"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.