OF LORRAINE </a>
</h3>
<p class="noindent">
How the brilliant generalship there thwarted the German plan; and how
Joffre recognized it in reorganizing his army.
</p>
<p>
<br />
</p>
<h3>
<a href="#chap14"> XIV. THE FIRST VICTORY AT THE MARNE </a>
</h3>
<p class="noindent">
"The Miracle of the Marne" was Foch. How he turned defeat to victory.
</p>
<p>
<br />
</p>
<h3>
<a href="#chap15"> XV. SENT NORTH TO SAVE CHANNEL PORTS </a>
</h3>
<p class="noindent">
Foch's skill and diplomacy in that crisis show him a great coordinator.
</p>
<p>
<br />
</p>
<h3>
<a href="#chap16"> XVI. THE SUPREME COMMANDER </a>
</h3>
<p class="noindent">
How Foch stopped the German drive that nearly separated the French and
English armies.
</p>
<p>
<br />
</p>
<h3>
<a href="#chap17"> XVII. BRINGING GERMANY TO ITS KNEES </a>
</h3>
<p class="noindent">
The completest humiliation ever inflicted on a proud nation.
</p>
<p>
<br />
</p>
<h3>
<a href="#chap18"> XVIII. DURING THE ARMISTICE—AND AFTER </a>
</h3>
<p class="noindent">
How Foch carries himself as victor.
</p>
<p>
<br /><br /><br />
</p>
<h3>
ILLUSTRATIONS
</h3>
<p>
<br />
</p>
<h3>
<a href="#img-front"> Marshal Foch at the Peace Conference . . . . . .
<i>Frontispiece</i> </a>
</h3>
<h3>
<a href="#img-002"> Hand-written letter from Foch. </a>
</h3>
<h3>
<a href="#img-003"> Page 1 of hand-written letter from Lt.-Colonel E.
Réquin to Clara Laughlin. </a>
</h3>
<h3>
<a href="#img-004"> Page 2 of hand-written letter from Lt.-Colonel E.
Réquin to Clara Laughlin. </a>
</h3>
<h3>
<a href="#img-018a"> The room in which Ferdinand Foch was born </a>
</h3>
<h3>
<a href="#img-018b"> The house in Tarbes where Foch was born </a>
</h3>
<h3>
<a href="#img-028a"> Ferdinand Foch as a schoolboy of twelve </a>
</h3>
<h3>
<a href="#img-028b"> The school in Tarbes </a>
</h3>
<h3>
<a href="#img-060"> Marshall Joffre--General Foch </a>
</h3>
<h3>
<a href="#img-142"> General Pétain--Marshal Haig--General Foch--General
Pershing </a>
</h3>
<h3>
<a href="#img-148"> General Foch--General Pershing </a>
</h3>
<h3>
<a href="#img-160"> Marshal Foch, Executive head of the allied forces </a>
</h3>
<h3>
<a href="#img-174"> Ferdinand Foch, Marshal of France </a>
</h3>
<p>
<br /><br /><br /> <a name="chap00b"></a>
</p>
<h3>
FOREWORD TO REVISED AND ENLARGED EDITION
</h3>
<p>
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 <i>Joffre</i> 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 <i>could</i> dominate the scene.
</p>
<p>
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!
</p>
<p>
He was commanding all the armies of civilization. Who was he?
</p>
<p>
Hardly anyone knew.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
And also there came those, representing France and her interests in this
country, who said:
</p>
<p>
"Won't you put the facts about Foch before your people?"
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
Not being permitted that, I have yielded her such service as I could with
my pen.
</p>
<p>
And when asked to write, for my countrymen, about General Foch, I felt
honored in a supreme degree.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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 René 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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
Lieutenant-Colonel Édouard Réquin 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.
</p>
<p>
And I want especially to record my gratefulness to M. Antonin Barthélemy,
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
This is what I have tried to make clear in my simple sketch here offered.
</p>
<p>
<br /><br /><br /> <a name="chap01"></a>
</p>
<h3>
I
</h3>
<h3>
WHERE HE WAS BORN
</h3>
<p>
Ferdinand Foch was born at Tarbes on October 2, 1851.
</p>
<p>
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 Pyrénées.
</p>
<p>
The mother of Ferdinand was Sophie Dupré, born at Argèles, 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 Dupré'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.
</p>
<p>
There was a little sister in the family which welcomed Ferdinand. And in
course of time two other boys came.
</p>
<p>
<a name="img-018a"></a> <img src="images/img-018a.jpg"
alt="The Room in Which Ferdinand Foch was Born." width="352" height="305" />
</p>
<h4>
[Illustration: The Room in Which Ferdinand Foch was Born.]
</h4>
<p>
<br /> <a name="img-018b"></a> <img src="images/img-018b.jpg"
alt="The House in Tarbes Where Foch was Born." width="352" height="309" />
</p>
<h4>
[Illustration: The House in Tarbes Where Foch was Born.]
</h4>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
To begin with, there was Tarbes.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
Many important highways converge at Tarbes, which lies in a rich, elevated
plain on the left bank of the River Adour.
</p>
<p>
The town now has some 30,000 inhabitants, but when Ferdinand Foch was a
little boy it had fewer than half that many.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
This encounter took place on a plain a little to the south of Tarbes which
is still called the Heath of the Moors.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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 Pyrénées where he needed one desperately, cleaved one with
his sword Durandal.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
With such traditions is the country round about Tarbes impregnated.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
"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."
</p>
<p>
So they were! And of all Froissart's incomparable recitals, none are more
fascinating than those of the countryside Ferdinand Foch grew up in.
</p>
<p>
<br /><br /><br /> <a name="chap02"></a>
</p>
<h3>
II
</h3>
<h3>
BOYHOOD SURROUNDINGS
</h3>
<p>
The country round about Tarbes has long been famed for its horses of an
Arabian breed especially suitable for cavalry.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
A community devoted to the raising of fine saddle horses is all but
certain to be a community devotedly fond of horse racing.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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:
</p>
<p>
"On these days all the streets and public squares are flooded with streams
of curious people come from all corners of the Pyrénées and exhibiting in
their infinite variety of type and costume all the races of the southern
provinces and the mountains.
</p>
<p>
"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.
</p>
<p>
"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.
</p>
<p>
"There are the men of the Béarnais, 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.
</p>
<p>
"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.
</p>
<p>
"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."
</p>
<p>
It was a remarkable crowd for a little boy to wander in.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
<a name="img-028a"></a> <img src="images/img-028a.jpg"
alt="Ferdinand Foch (center) as a Schoolboy." width="353" height="298" />
</p>
<h4>
[Illustration: Ferdinand Foch (center) as a Schoolboy.]
</h4>
<p>
<br /> <a name="img-028b"></a> <img src="images/img-028b.jpg"
alt="The School in Tarbes Where Foch Prepared for the Military Academy."
width="350" height="323" />
</p>
<h4>
[Illustration: The School in Tarbes Where Foch Prepared for the Military
Academy.]
</h4>
<p>
But that was not the way it served him.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
There were two old churches, much restored and of no great beauty, but
very dear to the people of Tarbes nevertheless.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
Later on in these chapters we shall see that phase of a little French
boy's training in its due relation to a maréchal of France, directing the
greatest army the world has ever seen.
</p>
<p>
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:
</p>
<p>
"May this house remain standing until the ant has drunk all the waves of
the sea and the tortoise has crawled round the world."
</p>
<p>
Ferdinand was a hard student, serious beyond his years, but not
conspicuous except for his earnestness and diligence.
</p>
<p>
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."
</p>
<p>
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 Pyrénées. 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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
There Ferdinand continued his studies, as also at Saint-Étienne, near
Lyons, whither the family moved in 1867 when the father was appointed tax
collector there.
</p>
<p>
And in 1869 he was sent to Metz, to the Jesuit College of Saint Clément,
to which students flocked from all parts of Europe.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
Immediately Ferdinand Foch enlisted for the duration of the war.
</p>
<p>
<br /><br /><br /> <a name="chap03"></a>
</p>
<h3>
III
</h3>
<h3>
A YOUNG SOLDIER OF A LOST CAUSE
</h3>
<p>
There is nothing to record of Ferdinand Foch's first soldiering except
that from the dépôt of the Fourth Regiment of Infantry, in his home city
of Saint-Étienne, he was sent to Chalon-sur-Saône, and there was
discharged in January, 1871, after the capitulation of Paris.
</p>
<p>
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!
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
At the time when his Fall term should have been beginning at Saint
Clément'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.
</p>
<p>
How much the young soldier-student of the Saône 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.
</p>
<p>
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."
</p>
<p>
What his devotion to Saint Clément'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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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 <i>us</i> where <i>we</i> are!
</p>
<p>
From Metz, Foch went to Nancy to take his examination for the Polytechnic
at Paris.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.)
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
Ferdinand Foch listened and thought and wrote his examinations for the
school of war.
</p>
<p>
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 <i>the</i> most important—to the safety of
the nation.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
Nancy will never forget that night! It was Saturday, the 23d of August,
1913. And the new commandant's name was Ferdinand Foch!
</p>
<p>
Less than a year later he was fighting to save Nancy, and what lay beyond,
from the Germans.
</p>
<p>
And <i>this</i> time there was to be a different story! Ferdinand Foch was
foremost of those who assured it.
</p>
<p>
<br /><br /><br /> <a name="chap04"></a>
</p>
<h3>
IV
</h3>
<h3>
PARIS AFTER THE GERMANS LEFT
</h3>
<p>
Ferdinand Foch entered the Polytechnic School at Paris on the 1st of
November, 1871, just after he had completed his twentieth year.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
Cloistral, scholastic atmosphere, with its grave beauty, as at Oxford and
Cambridge, he will not find in the Paris Latin Quarter.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
The blight of defeat lay on everything.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
The cannon of the communards, set on the heights of Pére-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.
</p>
<p>
At last, on May 24, the Polytechnic was taken from the revolutionists by
assault, and many of the communards were seized.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
The most sacred spot in Paris to young Foch, in all the depression he
found there, was undoubtedly the great Dôme des Invalides, where, bathed
in an unearthly radiance and surrounded by faded battle flags, lies the
great porphyry sarcophagus of Napoleon I.
</p>
<p>
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:
</p>
<p>
"Science and glory—all for country."
</p>
<p>
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:
</p>
<p>
"May this house remain standing until the ant has drunk all the waves of
the sea and the tortoise has crawled round the world."
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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 Césaire 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.
</p>
<p>
Joffre graduated from the Polytechnic on September 21, 1872, and went
thence to the School of Applied Artillery at Fontainebleau.
</p>
<p>
Foch left the Polytechnic about six months later, and also went to
Fontainebleau for the same special training that Joffre was taking.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
<br /><br /><br /> <a name="chap05"></a>
</p>
<h3>
V
</h3>
<h3>
LEARNING TO BE A ROUGH RIDER
</h3>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
No one, to my knowledge, has advanced an explanation for this move.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
"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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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."
</p>
<p>
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!
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
King René 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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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."
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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 Provençal, 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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
And his preparation for this mastery was remarkably thorough.
</p>
<p>
At Saumur he learned not only to direct cavalry operations, but to know
the Angevin characteristics.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
But not so Ferdinand Foch.
</p>
<p>
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 <i>of soul</i>.
</p>
<p>
For Ferdinand Foch wins victories with men's souls—not just with
their flesh and blood, nor even with their brains.
</p>
<p>
And to command men's souls it is necessary to understand them.
</p>
<p>
<br /><br /><br /> <a name="chap06"></a>
</p>
<h3>
VI
</h3>
<h3>
FIRST YEARS IN BRITTANY
</h3>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
He stayed at Rennes, as an artillery captain, for seven years.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
In 1885 Captain Foch was called to Paris and entered the Superior School
of War.
</p>
<p>
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."
</p>
<p>
One of the "young gentlemen" who profited by this instruction was the
little Corsican whom Ferdinand Foch so ardently venerated.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
This field is eleven hundred yards long and just half that wide. It
occupies all the ground between the school buildings and the river.
</p>
<p>
Across the river is the height called the Trocadéro, 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.
</p>
<p>
Facing the Trocadéro 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 Hôtel 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-Élysées.
</p>
<p>
On the other side of the Hôtel 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.
</p>
<p>
Soldiers and government officials and foreign diplomats dominate the
quarter—and homes of the old French aristocracy.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
<br /><br /><br /> <a name="chap07"></a>
</p>
<h3>
VII
</h3>
<h3>
JOFFRE AND FOCH
</h3>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
<a name="img-060"></a> <img src="images/img-060.jpg"
alt="Marshall Joffre, General Foch" width="357" height="599" />
</p>
<h4>
[Illustration: Marshall Joffre, General Foch]
</h4>
<p>
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]
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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!
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
From Montpellier, Ferdinand Foch returned to Paris, in February, 1891, as
major on the general army staff.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
Neither man had a quick rise but Foch's was (as measurable in grades and
pay) specially slow.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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 Condé,
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
It would be hard to imagine anything more idyllic, more sylvan, on the
edge of a great city—anything more peaceful, restful, anywhere.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
France knew her need of protection—and none of us can ever be
sufficiently grateful that she did!
</p>
<p>
But she did not obtrude her defensive measures. She seldom made one
conscious of her military affairs.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
<br />
</p>
<p class="noindent">
[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.
</p>
<p>
<br /><br /><br /> <a name="chap08"></a>
</p>
<h3>
VIII
</h3>
<h3>
THE SUPERIOR SCHOOL OF WAR
</h3>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
His old schoolfellow, Joseph Joffre, was then building fortifications in
northern Madagascar; and his army rank was the same as that of Foch.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
It cannot have been prescience that called him there. It was just
Providence, nothing less!
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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."
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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!
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
I have various word-pictures of him as he then appeared to, and impressed,
his students.
</p>
<p>
One is by a military writer who uses the pseudonym of "Miles."
</p>
<p>
"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.
</p>
<p>
"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.
</p>
<p>
"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.
</p>
<p>
"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."
</p>
<p>
Colonel E. Réquin of the French general staff, who has fought under Foch
in some of the latter's greatest engagements, says:
</p>
<p>
"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 Réquin goes on to
say, in a 1918 number of the <i>World's Work</i>, "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.
</p>
<p>
"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.
</p>
<p>
"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.
</p>
<p>
"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."
</p>
<p>
But best of all the things said about Foch in that period of his life, I
like this, by Charles Dawbarn, in the <i>Fortnightly Review</i>:
</p>
<p>
"Such was"—in spite of many disappointments—"<i>his fine
confidence in life, that he communicated to others not his grievances, but
his secret satisfactions</i>."
</p>
<p>
<br /><br /><br /> <a name="chap09"></a>
</p>
<h3>
IX
</h3>
<h3>
THE GREAT TEACHER
</h3>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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."
</p>
<p>
In the five years, 1895-1901 (his work at the school was interrupted by
politics in 1901), "many hundreds of officers," as René 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."
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
From all his study, he repeatedly declared, one dominant conviction has
evolved: Force that is not dominated by spirit is vain force.
</p>
<p>
Victory, in his belief, goes to those who merit it by the greatest
strength of will and intelligence.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
And he asks this combination not from higher officers alone, but from all
their men down to the humblest in the ranks.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
At the beginning of his celebrated course of lectures on tactics he always
admonished his students thus:
</p>
<p>
"You will be called on later to be the brain of an army. So I say to you
to-day: Learn to think."
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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."
</p>
<p>
This leaves a great responsibility to officers, but it is the secret of
that flexibility which makes the French army so effective.
</p>
<p>
For Foch carries his belief in individual judgment far beyond the officers
commanding units; he carries it to the privates in the ranks.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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 Château 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.
</p>
<p>
It was an intelligent democracy, acting under superb leadership that
vanquished the forces of autocracy.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
No wonder his first injunction was: Learn to think!
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
This he deduced from his study of their methods in previous wars,
especially in that of 1870.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
<br /><br /><br /> <a name="chap10"></a>
</p>
<h3>
X
</h3>
<h3>
A COLONEL AT FIFTY
</h3>
<p>
"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."
</p>
<p>
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."
</p>
<p>
But I am sure that Foch would not wish this said of him in the same sense
that Napoleon said it of earlier generals.
</p>
<p>
For Foch has a greater vision of generalship than was possible to any
commander of long ago.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
But his conception of military leadership is permeated with the ideals of
democracy and justice for which he fights.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
Brunswick and his fellow generals were to banquet with the King of Prussia
at the Tuileries. And the soldiers were bent upon the cafés of the Palais
Royal.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
"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!'"
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
In 1792 Prussia measured her military skill and her masses of trained men
against France's disorganization—and overlooked "The Marseillaise."
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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 Château Thierry and later.
</p>
<p>
"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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
Foch adheres devoutly to the religious practices in which he was reared,
and one of his brothers belongs to the Jesuit order.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
Ferdinand Foch, with his brilliant knowledge and high ideals of
soldiering, was now past fifty and not yet a colonel.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
At any rate, Foch was not poisoned at the cup of disappointment.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
In 1903 he was made colonel and sent to the Thirty-fifth artillery at
Vannes, in Brittany.
</p>
<p>
Only two years later he was called to Orleans as chief of staff of the
Fifth army corps.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
"I offer you command of the School of War."
</p>
<p>
"I thank you," Foch replied, "but you are doubtless unaware that one of my
brothers is a Jesuit."
</p>
<p>
"I know it very well," was Clemenceau's answer. "But you make good
officers, and that is the only thing which counts."
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
"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."
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
<br /><br /><br /> <a name="chap11"></a>
</p>
<h3>
XI
</h3>
<h3>
FORTIFYING FRANCE WITH GREAT PRINCIPLES
</h3>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
In 1910 General Joseph Joffre became a member of the Superior War Council,
and in 1911 he became generalissimo.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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!"
</p>
<p>
"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."
</p>
<p>
This complete readiness was beyond his power to effect. But in his
province—the army—he achieved marvels that were almost
miracles.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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]
</p>
<p>
The officer was, if I mistake not, of the artillery, and he wrote this
"forecast" to entertain the members of his mess or battery.
</p>
<p>
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 Liége 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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
He was not, however, expecting it when it came.
</p>
<p>
<br />
</p>
<p class="noindent">
[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.
</p>
<p>
<br /><br /><br /> <a name="chap12"></a>
</p>
<h3>
XII
</h3>
<h3>
ON THE EVE OF WAR
</h3>
<p>
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."
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
"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.
</p>
<p>
"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.
</p>
<p>
"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.
</p>
<p>
"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.
</p>
<p>
"His speech is sober, direct; he affirms principles, condemns faults,
appeals to our energies in a brief but comprehensive style.
</p>
<p>
"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."
</p>
<p>
The young officer who wrote thus to his parents was Captain André Dubarle;
and he later laid down his life for his country on the field of honor
commanded by General Foch.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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-à-Mousson. He was given twenty-five days' leave. The wives and
children of both were at Morlaix with Madame Foch.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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!"
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
They were all gone when General Foch was recalled, on July 26.
</p>
<p>
On July 30 German under-officers crossed the frontier.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
They did not know his maxim: "The best means of defense is to attack."
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
How bitter was the disappointment to Foch we may guess but shall never
know. But remaking plans in his genius.
</p>
<p>
"What have we to do here?" he asked himself.
</p>
<p>
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."
</p>
<p>
<br /><br /><br /> <a name="chap13"></a>
</p>
<h3>
XIII
</h3>
<h3>
THE BATTLE OF LORRAINE
</h3>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
A German military telegram intercepted on August 27 said:
</p>
<p>
"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]."
</p>
<p>
So much depended on those plans which Castelnau and Dubail and Foch—and
very particularly Foch!—had frustrated.
</p>
<p>
Joffre realized what had been achieved. And on August 27 he issued the
following "order of the day":
</p>
<p>
"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.
</p>
<p>
"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.
</p>
<p>
"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.
</p>
<p>
"The enemy bent before them and his recoil enabled us to establish
undeniably the very serious losses he had suffered.
</p>
<p>
"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.
</p>
<p>
"The general-in-chief knows that the other armies will be moved to follow
the example of the First and Second armies."
</p>
<p>
Now, where were those other armies? And what were they doing?
</p>
<p>
France had then eight armies in the field, and was soon to have a ninth—commanded
by General Foch.
</p>
<p>
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'Espérey; 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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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 Châlons-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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
Then there was the Eleventh corps of Bretons and Vendeans, which had been
through the same terrible retreat.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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."
</p>
<p>
"Those who lived through these tragic hours near him," says René 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."
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
"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."
</p>
<p>
Thus we see Ferdinand Foch, on the eve of the first Battle of the Marne.
</p>
<p>
<br /><br /><br /> <a name="chap14"></a>
</p>
<h3>
XIV
</h3>
<h3>
THE FIRST VICTORY AT THE MARNE
</h3>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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
Châlons, and he had then determined the limits to which he would permit
the retreat of his armies.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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'Espérey; then the little British army of
three corps, under General Sir John French; and then the new Sixth army,
under General Manoury.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
In the morning of Saturday, September 5, all commanders received from
Joffre the now historic message:
</p>
<p>
"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."
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
"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."
</p>
<p>
At daybreak on Sunday, the 6th, Foch pitched his headquarters in a modern
château 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 Sézanne. And the front assigned to Foch ran from Sézanne 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.
</p>
<p>
Thus, at nightfall of the first day's fighting, Foch's new army had given
ground practically everywhere.
</p>
<p>
The next day the German attack became fiercer, and it seemed that more
ground must be yielded.
</p>
<p>
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."
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
But the attempt to break through the center Foch held, waxed fiercer as
the Germans realized the strength opposing them on their right.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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."
</p>
<p>
On that evening he sent Major Réquin to the Forty-second Division with
orders for the morrow. The most incredible orders!
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
They were weary—those splendid troops—but they were exalted;
they had advanced!
</p>
<p>
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'Espérey to stretch
out the front covered by his right wing and adjoining Foch's left.
</p>
<p>
In a letter to me, Lieutenant-Colonel (then Major) Réquin 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.
</p>
<p>
"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.
</p>
<p>
"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."
</p>
<p>
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 Fère-Champenoise.
</p>
<p>
When this was announced to Foch he telegraphed to general headquarters:
</p>
<p>
"My center gives way, my right recedes; the situation is excellent. I
shall attack."
</p>
<p>
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."
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
"To be victorious," said Napoleon, "it is necessary only to be stronger
than your enemy at a given point and at a given moment."
</p>
<p>
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."
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
"I still seem," says René Puaux, "to hear General Foch telling us, one
evening after dinner at Cassel several months later, about that maneuver
of September 9.
</p>
<p>
"He had put matches on the tablecloth"—some red matches which
Colonel Réquin 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.
</p>
<p>
"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.
</p>
<p>
"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.
</p>
<p>
"'It might succeed,' he said, laconically, 'or it might fail. It
succeeded. Those men were exhausted; they won, nevertheless.'"
</p>
<p>
At nine o'clock the next morning (September 10) the Forty-second entered
La Fère-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.
</p>
<p>
Two days later Foch was at Châlons, to direct in person the crossing of
the Marne by his army in pursuit of the fleeing enemy.
</p>
<p>
"The cavalry, the artillery, the unending lines of supply wagons," says
Colonel Réquin, "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."
</p>
<p>
<br /><br /><br /> <a name="chap15"></a>
</p>
<h3>
XV
</h3>
<h3>
SENT NORTH TO SAVE THE CHANNEL PORTS
</h3>
<p>
Germany's plan to enter France by the east gate, in Lorraine, was
frustrated with the aid of Foch.
</p>
<p>
Her plan to smash through the center of the armies on the Marne was
frustrated, with the very special aid of Foch.
</p>
<p>
Blocked in both these moves, there was just one other for Germany to make,
then, on the western front.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
And late in the afternoon of October 4 he telegraphed to General Foch at
Châlons, 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.
</p>
<p>
Five weeks previously Foch had been called to the vicinity of Châlons to
assemble an army just coming into existence. Now he was called to leave
Châlons 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.
</p>
<p>
But in a few hours he had his affairs in order and was ready to leave.
</p>
<p>
It was ten o'clock that Sunday night when he got into his automobile to be
whirled from the Marne to the Somme.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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!
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
In 1912 General Foch had been the head of the French military commission
sent to witness the British army maneuvers at Cambridge.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
His study of what seemed to him the military strength and weakness of
France's great neighbor and ally was minute and comprehensive.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
Now he was placed where he could render aid—where he <i>must</i>
render aid.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
There are several graphic accounts of interviews which took place between
these generals.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
When word of this disaster reached Foch that night he at once set out from
Cassel for French's headquarters at Saint Omer.
</p>
<p>
It was 1 A.M. when he arrived. Marshal French was asleep. He was waked to
receive his visitor.
</p>
<p>
"Marshal," said Foch, "your line is cracked?"
</p>
<p>
"Yes."
</p>
<p>
"Have you any resources?"
</p>
<p>
"I have none."
</p>
<p>
"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!"
</p>
<p>
The offer was most gratefully received. At two o'clock the orders were
given; the gap was stopped.
</p>
<p>
Nevertheless, the British despaired of their ability to hold. Marshal
French had no reserves, and decided to fall back.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
Realizing the importance of the British commander's presence at that
interview, Jamet ventured to stop him and suggest his attendance.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
"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."
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
And the Channel ports were saved.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
"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.
</p>
<p>
"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!
</p>
<p>
"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.' …
</p>
<p>
"The general has raised his head; his eyes are shining.
</p>
<p>
"'Good! good!'
</p>
<p>
"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.
</p>
<p>
"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.
</p>
<p>
"In the hall, the gendarme on guard duty gets up, quickly, from the chair
wherein he is dozing.
</p>
<p>
"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.'
</p>
<p>
"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.
</p>
<p>
"A few hours later, very early in the morning, the general is back again
at his office."
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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
Réquin calls that Battle of the Yser "like a preface to the great victory
of 1918."
</p>
<p>
In the spring of 1915 Foch left Cassel and took up headquarters at
Frévent, 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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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."
</p>
<p>
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 <i>within</i>
is always apparent; and it inspires confidence, and renewed effort, in all
who come in contact with him.
</p>
<p>
<br /><br /><br /> <a name="chap16"></a>
</p>
<h3>
XVI
</h3>
<h3>
THE SUPREME COMMANDER OF THE ALLIED ARMIES
</h3>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
<a name="img-142"></a> <img src="images/img-142.jpg"
alt="General Pétain--Marshal Haig--General Foch--General Pershing"
width="345" height="491" />
</p>
<h4>
[Illustration: General Pétain--Marshal Haig--General Foch--General
Pershing]
</h4>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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 Pétain, 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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
Wherever General Foch goes, one finds him creating harmony and, through
harmony, doubling everyone's strength.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
In council he is still the great teacher striving always not merely to
make his principles remembered, but to have them shared.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
"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."
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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!
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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:
</p>
<p>
"I am greatly touched," he replied, "by your congratulations and thank you
sincerely.
</p>
<p>
"I do not forget that it was to your insistence that I owe the position
which I occupy to-day."
</p>
<p>
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!
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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, Pétain,
Clemenceau and Loucheur (Minister of Munitions) Pershing made the
following declaration:
</p>
<p>
"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."
</p>
<p>
<a name="img-148"></a> <img src="images/img-148.jpg"
alt="General Foch--General Pershing" width="358" height="511" />
</p>
<h4>
[Illustration: General Foch--General Pershing]
</h4>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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."
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
His manner on that occasion was calm, unhurried, but very direct, to the
point.
</p>
<p>
"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.
</p>
<p>
"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."
</p>
<p>
"I regret," wrote Lieutenant d'Entraygues in the Paris <i>Temps</i>, "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."
</p>
<p>
It was probably about that time that Major Darnley Stuart-Stephens wrote
of Foch, for the <i>English Review</i>.
</p>
<p>
"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."
</p>
<p>
Major Stuart-Stephens had studied the "mental assets" of Ferdinand Foch.
</p>
<p>
"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."
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
"We do not know," says an editorial writer in the New York <i>Evening Sun</i>,
"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."
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
<br /><br /><br /> <a name="chap17"></a>
</p>
<h3>
XVII
</h3>
<h3>
BRINGING GERMANY TO ITS KNEES
</h3>
<p>
Faith in the ability of Foch to lead us all to victory was, however, not
to endure without its grave tests.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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!
</p>
<p>
So he fought like a maddened beast whose usual cunning has given place to
frenzied desperation.
</p>
<p>
Again and again and again he lunged—now here, now there. And the
defenders of civilization fell back and back, before him.
</p>
<p>
Where was that calm, quiet man who had said: "Well, gentlemen, our affairs
are not going badly; are they?"
</p>
<p>
"The boche," he had said, "has been halted … now we shall
endeavor to do better."
</p>
<p>
What had happened? The boche was <i>not</i> halted! He was, in fact,
shelling Paris!
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
These things we know; but not what Foch was thinking—except that he
was not thinking of defeat.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
<br />
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
On that night of July 14 he began the great offensive which never stopped
until the whining boche was east of the Rhine!
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
<br />
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
<a name="img-160"></a> <img src="images/img-160.jpg"
alt="Marshal Foch, Executive Head of the Allied Forces" width="356"
height="541" />
</p>
<h4>
[Illustration: Marshal Foch, Executive Head of the Allied Forces]
</h4>
<p>
"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."
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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!
</p>
<p>
<br />
</p>
<p>
On August 6, Foch was made Marshal of France.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
"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.'"
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
October 4 the Hohenzollern King of Bulgaria deserted his doomed allies and
his throne and began looking for a place of refuge.
</p>
<p>
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."
</p>
<p>
October 10, Austria and Turkey joined Germany in appealing for peace
terms. Notes continued to pass between the Germanic capitals and
Washington, D. C.
</p>
<p>
But Foch fought on.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
(Foch meanwhile had launched an offensive against the Austrians on the
Piave.)
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
When the Allied War Council had agreed with Foch on the armistice terms,
he said:
</p>
<p>
"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?"
</p>
<p>
No one could think of anything that might add a jot to the completeness of
Germany's subjugation.
</p>
<p>
"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!"
</p>
<p>
"The German high command," he said later, at Trèves, "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."
</p>
<p>
The German plenipotentiaries arrived at the French front at nine o'clock
on the evening of November 7, and were escorted to the Château Francfort
to spend the night. The next morning they were taken to Rethondes in the
forest of Compiègne. There Foch (whose headquarters were at Semis,
twenty-two miles nearer Paris) awaited them in his special train.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
Mathias Erzberger, their spokesman, requested a cessation of hostilities
whilst a courier carried the terms to German General Headquarters at Spa.
</p>
<p>
There the Kaiser, Hindenburg and others awaited particulars.
</p>
<p>
Foch declined to cease hostilities. He knew his enemy too well.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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 Compiègne 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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
Then the papers were signed.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
<br /><br /><br /> <a name="chap18"></a>
</p>
<h3>
XVIII
</h3>
<h3>
DURING THE ARMISTICE AND AFTER
</h3>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
<a name="img-174"></a> <img src="images/img-174.jpg"
alt="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."
width="388" height="632" />
</p>
<h4>
[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.]
</h4>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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 Comédie Française, had
written several books about the leaders of the French Revolution.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
"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."
</p>
<p>
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:
</p>
<p>
"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."
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
"The fame of one man," says Henri Bordeaux, "is nothing unless its
represents the obscure deeds of the anonymous multitude."
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
"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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
Every good father in France may see himself in Foch—and especially
every father who gave his son for France and her ideals.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
For nearly every great commander, victory in arms has led to power in the
state.
</p>
<p>
Foch is a statesman as preëminently as he is a warrior. His counsel was as
weighty in the peace settlement as his strategy was in winning the war.
</p>
<p>
But one cannot conceive him using his prestige, military or diplomatic, to
increase his personal power.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
"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."
</p>
<p>
In presenting to Foch the baton of a Marshal of France, President Poincaré
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."
</p>
<p>
"This moral superiority," said the President of the French Republic to the
new Marshal of France, "you have tended like a sacred flame."
</p>
<p>
Always, the tone of tribute to Foch is one of veneration for the greatness
of his soul and his preëminent ability to represent and to lead his
people.
</p>
<p>
"You are not," President Poincaré 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."
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
Had the presentation been three months later, President Poincaré 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."
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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 <i>soul</i>, and the laws of the soul
were made by God."
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
And to us, with this sacred obligation on us, Foch would say:
</p>
<p>
"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 <i>know how</i> to serve your ideals, your
principles. Victory always goes to those who deserve it by possessing the
greatest power of will and intelligence."
</p>
<p>
<br /><br /><br /><br />
</p>
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EBooks posted prior to November 2003, with eBook numbers BELOW #10000,
are filed in directories based on their release date. If you want to
download any of these eBooks directly, rather than using the regular
search system you may utilize the following addresses and just
download by the etext year.
<a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext06/">http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext06/</a>
(Or /etext 05, 04, 03, 02, 01, 00, 99,
98, 97, 96, 95, 94, 93, 92, 92, 91 or 90)
EBooks posted since November 2003, with etext numbers OVER #10000, are
filed in a different way. The year of a release date is no longer part
of the directory path. The path is based on the etext number (which is
identical to the filename). The path to the file is made up of single
digits corresponding to all but the last digit in the filename. For
example an eBook of filename 10234 would be found at:
http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/0/2/3/10234
or filename 24689 would be found at:
http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/4/6/8/24689
An alternative method of locating eBooks:
<a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/GUTINDEX.ALL">http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/GUTINDEX.ALL</a>
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