"I know all about it, and I don't care a rap," he answered. "Mon Général, or rather, Monsieur le Directeur, you may consider yourself appointed, Jesuit or no Jesuit. We need men of your stamp to train up officers in our army."
Foch held this responsible position for several years just preceding the Great War. Whether he saw it or not, lowering upon the horizon, he bent every effort to making the command of the French army fit, ready for any emergency. He had never forgotten the dreadful invasion of his boyhood days. With him the teaching of preparedness was almost as sacred as religion.
And when the Great War at last descended, Foch was like a shining sword in its path, one that had never been allowed to rust in its scabbard. The story of his dogged perseverance and his brilliant strategy has been fully told in the annals of war. Two or three strongly characteristic points yet demand mention. He was a firm believer in the element of surprise; he outguessed the enemy. And he never knew when he was beaten.
"The weaker we are, the more important it is for us to attack," is one of his famous sayings.
At the Battle of the Marne, when his corps was hard pressed at a critical salient, he telegraphed Joffre:
"My left flank has been driven in. My right flank has been driven in.
Consequently nothing remains but for me to attack with my center."
And attack he did, hurling back the surprised Teutons and aiding Joffre to turn the invader, and save Paris.
Foch, in brief, is a soldier of the intellectual type. His headquarters when at last he was made Marshal of France and Generalissimo of the Allied forces, resembled a classroom more nearly than the center of a vast and far-reaching activity. There was no bustle, no confusion. Orderlies pored over papers and presented reports quietly. The commander looked them over with keen appraising glance, then issued orders without raising his voice. But that very quietness and precision pronounced the doom of Germany. It was a triumph of science over brute force.
If in America we have had a "schoolmaster in politics," the French have had a "schoolmaster in war"—one who taught the Hun a lesson!