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 was not halted! 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.