After quitting the School of War in 1887 (he graduated fourth in his class, as he had at Saumur; he was third at Fontainebleau), Ferdinand Foch was sent to Montpellier as a probationer for the position of staff officer.
He remained at Montpellier for four years—first as a probationer and later as a staff officer in the Sixteenth Army Corps, whose headquarters are there.
Marshall Joffre, General Foch
It is a coincidence—without special significance, but interesting—that Captain Joseph Joffre had spent several years at the School of Engineering in Montpellier; he left there in 1884, after the death of his young wife, to bury himself and his grief in Indo-China; so the two men did not meet in the southern city.[1]
Joffre returned from Indo-China in 1888, while Foch was at Montpellier, and after some time in the military railway service, and a promotion in rank (he was captain for thirteen years), received an appointment as professor of fortifications at Fontainebleau.
Some persons who claim to have known Joffre at Montpellier have manifested surprise at the greatness to which he attained thirty years later; he did not impress them as a man of destiny. That is quite as likely to be their fault as his. And also it is possible that Captain Joseph Joffre had not then begun to develop in himself those qualities which made him ready for greatness when the opportunity came.
If, however, any one has ever expressed surprise at Ferdinand Foch's attainment, I have not heard of it. He seems always to have impressed people with whom he came in contact as a man of tremendous energy, application, and thoroughness.
The opportunities for study at Montpellier are excellent, and the region is one of extraordinary richness for the lover of history. The splendor of the cities of Transalpine Gaul in this vicinity is attested by remains more numerous and in better preservation than Italy affords save in a very few places. And awe-inspiring evidences of medievalism's power flank one at every step and turn. Without doubt, Foch made the most of them.
Needless to remark, the commander-in-chief of the allied armies has not confided to me what were his favorite excursions during these four years at Montpellier. But I am quite sure that Aigues-Mortes was one of them. And I like to think of him, as we know he looked then, pacing those battlements and pondering the warfare of those militant ages when this vast fortress in the wide salt marshes was one of the most formidable in the world. What fullness of detail there must have been in the mental pictures he was able to conjure of St. Louis embarking here on his two crusades? What particularity in his appreciation of those defenses!
The place is, to-day, the very epitome of desolation—much more so than if the fortifications were not so perfectly preserved. For they look as if yesterday they might have been bristling with men-at-arms—whereas not in centuries has their melancholy majesty served any other purpose than that of raising reflections in those to whom the past speaks through her monuments.
From Montpellier, Ferdinand Foch returned to Paris, in February, 1891, as major on the general army staff.
He and Joffre had now the same rank. Joffre became lieutenant colonel in 1894 and colonel in 1897; similar promotions came to Foch in 1896 and 1903. He was six years later than Joffre in attaining a colonelcy, and exactly that much later in becoming a general.
Neither man had a quick rise but Foch's was (as measurable in grades and pay) specially slow.
About the time that Major Joffre went to the Soudan, to superintend the building of a railway in the Sahara desert, Major Foch went to Vincennes as commander of the mounted group of the Thirteenth Artillery.
Vincennes is on the southeastern skirts of Paris, close by the confluence of the Seine and the Marne; about four miles or so from the Bastille, which was the city's southeastern gate for three hundred years or thereabouts, until the fortified inclosure on that side of the city was enlarged under Louis XIV.
The fort of Vincennes was founded in the twelfth century to guard the approach to Paris from the Marne valley. And on account of its pleasant situation—close to good hunting and also to their capital—the castle of Vincennes was a favorite residence of many early French kings.
It was there that St. Louis is said to have held his famous open-air court of justice, which he established so that his subjects might come direct to him with their troubles and he, besides settling them, might learn at first hand what reforms were needed.
Five Kings of France died there (among them Charles VI, the mad king, and Charles IX, haunted by the horrors of the massacre on St. Bartholomew's eve), and one King of England, Harry Hotspur. King Charles V was born there.
From the days of Louis XI the castle has been used as a state prison. Henry of Navarre was once a prisoner there, and so was the Grand 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.
The castle is now (and has been for many years) an arsenal and school of musketry, artillery, and other military services. Before its firing squad perish many traitors to France, whose last glimpse of the country they have betrayed is in the courtyard of this ancient castle.
The vicinity is very lovely. The Bois de Vincennes, on the edge of which the castle stands, is scarcely inferior to the Bois de Boulogne in charm. We used to go out there, not infrequently, for luncheon, which we ate in a rustic summerhouse close to the edge of the lake, with many sociable ducks and swans bearing us company and clamoring for bits of bread.
It would be hard to imagine anything more idyllic, more sylvan, on the edge of a great city—anything more peaceful, restful, anywhere.
Yet the whole locality was, even then, a veritable camp of Mars—forts, barracks, fields for maneuvers and for artillery practice, infantry butts, rifle ranges, school of explosives; and what not.
France knew her need of protection—and none of us can ever be sufficiently grateful that she did!
But she did not obtrude her defensive measures. She seldom made one conscious of her military affairs.
In Germany, for many years before this war, remembrance of the army and reverence to the army was exacted of everyone almost at every breath. Forever and forever and forever you were being made to bow down before the God of War.
In France, on the contrary, it was difficult to think about war—even in the very midst of a place like Vincennes—unless you were actually engaged in organizing and preparing the country's defenses.
After three years at Vincennes, Ferdinand Foch was recalled to the army staff in Paris. And on the 31st of October, 1895, he was made associate professor of military history, strategy, and applied tactics, at the Superior School of War.
He had then just entered upon his forty-fifth year; and the thoroughness of his training was beginning to make itself felt at military headquarters.
[1] I have found it interesting to compare the careers of Joffre and Foch from the time they were at school together, and I daresay that others will like to know what steps forward he was taking who is not the subject of these chapters but inseparably bound up with him in many events and forever linked with him in glory.
After a year's service as associate professor of military history, strategy, and applied tactics at the Superior School of War in Paris, Ferdinand Foch was advanced to head professorship in those branches and at the same time he was made lieutenant-colonel. This was in 1896. He was forty-five years old and had been for exactly a quarter of a century a student of the art of warfare.
His old schoolfellow, Joseph Joffre, was then building fortifications in northern Madagascar; and his army rank was the same as that of Foch.
It was just twenty years after Foch entered upon his full-fledged professorship at the Superior School of War that Marshal Joffre, speaking at a dinner assembling the principal leaders of the government and of the army, declared that without the Superior School of War the victory of the Marne would have been impossible.
All the world knows this now, almost as well as Marshal Joffre knew it then. And all the world knows now as not even Marshal Joffre could have known then, how enormous far, far beyond the check of barbarism at the first battle of the Marne—is our debt and that of all posterity to the Superior School of War and, chiefly, to Ferdinand Foch.
It cannot have been prescience that called him there. It was just Providence, nothing less!
For that was a time when men like Ferdinand Foch (whose whole heart was in the army, making it such that nothing like the downfall of 1870 could ever again happen to France), were laboring under extreme difficulties. The army was unpopular in France.
This was due, partly to the disclosures of the Dreyfus case; partly to a wave of internationalism and pacifism; partly to jealousy of the army among civil officials.
An unwarranted sense of security was also to blame. France had worked so hard to recoup her fortunes after the disaster of 1870 that her people—delighted with their ability as money makers, blinded by the glitter of great prosperity—grudged the expanse of keeping up a large army, grudged the time that compulsory military training took out of a young man's life. And this preoccupation with success and the arts and pleasures of prosperous peace made them incline their ears to the apostles of "Brotherhood" and "Federation" and "Arbitration instead of Armament."
Little by little legislation went against the army. The period of compulsory service was reduced from three years to two; that cut down the size of the army by one-third. The supreme command of the army was vested not in a general, but in a politician—the Minister of War. The generals in the highest commands not only had to yield precedence to the prefects of the provinces (like our governors of states), but were subject to removal if the prefects did not like their politics and the Minister of War wished the support of the prefects.
Even the superior war council of the nation might be politically made up, to pay the War Minister's scores rather than to protect the country.
All this can happen to a people lulled by a false sense of security—even to a people which has had to defend itself against the savage rapacity of its neighbors across the Rhine for two thousand years!
It was against these currents of popular opinion and of government opposition that Ferdinand Foch took up his work in the Superior School of War—that work which was to make possible the first victory of the Marne, to save England from invasion by holding Calais, and to do various other things vital to civilization, including the prodigious achievements of the days that have since followed.
Foch foresaw that these things would have to be done and, with absolute consecration to his task, he set himself not only to train officers for France when she should need them, but to inspire them with a unity of action which has saved the world.
I have various word-pictures of him as he then appeared to, and impressed, his students.
One is by a military writer who uses the pseudonym of "Miles."
"The officers who succeeded one another at the school of war between 1896 and 1901," he says, referring to the first term of Foch as instructor there, "will never forget the impressions made upon them by their professor of strategy and of general tactics. It was this course that was looked forward to with the keenest curiosity as the foundational instruction given by the school. It enjoyed the prestige given it by the eminent authorities who had held it; and the eighty officers who came to the school at each promotion, intensely desirous of developing their skill and judgment, were always impatient to see and hear the man who was to instruct them in these branches.
"Lieutenant-Colonel Foch did not disappoint their expectations. Thin, elegant, of distinguished bearing, he at once struck the beholder with his expression—full of energy, of calm, of rectitude.
"His forehead was high, his nose straight and prominent, his gray-blue eyes looked one full in the face. He spoke without gestures, with an air of authority and conviction; his voice serious, harsh, a little monotonous; amplifying his phrases to press home in every possible way a rigorous reasoning; provoking discussion; always appealing to the logic of his hearers; sometimes difficult to follow, because his discourse was so rich in ideas; but always holding attention by the penetration of his surveys as well as by his tone of sincerity.
"The most profound and the most original of the professors at the school of war, which at that time counted in its teaching corps many very distinguished minds and brilliant lecturers: such Lieutenant-Colonel Foch seemed to his students, all eager from the first to give themselves up to the enjoyment of his lessons and the acceptance of his inspiration."
Colonel E. Réquin of the French general staff, who has fought under Foch in some of the latter's greatest engagements, says:
"Foch has been for forty years the incarnation of the French military spirit." For forty years! That means ever since he left the cavalry school at Saumur and went, as captain of the Tenth regiment of artillery, to Rennes. "Through his teachings and his example," Colonel Réquin goes on to say, in a 1918 number of theWorld's Work, "he was the moral director of the French general staff before becoming the supreme chief of the allied armies. Upon each one of us he has imprinted his strong mark. We owe to him in time of peace that unity of doctrine which was our strength. Since the war we owe to him the highest lessons of intellectual discipline and moral energy.
"As a professor he applied the method which consists in taking as the base of all strategical and tactical instruction the study of history completed by the study of military history—that is to say, field operations, orders given, actions, results, and criticisms to be made and the instructions to be drawn from them. He also used concrete cases—that is to say, problems laid by the director on the map or on the actual ground.
"By this intellectual training he accustomed the officers to solving all problems, not by giving them ready-made solutions, but by making them find the logical solution to each individual case.
"His mind was trained through so many years of study that no war situation could disturb him. In the most difficult ones, he quickly pointed out the goal to be reached and the means to employ, and each one of us felt that it must be right."
But best of all the things said about Foch in that period of his life, I like this, by Charles Dawbarn, in theFortnightly Review:
"Such was"—in spite of many disappointments—"his fine confidence in life, that he communicated to others not his grievances, but his secret satisfactions."
Foch made the men who sat under him love their work for the work's sake and not for its rewards. He fired them with an ardor for military art which made them feel that in all the world there is nothing so fascinating, so worth while, as knowing how to defend one's country when she needs defense.
He was able, in peace times when the military spirit was little applauded and much decried, to give his students an enthusiasm for "preparedness" which flamed as high and burned as pure as that which ordinarily is lighted only by a great national rush to arms to save the country from ravage.
It was tremendously, incalculably important for France and for all of us that Ferdinand Foch was eager and able to impart this enthusiasm for military skill.
But also it is immensely important, to-day, when the war is won, and in all days and all walks of life, that there be those who can kindle and keep alight the enthusiasm of their fellows; who can overlook the failure of their own ardor and faithfulness to win its fair reward, and convey to others only the alluring glow of their "secret satisfactions."
In the five years, 1895-1901 (his work at the school was interrupted by politics in 1901), "many hundreds of officers," as 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."
Let us try to get some idea of the sort of thing that Foch taught those hundreds of French army officers, not only about war but about life.
From all his study, he repeatedly declared, one dominant conviction has evolved: Force that is not dominated by spirit is vain force.
Victory, in his belief, goes to those who merit it by the greatest strength of will and intelligence.
It was his endeavor, always, to develop in the hundreds of officers who were his students, that dual strength in which it seemed to him that victory could only lie: moral and intellectual ability to perceive what ought to be done, and intellectual and moral ability to do it.
In his mind, it is impossible to be intelligent with the brain alone. The Germans do not comprehend this, and therein, to Ferdinand Foch, lies the key to all their failures.
He believes that each of us must think with our soul's aid—that is to say, with our imagination, our emotions, our aspiration—and employ our intelligence to direct our feeling.
And he asks this combination not from higher officers alone, but from all their men down to the humblest in the ranks.
He believes in the invincibility of men fighting for a principle dearer to them than life—but he knows that ardor without leadership means a lost cause; that men must know how to fight for their ideals, their principles; but that their officers are charged with the sacred responsibility of making the men's ardor and valor count.
At the beginning of his celebrated course of lectures on tactics he always admonished his students thus:
"You will be called on later to be the brain of an army. So I say to you to-day: Learn to think."
By this he was far from meaning that officers were to confine thinking to themselves, but that they were to teach themselves to think so that they might the better hand on intelligence and stimulate their men to obey not blindly but comprehendingly.
It was a maxim of Napoleon's, of which Foch is very fond, that "as a general rule, the commander-in-chief ought only to indicate the direction, determine the ends to be attained; the means of getting there ought to be left to the free choice of the mediums of execution, without whom success is impossible."
This leaves a great responsibility to officers, but it is the secret of that flexibility which makes the French army so effective.
For Foch carries his belief in individual judgment far beyond the officers commanding units; he carries it to the privates in the ranks.
An able officer, in Foch's opinion, is one who can take a general command to get his men such-and-such a place and accomplish such-and-such a thing, and so interpret that command to his men that each and every one of them will, while acting in strict obedience to orders, use the largest possible amount of personal intelligence in accomplishing the thing he was told to do.
It is said that there was probably never before in history a battle fought in which every man was a general—so to speak—as at the battle of 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.
It was an intelligent democracy, acting under superb leadership that vanquished the forces of autocracy.
Foch has worked with a free hand to test the worth of his lifelong principles. And the hundreds of men he trained in those principles were ready to carry them out for him.
No wonder his first injunction was: Learn to think!
To him, the leadership of units is not a simple question of organization, of careful plans, of strategic and tactical intelligence, but a problem involving enormous adaptability.
Battles are not won at headquarters, he contends; they are won in the field; and the conditions that may arise in the field cannot be foreseen or forestalled—they must be met when they present themselves. In large part they are made by the behavior of men in unexpected circumstances; therefore, the more a commander knows about human nature and its spiritual depressions and exaltations, the better able he is to change his plans as new conditions arise.
German power in war, Foch taught his students, lay in the great masses of their effective troops and their perfect organization for moving men and supplies. German weakness was in the absolute autocracy of great headquarters, building its plans as an architect builds a house and unable to modify them if something happens to make a change necessary.
This he deduced from his study of their methods in previous wars, especially in that of 1870.
And with this in mind he labored so that when Germany made her next assault upon France, France might be equipped with hundreds of officers cognizant of Germany's weakness and prepared to turn it to her defeat.
"It was not," Napoleon wrote, "the Roman legions which conquered Gaul, but Caesar. It was not the Carthaginian soldiers who made Rome tremble, but Hannibal. It was not the Macedonian phalanx which penetrated India, but Alexander. It was not the French army which reached the Weser and the Inn, but Turenne. It was not the Prussian soldiers who defended their country for seven years against the three most formidable powers in Europe; it was Frederick the Great."
And already it has been suggested that historians will write of this war: "It was not the allied armies, struggling hopelessly for four years, that finally drove the Germans across the Rhine, but Ferdinand Foch."
But I am sure that Foch would not wish this said of him in the same sense that Napoleon said it of earlier generals.
For Foch has a greater vision of generalship than was possible to any commander of long ago.
His strategy is based upon a close study of theirs; for he says that though the forms of making war evolve, the directing principles do not change, and there is need for every officer to make analyses of Xenophon and Caesar and Hannibal as close as those he makes of Frederick and Napoleon.
But his conception of military leadership is permeated with the ideals of democracy and justice for which he fights.
One of his great lectures to student-officers was that in which he made them realize what, besides the route of the Prussians, happened at Valmy in September, 1792.
On his big military map of that region (it is on the western edge of the Argonne) Foch would show his students how the Prussians, Hessians and some Austrian troops; under the Duke of Brunswick, crossed the French frontier on August 19 and came swaggering toward Paris, braggartly announcing their intentions of "celebrating" in Paris in September.
Brunswick and his fellow generals were to banquet with the King of Prussia at the Tuileries. And the soldiers were bent upon the cafés of the Palais Royal.
Foch showed his classes how Dumouriez, who had been training his raw troops of disorganized France at Valenciennes, dashed with them into the Argonne to intercept Brunswick; how this and that happened which I will not repeat here because it is merely technical; and then how the soldiers of the republic, rallied by the cry, "The country is in danger," and thrilled by "The Marseillaise" (written only five months before, but already it had changed the beat of nearly every heart in France), made such a stand that it not only halted Prussia and her allies, but so completely broke their conquering spirit that without firing another shot they took themselves off beyond the Rhine.
"We," Foch used to tell his students, "are the successors of the revolution and the empire, the inheritors of the art, new-born upon the field of Valmy to astonish the old Europe, to surprise in particular the Duke of Brunswick, the pupil of Frederick the Great, and to tear from Goethe, before the immensity of a fresh horizon, this profound cry: 'I tell you, from this place and this day comes a new era in the history of the world!'"
It is that new era which Foch typifies—that new era which his adversaries, deaf to Goethe's cry and blind to Goethe's vision, have not yet realized.
It was "the old Europe" against which Foch fought—the old Europe which learned nothing at Valmy and had learned nothing since; the old Europe that fought as Frederick the Great fought and that had not yet seen the dawn of that new day which our nation and the French nation greeted with glad hails much more than a century ago.
In 1792 Prussia measured her military skill and her masses of trained men against France's disorganization—and overlooked "The Marseillaise."
In 1914 she weighed her might against what she knew of the might of France—and omitted to weigh certain spiritual differences which she could not comprehend, but which she felt at the first battle of the Marne, has been feeling ever since, and before which she had to retire, beaten but still blind.
In 1918 she estimated the probable force of those "raw recruits" whom we were sending overseas—and laughed. She based her calculations on our lack of military tradition, our hastily trained officers, our "soft," ease-loving men uneducated in those ideals of blood and iron wherein she has reared her youth always. She overlooked that spiritual force which the "new era" develops and which made our men so responsive to the command of Foch at Château Thierry and later.
"The immensity of a fresh horizon" whereon Goethe saw the new era dawning, is still veiled from the vision of his countrymen. But across its roseate reaches unending columns of marching men passed, under the leadership of Ferdinand Foch, to liberate the captives the blind brute has made and to strike down the strongholds of "old Europe" forever.
For nearly six years Foch taught such principles as these and others which I shall recall in connection with great events which they made possible later on.
Then came the anti-clerical wave in French politics, and on its crest a new commandant to the School of War—a man elevated by the anti-clericals and eager to keep his elevation by pleasing those who put him there.
Foch adheres devoutly to the religious practices in which he was reared, and one of his brothers belongs to the Jesuit order.
These conditions made his continuance at the school under its new head impossible. Whether he resigned because he realized this, or was superseded, I do not know. But he left his post and went as lieutenant-colonel to the Twenty-ninth artillery, at Laon.
He was there two years and undoubtedly made a thorough study of the country round Laon—which was for more than four years to be the key to the German tenure in that part of France.
Ferdinand Foch, with his brilliant knowledge and high ideals of soldiering, was now past fifty and not yet a colonel.
Strong though his spirit was, sustained by faith in God and rewarded by those "secret satisfactions" which come to the man who loves his work and is conscious of having given it his best, he must have had hours, days, when he drank deep of the cup of bitterness. There are, though, bitters that shrivel and bitters that tone and invigorate. Or perhaps they are the same and the difference is in us.
At any rate, Foch was not poisoned at the cup of disappointment.
And when the armies under his command encircled the great rock whereon Laon is perched high above the surrounding plains I hope Foch was with them—in memory of the days when he was "dumped" there, so to speak, far away from his sphere of influence at the School of War.
In 1903 he was made colonel and sent to the Thirty-fifth artillery at Vannes, in Brittany.
Only two years later he was called to Orleans as chief of staff of the Fifth army corps.
On June 20, 1907, he was made Brigadier General and passed to the general staff of the French army at Paris. Soon afterwards, Georges Clemenceau became Minister of War, and was seeking a new head for the Staff College. Everyone whose advice he sought said: Foch. So the redoubtable old radical and anti-clerical summoned General Foch.
"I offer you command of the School of War."
"I thank you," Foch replied, "but you are doubtless unaware that one of my brothers is a Jesuit."
"I know it very well," was Clemenceau's answer. "But you make good officers, and that is the only thing which counts."
Thus was foreshadowed, in these two great men, that spirit of "all for France" which, under the civil leadership of one and the military leadership of the other, was to save the country and the world.
In 1911 Foch, at 60, was given command of the Thirteenth division at Chaumont, just above the source of the Marne. On December 17, 1912, he was placed at the head of the Eighth Army Corps, at Bourges. And on August 23, 1913, he took command of the Twentieth corps at Nancy.
"When," says Marcel Knecht, "we in Nancy heard that Foch had been chosen to command the best troops in France, the Twentieth Army Corps, pride of our capital, everybody went wild with enthusiasm."
It is M. Knecht who tells us about the visit to General Foch at Nancy, in the spring of 1914, of three British generals whose presence there Foch utilized for two purposes: He showed them what he was doing to strengthen Nancy's defensibility, and thereby urged upon them France's conviction that an attack by Germany was imminent and unavoidable; and he utilized the occasion to show the Lorrainers his warm friendliness for England—which Lorraine was inclined still to blame for the death of Joan of Arc. Foch knew that German propagandists were continually fanning this resentment against England. And he made it part of his business to overcome that prejudice by showing the honor in which he held Great Britain's eminent soldiers.
So much has been said about France's unreadiness for the war that it is easy for those who do not know what the real situation was to suppose that the French were something akin to fools. For twenty centuries the Germans had been swarming over the Rhine in preying, ravaging hordes, and France had been beating them back to save her national life. That they would swarm again, more insolent and more rapacious than ever after their triumph of 1870, was not to be doubted. Everyone in France who had the slightest knowledge of the spirit that has animated the Hohenzollern empire knew its envy of France, its cupidity of France's wealth, its hatred of France's attractions for all the world. Everyone who came in contact with the Germans felt the bullet-headed belligerence of their attitude which they were never at any pains to conceal.
The military men of France knew that Germany had for years been preparing for aggression on a large scale. They knew that she would strike when she felt that she was readiest and her opponents of the Triple Entente were least ready.
The state of mind of the civilians—busy, prosperous, peace-loving, concerned with conversational warfare about a multitude of petty internal affairs—is difficult to describe. But I think it may not be impertinent to say of it that it was something like the state of mind of a congregation, well fed, comfortable, conscious of many pleasant virtues and few corroding sins, before whom a preacher holds up the last judgment. None of them hopes to escape it, none of them can tell at what moment he may be called to his account, none of them would wish to go in just his present state, and yet none of them does anything when he leaves church to put himself more definitely in readiness for that great decision which is to determine where he shall spend eternity.
In 1911 it seemed for a brief while that the irruption from the east was at hand. But Germany did not feel quite ready; she "dickered"; and things went on seemingly as before.
France seemed to forget. But she was not so completely abandoned to hopefulness as was England—England, who turned her deafest ear to Lord Roberts' impassioned pleas for preparedness.
France has an institution called the Superior War Council. It is the supreme organ of military authority and the center of national defense; it consists of eleven members supposed to be the ablest commanding generals in the nation. The president of this council is the Minister of War; the vice president is known as the generalissimo of the French army.
In 1910 General Joseph Joffre became a member of the Superior War Council, and in 1911 he became generalissimo.
It was because the Council felt the imminence of war with Germany that General Pau—to whom the vice presidency should have gone by right of his priority and also of his eminent fitness—patriotically waived the honor, because in two years he would be sixty-five and would have to retire; he felt that the defense of the country needed a younger man who could remain more years in service. So Joffre was chosen and almost immediately he began to justify the choice.
Joffre and his associates of the council not only foresaw the war, but they quite clearly previsioned its extent and something of its character. In 1912 Joffre declared "the fighting front will extend from four hundred to five hundred miles." He talked little, but he worked prodigiously; and always his insistence was: "We must be prepared!"
"With whole nations," he said, "engaged in a mortal combat, disaster is certain for those who in time of peace failed to prepare for war." And "To be ready means, to-day, to have mustered in advance all the resources of the country, all the intelligence of its citizens, all their moral energy, for the purpose of attaining this one aim—victory. Getting ready is a duty that devolves not only upon the army, but upon all public officials, upon all organizations, upon all societies, upon all families, upon all citizens."
This complete readiness was beyond his power to effect. But in his province—the army—he achieved marvels that were almost miracles.
It was France's good fortune (and that of her allies) that in all he undertook for the purification and strengthening of the army Joffre had, from January, 1912, the complete co-operation of the Minister of War, M. Millerand. Together, these two men, brilliantly supported by some of Joffre's colleagues in the Superior Council—notably Pau and Castelnau—achieved results that have been pronounced "unparalleled in the history of the Third Republic." They freed the army from the worst effects of political influence, made it once more a popular institution, and organized it into an effectiveness which needs, now, no comment.
When Foch was put in command of the Twentieth army corps at Nancy it was in the expectation that Nancy would sustain the first shock of the German invasion when it came. The opinion prevailed that Nancy could not be held. Whether Joffre was of this opinion or not, I do not know. If he was, he probably felt that Foch would give it up only after harder fighting than any other general. But Foch believed that Nancy could be defended, and so did his immediate superior, the gallant General Castelnau, in command of the Second Army of Lorraine.
For nearly a year following upon his appointment to Nancy, Foch labored mightily to strengthen Nancy against the attack which was impending. He seems never to have doubted that Germany would make her first aggression there, only seventeen miles from her own border, and with Metz and Strassburg to back the invading army.
But that there were other opinions, even at Nancy, I happen to know. For, one day while the war was still new, I chanced in rooting in an old bookstall in Paris, to find a book which was written by an officer of the Twentieth Corps, in 1911.[1]
The officer was, if I mistake not, of the artillery, and he wrote this "forecast" to entertain the members of his mess or battery.
He predicted with amazing accuracy the successive events which happened nearly three years later, only he "guessed" the order for mobilization in France to fall on August 14, instead of August 1; and all his subsequent dates were just about two weeks later than the actualities. But he "foresaw" the invasion of Belgium, the resistance at 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.
The book was published in January, 1912, if I remember rightly, and was almost immediately translated into German. And I was told that one hundred thousand copies were sold in Germany in a very short time, and it was made the subject of editorials in nearly every prominent German paper.
Probably Foch read it. He may even have discussed it with the author. But he held to the belief that when the attack came it would come through Nancy.
He was not, however, expecting it when it came.
[1] The reason I cannot give his name, nor quote directly from his book, is that a fellow-traveler borrowed the book from me and I have never seen it since.
In the first days of July, 1914, divisional maneuvers were held as usual in Lorraine. Castelnau and Foch reviewed the troops, known throughout the army as "the division of iron."
A young captain, recently assigned from the School of War to a regiment of Hussars forming part of the Twentieth army corps, wrote to his parents on July 5 an account of the maneuvers in which he had just taken part. He said that "the presence of these two eminent men gave a great interest" to the events he described. And the impression made upon him by Foch is so remarkable that his letter is likely to become one of the small classics of the war—endlessly reproduced whenever the story of Foch is told.
"General Foch," he reminds his parents, "is a former commander of the School of War, where he played, on account of his great fitness, a very remarkable role.
"He is a man still young [he was almost 63!], slender and supple, and rather frail; his powerful head seems like a flower too heavy for a stem too slight.
"What first strikes one about him is his clear gaze, penetrating, intellectual, but above all and in spite of his tremendous energy, luminous. This light in his eyes spiritualizes a countenance which otherwise would be brutal, with its big mustache bristling above a very prominent, dominant jaw.
"When he speaks, pointing lessons from the maneuver, he becomes animated to the extent of impassionedness, but never expressing himself otherwise than with simplicity and purity.
"His speech is sober, direct; he affirms principles, condemns faults, appeals to our energies in a brief but comprehensive style.
"He is a priest, who judges, condemns, and instructs in the name of the faith which illumines him and to which he has consecrated all the powers of his mind and his heart. General Foch is a prophet whom his God transports."
The young officer who wrote thus to his parents was Captain André Dubarle; and he later laid down his life for his country on the field of honor commanded by General Foch.
The letter seems to me as treasurable for what it conveys to us of the sort of young man Foch found among his officers and soldiers (there were many such!) as for what it tells us of the impression Foch created even in those days before men's souls were set on fire with fervor for France.
On July 18 General Foch asked and obtained a leave of absence for fifteen days, so that he might join the family group gathered at his home near Morlaix in Brittany. His two sons-in-law, Captain Fournier and Captain Becourt, also obtained leave. The former was attached to the general army staff at Paris, and was granted seventeen days. The latter was in command of a company of the Twenty-sixth battalion of Foot Chasseurs at Pont-à-Mousson. He was given twenty-five days' leave. The wives and children of both were at Morlaix with Madame Foch.
So little expectation of immediate war had France on July 18 that she granted a fortnight's absence to the commander of those troops which were expected to bear the first shock of German aggression when it came.
But I happen to know of a French family reunion held at Nancy on July 14 and the days following, which was incomplete. One of the women of this family was married to a German official at Metz whose job it was to be caretaker for three thousand locomotives belonging to the imperial government and kept at Metz for "emergencies." On July 12 (as it afterwards transpired) he was ordered to have fires lighted and steam got up in those three thousand engines, and to keep them, night and day, ready for use at a moment's notice.
Those smoking iron horses in Metz are a small sample of what was going on all over Germany while France's frontier-defenders were being given permission to visit Brittany.
But for that matter German war-preparations were going on much nearer to Nancy than in Metz, while Foch was playing with his grandchildren at Morlaix.
Beginning about July 21 and ending about the 25th, twelve thousand Germans left Nancy for "points east," and six thousand others left the remainder of French Lorraine.
The pretexts they gave were various—vacations, urgent business matters, "cures" at German watering places. They all knew, when they left, that Germany was mobilizing for attack upon France. They had known it for some time before they left.
Since the beginning of July they had been working in Nancy to aid the German attack. They had visited the principal buildings, public and private, and especially the highest ones, with plans for the installation of wireless at the modest price of $34. "It is so interesting," they said, "to get the exact time, every day, from the Eiffel Tower!"
They had also some amazingly inexpensive contrivances for heating houses, or regulating the heating already installed, or for home refrigeration—things which took them into cellars in Nancy—and before they left to join their regiments they were exceedingly busy demonstrating those things.
They were all gone when General Foch was recalled, on July 26.
On July 30 German under-officers crossed the frontier.
On August 3 Uhlans and infantrymen on motorcycles were shooting and pillaging on the French side of the border, although it was not until 6:45 P.M. that day that Germany declared war on France.
That which France had been unable to suppose even Germany capable of, happened: The treaty with Belgium became a scrap of paper and the main attack upon France was made by way of the north.
But the expectation that Nancy would be one of the first objectives of the Hun-rampant was not without fulfillment. For the hordes advanced in five armies; and the fifth, the German left wing under Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, was ordered to swarm into France south of that of the Imperial Crown Prince, spread itself across country behind the French armies facing northward, join with Von Kluck's right wing somewhere west of Paris, and "bag" the French—armies, capital and all—"on or about" September 1.
It was all perfectly practicable—on paper. The only difficulty was that there were so many things the German staff had omitted from its careful calculations—omitted, perforce, because it had never guessed their existence. And that spoiled their reckoning.
Foch had, for years, been teaching that fighting demands supreme flexibility, adaptability; that war is full of surprises which must be met as they arise; that morale, the spiritual force of an army, is subject to fluctuations caused by dozens of conditions which cannot be foreseen and must be overcome. The phrase oftenest on his lips was: "What have we to do here?" For, as he conceived warfare, officers and even privates must constantly be asking themselves that. One plan goes awry. Very well! we'll find a better.
But Foch had not trained the German general staff. They made war otherwise. And well he knew it! Well he knew what happened to them when their "blue prints" would not fit unexpected conditions.
He knew that they expected to take Nancy easily, that they were looking for some effort to defend it, but not for a French attack.
They did not know his maxim: "The best means of defense is to attack."
He attacked. His Twentieth corps fought its way through the center of the Bavarian army, into German Lorraine. Then something happened. Just what it was is not clear—but doubtless will be some day. The offensive had to be abandoned and the French troops had to withdraw from German soil to defend their own.
How bitter was the disappointment to Foch we may guess but shall never know. But remaking plans in his genius.
"What have we to do here?" he asked himself.
Then, "in the twinkling of an eye," says one military historian, "General Foch found the solution to the defense problem wherewith he was so suddenly confronted when his offensive failed of support."
What is known as the battle of Lorraine began at the declaration of war and lasted till August 26—though the major part of it was fought in the last six of those days.
I shall not go into details about it here, except to recall that it was in this fighting that General Castelnau lost his oldest son, stricken almost at the father's side.
A German military telegram intercepted on August 27 said:
"On no account make known to our armies of the west [that is to say, the right wing, in Belgium] the checks sustained by our armies of the east [the left wing, in Lorraine]."
So much depended on those plans which Castelnau and Dubail and Foch—and very particularly Foch!—had frustrated.
Joffre realized what had been achieved. And on August 27 he issued the following "order of the day":
"The First and Second armies are at this moment giving an example of tenacity and of courage which the commander-in-chief is happy to bring to the knowledge of the troops under his orders.
"These two armies undertook a general offensive and met with brilliant success, until they hurled themselves at a barrier fortified and defended by very superior forces.
"After a retreat in perfect order, the two armies resumed the offensive and, combining their efforts, retook a great part of the territory they had given up.
"The enemy bent before them and his recoil enabled us to establish undeniably the very serious losses he had suffered.
"These armies have fought for fourteen days without a moment's respite, and with an unshakable confidence in victory as the reward of their tenacity.
"The general-in-chief knows that the other armies will be moved to follow the example of the First and Second armies."
Now, where were those other armies? And what were they doing?
France had then eight armies in the field, and was soon to have a ninth—commanded by General Foch.
There was the First army, under General Dubail; the Second, under General Castelnau; the Third, under General Sarrail; the Fourth, under General Langle de Cary; the Fifth, under General Franchet d'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.
The First and Second armies, fighting in Lorraine, we know about. They developed, in that battle, more than one great commander of whose abilities Joffre hastened to avail himself. On the day he issued that order commending the First and Second armies, the generalissimo called Manoury from the Lorraine front, where he had shown conspicuous leadership, and put him in command of the newly-created Sixth army, which was to play the leading part in routing Von Kluck. And on the next day (August 28) Joffre called Foch from Lorraine to head the new Ninth army, which was to hold the center at the Battle of the Marne and deal the smashing, decisive blow.
In two days, while his troops were retreating before an apparently irresistible force, Joffre created two new armies, put at the head of each a man of magnificent leadership, and intrusted to those two armies and their leaders the most vital positions in the great battle he was planning.
The German soldiers facing Joffre were acting on general orders printed for them eight years before, and under specific orders which had been worked out by their high command with the particularity of machine specifications. And all their presumptions were based on the French doing what Teutons would do in the same circumstances. Their extra-suspender-button efficiency and preparedness were pitted against the flexible genius of a man who could assemble his two "shock" armies in two days and put them under the command of men picked not from the top of his list of available commanders, but practically from the bottom.
The Third, Fourth and Fifth armies of Joffre were those which had sustained the terrific onslaught in the north and had been fighting in retreat, practically since the beginning.
On August 25 Joffre declared; "We have escaped envelopment"—thanks largely to the action in Lorraine, holding back the Bavarians—and, clearly seeing that he could not hope for favorable results from a great battle fought in the north, he gave the order for retreat which meant the abandonment of north-eastern France to the Hunnish hordes.
What anguish that order caused him we shall never know. He realized to the full what the people of that great, prosperous part of France would have to suffer. He was aware what the loss of those resources would mean to the French, and also what their gain would mean to the Germans. He understood the effect of retreat upon the morale of his men. And he must have been aware of the panic his order would create throughout the yet-uninvaded parts of France where no one could know at what point the invasion would be checked. He knew that the nation's faith in him would be severely shaken, and that even his army's faith in him would be put to a supreme test.
But when a man trains himself to be a commander of men, he trains himself to go through, heroically and at any cost, what he believes must be done. To sacrifice one's self comes comparatively easy—given compelling circumstances and an obedient soul. But to sacrifice others never becomes easy to a man who respects the rights of others. And we shall never begin to comprehend men like Joffre and Foch until we shake ourselves free from any notion we may have that military expediency makes it easy for them to order great mental and physical suffering.
General Foch detached himself, on August 29, from his beloved Twentieth corps and betook himself to the little village of Machault, about twenty miles northeast of 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.
There was the Ninth army corps, from Tours, made up of Angevins (men such as Foch had learned to know when he was at Saumur) and Vendeans (the Bretons' south neighbors). Some of these men had been fighting without respite for nine days as they fell back, with the Fourth army, from the Belgian border. With them, since August 22, had been the remarkable Moroccan division under General Humbert.
Then there was the Eleventh corps of Bretons and Vendeans, which had been through the same terrible retreat.
And—not to enumerate too far—there was that Forty-second division of infantry which was destined to play one of the most dramatic, thrilling, forever-memorable parts in all warfare. It had been in the Ardennes, and had fallen back, fighting fiercely as it came.
To help him command these weary men whose hearts were heavy with forebodings for France, Foch had, as he himself has said, "a general staff of five or six officers, gathered in haste to start with, little or no working material, our note books and a few maps."
"Those who lived through these tragic hours near him," says 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."
And through all this stress he had the personal anguish of being unable to get word of his only son, Germain Foch, or of his son-in-law, Captain Becourt, both of whom had been fighting on the Belgian front.
"It was not, however," M. Puaux says, "the time for personal emotions. The father effaced himself before the soldier. There was nothing to be thought of save the country."
Thus we see Ferdinand Foch, on the eve of the first Battle of the Marne.
It was Saturday, August 29, 1914, when General Foch went to Machault to take command of the various units he was to weld into the Ninth army.
On the Tuesday following (September 1) Joffre was quartered with his general staff at the little old town of Bar-sur-Aube, fifty miles south of Châlons, and he had then determined the limits to which he would permit the retreat of his armies.
If a stand could be taken and an offensive launched further north than the Aube River, it should be done; but in no event would the withdrawal go beyond the Seine, the Aube and the region north of Bar-le-Duc.
He then placed his armies in the field in the relation in which he deemed they would be most effective: the First army, under General Dubail, was in the Vosges, and the Second army, under General Castelnau, was round about Nancy; the Third army, under General Sarrail, east and south of the Argonne in a kind of "elbow," joining the Fourth army, under General de Langle de Cary; then the Ninth army, under General Foch; then the Fifth army, under General Franchet d'Espérey; then the little British army of three corps, under General Sir John French; and then the new Sixth army, under General Manoury.
So Foch, on the third day of organizing his new command, received orders—at once terrible and immensely flattering—that he was to occupy the center of Joffre's battle line and to sustain the onslaught of Von Buelow and the famous Prussian Guards.
In the morning of Saturday, September 5, all commanders received from Joffre the now historic message:
"The moment has come for the army to advance at all costs and allow itself to be slain where it stands rather than give way."
The men to whom this order was relayed by their commanders had, five-sixths of them, been ceaselessly engaged, without one single day's rest of any kind and much of the time without night rest either, for fourteen days, fighting as they fell back, and falling back as they fought; the skin was all worn from the soles of their feet, and what shoes they had left were stuck to their feet with blood.
"They had marched under a torrid sky," says Louis Madelin, "on scorching roads, parched and suffocated with dust. In reality they moved with their hearts rather than with their legs. According to Pierre Lasserre's happy expression, 'Our bodies had beaten a retreat, but not our hearts,' … But when, worn out with fatigue, faces black with powder, blinded by the chalk of Champagne, almost dying, they learned Joffre's order announcing the offensive, then the faces of our troops from Paris to Verdun beamed with joy. They fought with tired limbs, and yet no army ever showed such strength, for their hearts were filled with faith and hope."
At daybreak on Sunday, the 6th, Foch pitched his headquarters in a modern 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.
Thus, at nightfall of the first day's fighting, Foch's new army had given ground practically everywhere.
The next day the German attack became fiercer, and it seemed that more ground must be yielded.
That was the day when Foch made his memorable deduction: "They are trying to throw us back with such fury I am sure that means things are going badly for them elsewhere and they are seeking compensation."
He was right! Von Kluck was retiring in a northeasterly direction under Manoury's blows; and even Von Buelow (whom Foch faced) was withdrawing parts of his troops from the line at Foch's left.
But the attempt to break through the center Foch held, waxed fiercer as the Germans realized the strength opposing them on their right.
And on Tuesday, the 8th, Foch was unable to hold—save at certain points—and had to move his headquarters eleven miles south, to Plancy.
He had now reached the Aube, beyond which Joffre had decreed that he must not retire. On its north bank his gallant army must, if it could not do otherwise, "allow itself to be slain where it stands rather than give way."
On that evening he sent Major Réquin to the Forty-second Division with orders for the morrow. The most incredible orders!
The enemy had found his point of least resistance—on his right wing. He ought to strengthen that wing, but he could not. All the reserves were engaged—and the enemy knew it as well as he did. And it is a fixed principle of war not to withdraw active troops from one part of the line to strengthen another.
Only one part of his army had had any success that day: Toward evening the Forty-second Division and the Moroccans had made an irresistible lunge forward and driven the enemy to the north edge of the marshes.
They were weary—those splendid troops—but they were exalted; they had advanced!
Foch believes in the power of the spirit. He appealed to the Forty-second to do an extraordinary thing—to march, weary as it was, from left to right of his long line and brace the weak spot. And to cover up the gap their withdrawal would make he asked General Franchet d'Espérey to stretch out the front covered by his right wing and adjoining Foch's left.
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.
"It was 10 P.M.," he writes, "when I roused General Grossetti from his sleep in the straw, in the miserable little shell-riddled farm of Chapton.
"The order astonished him; but like a disciplined leader, he started to execute it with all the energy of which this legendary soldier was capable."
The Forty-second came! While they were marching to the rescue the Prussian Guard in a colossal effort smashed through Foch's right. They were wild with joy. The French line was pierced. They at once began celebrating, at La Fère-Champenoise.
When this was announced to Foch he telegraphed to general headquarters:
"My center gives way, my right recedes; the situation is excellent. I shall attack."
For this, we must remember, is the man who says: "A battle won is a battle in which one is not able to believe one's self vanquished."
He gave the order to attack. Everything that he cared about in this world was at stake. This desperate maneuver would save it all—or it would not. He gave the order to attack—and then he went for a walk on the outskirts of the little village of Plancy. His companion was one of his staff officers, Lieutenant Ferasson of the artillery; and as they walked they discussed metallurgy and economics.
There could be nothing more typically French or more diametrically opposed to the conceptions of French character which prevailed in other countries before this war. And I hope that if Lieutenant Ferasson survives, he will accurately designate (if he can) exactly where Foch walked on that Wednesday afternoon, September 9, when, his center having given way, his right wing receded, he pronounced the "situation excellent," gave the order for attack, and went out to discuss metallurgy.
Toward six o'clock on that evening the Germans, celebrating their certain victory, saw themselves confronted by a "new" French army pouring into the gap they had thought their road to Paris.
The Forty-second Division (more than half dead of fatigue, but their eyes blazing with such immensity and intensity of purpose it has been said the Germans fled, as before spirits, when they saw these men) had not only blocked the roundabout road to Paris; they had broken the morale of Von Buelow's crack troops. Without this brilliant maneuver and superb execution the successes of all the other armies must have gone for naught.