"You will be called on later to be the brain of an army. So I say to you to-day: Learn to think."
By this he was far from meaning that officers were to confine thinking to themselves, but that they were to teach themselves to think so that they might the better hand on intelligence and stimulate their men to obey not blindly but comprehendingly.
It was a maxim of Napoleon's, of which Foch is very fond, that "as a general rule, the commander-in-chief ought only to indicate the direction, determine the ends to be attained; the means of getting there ought to be left to the free choice of the mediums of execution, without whom success is impossible."
This leaves a great responsibility to officers, but it is the secret of that flexibility which makes the French army so effective.
For Foch carries his belief in individual judgment far beyond the officers commanding units; he carries it to the privates in the ranks.
An able officer, in Foch's opinion, is one who can take a general command to get his men such-and-such a place and accomplish such-and-such a thing, and so interpret that command to his men that each and every one of them will, while acting in strict obedience to orders, use the largest possible amount of personal intelligence in accomplishing the thing he was told to do.
It is said that there was probably never before in history a battle fought in which every man was a general—so to speak—as at the battle of Château Thierry, in July, 1918. That is to say, there was probably never before a battle in which so many men comprehended as clearly as if they had been generals what it was all about, and acted as if they had been generals to attain their objectives.
It was an intelligent democracy, acting under superb leadership that vanquished the forces of autocracy.
Foch has worked with a free hand to test the worth of his lifelong principles. And the hundreds of men he trained in those principles were ready to carry them out for him.
No wonder his first injunction was: Learn to think!