"With the Honors of War"
By Wythe Williams
[From THE NEW YORK TIMES, April, 1915.]
It was just at the dawn of a March morning when I got off a train at Gerbéviller, the little "Martyr City" that hides its desolation as it hid its existence in the foothills of the Vosges.
There was a dense fog. At 6 A.M. fog usually covers the valleys of the Meurthe and Moselle. From the station I could see only a building across the road. A gendarme demanded my credentials. I handed him the laisser-passer from the Quartier Général of the "First French Army," which controls all coming and going, all activity in that region. The gendarme demanded to know the hour when I proposed to leave. I told him. He said it would be necessary to have the permit "viséd for departure" at the headquarters of the gendarmerie. He pointed to the hazy outlines of another building just distinguishable through the fog.
This was proof that the town contained buildings—not just a building. The place was not entirely destroyed, as I had supposed. I went down the main street from the station, the fog enveloping me. I had letters to the town officials, but it was too early in the morning to present them. I would first get my own impressions of the wreck and the ruin. But I could see nothing on either hand as I stumbled along in the mud. So I commented to myself that this was not as bad as some places I had seen. I thought of the substantial station and the buildings across the road—untouched by war. I compared Gerbéviller with places where there is not even a station—where not one simple house remains as the result of "the day when the Germans came."
The road was winding and steep, dipping down to the swift little stream that twists a turbulent passage through the town. The day was coming fast but the fog remained white and impenetrable. After a few minutes I began to see dark shapes on either side of the road. Tall, thin, irregular shapes, some high, some low, but with outlines all softened, toned down by the banks of white vapor.
I started across the road to investigate and fell into a pile of jagged masonry on the sidewalk. Through the nearness of the fog I could see tumbled piles of bricks. The shapes still remained—spectres that seemed to move in the light wind from the valley. An odor that was not of the freshness of the morning assailed me. I climbed across the walk. No wall of buildings barred my path, but I mounted higher on the piles of brick and stones. A heavy black shape was now at my left hand. I looked up and in the shadow there was no fog. I could see a crumbled swaying side wall of a house that was. The odor I noticed was that caused by fire. Sticking from the wall I could see the charred wood joists that once supported the floor of the second story. Higher, the lifting fog permitted me to see the waving boughs of a tree that hung over the house that was, outlined against a clear sky. At my feet, sticking out of the pile of bricks and stones, was the twisted iron fragments that was once the frame of a child's bed. I climbed out into the sunshine.
I was standing in the midst of a desolation and a silence that was profound. There was nothing there that lived, except a few fire-blacked trees that stuck up here and there in the shelter of broken walls. Now I understood the meaning of the spectral shapes. They were nothing but the broken walls of the other houses that were. They were all that remained of nine-tenths of Gerbéviller.
I wandered along to where the street turned abruptly. There the ground pitched more sharply to the little river. There stood an entire half of a house unscathed by fire; it was one of those unexplainable freaks that often occur in great catastrophes. Even the window glass was intact. Smoke was coming from the chimney. I went to the opposite side and there stood an old woman looking out toward the river, brooding over the ruin stretching below her.
"You are lucky," I said. "You still have your home."
She threw out her hands and turned a toothless countenance toward me. I judged her to be well over seventy. It wasn't her home, she explained. Her home was "là-bas"—pointing vaguely in the distance. She had lived there fifty years—now it was burned. Her son's house for which he had saved thirty years to be able to call it his own, was also gone; but then her son was dead, so what did it matter? Yes, he was shot on the day the Germans came. He was ill, but they killed him. Oh, yes, she saw him killed. When the Germans went away she came to this house and built a fire in the stove. It was very cold.
And why were the houses burned? No; it was not the result of bombardment. Gerbéviller was not bombarded until after the houses were burned. They were burned by the Germans systematically. They went from house to house with their torches and oil and pitch. They did not explain why they burned the houses, but it was because they were angry.
The old woman paused a moment, and a faint flicker of a smile showed in the wrinkles about her eyes. I asked her to continue her story.
"You said because they were angry," I prompted. The smile broadened. Oh, yes, they were very angry, she explained. They did not even make the excuse that the villagers fired upon them. They were just angry through and through. And it was all because of those seventy-five French chasseurs who held the bridge. Some one called to her from the house. She hobbled to the door. "Anyone can tell you about the seventy-five chasseurs," she said, disappearing within.
I went on down the road and stood upon the bridge over the swift little river. It was a narrow little bridge only wide enough for one wagon to pass. Two roads from the town converged there, the one over which I had passed and another which formed a letter "V" at the juncture with the bridge. Across the river only one road led away from the bridge and it ran straight up a hill, when it turned suddenly into the broad national highway to Lunéville about five miles away.
One house remained standing almost at the entrance to the bridge, at the end nearest the town. Its roof was gone, and its walls bore the marks of hundreds of bullets, but it was inhabited by a little old man of fifty, who came out to talk with me. He was the village carpenter. His house was burned, so he had taken refuge in the little house at the bridge. During the time the Germans were there he had been a prisoner, but they forgot him the morning the French army arrived. Everybody was in such a hurry, he explained.
I asked him about the seventy-five chasseurs at the bridge. Ah, yes, we were then standing on the site of their barricade. He would tell me about it, for he had seen it all from his house half way up the hill.
The chasseurs were first posted across the river on the road to Lunéville, and when the Germans approached, early in the morning, they fell back to the bridge, which they had barricaded the night before. It was the only way into Gerbéviller, so the chasseurs determined to fight. They had torn up the street and thrown great earthworks across one end of the bridge. Additional barricades were thrown up on the two converging streets, part way up the hill, behind which they had mitrailleuses which could sweep the road at the other end of the bridge.
About a half mile to the south a narrow footbridge crossed the river, only wide enough for one man. It was a little rustic affair that ran through the grounds of the Château de Gerbéviller that faced the river only a few hundred yards below the main bridge. It was a very ancient château, built in the twelfth century and restored in the seventeenth century. It was a royal château of the Bourbons. In it once lived the great François de Montmorency, Duc de Luxembourg and Marshal of France. Now it belonged to the Marquise de Lamberty, a cousin of the King of Spain.
I interrupted, for I wanted to hear about the chasseurs. I gave the little old man a cigarette. He seized it eagerly—so eagerly that I also handed him a cigar. He just sort of fondled that cigar for a moment and then placed it in an inside pocket. It was a very cheap and very bad French cigar, for I was in a part of the country that has never heard of Havanas, but to the little old man it was something precious. "I will keep it for Sunday," he said.
I then got him back to the seventy-five chasseurs. It was just eight o'clock in the morning—a beautiful sunshiny morning—when the German column appeared around the bend in the road which we could see across the bridge, and which joined the highway from Lunéville. There were twelve thousand in that first column. One hundred and fifty thousand more came later. A band was playing "Deutschland über alles" and the men were singing. The closely packed front ranks of infantry broke into the goose step as they came in sight of the town. It was a wonderful sight; the sun glistened on their helmets; they marched as though on parade right down almost to the opposite end of the bridge.
Then came the command to halt. For a moment there was a complete silence. The Germans, only a couple of hundred yards from the barricade, seemed slowly to consider the situation. The Captain of the chasseurs, from a shelter behind the very little house that is still standing—and where his men up the two roads could see him—softly waved his hand.
Crack-crack-crack—crack-crack-crack-crack—crack-crack-crack! The bullets from the mitrailleuses whistled across the bridge into the front ranks of the "Deutchland über alles" singers, while the men behind the bridge barricade began a deadly rifle fire.
Have you ever heard a mitrailleuse? It is just like a telegraph instrument, with its insistant clickety click-click-click, only it is a hundred times as loud. Indeed I have been told by French officers that it has sometimes been used as a telegraph instrument, so accurately can its operator reel out its hundred and sixty shots a minute.
On that morning at the Gerbéviller barricade, however, it went faster than the telegraph. These men on the converging roads just shifted their range slightly and poured bullets into the next ranks of infantry and so on back along the line, until Germans were dropping by the dozen at the sides of the little straight road. Then the column broke ranks wildly and fled back into the shelter of the road from Lunéville.
A half hour later a detachment of cavalry suddenly rounded the corner and charged straight for the barricade. The seventy-five were ready for them. Some of them got half way across the bridge and then tumbled into the river. Not one got back around the corner of the road to Lunéville.
There was another half hour of quiet, and then from the Lunéville road a battery of artillery got into action. Their range was bad, so far as any achievement against the seventy-five was concerned, so they turned their attention to the château, which they could easily see from their position across the river. The first shell struck the majestic tower of the building and shattered it. The next smashed the roof, the third hit the chapel—and so continued the bombardment until flames broke out to complete the destruction.
Of course the Germans could not know that the château was empty, that its owner was in Paris and both her sons fighting in the French Army. But they had secured the military advantage of demolishing one of the finest country houses in France, with its priceless tapestries, ancient marbles and heirlooms of the Bourbons. A howl of German glee was heard by the seventy-five chasseurs crouching behind their barricades. So pleased were the invaders with their achievement, that next they bravely swung out a battery into the road leading to the bridge, intending to shell the barricades. The Captain of chasseurs again waved his hand. Every man of the battery was killed before the guns were in position. It took an entire company of infantry—half of them being killed in the action—to haul those guns back into the Lunéville road, thus to clear the way for another advance.
From then on until 1 o'clock in the afternoon there were three more infantry attacks, all failing as lamentably as the first. The seventy-five were holding off the 12,000. At the last attack they let the Germans advance to the entrance of the bridge. They invited them with taunts to "avancez." Then they poured in their deadly fire, and as the Germans broke and fled they permitted themselves a cheer. Up to this time not one chasseur was killed. Only four were wounded.
Shortly after 1 o'clock the German artillery wasted a few more shells on the ruined château and the chasseurs could see a detachment crawling along the river bank in the direction of the narrow footbridge that crossed through the château park a half mile below. The Captain of the chasseurs sent one man with a mitrailleuse to hold the bridge. He posted himself in the shelter of a large tree at one end. In a few minutes about fifty Germans appeared. They advanced cautiously on the bridge. The chasseur let them get half way over before he raked them with his fire. The water below ran red with blood.
The Germans retreated for help and made another attack an hour later with the same result. By 4 o'clock, when the lone chasseur's ammunition was exhausted, it is estimated that he had killed 175 Germans, who made five desperate rushes to take the position, which would have enabled them to make a flank attack on the seventy-four still holding the main bridge. When his ammunition was gone—which occurred at the same time as the ammunition at the main bridge was exhausted—this chasseur with the others succeeded in effecting a retreat to a main body of cavalry. If he still lives—this modern Horatius at the bridge—he remains an unnamed hero in the ranks of the French Army, unhonored except in the hearts of those few of his countrymen who know.
During the late hours of the afternoon aeroplanes flew over the chasseurs' position, thus discovering to the Germans how really weak were the defenses of the town, how few its defenders. Besides, the ammunition was gone. But for eight hours—from 8 in the morning until 4 in the afternoon—the seventy-five had held the 12,000. General Joffre has said in one of his reports that the defense of the bridge at Gerbéviller had an important bearing on the battle of the Marne, which was just beginning, for it gave Castelnau's Army of the East time to dig its trenches a few miles back of Gerbéviller before the Germans got through.
Had that body of 12,000 succeeded earlier the 150,000 Germans that advanced the next day might have been able to fall on the French right flank during the most critical and decisive battle of the war. The total casualties of the chasseurs were three killed, three captured, and six wounded.
The little old man and I had walked to the entrance of the château park before he finished his story. It was still too early for breakfast. I thanked him and told him to return to his work in the little house by the bridge. I wanted to explore the château at leisure.
I entered the place—what was left of it. Most of the walls were standing. Walls built in the twelfth century do not break easily, even with modern artillery. But the modern roof and seventeenth century inner walls were all demolished. Not a single article of furniture or decoration remained. But the destruction showed some of the same freaks—similar to that little house left untouched by fire on the summit of the hill.
For instance, the Bourbon coat of arms above the grand staircase was untouched, while the staircase itself was just splintered bits of marble. On another fragment of a wall there still hung a magnificent stag's antlers. Strewed about in the corners I saw fragments of vases that had been priceless. Even the remnants were valuable. In the ruined music room I found a piece of fresh, clean music, (an Alsatian waltz,) lying on the mantelpiece. I went out to the front of the building, where the great park sweeps down to the edge of the river. An old gardener in one of the side paths saw me. We immediately established cordial relations with a cigarette.
He told me how, after the chasseurs retreated beyond the town, the Germans—reduced over a thousand of their original number by the activities of the day—swept over the barricades of the bridge and into the town. Yes, the old woman I had talked with was right about it. They were very angry. They were ferociously angry at being held eight hours at that bridge by a force so ridiculously small.
The first civilians they met they killed, and then they began to fire the houses. One young man, half witted, came out of one of the houses near the bridge. They hanged him in the garden behind the house. Then they called his mother to see. A mob came piling into the château headed by four officers. All the furniture and valuables that were not destroyed they piled into a wagon and sent back to Lunéville. Of the gardener who was telling me the story they demanded the keys of the wine cellars. No; they did not injure him. They just held him by the arms while several dozen of the soldiers spat in his face.
While the drunken crew were reeling about the place, one of them accidentally stumbled upon the secret underground passage leading to the famous grottoes. These grottoes and the underground connection from the château were built in the fifteenth century. They are a half mile away, situated only half above ground, the entrance looking out on a smooth lawn that extends to the edge of the river. Several giant trees, the trunks of which are covered with vines, semi-shelter the entrance, which is also obscured by climbing ivy. The interior was one of the treasures of France. The vaulted ceilings were done in wonderful mosaic. The walls decorated with marbles and rare sea shells. In every nook were marble pedestals and antique statuary, while the fountain in the centre, supplied from an underground stream, was of porphyry inlaid with mosaic.
The Germans looked upon it with appreciative eyes and cultured minds. But it did not please them. They were still very angry. Its destruction was a necessity of war. It could not be destroyed by artillery because it was half underground and screened by the giant trees. But it could be destroyed by picks and axes. A squad of soldiers was detailed to the job. They did it thoroughly. The gardener took me there to see. Not a scrap of the mosaic remained. The fountain was smashed to bits. A headless Venus and a smashed and battered Adonis were lying prone upon the ground.
The visitors to the château and environs afterward joined their comrades in firing the town. Night had come. Also across the bridge waited the hundred and fifty thousand reinforcements come from Lunéville. The five hundred of the two thousand inhabitants who remained were herded to the upper end of the town near the station. That portion was not to be destroyed because the German General would make his headquarters there.
The inhabitants were to be given a treat. They were to witness the entrance of the hundred and fifty thousand—the power and might of Germany was to be exhibited to them. So while the flames leaped high from the burning city, reddening the sky for miles, while old men prayed, while women wept, while little children whimpered, the sound of martial music was heard down the street near the bridge. The infantry packed in close formation, the red light from the fire shining on their helmets, were doing the goose step up the main street to the station—the great German army had entered the city of Gerbéviller with the honors of war.
General Foch, the Man of Ypres
An Account of France's New Master of War
[From THE NEW YORK TIMES, April, 1915.]
"Find out the weak point of your enemy and deliver your blow there," said the Commander of the Twentieth French Army Corps at Nancy at a staff banquet in 1913.
"But suppose, General," said an artillery officer, "that the enemy has no weak point?"
"If the enemy has no weak point," returned the commander, with a gleam of the eye and an aggressive tilt of the chin, "make one."
The commander was Foch—Ferdinand Foch—who has suddenly flashed before the world as the greatest leader in the French Army after Joffre, and who in that remark at Nancy gave the index to the basic quality of his character as a General. General Foch is today in command of the northern armies of France, besides being the chief Lieutenant and confidant of Joffre. Joffre conceives; Foch, master tactician, executes. He finds the weak point; if there is no weak point, he creates or seeks to create one.
When King George of England was at the front in France recently he conferred the Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath—the highest military distinction in the form of an order within the gift of the British Crown—on two Frenchmen. Joffre was one. The other was Foch.
"Foch? Foch? Who is Foch?" asked the British public, perplexed, when the newspapers printed the news of the granting of this signal honor.
"Foch is the General who was at the head of the French military mission which followed our army manoeuvres three years ago," replied a few men who happened to have been intimately acquainted with those manoeuvres.
"But what has that to do with the Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath?" asked John Bull. And the manoeuvre experts not being able to reply, the English newspapers demanded from their correspondents in France an answer to the query, "Who is Foch? Why the Grand Cross?"
And the main features of the answers to that query were these:
Foch is the "greatest strategist in Europe and the humblest," in the words of Joffre.
Foch is the hero of the Marne, the man who perceived on Sept. 9 that there must be a gap between the Prussian Guard and the Saxon Army, and who gathered enough artillery to crush the guard in the St. Gond marshes and forced both the Prussians and the Saxons, now separated, to retreat.
Foch is the man of Ypres, the commander who was in general control of the successful fight made by the French and the British, aided by the Belgians, to prevent the Germans from breaking through to Calais.
Foch, in short, is one of the military geniuses of the war, so record observers at the front. He is a General who has something of the Napoleonic in his composition; the dramatic in war is for him—secrecy and suddenness, gigantic and daring movements; fiery, yet coldly calculated attacks; vast strategic conceptions carried out by swift, unfaltering tactics. Foch has a tendency to the impetuous, but he is impetuous scientifically. He has, however, taken all in all, much more of the dash and nervousness and warmth of the Southern Latin than has Joffre—cool, cautious, taciturn Joffre. Yet both men are from the south of France. They were born within a few miles of one another, within three months of one another, Foch being born on Oct. 2, 1851, and Joffre on Jan. 12, 1852.
Most writers who have dealt with Foch agree on this as one of his paramount characteristics—the Napoleonic mode of military thought. When Foch was director of the Ecole de Guerre, where he had much to do with shaping the military views of many of the men who are now commanding units of the French Armies, he was considered to be possessed of almost an obsession on the subject of Napoleon. He studied Napoleon's campaigns, and restudied them. He went back much further, however, in his choice of a master, and gave intense application to the campaigns of Caesar. Napoleon and Caesar—these were the minds from which the mind of the Marne and Ypres has learned some of its lessons of success.
Here Foch invites comparison with another of the dominant figures of the war—General French. For French is described by his biographer as "a worshipper of Napoleon," regarding him as the world's greatest strategist, and in following out and studying Napoleon's campaigns French personally covered and studied much of the ground in Belgium over which he has been fighting. French is a year younger than Foch. They are old friends, as are French and Joffre, and Joffre and Foch.
The inclination of Foch to something of the Napoleonic is shown beyond the realm of strategy and tactics. Foch is credited with knowing the French soldier, his heart, his mind, his capabilities, and the method of getting the most out of those capabilities, in a way reminiscent of the winner of Jena. And Foch knows not only the privates, but the officers. When he went to the front he visited each commander; the Colonels he called by name; the corps commanders, without exception, had attended his lectures at the Ecole de Guerre.
As for the men, Foch makes it his business to get into personal contact with them, as Napoleon used to do. Foch does not hobnob with them, there is no joking or familiarity, but he goes into the trenches and the occupied villages and looks the men over informally, inspects food or equipment, makes a useful comment or two, drops a phrase that is worth repeating, and leaves behind him enthusiasm and respect. The Paris Figaro says that he has the gift of setting souls afire, of arousing that élan in the French fighter which made that fighter perform military miracles when the "sun of Austerlitz" was high. It has been declared by a French writer that Foch knows the human element in the French Army better than any other man living.
With all his knowledge of men, his power of inspiring them, Foch is quiet, retiring, non-communicative, with no taste for meeting people in social intercourse. His life has been monotonous—work and work and work. He has the reputation of being a driver; he used to be particularly severe on shirkers in the war college, and such, no matter what their influence, had no chance of getting a diploma leading to an attractive staff position when Foch was Director. When he was in command at Nancy and elsewhere he used to work his staffs hard, and they had to share much of the monotony of work which has been chiefly Foch's life. He did not go in for society, merely making the formal calls required by the etiquette of garrison towns on the chief garrison hostesses, and giving dinners two or three times a year to his staff.
Foch, indeed, with his quiet ways and his hard work and his studying of Napoleon and Caesar, was characterized by some of the officers of the army as a pedant, a theorist, and these held that Foch had small chance of doing anything important in such a practical realm as that of real war.
Because of his Directorship of the Ecole de Guerre he was known to many officers, but as far as France at large was concerned his name was scarcely known at all last August. Yet officers knew him in other lands besides his own. His two great books, "Principles of War" and "Conduct of War," have been translated into English, German, and Italian, and are highly regarded by military men. He has been ranked by the Militär-Wochenblatt, organ of the German General Staff, as one of the few strategists of first class ability among the Allies.
Foch is a slim man, with a great deal of nervous energy in his actions, being so quick and graceful in movement, indeed, that a recent English observer declares he carries himself more like a man of 40 than one of 64. His gray blue eyes are particularly to be noticed, so keen are they. His speech is quick, precise, logical.
So little has Foch been known to the French public that it has been stated time and again that he is an Alsatian. He is not, but comes of a Basque family which has lived for many generations in the territory which is now the Department of the Hautes-Pyrénées, directly on the border of Spain. Foch was born in the town of Tarbes in that department. Joffre was born in the Department Pyrénées-Orientales, on the Spanish border to the east. Foch's father, Napoleon Foch, was a Bonapartist and Secretary of the Prefecture at Tarbes under Napoleon III. One of his two brothers, a lawyer, is also called Napoleon. The other is a Jesuit priest. Foch and these brothers attended the local college, and then turned to their professions.
In 1870 Foch served as a subaltern against the Germans, as did Joffre. After the war Foch began to win recognition as a man of brains, and at 26 he was given a commission as artillery Captain. Later he became Professor of Tactics in the Ecole de Guerre, with the title of Commandant, where he remained for five years, and then returned to regimental work. It was when Foch reached the grade of Brigadier General that he went back to the War College, this time as Director, one of the most confidential positions in the War Department. From this post he went to the command of the Thirteenth Division, thence to the command of the Eighth Corps at Bourges, and thence to the command of the Twentieth Corps at Nancy.
At the time that Foch was appointed Director of the Ecole de Guerre, Clemenceau was Premier, and upon the latter fell the task of choosing an officer for the important Directorship. There was keen competition for the position, many influential Generals desiring the appointment, and in consequence much wire-pulling went on. The story goes that Clemenceau, a man of action, became impatient of the intrigues for the post, and determined to make his own choice unhampered.
According to the story, Clemenceau, after a conference one day upon routine business with Foch, asked the latter to dine. The Ecole de Guerre was not mentioned during the meal, the men chatting upon general topics. But as the coffee was being brought on, the Premier turned suddenly to the General and said, brusquely:
"By the way, I've a good bit of news for you. You're nominated Director of the Ecole de Guerre."
"Director of the Ecole de Guerre! But I'm not a candidate for the post."
"That is possible. But you're appointed all the same, and I know you will do excellent work in the position."
Foch thanked the Premier, but he still had some doubts, and added:
"I fear you don't know all my family connections. I have a brother who is a Jesuit."
"Jesuit be d——-!" the Premier is reported to have roared in reply. "Oh, I beg your pardon, Mr. Director! You are the Director of the Ecole de Guerre. All the Jesuits in creation won't alter that—it is a fait accompli."
Among the confidential bits of work worthy of note that Foch has done for the War Department is the report he made upon the larger guns of the French field artillery, which have done such execution in the present war. For many weeks Foch went around the great Creusot gun works in the blouse of a workman, testing, watching, experimenting, analyzing.
Foch was one of the high officers in France who was not in the least surprised by the war and who had personally been holding himself in readiness for it for years. He felt, and often said, that a great war was inevitable; so much used he to dwell upon the certainty of war that some persons regarded him as an alarmist when he kept declaring that French officers should take every step within their power to get themselves and the troops ready for active service at an instant's notice. He also held that France as a nation should prepare to the utmost of her power for the assured conflict.
In a recent issue of The London Times there was a description of Foch by a Times correspondent who had been at Foch's headquarters in the north of France. The correspondent's remarks are prefaced by the statement that in a late dispatch General French mentions General Foch as one of those whose help he has "once more gratefully to acknowledge." The correspondent writes in part:
What Ernest Lavisse has clone for civilian New France in his direction of the Ecole Normale General Foch has done in a large measure for the officers of New France by his teaching of strategy and tactics at the Ecole de Guerre. He left his mark upon the whole teaching of general tactics.
I had the honor of being received recently by General Foch at his headquarters in the north of France—a house built for very different purposes many years ago, when Flemish civil architecture was in its flower. The quiet atmosphere of Flemish ease and burgomaster comfort has completely vanished. The building hums with activity, as does the whole town. A fleet of motor cars is ready for instant action. Officers and orderlies hurry constantly to and fro. There is an occasional British uniform, a naval airman's armored car, and above all the noise of this bustle, though lower in tone, the sound of guns in the distance from Ypres.
The director of all this activity is General Foch. There in the north he is putting his theories of war to the test with as much success as he did at the outbreak of hostilities in Lorraine and later in the centre during the battle of the Marne. Although born with the brain of a mathematician, General Foch's ideas upon war are by no means purely scientific. He refuses, indeed, to regard war, and more especially modern war, as an exact science. The developments of science have, indeed, but increased the mental and moral effort required of each participant, and it is only in the passions aroused in each man by the conflict of conception of life that the combatant finds the strength of will to withstand the horrors of modern warfare.
General Foch is a philosopher as well as a fighter. He is one of the rare philosophers who have proved the accuracy of their ideas in the fire of battle. A typical instance of this is given by "Miles" in a recent number of the Correspondant. During the battle of the Marne the Germans made repeated efforts to cut through the centre where General Foch commanded between Sézanne and Mailly. On three consecutive days General Foch was forced to retire. Every morning he resumed the offensive, with the result that his obstinacy won the day. He was able to profit by a false step by the enemy to take him in the flank and defeat him.
General Foch's whole life and teaching were proved true in those days. He has resolved the art of war into three fundamental ideas—preparation, the formation of a mass, and the multiplication of this mass in its use. In order to derive the full benefit of the mass created it is necessary to have freedom of action, and that is only obtained by intellectual discipline. General Foch has written:
"Discipline for a leader does not mean the execution of orders received in so far as they seem suitable, just reasonable, or even possible. It means that you have entirely grasped the ideas of the leader who has given the order and that you take every possible means of satisfying him. Discipline does not mean silence, abstention, only doing what appears to you possible without compromising yourself; it is not the practice of the art of avoiding responsibilities. On the contrary, it is action in the sense of orders received."
Fifteen years ago at the Ecole de Guerre General Foch was fond of quoting Joseph de Maistre's remark, "A battle lost is a battle which one believes to have lost, for battles are not lost materially," and of adding, "Battles are therefore lost morally, and it is therefore morally that they are won." The aphorism can be extended by this one: "A battle won is a battle in which one will not admit one's self vanquished." As "Miles" remarks, "He did as he had said."
Ernest Dimnet in The London Saturday Review has this to say in part about Foch and his two widely known books:
During his two terms of service at the Ecole de Guerre he produced two considerable works, "Principes de la Guerre" and "De la Conduite de La Guerre," which give a high idea of their author's character and talent. There is nothing in them that ought to scare away the average reader. Their style has the geometrical lucidity which is the polytechnician's birthright, but in spite of the deliberate impersonality generally attached to that style of writing, there emanates from it a curious quality which gradually shows us the author as a living person.
We have the impression of a vast mental capacity turned to the lifelong study of a fascinating subject and acquiring in it the dignity of attitude and the naturalness which mastery inevitably produces. War has been the constant meditation of this powerful brain. In "La Conduite de la Guerre" this meditation is the minute historical examination of the battles of the First Empire and 1870. "Nothing can replace the experience of war," writes the author, "except the history of war," and it is clear that he understands the word "history" as all those who go to the past for a lesson in greatness understand it.
"Les Principes de la Guerre" is more immediately technical, yet it strikes one as being less a speculation than a visualizing of what modern war was sure to be. If the reader did not feel that he lacks the background which only the contemplation a million times repeated of concrete details can create, he would be tempted to marvel at the extraordinary simplicity of these views. But a good judge who was very near the General until a wound removed him for a while from the—to him—fascinating scene tells me that this simplicity and directness—which marked the action of Foch at the battle of the Marne as they formerly marked his teaching—are the perfection to which only a few can aspire.