E-text prepared by Al Haines

[Frontispiece: Marshal Foch at the Peace Conference.]

FOCH THE MAN

A Life of
The Supreme Commander
of the
Allied Armies

BY

CLARA E. LAUGHLIN

WITH APPRECIATION BY

LIEUT.-COL. EDOUARD RÉQUIN

of the French High Commission to the United States

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

REVISED AND ENLARGED EDITION

NEW YORK ———— CHICAGO
Fleming H. Revell Company
LONDON AND EDINBURGH

Copyright, 1918, 1919, by
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY

First Printing - November 11, 1918
Second Printing - November 19, 1918
Third Printing - November 29, 1918
Fourth Printing - December 7, 1918
Fifth Printing - January 9, 1919
Sixth Printing - May 1, 1919

DEDICATION

TO THE MEN WHO HAVE FOUGHT UNDER GENERAL
FOCH'S COMMAND. TO ALL Of THEM, IN ALL
GRATITUDE. BUT IN AN ESPECIAL WAY TO THE MEN
OF THE 42D DIVISION, THE SPLENDOR OF
WHOSE CONDUCT ON SEPTEMBER 9, 1914,
NO PEN WILL EVER BE ABLE
ADEQUATELY TO COMMEMORATE.

[Illustration: Hand-written letter from Foch.]

[Illustration: Page 1 of hand-written letter from Lt.-Colonel E. Réquin to Clara Laughlin.]

[Illustration: Page 2 of hand-written letter from Lt.-Colonel E. Réquin to Clara Laughlin.]

[Transcriber's note: The letter in the second and third illustrations is shown translated on the following page.]

Dear MADEMOISELLE LAUGHLIN:

I have read with the keenest interest your sketch of the life of Marshal Foch. It is not yet history: we are too close to events to write it now, but it is the story of a great leader of men on which I felicitate you because of your real understanding of his character.

Christian, Frenchman, soldier, Foch will be held up as an example for future generations as much for his high moral standard as for his military genius.

It seems that in writing about him the style rises with the noble sentiments which inspire him.

Thus in form of presentation as well as in substance you convey admirably the great lesson which applies to each one of us from the life of Marshal Foch.

Please accept, Mademoiselle, this expression of my respectful regards.

LT.-COLONEL E. RÉQUIN.

"THEY SHALL NOT PASS!"

Three Spirits stood on the mountain peak
And gazed on a world of red,--
Red with the blood of heroes,
The living and the dead;
A mighty force of Evil strove
With freemen, mass on mass.
Three Spirits stood on the mountain peak
And cried: "They shall not pass!"

The Spirits of Love and Sacrifice,
The Spirit of Freedom, too,--
They called to the men they had dwelt among
Of the Old World and the New!
And the men came forth at the trumpet call,
Yea, every creed and class;
And they stood with the Spirits who called to them,
And cried: "They shall not pass!"

Far down the road of the Future Day
I see the world of Tomorrow;
Men and women at work and play,
In the midst of their joy and sorrow.
And every night by the red firelight,
When the children gather 'round
They tell the tale of the men of old.
These noble ancestors, grim and bold,
Who bravely held their ground.
In thrilling accents they often speak
Of the Spirits Three on the mountain peak.

O Freedom, Love and Sacrifice
You claimed our men, alas!
Yet everlasting peace is theirs
Who cried, "They shall not pass!"

ARTHUR A. PENN.

Reprinted by permission of M. Witmark & Sons, N. Y.
Publishers of the musical setting to this poem.

CONTENTS

[ FOREWORD TO REVISED AND ENLARGED EDITION ]

[ I. WHERE HE WAS BORN ]

Stirring traditions and historic scenes which surrounded him in childhood.

[ II. BOYHOOD SURROUNDINGS ]

The horsemarkets at Tarbes. The school. Foch at twelve a student of Napoleon.

[ III. A YOUNG SOLDIER OF A LOST CAUSE ]

What Foch suffered in the defeat of France by the Prussians.

[ IV. PARIS AFTER THE GERMANS LEFT ]

Foch begins his military studies, determined to be ready when France should again need defense.

[ V. LEARNING TO BE A ROUGH RIDER ]

Begins to specialize in cavalry training. The school at Saumur.

[ VI. FIRST YEARS IN BRITTANY ]

Seven years at Rennes as artillery captain and always student of war. Called to Paris for further training.

[ VII. JOFFRE AND FOCH ]

Parallels in their careers since their school days together.

[ VIII. THE SUPERIOR SCHOOL OF WAR ]

Where Foch's great work as teacher prepared hundreds of officers for the superb parts they have played in this war.

[ IX. THE GREAT TEACHER ]

Some of the principles Foch taught. Why he is not only the greatest strategist and tactician of all time, but the ideal leader and coordinator of democracy.

[ X. A COLONEL AT FIFTY ]

Clemenceau's part in giving Foch his opportunity.

[ XI. FORTIFYING FRANCE ]

How the Superior War Council prepared for the inevitable invasion of France. Foch put in command at Nancy.

[ XII. ON THE EVE OF WAR ]

True to his belief that "the way to make war is to attack" Foch promptly invaded Germany, but was obliged to retire and defend his own soil.

[ XIII. THE BATTLE OF LORRAINE ]

How the brilliant generalship there thwarted the German plan; and how Joffre recognized it in reorganizing his army.

[ XIV. THE FIRST VICTORY AT THE MARNE ]

"The Miracle of the Marne" was Foch. How he turned defeat to victory.

[ XV. SENT NORTH TO SAVE CHANNEL PORTS ]

Foch's skill and diplomacy in that crisis show him a great coordinator.

[ XVI. THE SUPREME COMMANDER ]

How Foch stopped the German drive that nearly separated the French and English armies.

[ XVII. BRINGING GERMANY TO ITS KNEES ]

The completest humiliation ever inflicted on a proud nation.

[ XVIII. DURING THE ARMISTICE—AND AFTER ]

How Foch carries himself as victor.

ILLUSTRATIONS

[ Marshal Foch at the Peace Conference . . . . . . Frontispiece ]

[ Hand-written letter from Foch. ]

[ Page 1 of hand-written letter from Lt.-Colonel E. Réquin to Clara Laughlin. ]

[ Page 2 of hand-written letter from Lt.-Colonel E. Réquin to Clara Laughlin. ]

[ The room in which Ferdinand Foch was born ]

[ The house in Tarbes where Foch was born ]

[ Ferdinand Foch as a schoolboy of twelve ]

[ The school in Tarbes ]

[ Marshall Joffre--General Foch ]

[ General Pétain--Marshal Haig--General Foch--General Pershing ]

[ General Foch--General Pershing ]

[ Marshal Foch, Executive head of the allied forces ]

[ Ferdinand Foch, Marshal of France ]

FOREWORD TO REVISED AND ENLARGED EDITION

When the Great War broke out, one military name "led all the rest" in world-prominence: Kitchener. Millions of us were confident that the hero of Kartoum would save the world. It was not so decreed. Almost immediately another name flashed into the ken of every one, until even lisping children said Joffre with reverence second only to that wherewith they named Omnipotence. Then the weary years dragged on, and so many men were incredibly brave and good that it seemed hard for anyone to become pre-eminent. We began to say that in a war so vast, so far-flung, no one man could dominate the scene.

But, after nearly four years of conflict, a name we had heard and seen from the first, among many others, began to differentiate itself from the rest; and presently the whole wide world was ringing with it: Foch!

He was commanding all the armies of civilization. Who was he?

Hardly anyone knew.

Up to the very moment when he had compassed the most momentous victory in the history of mankind, little was known about him, outside of France, beyond the fact that he had been a professor in the Superior School of War.

Now and then, as the achievements of his generalship rocked the world, someone essayed an account of him. They said he was a Lorrainer, born at Metz; they said his birthday was August 4; they said he was too young to serve in the Franco-Prussian war; and they said a great many other things of which few happened to be true.

Then, as the summer of 1918 waned, there came to me from France, from Intelligence officers of General Foch's staff, authoritative information about him.

And also there came those, representing France and her interests in this country, who said:

"Won't you put the facts about Foch before your people?"

If I could have fought for France with a sword (or gun) I should have been at her service from the first of August, 1914, when I heard her tocsin ring, saw her sons march away to fight and die on battlefields as familiar to me as my home neighborhood.

Not being permitted that, I have yielded her such service as I could with my pen.

And when asked to write, for my countrymen, about General Foch, I felt honored in a supreme degree.

In due course we shall have many volumes about him: his life, his teachings, his writings, his great deeds will be studied in minutest details as long as that civilization endures which he did so much to preserve to mankind.

But just now, while all hearts are overflowing with gratefulness to him, it may be—I cannot help thinking—as valuable to us to know a little about him as it will be for us to know a great deal about him later on.

My sources of information are mainly French; and notable among them is a work recently published in Paris: "Foch, His Life, His Principles, His Work, as a Basis for Faith in Victory," by René Puaux, a French soldier-author who has served under the supreme commander in a capacity which enabled him to study the man as well as the General.

French, English and some few American periodicals have given me bits of impression and some information. French military and other writers have also helped. And noted war correspondents have contributed graphic fragments. The happy fortune which permitted me to know France, her history and her people, enabled me to "read into" these brief accounts much which does not appear to the reader without that acquaintance. And distinguished Frenchmen, scholars and soldiers, including several members of the French High Commission to the United States, have helped me greatly; most of them have not only close acquaintance with General Foch, having served as staff officers under him, but are eminent writers as well, with the highest powers of analysis and of expression.

Lieutenant-Colonel Édouard Réquin of the French General Staff, who was at General Foch's side from the day Foch was made commander of an army, has been especially kind to me in this undertaking; I am indebted to him, not only for many anecdotes and suggestions, but also for his patience in reading my manuscript for verification (or correction) of its details and its essential truthfulness.

And I want especially to record my gratefulness to M. Antonin Barthélemy, French Consul at Chicago, the extent and quality of whose helpfulness, not alone on this but on many occasions, I shall never be able to describe. Through him the Spirit of France has been potent in our community.

Thus aided and encouraged, I have done what I could to set before my countrymen a sketch of the great, dominant figure of the World War.

The thing about Foch that most impresses us as we come to know him is not primarily his greatness as a military genius, but his greatness as a spiritual force.

Those identical qualities in him which saved the world in war, will serve it no less in peace—if we study them to good purpose.

As a leader of men, his principles need little, if any, adaptation to meet the requirements of the re-born world from which, we hope, he has banished the sword.

Not to those only who would or who must captain their fellows, but to every individual soul fighting alone against weakness and despair and other foes, his life-story brings a rising tide of new courage, new strength, new faith.

For the young man or woman struggling with the principles of success; for the man or woman of middle life, fearful that the time for great service has gone by; to the preacher and the teacher and other moulders of ideals—to these, and to many more, he speaks at least as thrillingly as to the soldier.

This is what I have tried to make clear in my simple sketch here offered.

I

WHERE HE WAS BORN

Ferdinand Foch was born at Tarbes on October 2, 1851.

His father, of good old Pyrenean stock and modest fortune, was a provincial official whose office corresponded to that of secretary of state for one of our commonwealths. So the family lived in Tarbes, the capital of the department called the Upper Pyrénées.

The mother of Ferdinand was Sophie Dupré, born at Argèles, twenty miles south of Tarbes, nearer the Spanish border. Her father had been made a chevalier of the empire by Napoleon I for services in the war with Spain, and the great Emperor's memory was piously venerated in Sophie Dupré's new home as it had been in her old one. So her first-born son may be said to have inherited that passion for Napoleon which has characterized his life and played so great a part in making him what he is.

There was a little sister in the family which welcomed Ferdinand. And in course of time two other boys came.

[Illustration: The Room in Which Ferdinand Foch was Born.]

[Illustration: The House in Tarbes Where Foch was Born.]

These four children led the ordinary life of happy young folks in France. But there was much in their surroundings that was richly colorful, romantic. Probably they took it all for granted, the way children (and many who are not children) take their near and intimate world. But even if they did, it must have had its deep effect upon them.

To begin with, there was Tarbes.

Tarbes is a very ancient city. It is twenty-five miles southeast of Pau, where Henry of Navarre made his dramatic entry upon a highly dramatic career, and just half that distance northeast of Lourdes, whose famous pilgrimages began when Ferdinand Foch was a little boy of seven.

He must have heard many soul-stirring tales about little Bernadette, the peasant girl to whom the grotto's miraculous qualities were revealed by the Virgin, and whose stories were weighed by the Bishop of Tarbes before the Catholic Church sponsored them. The procession of sufferers through Tarbes on their way to Lourdes, and the joyful return of many, must have been part of the background of Ferdinand Foch's young days.

Many important highways converge at Tarbes, which lies in a rich, elevated plain on the left bank of the River Adour.

The town now has some 30,000 inhabitants, but when Ferdinand Foch was a little boy it had fewer than half that many.

For many centuries of eventful history it has consisted principally of one very long street, running east and west over so wide a stretch of territory that the town was called Tarbes-the-Long. Here and there this "main street" is crossed by little streets running north and south and giving glimpses of mountains, green fields and orchards; and many of these are threaded by tiny waterways—small, meandering children of the Adour, which take themselves where they will, like the chickens in France, and nobody minds having to step over or around them, or building his house to humor their vagaries.

Tarbes was a prominent city of Gaul under the Romans. They, who could always be trusted to make the most of anything of the nature of baths, seem to have been duly appreciative of the hot springs in which that region abounds.

But nothing of stirring importance happened at or near Tarbes until after the battle of Poitiers (732), when the Saracens were falling back after the terrible defeat dealt them by Charles Martel.

Sullen and vengeful, they were pillaging and destroying as they went, and probably none of the communities through which they passed felt able to offer resistance to their depredations—until they got to Tarbes. And there a valiant priest named Missolin hastily assembled some of the men of the vicinity and gave the infidels a good drubbing—killing many and hastening the flight, over the mountains, of the rest.

This encounter took place on a plain a little to the south of Tarbes which is still called the Heath of the Moors.

When Ferdinand Foch was a little boy, more than eleven hundred years after that battle, it was not uncommon for the spade or plowshare of some husbandman on the heath to uncover bones of Christian or infidel slain in what was probably the last conflict fought on French soil to preserve France against the Saracens. And there may still have been living some old, old men or women who could tell Ferdinand stories of the 24th of May (anniversary of the battle) as it was observed each year until the Revolution of 1789. At the southern extremity of the battlefield there stood for many generations a gigantic equestrian statue, of wood, representing the holy warrior, Missolin, rallying his flock to rout the unbelievers. And in the presence of a great concourse singing songs of grateful praise to Missolin, his statue was crowned with garlands by young maidens wearing the picturesque gala dress of that vicinity.

Some forty-odd years after Missolin's victory, Charlemagne went with his twelve knights and his great army through Tarbes on his way to Spain to fight the Moors. And when that ill-starred expedition was defeated and its warriors bold were fleeing back to France, Roland—so the story goes—finding no pass in the Pyrénées where he needed one desperately, cleaved one with his sword Durandal.

High up among the clouds (almost 10,000 feet) is that Breach of Roland—200 feet wide, 330 feet deep, and 165 feet long. A good slice-out for a single stroke! And when Roland had cut it, he dashed through it and across the chasm, his horse making a clean jump to the French side of the mountains. That no one might ever doubt this, the horse thoughtfully left the mark of one iron-shod hoof clearly imprinted in the rock just where he cleared it, and where it is still shown to the curious and the stout of wind.

It is a pity to remember that, in spite of such prowess of knight and devotion of beast. Roland perished on his flight from Spain.

But, like all brave warriors, he became mightier in death even than he had been in life, and furnished an ideal of valor which animated the most chivalrous youth of all Europe, throughout many centuries.

With such traditions is the country round about Tarbes impregnated.

It has been suggested that the name Foch (which, by the way, is pronounced as if it rhymed with "hush") is derived from Foix—a town some sixty miles east of St. Gaudens, near which was the ancestral home of the Foch family.

Whatever the relatives of Ferdinand may have thought of this as a probability, it is certain that Ferdinand was well nurtured in the history of Foix and especially in those phases of it that Froissart relates.

Froissart, the genial gossip who first courted the favor of kings and princes and then was gently entreated by them so that his writing of them might be to their renown, was on his way to Blois when he heard of the magnificence of Gaston Phoebus, Count of Foix. Whereupon the chronicler turned him about and jogged on his way to Foix. Gaston Phoebus was not there, but at Orthez—150 miles west and north—and, nothing daunted, to Orthez went Froissart, by way of Tarbes, traveling in company with a knight named Espaing de Lyon, who was a graphic and charmful raconteur thoroughly acquainted with the country through which they were journeying. A fine, "that-reminds-me" gentleman was Espaing, and every turn of the road brought to his mind some stirring tale or doughty legend.

"Sainte Marie!" Froissart cried. "How pleasant are your tales, and how much do they profit me while you relate them. They shall all be set down in the history I am writing."

So they were! And of all Froissart's incomparable recitals, none are more fascinating than those of the countryside Ferdinand Foch grew up in.

II

BOYHOOD SURROUNDINGS

The country round about Tarbes has long been famed for its horses of an Arabian breed especially suitable for cavalry.

Practically all the farmers of the region raised these fine, fleet animals. There was a great stud-farm on the outskirts of town, and the business of breeding mounts for France's soldiers was one of the first that little Ferdinand Foch heard a great deal about.

He learned to ride, as a matter of course, when he was very young. And all his life he has been an ardent and intrepid horseman.

A community devoted to the raising of fine saddle horses is all but certain to be a community devotedly fond of horse racing.

Love of racing is almost a universal trait in France; and in Tarbes it was a feature of the town life in which business went hand-in-hand with pleasure.

In an old French book published before Ferdinand Foch was born, I have found the following description of the crowds which flocked into Tarbes on the days of the horse markets and races:

"On these days all the streets and public squares are flooded with streams of curious people come from all corners of the Pyrénées and exhibiting in their infinite variety of type and costume all the races of the southern provinces and the mountains.

"There one sees the folk of Provence, irascible, hot-headed, of vigorous proportions and lusty voice, passionately declaiming about something or other, in the midst of small groups of listeners.

"There are men of the Basque province—small, muscular and proud, agile of movement and with bodies beautifully trained; plain of speech and childlike in deed.

"There are the men of the Béarnais, mostly from towns of size and circumstance—educated men, of self-command, tempering the southern warmth which burns in their eyes by the calm intelligence born of experience in life and also by a natural languor like that of their Spanish neighbors.

"There are the old Catalonians, whose features are of savage strength under the thick brush of white hair falling about their leather-colored faces; the men of Navarre, with braided hair and other evidences of primitiveness—vigorous of build and handsome of feature, but withal a little subnormal in expression.

"Then, in the midst of all these characteristic types, moving about in a pell-mell fashion, making a constantly changing mosaic of vivid hues, there are the inhabitants of the innumerable valleys around Tarbes itself, each of them with its own peculiarities of costume, manners, speech, which make them easily distinguishable one from another."

It was a remarkable crowd for a little boy to wander in.

If Ferdinand Foch had been destined to be a painter or a writer, the impressions made upon his childish mind by that medley of strange folk might have been passed on to us long ago on brilliant canvas or on glowing page.

[Illustration: Ferdinand Foch (center) as a Schoolboy.]

[Illustration: The School in Tarbes Where Foch Prepared for the Military Academy.]

But that was not the way it served him.

I want you who are interested to comprehend Ferdinand Foch, to think of those old horsefairs and race meets of his Gascony childhood, and the crowds of strange types they brought to Tarbes, when we come to the great days of his life that began in 1914—the days when his comprehension of many types of men, his ability to "get on with" them and harmonize them with one another, meant almost as much to the world as his military genius.

Tarbes had suffered so much in civil and religious wars, for many centuries, that not many of her ancient buildings were left. The old castle, with its associations with the Black Prince and other renowned warriors, was a ramshackle prison in Ferdinand Foch's youth. The old palace of the bishops was used as the prefecture, where Ferdinand's father had his office.

There were two old churches, much restored and of no great beauty, but very dear to the people of Tarbes nevertheless.

Ferdinand and his brothers and sister were very piously reared, and at an early age learned to love the church and to seek it for exaltation and consolation.

Later on in these chapters we shall see that phase of a little French boy's training in its due relation to a maréchal of France, directing the greatest army the world has ever seen.

The college of Tarbes, where Ferdinand began his school days, was in a venerable building over whose portal there was, in Latin, an inscription recording the builder's prayer:

"May this house remain standing until the ant has drunk all the waves of the sea and the tortoise has crawled round the world."

Ferdinand was a hard student, serious beyond his years, but not conspicuous except for his earnestness and diligence.

When he was twelve years old, his fervor for Napoleon led him to read Thiers' "History of the Consulate and the Empire." And about this time his professor of mathematics remarked of him that "he has the stuff of a polytechnician."

The vacations of the Foch children were passed at the home of their paternal grandparents in Valentine, a large village about two miles from the town of St. Gaudens in the foothills of the Pyrénées. There they had the country pleasures of children of good circumstances, in a big, substantial house and a vicinity rich in tranquil beauty and outdoor opportunities. And there, as in the children's own home at Tarbes, one was ashamed not to be a very excellent child, and, so, worthy to be descended from a chevalier of the great Napoleon.

In the mid-sixties the family moved from Tarbes to Rodez—almost two hundred miles northeast of their old locality in which both parents had been born and where their ancestors had long lived.

It was quite an uprooting—due to the father's appointment as paymaster of the treasury at Rodez—and took the Foch family into an atmosphere very different from that of their old Gascon home, but one which also helped to vivify that history which was Ferdinand's passion.

There Ferdinand continued his studies, as also at Saint-Étienne, near Lyons, whither the family moved in 1867 when the father was appointed tax collector there.

And in 1869 he was sent to Metz, to the Jesuit College of Saint Clément, to which students flocked from all parts of Europe.

He had been there a year and had been given, by unanimous vote of his fellow students, the grand prize for scholarly qualities, when the Franco-Prussian war began.

Immediately Ferdinand Foch enlisted for the duration of the war.

III

A YOUNG SOLDIER OF A LOST CAUSE

There is nothing to record of Ferdinand Foch's first soldiering except that from the dépôt of the Fourth Regiment of Infantry, in his home city of Saint-Étienne, he was sent to Chalon-sur-Saône, and there was discharged in January, 1871, after the capitulation of Paris.

He did not distinguish himself in any way. He was just one of a multitude of youths who rushed to the colors when France called, and did what they could in a time of sad confusion, when a weak government had paralyzed the effectiveness of the army—of the nation!

Whatever blows Ferdinand Foch struck in 1870 were without weight in helping to avert France's catastrophe. But he was like hundreds of thousands of other young Frenchmen similarly powerless in this: In the anguish he suffered because of what he could not do to save France from humiliation were laid the foundations of all that he has contributed to the glory of new France.

At the time when his Fall term should have been beginning at Saint Clément's College, Metz was under siege by the German army, and its garrison and inhabitants were suffering horribly from hunger and disease; Paris was surrounded; the German headquarters were at Versailles; and the imperial standards so dear to young Foch because of the great Napoleon were forever lowered when the white flag was hoisted at Sedan and an Emperor with a whole army passed into captivity.

How much the young soldier-student of the Saône comprehended then of the needlessness of the shame and surrender of those inglorious days we do not know. He cannot have been sufficiently versed in military understanding to realize how much of the defeat France suffered was due to her failure to fight on, at this juncture and that, when a stiffer resistance would have turned the course of events.

But if he did not know then, he certainly knew later. And as soon as he got where he could impress his convictions upon other soldiers of the new France he began training them in his great maxim: "A battle is lost when you admit defeat."

What his devotion to Saint Clément's College was we may know from the fact of his return there to resume his interrupted studies under the same teachers, but in sadly different circumstances.

He found German troops quartered in parts of the college, and as he went to and from his classes the young man who had just laid off the uniform of a French soldier was obliged to pass and repass men of the victorious army of occupation.

The memory of his shame and suffering on those occasions has never faded. How much France and her allies owe to it we shall never be able to estimate.

For the effect on Foch was one of the first acid tests in which were revealed the quality of his mind and soul. Instead of offering himself a prey to sullen anger and resentment, or of flaring into fury when one time for fury was past and another had not yet come, he used his sorrow as a goad to study, and bent his energies to the discovery of why France had failed and why Prussia had won. His analysis of those reasons, and his application of what that analysis taught him, is what has put him where he is to-day—and us where we are!

From Metz, Foch went to Nancy to take his examination for the Polytechnic at Paris.

Just why this should have been deemed necessary I have not seen explained. But it was, like a good many other things of apparent inconsequence in this young man's life, destined to leave in him an impress which had much to do with what he was to perform.

I have seldom, if ever, studied a life in which events "link up" so marvelously and the present is so remarkably an extension of the past.

Nancy had been chosen by General Manteuffel, commander of the First German Army Corps, as headquarters, pending the withdrawal of the victors on the payment of the last sou in the billion-dollar indemnity they exacted of France along with the ceding of Alsace-Lorraine. (For three years France had to endure the insolent victors upon her soil.)

And with the fine feeling and magnanimity in which the German was then as now peculiarly gifted General Manteuffel delighted in ordering his military bands to play the "Retreat"—to taunt the sad inhabitants with this reminder of their army's shame.

Ferdinand Foch listened and thought and wrote his examinations for the school of war.

Forty-two years later—in August, 1913—a new commandant came to Nancy to take control of the Twentieth Army Corps, whose position there, guarding France's Eastern frontier, was considered one of the most important—if not the most important—to the safety of the nation.

The first order he gave was one that brought out the full band strength of six regiments quartered in the town. They were to play the "March Lorraine" and the "Sambre and Meuse." They were to fill Nancy with these stirring sounds. The clarion notes carrying these martial airs were to reach every cranny of the old town. It was a veritable tidal wave of triumphant sound that he wanted—for it had much to efface.

Nancy will never forget that night! It was Saturday, the 23d of August, 1913. And the new commandant's name was Ferdinand Foch!

Less than a year later he was fighting to save Nancy, and what lay beyond, from the Germans.

And this time there was to be a different story! Ferdinand Foch was foremost of those who assured it.

IV

PARIS AFTER THE GERMANS LEFT

Ferdinand Foch entered the Polytechnic School at Paris on the 1st of November, 1871, just after he had completed his twentieth year.

This school, founded in 1794, is for the technical education of military and naval engineers, artillery officers, civil engineers in government employ, and telegraphists—not mere operators, of course, but telegraph engineers and other specialists in electric communication. It is conducted by a general, on military principles, and its students are soldiers on their way to becoming officers.

Its buildings cover a considerable space in the heart of the great school quarter of Parts. The Sorbonne, with its traditions harking back to St. Louis (more than six centuries) and its swarming thousands of students, is hard by the Polytechnic. So is the College de France, founded by Francis I. And, indeed, whichever way one turns, there are schools, schools, schools—of fine arts and applied arts; of medicine in all its branches; of mining and engineering; of war; of theology; of languages; of commerce in its higher developments; of pedagogy; and what-not.

Nowhere else in the world is there possible to the young student, come to advance himself in his chosen field of knowledge, quite such a thrill as that which must be his when he matriculates at one of the scores of educational institutions in that quarter of Paris to which the ardent, aspiring youth of all the western world have been directing their eager feet from time immemorial.

Cloistral, scholastic atmosphere, with its grave beauty, as at Oxford and Cambridge, he will not find in the Paris Latin Quarter.

Paris does not segregate her students. Conceiving them to be studying for life, she aids them to do it in the midst of life marvelously abundant. They do not go out of the world—so to speak—to learn to live and work in the world. They go, rather, into a life of extraordinary variety and fullness, out of which—it is expected—they will discover how to choose whatever is most needful to their success and well-being.

There is no feeling of being shut in to a term of study. There is, rather, the feeling of being "turned loose" in a place of vast opportunity of which one may make as much use as he is able.

To a young man of Ferdinand Foch's naturally serious mind, deeply impressed by his country's tragedy, the Latin Quarter of Paris in those Fall days of 1871 was a sober place indeed.

Beautiful Paris, that Napoleon III had done so much to make splendid, was scarred and seared on every hand by the German bombardment and the fury of the communards, who had destroyed nearly two hundred and fifty public and other buildings. The government of France had deserted the capital and moved to Versailles—just evacuated by the Germans.

The blight of defeat lay on everything.

In May, preceding Foch's advent, the communards—led by a miserable little shoemaker who talked about shooting all the world—took possession of the buildings belonging to the Polytechnic, and were dislodged only after severe fighting by Marshal MacMahon's Versailles troops.

The cannon of the communards, set on the heights of Pére-Lachaise (the great city of the dead where the slumber of so many of earth's most illustrious imposed no respect upon the "Bolsheviki" of that cataclysm) aimed at the Pantheon, shot short and struck the Polytechnic. One shell burst in the midst of an improvised hospital there, gravely wounding a nurse.

At last, on May 24, the Polytechnic was taken from the revolutionists by assault, and many of the communards were seized.

In the days following, the great recreation court of the school was the scene of innumerable executions, as the wretched revolutionists paid the penalty of their crimes before the firing squad. And the students' billiard room was turned into a temporary morgue, filled with bodies of those who had sought to destroy Paris from within.

The number of Parisians slain in those days after the second siege of Paris has been variously estimated at from twenty thousand to thirty-six thousand. And all the while, encamped upon the heights round about Paris, were victorious German troops squatting like Semitic creditors in Russia, refusing to budge till their account was settled to the last farthing of extortion.

The most sacred spot in Paris to young Foch, in all the depression he found there, was undoubtedly the great Dôme des Invalides, where, bathed in an unearthly radiance and surrounded by faded battle flags, lies the great porphyry sarcophagus of Napoleon I.

With what bitter reflections must the young man who had been nurtured in the adoration of Bonaparte have returned from that majestic tomb to the Polytechnic School for Warriors—to which, on the day after his coronation as Emperor, Napoleon had given the following motto:

"Science and glory—all for country."

But, also, what must have been the young southerner's thought as he lifted his gaze on entering the Polytechnic and read there that self-same wish which was inscribed over the door of his first school in Tarbes:

"May this house remain standing until the ant has drunk all the waves of the sea and the tortoise has crawled round the world."

The edifice in which part of the Polytechnic was housed was the ancient College of Navarre, and a Navarrias poet of lang syne had given to the Paris school for his countrymen this quaint wish, repeated from the inscription he knew at Tarbes.

France had had twelve different governments in fourscore years when Ferdinand Foch came to study in that old building which had once been the college of Navarre. Houses of cards rather than houses of permanence seemed to characterize her.

Yet she has always had her quota—a larger one, too, than that of any other country—of those who look toward far to-morrows and seek to build substantially and beautifully for them.

That forward-looking prayer of old Navarre, and recollection of the centuries during which it had prevailed against destroying forces, was undoubtedly an aid and comfort to the heavy-hearted youth who then and there set himself to the study of that art of war wherewith he was to serve France.

Among the two hundred and odd fellow-students of Foch at the Polytechnic was another young man from the south—almost a neighbor of his and his junior by just three months—Jacques Joseph Césaire Joffre, who had entered the school in 1869, interrupted his studies to go to war, and resumed them shortly before Ferdinand Foch entered the Polytechnic.

Joffre graduated from the Polytechnic on September 21, 1872, and went thence to the School of Applied Artillery at Fontainebleau.

Foch left the Polytechnic about six months later, and also went to Fontainebleau for the same special training that Joffre was taking.

Both young men were hard students and tremendously in earnest. Both were heavy-hearted for France. Both hoped the day would come when they might serve her and help to restore to her that of which she had been despoiled.

But if any one, indulging in the fantastic extravagancies of youth, had ventured to forecast, then, even a tithe of what they have been called to do for France, he would have been set down as madder than March hares know how to be.

V

LEARNING TO BE A ROUGH RIDER

When Ferdinand Foch graduated, third in his class, from the artillery school at Fontainebleau, instead of seeking to use what influence he might have commanded to get an appointment in some garrison where the town life or social life was gay for young officers, he asked to be sent back to Tarbes.

No one, to my knowledge, has advanced an explanation for this move.

To so earnest and ambitious a student of military art (Foch will not permit us to speak of it as "military science") sentimental reasons alone would never have been allowed to control so important a choice.

That he always ardently loved the Pyrenean country, we know. But to a young officer of such indomitable purpose as his was, even then, it would have been inconceivable that he should elect to spend his first years out of school in any other place than that one where he saw the maximum opportunity for development.

"Development," mind you—not just "advancement." For Foch is, and ever has been, the kind of man who would most abhor being advanced faster than he developed.

He would infinitely rather be prepared for a promotion and fail to get it than get a promotion for which he was not thoroughly prepared.

Nor is he the sort of individual who can comfortably deceive himself about his fitness. He sustains himself by no illusions of the variety: "If I had so-and-so to do, I'd probably get through as well as nine-tenths of commanders would."

He is much more concerned to satisfy himself that his thoroughness is as complete as he could possibly have made it, than he is to "get by" and satisfy the powers that be!

So we know that it wasn't any mere longing for the scenes of his happy childhood which directed his choice of Tarbes garrison when he left the enchanting region of Fontainebleau, with its fairy forest, its delightful old town, and its many memories of Napoleon.

His mind seems to have been fixed upon a course involving more cavalry skill than was his on graduating. And after two years at Tarbes, with much riding of the fine horses of Arabian breed which are the specialty of that region, he went to the Cavalry School at Saumur, on the Loire.

King René of Anjou, whose chronic poverty does not seem to have interfered with his taste for having innumerable castles, had one at Saumur, and it still dominates the town and lends it an air of medievalism.

Toward the end of the sixteenth century Saumur was one of the chief strongholds of Protestantism in France and the seat of a Protestant university.

But the revocation of the Edict of Nantes granting tolerance to the Huguenots, brought great reverses upon Saumur, whose inhabitants were driven into exile. And thereupon (1685) the town fell into a decline which was not arrested until Louis XV, in the latter part of his reign, caused this cavalry school to be established there.

It is a large school, with about four hundred soldiers always in training as cavalry officers and army riding masters. And the riding exhibitions which used to be given there in the latter part of August were brilliant affairs, worth going many miles to see.

There Ferdinand Foch studied cavalry tactics, practiced "rough riding" and—by no means least important—learned to know another type of Frenchman, the men of old Anjou.

In our own country of magnificent distances and myriad racial strains we are apt to think of French people as a single race: "French is French."

This is very wide of the truth. French they all are, in sooth, with an intense national unity surpassed nowhere on earth if, indeed, it is anywhere equaled. But almost every one of them is intensely a provincial, too, and very "set" in the ways of his own section of country—which, usually, has been that of his forbears from time immemorial.

In the description I quoted in the second chapter, showing some of the types from the vicinity of Tarbes which frequent its horse market, one may get some idea of the extraordinary differences in the men of a single small region which is bordered by many little "pockets" wherein people go on and on, age after age, perpetuating their special traits without much admixture of other strains.

Not every part of France has so much variety in such small compass. But every province has its distinctive human qualities. And between the Norman and the Gascon, the Breton and the Provençal, the man of Picardy and the man of Languedoc, there are greater temperamental differences than one can find anywhere else on earth in an equal number of square miles—except in some of our American cities.

To the commander of General Foch's type (and as we begin to study his principles we shall, I believe, see that they apply to command in civil no less than in military life) knowledge of different men's minds and the way they work is absolutely fundamental to success.

And his preparation for this mastery was remarkably thorough.

At Saumur he learned not only to direct cavalry operations, but to know the Angevin characteristics.

In each school he attended, beginning with Metz, he had close class association with men from many provinces, men of many types. And this was valuable to him in preparing him to command under-officers in whom a rigorous uniformity of training could not obliterate bred-in-the-bone differences.

Many another young officer bent on "getting on" in the army would have felt that what he learned among his fellow officers of the provincial characteristics was enough.

But not so Ferdinand Foch.

Almost his entire comprehension of war is based upon men and the way they act under certain stress—not the way they might be expected to act, but the way they actually do act, and the way they can be led to act under certain stimulus of soul.

For Ferdinand Foch wins victories with men's souls—not just with their flesh and blood, nor even with their brains.

And to command men's souls it is necessary to understand them.

VI

FIRST YEARS IN BRITTANY

Upon leaving the cavalry school at Saumur, in 1878, Ferdinand Foch went, with the rank of captain of the Tenth Regiment of Artillery, to Rennes, the ancient capital of Brittany and the headquarters of France's tenth army corps.

He stayed at Rennes, as an artillery captain, for seven years.

It is not a particularly interesting city from some points of view, but it is a very "livable" one, and for a student like Foch it had many advantages. The library is one of the best in provincial France and has many valuable manuscripts. There is also an archaeological museum of antiquities found in that vicinity, many of them relating to prehistoric warfare. Some good scientific collections are also treasured there.

What is now known as the University of Rennes was styled merely the "college" in the days of Foch's residence there. But it did substantially the same work then as now, and among its faculty Foch undoubtedly found many who could give him able aid in his perpetual study of the past.

Rennes especially cherishes the memory of Bertrand du Guesclin, the great constable of France under King Charles V and the victorious adversary of Edward III. This brilliant warrior, who drove the English, with their claims on French sovereignty, out of France, was a native of that vicinity. And we may be sure that whatever special opportunity Rennes afforded of studying documents relating to his campaigns was fully improved by Captain Foch.

In that time, also, Foch had ample occasion to know the Bretons, who are, in some respects, the least French of all French provincials—being much more Celtic still than Gallic, although it is a matter of some fifteen hundred years since their ancestors, driven out of Britain by the Teutonic invasions, came over and settled "Little Britain," or Brittany.

The Bretons maintained their independence of France for a thousand years, and only became united with it through the marriage of their last sovereign, Duchess Anne, with Charles VIII, in 1491 and—after his death—with his successor, Louis XII.

And even to-day, after more than four centuries of political union, the people of Brittany are French in name and in spirit rather than in speech, customs, or temperament. Many of them do not speak or understand the French language. Few of them, outside of the cities, have conformed appreciably to French customs. Quaint, sturdy, picturesque folk they are—simple, for the most part, superstitious, tenacious of the old, suspicious of the new, and governable only by those who understand them.

Foch must have learned, in those seven years, not only to know the Bretons, but to like them and their rugged country very well. For he has had, these many years past, his summer home near Morlaix on the north coast of Brittany. It was from there that he was summoned into the great war on July 26, 1914.

In 1885 Captain Foch was called to Paris and entered the Superior School of War.

This institution, wherein he was destined to play in after years a part that profoundly affected the world's destiny, was founded only in 1878 as a training school for officers, connected with the military school which Louis XV established in 1751 to "educate five hundred young gentlemen in all the sciences necessary and useful to an officer."

One of the "young gentlemen" who profited by this instruction was the little Corsican whom Ferdinand Foch so ardently venerated.

The building covers an area of twenty-six acres and faces the vast Champ-de-Mars, which was laid out about 1770 for the military school's use as a field for maneuvers.