"To be victorious," said Napoleon, "it is necessary only to be stronger than your enemy at a given point and at a given moment."
Foch's preferred way to take advantage of that given point and moment is with reserves, which he called the reservoirs of force. "The art of war consists in having them when the enemy has none."
But as there were no reserves available at that first Battle of the Marne, he exemplified his other principle that conditions must be met as they arise.
"I still seem," says René Puaux, "to hear General Foch telling us, one evening after dinner at Cassel several months later, about that maneuver of September 9.
"He had put matches on the tablecloth"—some red matches which Colonel 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.
"The match representing the Twelfth German Corps (which with the Prussian Guard was cutting the gap in Foch's weak spot) was about to make a half-turn which would bring it in the rear of the French armies.
"The general, laying down the half-match that was the Forty-second Division, made an eloquent gesture with his hand, indicating the move that the Forty-second made.
"'It might succeed,' he said, laconically, 'or it might fail. It succeeded. Those men were exhausted; they won, nevertheless.'"
At nine o'clock the next morning (September 10) the Forty-second entered La 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.
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.
"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."
Germany's plan to enter France by the east gate, in Lorraine, was frustrated with the aid of Foch.
Her plan to smash through the center of the armies on the Marne was frustrated, with the very special aid of Foch.
Blocked in both these moves, there was just one other for Germany to make, then, on the western front.
And on September 14, Joffre, instead of celebrating the victory on the Marne, was deep in plans to forestall an advance upon the Channel ports, and began issuing orders for the transfer of his main fighting bodies to the north.
All this, of course, had to be done so as to leave no vulnerable spot in all that long battle line from Belfort to Calais.
Joffre had clearly foreseen the length of that line. He predicted it, as we have seen, in 1912. Doubtless he had foreseen also that it would be too long a line to direct from one viewpoint, from one general headquarters. What he was too wise to try to foresee before the war began was, which one of France's trained fighting men he would call to his aid as his second in command. He waited, and watched, before deciding that.
And late in the afternoon of October 4 he telegraphed to General Foch at 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.
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.
But in a few hours he had his affairs in order and was ready to leave.
It was ten o'clock that Sunday night when he got into his automobile to be whirled from the Marne to the Somme.
At four in the morning he was at Breteuil, where General Castelnau had the headquarters of his new army, created on September 20 and designated to service on Manoury's left. General Castelnau had not yet heard of the generalissimo's new order. He was sound asleep when the big gray car came to a stop at the door of his headquarters after its one-hundred-and-fifty-mile dash through silent towns and dark, war-invested country.
Six weeks ago Foch had been his subordinate. Then they became equals in command. Now the magnificent hero of Lorraine who, before the war, had done so much on the Superior War Council to aid Joffre in reorganizing the army, rose from his bed in the chill of a fall morning not yet dawned, to greet his superior officer.
Some black coffee was heated for them, and for two hours they discussed the problems of this new front—Castelnau as eager to serve under Foch, for France, as, eight weeks ago, Foch had been to serve under Castelnau. If the sublime unselfishness of such men could have communicated itself to some of the minor figures of this war, how much more inspiring might be the stories of these civilian commanders!
At six o'clock Foch was under way again—to Amiens, Doullens, St. Pol, and then, at nine, to Aubigny, where General Maud'huy had the headquarters of his army, holding the line north of Castelnau's.
The difficulties of Foch's new undertaking were not military alone, but diplomatic. He had to take account of the English and Belgian armies, each under independent command, and each small. It was the fitness of Foch for the diplomacy needed here, as well as his fitness for the great military task of barring the enemy from the Channel ports, that determined Joffre in nominating him to the place.
In 1912 General Foch had been the head of the French military commission sent to witness the British army maneuvers at Cambridge.
He speaks no English; and not many British generals at that time spoke much French. Yet he somehow managed to get on, with the aid of interpreters, so that his relations with the British officers were not only cordial, in a superficial social way, but important in their results of deepened understanding on his part and of respect on theirs.
His study of what seemed to him the military strength and weakness of France's great neighbor and ally was minute and comprehensive.
In his opinion, the soldiers of Britain were excellent; but he was fearful that their commanders lacked seasoned skill to direct them effectively. This lack he laid to that apparent inability to believe in the imminence of war, which was even more prevalent in Britain, with her centuries of inviolate security, than in France.
Two years before the long-suspended sword fell, Foch foresaw clearly what would be the difficulties in the way of England when she should gird herself for land conflict. Doubtless he had resolved in his mind plans for helping her to meet and to overcome them.
Now he was placed where he could render aid—where hemustrender aid.
After the Battle of the Marne Sir John French wanted his army moved up north, nearer to its channel communications—that is to say, to its source of supplies. And on October 1 Joffre began to facilitate this movement. It was just well under way when Foch arrived in the north.
And on October 9 the gallant Belgian army withdrew from Antwerp and made its way to the Yser under cover of French and British troops.
Foch soon saw that an allied offensive would not be possible then; that the most they could hope to do was to hold back the invading forces.
Until October 24 he remained at Doullens, twenty miles north of Amiens. Then he removed his headquarters to the ancient town of Cassel, about eighteen miles west and a little south of Ypres.
From there he was able to reach in a few hours' time any strategic part of the north front and from this actual watch-tower (Cassel is on an isolated hill more than 500 feet high, and commands views of portions of France, Belgium, and even—on a clear day—of the chalky cliffs of England; St. Omer, Dunkirk, Ypres, and Ostend are all visible from its heights), he was to direct movements affecting the destinies of all three nations.
The Belgians, whose sublime stand had thwarted Germany's murderous plan against an unready world, were a sad little army when they reached the Yser about mid October. It was not what they had endured that contributed most to break their spirit; but what they had been unable to prevent.
To those heroic men who had left their beautiful country to the arch-fiends of destruction, their parents and wives and children to savages who befoul the name of beasts; who no longer had any possessions, nor munitions wherewith to make another stand on Belgian soil; to them Foch took fresh inspiration with his calm and tremendous personality; to them he sent his splendid Forty-second Division to swell their ranks so frightfully depleted in Honor's cause; to them he gave the suggestion of opening their sluices and drowning out of their last little corner of Belgium the enemy they could not otherwise dislodge.
This done, the next problem of Foch was to establish relations with Sir John French whereby the most cordial and complete cooperation might be insured between the British Field Marshal and the French commander of the armies in the north.
There are several graphic accounts of interviews which took place between these generals.
It was on October 28 that Foch saw the success of the opened sluices and the consequent salvation to the heroic Belgians of a corner of their own earth whereon to maintain their sovereignty.
On the 30th the English suffered severe reverses in spite of the aid lent them by eight battalions of French soldiers and artillery reinforcements. In consequence, they had had to cede considerable ground, their line was pierced, and the flank of General Dubois' army, adjoining theirs, was menaced.
When word of this disaster reached Foch that night he at once set out from Cassel for French's headquarters at Saint Omer.
It was 1 A.M. when he arrived. Marshal French was asleep. He was waked to receive his visitor.
"Marshal," said Foch, "your line is cracked?"
"Yes."
"Have you any resources?"
"I have none."
"Then I give you mine; the gap must be stopped at once; if we allow our lines to be pierced at a single point we are lost, because of the masses our enemy has to pour through it. I have eight battalions of the Thirty-second Division that General Joffre has sent me. Take them and go forward!"
The offer was most gratefully received. At two o'clock the orders were given; the gap was stopped.
Nevertheless, the British despaired of their ability to hold. Marshal French had no reserves, and decided to fall back.
A liaison officer hastened to notify General Dubois that the British were about to retire, and General Dubois betook himself in all speed to Vlamertinghe, the Belgian headquarters, to notify their commanding general. Foch happened to be with the Belgian general. And while these three were conferring, the liaison officer (Jamet) saw the automobile of Marshal French pass by.
Realizing the importance of the British commander's presence at that interview, Jamet ventured to stop him and suggest his attendance.
Foch implored French to prevent retreat. French declared there was nothing else for him to do—his men were exhausted, he had no reserves. Foch pointed out to him the incalculable consequences of yielding.
"It is necessary to hold in spite of everything!" he cried; "to hold until death. What you propose would mean a catastrophe. Hold on! I'll help you."
And as he talked he wrote his suggestions on a piece of paper he found on the table before him, and passed it to the British commander.
Marshal French read what was written, at once added to it, "execute the order of General Foch," signed it, and gave it to one of his staff officers.
And the Channel ports were saved.
But a greater thing even than that was foreshadowed: Foch had begun to demonstrate what was in him before which not only the men of his command must bow but the generals of other nations also.
One of the staff officers of General Foch who was closely associated with him there in the north in that time of great anxiety, has given us a pen-picture of the chief as his aides often saw him then. Doubtless it is a good picture also, except for differences in trifling details, of the great commander as he has been on many and many a night since, while the destinies of millions hung in the balance of his decisions.
"All is silence. The little town of Cassel is early asleep. On the rough pavement of the Grande Place, occasional footsteps break the stillness. Now they are those of a staff officer on his way to his billet. Now it is the sentry moving about to warm himself up a bit. Then silence again.
"In a little office of the Hotel de Ville, a man is seated at a table. His elbows are on a big military map. A telephone is at his hand. He waits—to hear the results of orders he has given. And while he waits he chews an unlighted cigar and divides his attention between the map and the clock—an old Louis XVI timepiece with marble columns, which ticks off the minutes almost soundlessly. How slowly its hands go round! How interminable seems the wait for news!
"Someone knocks, and Colonel Weygand, chief of staff, enters; he has a paper in his hand: 'Telephoned from the Ninth army at 1.15 A.M.' …
"The general has raised his head; his eyes are shining.
"'Good! good!'
"His plans are working out successfully; the reinforcements he sent for have arrived in time. There is nothing more he can do now; so he will go to bed.
"A last look at the map. Then his eye-glasses, at the end of their string, are tucked away in the upper pocket of his coat. The general puts on his black topcoat and his cap.
"In the hall, the gendarme on guard duty gets up, quickly, from the chair wherein he is dozing.
"The general salutes him with a brisk gesture, but with it he seems to say: 'Sleep on, my good fellow; I'm sorry to have disturbed you.'
"At the foot of the grand staircase, the sentry presents arms; and one of the staff officers joins the commander, to accompany him to the house of the notary who is extending him hospitality.
"A few hours later, very early in the morning, the general is back again at his office."
Thus he was at Cassel, as he directed those operations on the Yser by which he checked the German attempt to reach Calais and Dunkirk, and revealed to the military world a new strategist of the first order.
By November 15 (six weeks after arriving in the north) Foch had the high command of the German army as completely thwarted in its design as it had been at the Marne. It had fallen to Foch to defeat the German plan on the east (Lorraine), in the center (Marne) and on the west (Ypres). And the consequences of this frustration that he dealt them in Flanders were calculated to be "at least equal to the victory of the Marne." Colonel Réquin calls that Battle of the Yser "like a preface to the great victory of 1918."
In the spring of 1915 Foch left Cassel and took up headquarters at 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.
In the autumn of 1915, Foch moved nearer to Amiens—to the village of Dury in the immediate outskirts of the ancient capital of Picardy. For the next chapter in his history was to be the campaign of the Somme including the first great offensive of France in the war, which, together with the Verdun defense, forced the Germans not only again to re-make their calculations, but to withdraw to the Hindenburg line.
On September 30, 1916 (just before his sixty-fifth birthday, on which his retirement from active service was due), he was "retained without age limit" in the first section of the general staff of the French army.
Honors were beginning to crowd upon him as the debt of France and of her allies to his genius began to be realized. Responsibility vested in him became heavier and heavier as he demonstrated his ability to bear it. But always, say those who were nearest him, "a great, religious serenity pervaded and illumined his soul."
This is a serenity not of physical calm. Foch is intensely nervous, almost ceaselessly active. His body is frail, racked with suffering, worn down by the enormous strains imposed upon it. But the self-masterywithinis always apparent; and it inspires confidence, and renewed effort, in all who come in contact with him.
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.
General Pétain--Marshal Haig--General Foch--General Pershing
At first the headquarters of this bureau were at Senlis, near Paris. Then they were moved close to France's eastern border where Foch and his associates studied ways and means of meeting a possible attack through Switzerland—if Germany resolved to add that crime to her category—or across northern Italy.
So clearly had Foch foreseen what would happen in the Venetian plain, that he had his plan of French reinforcement perfected long in advance, even to the schedule for dispatching troop trains to the Piave front.
In January, 1917, Marshal Joffre reached the age of retirement (65). He was venerated and loved throughout France as few men have ever been. Gratitude for his great gifts and great character filled every heart to overflowing. His country had no honor great enough to express its sense of his service to France. Yet it was felt that for the operations of the future, the interests of France and of her allies would be best furthered with another strategist in command of the armies in the field. Joffre's retirement was therefore effected.
Joffre is an engineer, a master-builder of fortifications, a great defense soldier. But defense would not end the war. France must look to her greatest offensive strategist.
There could be no question who that strategist was. No one knew it quite so well as Marshal Joffre. And one of the most splendid things about that mighty and noble man is the spirit in which he concurred in (if, indeed, he did not suggest) the change which meant that another should lead the armies of France to victory.
The appointment of General Foch as head of the General Staff was made on May 15, 1917, while Marshal Joffre was in the United States to confer with our officials regarding our part in the war. On the same date General Philippe 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.
General Foch installed himself at the Invalides, and addressed himself to the study of all the allies' fronts, the assembling American army, and to another task for which he was signally fitted: that of coordinating the plans and purposes of the Generalissimo and the government.
Wherever General Foch goes, one finds him creating harmony and, through harmony, doubling everyone's strength.
He "gets on" with everybody, but not in the way that sort of thing is too generally done—not by methods which have come to be called diplomatic and which involve a great deal of surface affability, of wordy beating about the bush and concealing one's real purposes from persons who see his hand and wonder if they are bluffing him about theirs.
Foch has no stomach for this sort of thing. His whole bent is toward discovering the right thing to do and then making it so plain to others that it is the right thing that they adopt it gladly and cooperate in it with ardor.
In council he is still the great teacher striving always not merely to make his principles remembered, but to have them shared.
The eminent French painter, Lucien Jonas, who has served in Artois, at Verdun, on the Somme and in Italy, and has been appointed painter of the Army Museum at Des Invalides, was commissioned to make a picture of General Foch holding an allies' council of war at Versailles.
It was, of course, impossible for Jonas to be actually present at a council meeting. But it was arranged that he should sit outside a glass door through which he could see all, but hear nothing.
"General Foch," he tells us, "held his auditors in a sort of fascination. One felt that in his explanations there was not a flaw, not a hesitancy. All seemed clear, plain, irresistible."
This power was his in great degree in the years before the war. But now men who listen to him know that his perceptions are not merely logical—they are workable. His performances prove the worth of his theories.
On March 21, 1918, Ludendorff launched his great offensive against the British army. The line bent; it cracked. Amiens seemed doomed; the British in France were threatened with severance from their allies—with envelopment!
After four days of onrushing disaster a conference was called to meet at Doullens—a conference of representatives of the allied governments. Something must be done to coordinate the various "fronts," to put them under a supreme command.
Foch was hastily empowered to order whatever he deemed advisable to prevent the separation of the English and French armies. It is apparent that the wide powers thus hurriedly given to him were bestowed with the approval of every member of the conference. In October, 1918, however, in responding to a note of greeting from Lloyd-George on the occasion of his sixty-seventh birthday, Foch recognized the weight of the British Prime Minister's influence at the conference:
"I am greatly touched," he replied, "by your congratulations and thank you sincerely.
"I do not forget that it was to your insistence that I owe the position which I occupy to-day."
Foch's new responsibilities were laid upon him on March 26. By evening of the 28th he had the situation so well in hand that he was able to hold in check the German onslaught without even employing all the troops he had brought up for that purpose. He had averted what threatened to be the worst disaster of the war, and he had reserves in readiness against a new and augmented attack. This in two days!
On the 30th an official announcement told all the world that the destinies of the allied armies were by common consent confided to the general direction of Ferdinand Foch.
On that same day there was made public, by the French war authorities, something which had taken place and had contributed in a degree we are not yet able to state, to the investment of Foch with supreme power. This was a visit made by General Pershing to Foch. In the presence of Foch, Pétain, Clemenceau and Loucheur (Minister of Munitions) Pershing made the following declaration:
"I come to tell you that the American people would hold it a great honor if our troops were engaged in the present battle. I ask you this in my name and in theirs. At this moment there is nothing to be thought of but combat. Infantry, artillery, aviation—all that we have is yours. Use them as you will. There are more to come—as many more as shall be needed. I am here solely to say to you that the American people will be proud to be engaged in the greatest and most glorious battle in history."
General Foch--General Pershing
On April 5, a week after his appointment to the supreme command was announced, Foch granted an interview to a group of war correspondents. Their various accounts differ very slightly. Instead of quoting any one I will make a digest of them.
They found the general installed in a provincial mansion, place not named. The room he occupied was nearly bare; an old table, an armchair, a telephone, a huge war map, no profusion of papers, no "air of importance."
Foch was writing in a notebook. He rose, when he had finished his entry among those epoch-making memoranda, and received his visitors. He had but a few minutes to give, yet he realized the importance of the occasion and treated it accordingly. These men were to send to millions of people in the great democracies of France, Britain and America their pen pictures of the man just invested with the greatest military responsibility any man in the world's history has ever borne. Battles must be fought, but also those people had a right to such a sense of participation as only their press could give them; it was their issue; their attitude toward it was the foundation of their nation's morale. Foch has neither time nor taste for talk about himself, but he is no war autocrat; he is, as he constantly reiterates, a son of France, defending human liberties. He might not have much time to give journalists, but it is not in him to minimize their place in a world where the will of the majority prevails and the press does much to shape that will.
His manner on that occasion was calm, unhurried, but very direct, to the point.
"Well, gentlemen," said he, "our affairs are not going badly; are they? The boche has been halted since March 27. He has, doubtless, encountered some obstacle. We have stopped him. Now we shall endeavor to do better. I do not see that there is anything more to say.
"But as to yourselves, keep at your task. It is a time when everyone ought to work steadfastly. Work with your pens. We will go on working with our arms."
"I regret," wrote Lieutenant d'Entraygues in the ParisTemps, "only one thing: that all the people of France were not able to see and hear this soldier as he spoke to us. They would know why it is not possible to doubt our victory."
It was probably about that time that Major Darnley Stuart-Stephens wrote of Foch, for theEnglish Review.
"The man who has been consecrated by destiny to the saving from Moloch of this globe's civilization, is he who will prove once more that in the conflict between the finely tempered sword and the finely tempered brain, it is the mental asset that will prevail."
Major Stuart-Stephens had studied the "mental assets" of Ferdinand Foch.
"Now and again at his lectures." he wrote, "I have noticed that far-away look of the mystic in his eyes that I remember so well in those of that other soldier-saint, Charles Gordon."
It was that spiritual greatness in Foch which everyone felt, on which everyone brought into contact with him based his unfaltering faith in the outcome.
"We do not know," says an editorial writer in the New YorkEvening Sun, "what the judgments of the military critics will be when they have carefully studied and sifted the evidence, but to a layman it looks as if Foch was not merely a very great general but one of the greatest generals of all recorded history … as great a general as Napoleon or Caesar or Hannibal or Alexander."
But whether they put him, as a military man, on a par with Napoleon, or come sapiently to the conclusion that he was no more than a very able general fortunate in being in command at the time the Germanic morale was breaking, it will never be possible to disprove that he was a supreme leader of men in a great war of ideals—an incarnation of all those qualities of faith and fervor, of self-mastery and dependence on the Divine, of self-realization and with it devotion to the rights and progress of others, which are embodied in the Christian democracy for whose preservation millions have gladly died.
Faith in the ability of Foch to lead us all to victory was, however, not to endure without its grave tests.
The German drive of March 21 was checked by his co-ordination of Allied forces. But checking the enemy just before he reached the key of the Channel ports was not defeating him; preventing him from driving a wedge between the British and French armies was only diverting him to another point of attack. He was desperate—that enemy! He knew that he must win a decisive victory soon, or see his own maladies destroy him.
He knew the genius of Foch; he knew the immense increase in strength that the Allies had achieved in unifying their command. He may have underestimated the worth in battle of our American fighters; but it is scarcely probable that he underestimated the worth, behind the lines, of our army of railroad builders, harbor constructors, supply handlers, and the like. He knew that whether we could fight or not, we had money and men and were pouring both into France to help win the war.
And he also knew that victory after victory which he had won had not only failed to increase his might but had, somehow, weakened him; country after country had fallen before his sword or before his poison-propaganda—or both!—his plunder was vast, his accessions in fighting men available for the Western front were formidable—yet something in his vitals was wrong, terribly wrong; he must stop, soon, and look to his health, or he would be too far-gone for recovery. But not now! not now! "They" must be crushed now or never!
So he fought like a maddened beast whose usual cunning has given place to frenzied desperation.
Again and again and again he lunged—now here, now there. And the defenders of civilization fell back and back, before him.
Where was that calm, quiet man who had said: "Well, gentlemen, our affairs are not going badly; are they?"
"The boche," he had said, "has been halted … now we shall endeavor to do better."
What had happened? The boche wasnothalted! He was, in fact, shelling Paris!
It was in those days that the "soldier-saint," as Major Stuart-Stephens has called him, must have had need of all his faith and all his fortitude.
We don't know much, yet, except of a very superficial sort, about those days. We know what happened in them insofar as army movements are concerned, and the heartbreaking re-occupation of towns and villages where French and American restoration squads were working to make habitable those places the Huns had laid waste; and the continued shelling of Paris by the "mystery gun"; and the great exodus of civilians from the capital as the ravaging hordes drew nearer and always nearer.
These things we know; but not what Foch was thinking—except that he was not thinking of defeat.
If there was a true heart in France that ever for a moment doubted the outcome of the war, or dreamed of abandoning the conflict before it had made the future safe, I have never heard of that one.
Certainly the man who was leading them never doubted. Nor was it on his own skill that his faith was founded. He knew Who would give his cause the victory.
In the fifth German drive of 1918 the enemy crossed the Marne! Paris was almost in sight—Paris! where millions of French were celebrating the fall of the Bastille and the birth of freedom as if the leering, jeering enemies of all freemen were not so close to the gates of the Capital that the gleam of their tusks might almost have been seen from the city's outermost ramparts. Certainly the drunken fools within—drunk with their deep draughts of liberty—could hear the snarling and snapping of the approaching wolves, the baying of Big Bertha, the barking of her smaller sisters! But it would be like those crazy French to dance and sing and celebrate the overthrow of autocracy, while an autocracy the like of which no French King had ever exercised was on the eve of engulfing them.
So the German General Staff said, sneering, as it laid its plans for the final drive on Paris. They would start that drive on the night of July 14, while the fools were celebrating, when they were least expecting an attack. Probably most of them would be drunk. Oh, almost certainly! Their resistance would be weak, And for all time thereafter it would make an impressive tale for schoolbooks throughout the Pan-Germanized world, that democracy was dispatched in her last orgy of exultation.
As clearly as if he were not only present in the councils of German Headquarters, but present inside the thick round skulls about the council table, this boche attitude and intent was comprehended by the small frail man at Mormant, where his Headquarters then were.
On that night of July 14 he began the great offensive which never stopped until the whining boche was east of the Rhine!
His Intelligence Department told him that the German drive would probably begin at ten minutes past midnight. They might be quite wrong, but that was their guess. Foch was all-but sure they were not wrong; that it was not in German nature to reason other than as I have described.
An hour before midnight the Germans were (doubtless) surprised by some lively action of French artillery. Strange! But it couldn't mean anything, of course! So the boche came on. The behavior of the French was not quite what he had expected; one thing after another happened that was not in his calculations. But that did not argue aught against the calculations! It was the exasperating habit of the French to do unexpected things. Most annoying! But not able to affect the outcome, of course.
On July 18th they got "more unexpected still"—they and sundry "green" troops from the flaccid, fatuous U. S. A.! Some "hounds of the devil" were let loose upon the gray-clad armies of righteousness. It was outrageous the way those sons of Satan fought! They rushed upon the legions of the Lord's anointed as if killing Germans were the noblest work a man could be about.
So many things happened that were not down on paper—in the plans of the German General Headquarters! It became distressingly evident that these Yanks knew as little, and cared as little, what was expected of them as the stupid Britishers or the mercurial French or the suicidal Belgians. They didn't know how to fight—they couldn't know—they had never done any fighting, and whom had they had to teach them warfare? They were absurd. They didn't know the simplest rules of war—they didn't know enough to surrender when they were surrounded, cut off, outnumbered. They fought on! They didn't know how to fight; but Lord! how they could kill Germans. And then they were such fools that their medical corps came out onto the battlefield and when they found a German who wasn't dead but was suffering, their doctors bound up his wounds and gave him water to quench his raging thirst, and left him for his own comrades to carry away and nurse—that, instead of gouging his eyes out with a bayonet's end or bashing in his skull with the butt of a gun! Strange people! They never could become good slaves of Kultur; so the wounded Germans whose agonies they had assuaged, rose up on their elbows and shot them dead.
In six hours the Allies, not only reinforced but recreated by this tide of new life, new eagerness, re-took twice as much ground on the Soissons-Rheims salient as the Germans had won in six days' desperate advance.
When the word to fight came to the men of the American army, it was less like a command to them than like a release, a long-desired permission. Many, if not most, of them had for nearly four years been straining at the leash which held them from the place where their sense of honor told them they should be.
Marshal Foch, Executive Head of the Allied Forces
"They were superb," Marshal Foch has said, paying wholehearted tribute to them. "There is no other word. Our armies were fatigued by years of relentless struggle and the mantle of war lay heavily upon them. We were magnificently comforted by the virility of the Americans. The youth of the United States brought a renewal of the hope that hastened victory. Not only was this moral factor of the highest importance, but also the enormous material aid placed at our disposal. Nobody among us will ever forget what America did."
Let us hope that neither will any among us ever forget for a single instant how much was paid for us in blood and anguish by those who held the beast at bay from us for long years before we put forth a stroke in our own defense or in friendly help or in support of our ideals.
That our aid arrived in time to help turn the tide, that our men were magnificent when their opportunity was given them, is cause not for vaunting ourselves, but only for gratefulness that our honor remains to us—that we have not had to accept life and liberty at other men's hands while our hands stayed in our pockets.
Our fighting men redeemed us in our own eyes; they restored our souls' dignity; for this we can never be grateful enough to them. But we can never be braggart about it. It might so easily have come too late!
On August 6, Foch was made Marshal of France.
And two days later, the British, on the Somme, launched the first really successful offensive of the war—not stopping a drive, but inaugurating one.
At last Foch was able to make war as he had for years contended that war should be made: The way to make war is to attack.
It was his plan, now that he had the men to make this possible, to keep the enemy busy by striking first at one point of the long line running from Belgium to the Piave, and then at another. And by the first of September the Allied line on the Western front was back where it ran in the deadlock of 1915-16 while the attack on Verdun was raging.
"General Pershing," Foch has said, "wished to have his army concentrated, as far as possible, in an American sector. The Argonne and the heights of the Meuse were a sector hard to tackle. So I said to him: 'All right; your men have the devil's own punch. They will get away with it. Go to it.'"
And they went! That was the famous St. Mihiel salient. The American infantry started their advance there on September 26. They went forward with a rush. On their left, the French advanced as rapidly, and on October 1 re-took St. Quentin, which the Germans had held since the beginning of the war. October 2 the British, operating on the left of the French, reached Cambrai which also had been in German hands for more than four years.
October 4 the Hohenzollern King of Bulgaria deserted his doomed allies and his throne and began looking for a place of refuge.
And on that day the Hohenzollern government at Berlin had so little relish for the situation on all fronts, that it besought the President of the United States "to take in hand the restoration of peace, acquaint all the belligerent states with this request and invite them to send plenipotentiaries for the purpose of opening negotiations.… With a view to avoiding further bloodshed, the German Government requests the immediate conclusion of an armistice on land and water and in air."
October 10, Austria and Turkey joined Germany in appealing for peace terms. Notes continued to pass between the Germanic capitals and Washington, D. C.
But Foch fought on.
The Americans had cleared the last corner of the Argonne of German machine-gun nests and gunners, and were widening their offensive on the Meuse. The French had taken Laon, and were pushing on. The British had taken Lens and Cambrai and were advancing on Douai and Lille.
On the 23rd of October the President of the United States referred the matter of the armistice to the Allies. On the 29th, the Allied War Council met at Versailles to fix the armistice conditions.
(Foch meanwhile had launched an offensive against the Austrians on the Piave.)
Now, an armistice is supposed to be a cessation of hostilities for an agreed period, all combatants to remain as they were; if the parley for peace is not successful, the struggle is to resume where it paused, neither side having gained or lost, except as delay may or may not have been favorable to them.
Foch had not the smallest intention of granting the hard-pushed enemy that sort of an armistice—time to recuperate, to parley while Winter came on and postponed the resumption of his offensive until Spring. To do that meant to prolong the war probably another year, at enormous cost in lives, suffering, materials.
What he would grant would be an armistice in which the enemy, so far from keeping his positions would abandon them all and retire far behind the Rhine; in which the Allies, so far from keeping their positions, would follow the retreating enemy into his own country, and police it; in which the enemy, so far from resting on his sword, would hand it over—his swords, and his cannon, and his machine-guns, and his fleet and his submarines and his aircraft and his locomotives; in which he would release all Allied prisoners and not ask the release of any of his captured men.
The terms were the most ignominious ever imposed upon a prostrate enemy. The sole reason for referring to them as "armistice terms" was that peace terms are final and absolute, and these were not final—they would be made much worse if the Germans failed to satisfy their conquerors on every point.
When the Allied War Council had agreed with Foch on the armistice terms, he said:
"Within ten days or a fortnight I can break the German army in three, envelop a section of it, and take a million prisoners. Is there any condition which, in the opinion of any of you, could be imposed upon the enemy then, more conclusive than those of the armistice?"
No one could think of anything that might add a jot to the completeness of Germany's subjugation.
"Then, gentlemen," answered the Commander-in-Chief, "we will proceed with the armistice. When all is won that can be won for the safety and honor of France and her Allies, I cannot for the sake of prestige or gratification or personal glory, order action that would cost the life of any parents' young son, any little child's father. I am a bereaved father. I think of the fathers and mothers whom further fighting must bereave. The enveloping advance which our armies could make in ten to fourteen days would cost us thousands of lives, many maimed men. If those things must be to bring the triumph of Right, we can bear them again as we have borne them these years past. But not for any other reason!"
"The German high command," he said later, at 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."
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.
I may be quite wrong about his reason for receiving the German envoys in a railway carriage. But my surmise about it is that he did not want any fixed place associated with Germany's humiliation until those empowered to act for the defunct empire of William I came to the Gallery of Mirrors at Versailles and there, where the German empire had been proclaimed, witnessed the formal degradation before the representatives of all civilization of their nation that was built on the principle that Might is Right.
Next to this in poetic justice would have been to summon those plenipotentiaries before him at Senlis where their troops had committed such insensate horrors in September, 1914. But for reasons of his own (which we may be sure had nothing to do with courtesy) Foch went part way to meet them.
They complained, afterwards, that he received them coldly. If he was able to keep his manner cold, it was only because his self-command is so great. For no other man in the world knows so well as he the extent and the enormity of the crimes those men and their masters and their minions are guilty of. A primitive man, or any undisciplined modern man, would have leaped at their throats. Instead, Foch treated them as if they were human though not humane beings, and read to them slowly and in a loud voice, the terms of the armistice for which they had asked.
Mathias Erzberger, their spokesman, requested a cessation of hostilities whilst a courier carried the terms to German General Headquarters at Spa.
There the Kaiser, Hindenburg and others awaited particulars.
Foch declined to cease hostilities. He knew his enemy too well.
As soon as the Kaiser learned what the terms were, he abdicated his throne and fled his country. When the courier had returned, and the German plenipotentiaries once more presented themselves before Foch (again in his car) the "War Lord" of all the world was cowering in a Holland hiding place, his blubbering heir was in another, and a Social Republic had been declared in Berlin.
How the Hohenzollerns knew the terms of the armistice full twenty-four hours before the courier's return to German Headquarters at Spa, I have not seen explained or heard any one conjecture.
From Rethondes to Spa is a matter of some two hundred and fifty miles, by road, and nearly forty-eight hours were consumed by the courier in covering that distance; he did not reach German Headquarters until ten o'clock Sunday morning, November 10. But the Kaiser abdicated and the Crown Prince renounced his claims to the throne, in Spa on Saturday morning, and they were both out of the country when the courier was received, his papers were read, and he was sent back with word to the plenipotentiaries to get amelioration of some conditions, if possible, but in any event to sign.
If the press reports are not in error as to the time the courier arrived at Spa, then the terms of the armistice must have been made known to the Hohenzollerns by telegraph or other quick communication very early on Saturday—probably as soon as the courier recrossed his own lines, which he could have done not many hours after quitting 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.
These details are significant, even in so brief a sketch of Foch's life as this is; for in their very confusion and obscurity they tell a great story of what was either realized or feared in the German camps and in the German capital.
The magnitude of that which Foch was ready (and was by his enemies known to be ready) to do could not be better conveyed to us than by the panicky haste of those who knew themselves doomed, to make any concessions but at all costs to avert Foch's next move.
Shortly after midnight on Sunday, the German delegation (which had by Foch's orders been scrupulously served in the matter of their creature comforts) again presented itself before him in his railway car. Four hours were spent discussing the possibility of performing some of the conditions exacted, and modifications were made which in no degree altered the completeness of Germany's subjugation.
Then the papers were signed.
The Germans were punctiliously escorted to their own lines. I have not heard what Foch did; but it would not surprise me to learn that he went back to bed, and to sleep.
Perhaps, after giving orders for notifying his Government and her Allies, he sent a message to Madame Foch. But I am quite sure that otherwise he did not "celebrate," except that he gave God thanks for the victory.
When the French army rode into Metz, Foch was not at its head. There may or there may not be another man who could and would have foregone that satisfaction; but certainly there are not many.
It does not seem probable that he avoided the occasion; although it would be like him to take advantage of some good excuse for absence if he thought there was one of his generals who specially deserved and desired the honor of that triumphant entry into reclaimed Metz.
The attitude of Foch toward praise and plaudits and personal glory is, it seems to me, one of the supremely great things about him. I cannot imagine him "ducking" shyly away from any place where he knew he ought to for fear of salvos of acclaim; it would be as unsoldierly to him to dodge cheers as to flee from battle, if that way his duty lay. And, similarly, I cannot imagine him going anywhere to gratify his personal feelings and collect the praises due him, if there was an urgent reason for his being somewhere else.
Ferdinand Foch. Showing His Insignia as a Marshal of France, Consisting of Seven Stars on Each Sleeve and Four Rows of Oak Leaves on His Cap.
The business, military and executive, of seeing that the armistice terms were fulfilled, was tremendous. Much of it devolved upon him and made inconceivably great requisitions on that genius he has "for the command of enormous material difficulties"—a genius he first displayed in getting the Ninth Army across the Marne in pursuit of the fleeing Germans, in September, 1914; and which he further evidenced in every succeeding phase, beginning with the reconstitution of all the forces fighting on the Yser.
The armistice period was a period of extreme demands on him. In it there was scant opportunity to go here or there with his triumphant armies. His work in the field, as a commanding general, had practically ceased with his removal from the Ninth Army after little more than a month of such command. From the time he took up his headquarters on the hill at Cassel, he became "a desk man"; it was no longer his function to execute orders; thenceforth he had the far more trying duty of issuing orders—a truly awful responsibility and one which demands much solitude, much soul-searching as well as map-pondering and other weighing of the ponderable which is so easily off-set by the imponderable, the unguessable.
There are few situations possible in life in which a man could be set apart with his soul and have so much demanded of his communings as was demanded of Foch from October, 1914, on to October, 1918. Every decision he made involved lives—hundreds and thousands or hundreds of thousands of lives—and not one pang of what must be suffered for each life laid down was strange to him; his only son was among the first to die for France and human liberties; and one of his daughters was widowed; the home he "left in the joyousness of a midsummer Sunday" was desolate, and it stood forever to him as a symbol of the homes in France and latterly, in the lands of all the Allies, with whose best-beloved he made this or that move in the war to preserve civilization. Nor were the lives he staked all that were involved; there were all that were incidentally menaced if his strategy failed—all that must suffer immediately and all that must suffer ultimately under the heel of the brute if the brute were not destroyed.
A man who has lived thus for more than four years, sharing the awfulness of his burden only with Almighty God, must needs have passed to a spiritual plane whereon such self-considerations as still sway the rest of us have ceased to obtrude themselves.
The quest of personal glory is as hard to associate with Ferdinand Foch as with the little Maid of France. Both fought for God and for France and for a Cause, as their Voices directed them; that he has one of the best brains of modern or of all times, and that she did "not know her A, B, C," sets them not so far apart as the materialist might imagine; for the thing that made both invincible was the power of their faith to create an unconquerable ardor in themselves and in their men. The churches in France wherein Foch knelt seeking guidance, beseeching strength, are likely to be doubly-consecrate, for ages, no less than those wherein Jeanne d'Arc prayed. She is venerated not as a military leader (though she was that) but as the one who awakened the soul of mediaeval, much-partitioned France and made possible the nationalization of her country. He will be venerated (by the great majority) not as "the first stategist of Europe," but as the supreme incarnation of that spirit which makes modern France transcendent among nations vowed to democracy.
It is Foch's "likeness" to the myriad soldiers of France that France adores—not his difference from the rest. Her poilu is her beau ideal of faith and courage, of patriotism and devotion to the principles of human rights, of cheerfulness and hopefulness, of invincibility in that his cause is just. France is too essentially democratic to esteem one set of characteristics in the mass of men and another set in the leaders of men. Foch and Joffre will live always in the hearts of their countrymen because, like Jeanne d'Arc, they have so much to say to everyone—so much that illumines every path in life wherever it is laid.
On the 19th of December, 1918, Joffre took his seat among the Immortals of the French Academy. The vacancy to which he had been elected was that made by the death of Jules Claretie who, before his admission to the Academy and before his absorption in the affairs of La Comédie Française, had written several books about the leaders of the French Revolution.
It was Ernest Renan who delivered the address of welcome to Claretie (in February, 1889) and he said that it was still too soon to know whether those leaders of whom Claretie had written were supremely justified or were not.
"You are young," Renan said to the new Immortal, "and you will see this question solved, … some years hence it will be known; if in ten or twenty years France is prosperous and free, faithful to right, strong in the friendship of the free peoples of the world, then the cause of the young Revolutionists is won; the world will enjoy the fruits of their endeavor without having had to know their unripe bitterness."
Joffre quoted this part of Renan's address, in taking his seat. Claretie had not lived quite long enough to see, save with the eye of faith, that day Renan foretold; but Claretie's successor in the French Academy had seen it! And it was like him to say:
"I think, gentlemen, that in doing me the honor of receiving me into your august body, your desire is to pay homage to that glorious French army which has proved that the soul of France is steadfast for the rights of man, even unto death that men may be free."
Accepting the honor as paid through him to the men who had proved the worth of that Liberty, Equality and Fraternity the Revolution declared and decreed, Joffre asked permission to name those to whom, he deemed, the gratitude of France and of France's Immortals was due. And first among them he named Foch.
This was gracious; it was generous; but it was more than that. And though Joffre went on to name many leaders, many armies, many moral forces incarnate in many men as co-responsible for victory, no one could know quite so well as he how completely the France of which Renan dreamed as a glorious possibility, is realized and typified in the man whose name leads all the rest as having saved not France only but the liberties of mankind.
Bonaparte, although he was not French (save technically) and not a democrat, captured the hearts of France in spite of all he cost them; because he aggrandized France, made her supreme in many things besides extent and power. It is instinctive in every Frenchman (or woman, or child!) to revere anyone who does new credit to the name of France or brings new glory to it; for the passionate love of country is the primary religion of the French—they may or may not have another, but unless they are totally renegade they have that faith, that devotion.
In Ferdinand Foch they have a great leader who is in no sense an "accident" (as Bonaparte was), a sporadic development in their midst, a spectacular growth on an exotic stem. They have, rather, a quintessential Frenchman of to-day, even more widely representative of his countrymen than Lincoln was of ours.
"The fame of one man," says Henri Bordeaux, "is nothing unless its represents the obscure deeds of the anonymous multitude."
This is a typically modern idea, and typically French. France of to-day would not deny the worth of any development because it was singular, isolate; but what she is particularly interested in is the possibilities of development along the lines that are followed by the many and are open (broadly speaking) to all. Guynemer, for a shining instance, is the idol of every schoolchild in France, not for his daring alone, nor for the number of boche birds of prey he brought down; but because wealth and influence were unavailing to get him an opportunity beyond what the poorest, humblest youngster might have got in the same indomitable way; and because frail health and puny strength could not debar him from the sublimest exploits of daring for France. His circumstance—physical and material—tended to bind him to the soft places of earth. His desire to serve France gave him wings to fly far beyond the eagles. He has no grave. He rides the empyrean for all time, to tell the youth of France how surmountable is everything to one who loves his country and the rights of mankind.
Foch is of less legendary sort, but he, too, epitomizes France; and he will be increasingly potent as time goes on, irrespective of whether the sword is or is not superseded in the affairs of men.
"The obscure deeds of the anonymous multitude" are much like his own obscure deeds prior to the great day when France needed him and found him ready.
Every black-smocked schoolboy in France loitering along historic highways to his gray-stuccoed school, may feel in himself a Foch of to-morrow—and quicken his steps so that he may make himself a little more ready for his recitation.
Every youth entering upon his military training must find in Foch a comrade whose influence is all toward thoroughness, "Learn to think," was Foch's personal admonition for long years before he thus charged his students.
Every teacher toiling to impart not knowledge alone but the thirst for knowledge, the zeal to use it nobly, has in Foch such a fellow as the annals of that great profession do not duplicate. Other teachers may have influenced more pupils; but no human teacher ever saw such a demonstration of his principles—to the saving of mankind.
Every good father in France may see himself in Foch—and especially every father who gave his son for France and her ideals.
Every man whose work in life calls him to lead other men, in peace or in war, has supreme need of Foch; because Foch embodies those principles of leadership to which men are now responsive, those ideals toward which they are striving. Particularly as a coordinator is Foch great—and potent for the future. There is, probably, no other kind of service so important to the world's welfare, now, as that of bringing men together; making them see that fundamentally they are all, if they are right-minded, fighting for the same thing; and that in union there is strength.
As a scholar, Foch is brilliant besides being profound. As a man, he is simple—and France admires simplicity; he is elegant—and France loves the elegance that is the expression of fine thinking, fine feeling; he is modest of his own attainments, and proud of France's glory.
For nearly every great commander, victory in arms has led to power in the state.
Foch is a statesman as preëminently as he is a warrior. His counsel was as weighty in the peace settlement as his strategy was in winning the war.
But one cannot conceive him using his prestige, military or diplomatic, to increase his personal power.
He has served God and man; he has served his country and his conviction of right. He is content therewith—just as he hopes millions of men are content who have done the same according to their best ability.
"I approach the twilight of my life," he wrote not long ago, "with the consciousness of a good servant who will rest in the peace of his Lord. Faith in eternal life, in a good and merciful God, has sustained me in the hardest hours. Prayer has illumined my soul."
In presenting to Foch the baton of a Marshal of France, President 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."
"This moral superiority," said the President of the French Republic to the new Marshal of France, "you have tended like a sacred flame."
Always, the tone of tribute to Foch is one of veneration for the greatness of his soul and his preëminent ability to represent and to lead his people.
"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."
This he said to Foch, in the field, on August 23, 1918, when the fruits of victory though in sight were not yet within grasp.
Had the presentation been three months later, President 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."
Foch may well feel that he has done his utmost for his country and for mankind, in the crisis for which he prepared himself and which he met with such superb faith in the triumph of Right; but he certainly does not feel that he has ushered in the millennium; he knows what other demands there are and will be upon the souls of men, on their devotion to their country, their perception of truth and honor, and their ardor and ability to serve humanity. He knows that not France alone but every nation has need to-day and henceforth of leaders who will do just what he did: personify the highest ideals of their people and prepare themselves to defend those ideals intelligently, unselfishly, devoutly.
He has established a new standard in leadership. Far from culminating an old order, he has inaugurated a new—an order which everyone may join who wills to serve. Its motto is: "Right is Might; believe in the power of Right; learn to uphold it; strengthen others, as they come in contact with you, to meet the enemies of Right and to vanquish them; never forget that the moving power of the world issoul, and the laws of the soul were made by God."