Chapter 3

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.

This field is eleven hundred yards long and just half that wide. It occupies all the ground between the school buildings and the river.

Across the river is the height called the Trocadéro, on which Napoleon hoped to build a great palace for the little King of Rome; but whereon, many years after he and his son had ceased to need mansions made by hands, the French republic built a magnificent palace for the French people. This vast building, with its majestic gardens, was the principal feature of the French national exhibition of 1878, which, like its predecessor of 1867 and its successors of 1889 and 1900, was held on the Champ-de-Mars.

Facing the Trocadéro Palace, on the Champ-de-Mars, is the Eiffel Tower (nearly a thousand feet high) which was erected for the exposition of 1889, and has served, since, then-unimaginable purposes during the stress and strain of war as a wireless station. The "Ferris" wheel put up for the exposition of 1900 is close by. And a stone's throw from the military school are the Hôtel des Invalides, Napoleon's tomb, and the magnificent Esplanade des Invalides down which one looks straightway to the glinting Seine and over the superb Alexander III bridge toward the tree-embowered palaces of arts on the Champs-Élysées.

On the other side of the Hôtel des Invalides from that occupied by the military school and Champ-de-Mars is the principal diplomatic and departmental district of Paris, with many embassies (not ours, however, nor the British--which are across the river) and many administrative offices of the French nation.

Soldiers and government officials and foreign diplomats dominate the quarter--and homes of the old French aristocracy.

The Hotel des Invalides, founded by Louis XIV and designed to accommodate, as an old soldiers' home, some seven thousand veterans of his unending wars, has latterly served as headquarters for the military governor of Paris, and also--principally--as a war museum.

Here are housed collections of priceless worth and transcendent interest. The museum of artillery contains ten thousand specimens of weapons and armor of all kinds, ancient and modern. The historical museum, across the court of honor, was--in the years when I spent many fascinating hours there--extraordinarily rich in personal souvenirs of scores of illustrious personages.

What it must be now, after the tragic years of a world war, and what it will become as a treasure house for the years to come, is beyond my imagination.

It was into this enormously rich atmosphere, pregnant with everything that conserves France's most glorious military traditions, that Captain Ferdinand Foch was called in 1885 for two years of intensive training and study.

VII

JOFFRE AND FOCH

After quitting the School of War in 1887 (he graduated fourth in his class, as he had at Saumur; he was third at Fontainebleau), Ferdinand Foch was sent to Montpellier as a probationer for the position of staff officer.

He remained at Montpellier for four years--first as a probationer and later as a staff officer in the Sixteenth Army Corps, whose headquarters are there.

It is a coincidence--without special significance, but interesting--that Captain Joseph Joffre had spent several years at the School of Engineering in Montpellier; he left there in 1884, after the death of his young wife, to bury himself and his grief in Indo-China; so the two men did not meet in the southern city.[1]

Joffre returned from Indo-China in 1888, while Foch was at Montpellier, and after some time in the military railway service, and a promotion in rank (he was captain for thirteen years), received an appointment as professor of fortifications at Fontainebleau.

Some persons who claim to have known Joffre at Montpellier have manifested surprise at the greatness to which he attained thirty years later; he did not impress them as a man of destiny. That is quite as likely to be their fault as his. And also it is possible that Captain Joseph Joffre had not then begun to develop in himself those qualities which made him ready for greatness when the opportunity came.

If, however, any one has ever expressed surprise at Ferdinand Foch's attainment, I have not heard of it. He seems always to have impressed people with whom he came in contact as a man of tremendous energy, application, and thoroughness.

The opportunities for study at Montpellier are excellent, and the region is one of extraordinary richness for the lover of history. The splendor of the cities of Transalpine Gaul in this vicinity is attested by remains more numerous and in better preservation than Italy affords save in a very few places. And awe-inspiring evidences of medievalism's power flank one at every step and turn. Without doubt, Foch made the most of them.

Needless to remark, the commander-in-chief of the allied armies has not confided to me what were his favorite excursions during these four years at Montpellier. But I am quite sure that Aigues-Mortes was one of them. And I like to think of him, as we know he looked then, pacing those battlements and pondering the warfare of those militant ages when this vast fortress in the wide salt marshes was one of the most formidable in the world. What fullness of detail there must have been in the mental pictures he was able to conjure of St. Louis embarking here on his two crusades? What particularity in his appreciation of those defenses!

The place is, to-day, the very epitome of desolation--much more so than if the fortifications were not so perfectly preserved. For they look as if yesterday they might have been bristling with men-at-arms--whereas not in centuries has their melancholy majesty served any other purpose than that of raising reflections in those to whom the past speaks through her monuments.

From Montpellier, Ferdinand Foch returned to Paris, in February, 1891, as major on the general army staff.

He and Joffre had now the same rank. Joffre became lieutenant colonel in 1894 and colonel in 1897; similar promotions came to Foch in 1896 and 1903. He was six years later than Joffre in attaining a colonelcy, and exactly that much later in becoming a general.

Neither man had a quick rise but Foch's was (as measurable in grades and pay) specially slow.

About the time that Major Joffre went to the Soudan, to superintend the building of a railway in the Sahara desert, Major Foch went to Vincennes as commander of the mounted group of the Thirteenth Artillery.

Vincennes is on the southeastern skirts of Paris, close by the confluence of the Seine and the Marne; about four miles or so from the Bastille, which was the city's southeastern gate for three hundred years or thereabouts, until the fortified inclosure on that side of the city was enlarged under Louis XIV.

The fort of Vincennes was founded in the twelfth century to guard the approach to Paris from the Marne valley. And on account of its pleasant situation--close to good hunting and also to their capital--the castle of Vincennes was a favorite residence of many early French kings.

It was there that St. Louis is said to have held his famous open-air court of justice, which he established so that his subjects might come direct to him with their troubles and he, besides settling them, might learn at first hand what reforms were needed.

Five Kings of France died there (among them Charles VI, the mad king, and Charles IX, haunted by the horrors of the massacre on St. Bartholomew's eve), and one King of England, Harry Hotspur. King Charles V was born there.

From the days of Louis XI the castle has been used as a state prison. Henry of Navarre was once a prisoner there, and so was the Grand Condé, and Diderot, and Mirabeau, and it was there that the young Duc d'Enghien was shot by Napoleon's orders and to Napoleon's everlasting regret.

The castle is now (and has been for many years) an arsenal and school of musketry, artillery, and other military services. Before its firing squad perish many traitors to France, whose last glimpse of the country they have betrayed is in the courtyard of this ancient castle.

The vicinity is very lovely. The Bois de Vincennes, on the edge of which the castle stands, is scarcely inferior to the Bois de Boulogne in charm. We used to go out there, not infrequently, for luncheon, which we ate in a rustic summerhouse close to the edge of the lake, with many sociable ducks and swans bearing us company and clamoring for bits of bread.

It would be hard to imagine anything more idyllic, more sylvan, on the edge of a great city--anything more peaceful, restful, anywhere.

Yet the whole locality was, even then, a veritable camp of Mars--forts, barracks, fields for maneuvers and for artillery practice, infantry butts, rifle ranges, school of explosives; and what not.

France knew her need of protection--and none of us can ever be sufficiently grateful that she did!

But she did not obtrude her defensive measures. She seldom made one conscious of her military affairs.

In Germany, for many years before this war, remembrance of the army and reverence to the army was exacted of everyone almost at every breath. Forever and forever and forever you were being made to bow down before the God of War.

In France, on the contrary, it was difficult to think about war--even in the very midst of a place like Vincennes--unless you were actually engaged in organizing and preparing the country's defenses.

After three years at Vincennes, Ferdinand Foch was recalled to the army staff in Paris. And on the 31st of October, 1895, he was made associate professor of military history, strategy, and applied tactics, at the Superior School of War.

He had then just entered upon his forty-fifth year; and the thoroughness of his training was beginning to make itself felt at military headquarters.

[1] I have found it interesting to compare the careers of Joffre and Foch from the time they were at school together, and I daresay that others will like to know what steps forward he was taking who is not the subject of these chapters but inseparably bound up with him in many events and forever linked with him in glory.

VIII

THE SUPERIOR SCHOOL OF WAR

After a year's service as associate professor of military history, strategy, and applied tactics at the Superior School of War in Paris, Ferdinand Foch was advanced to head professorship in those branches and at the same time he was made lieutenant-colonel. This was in 1896. He was forty-five years old and had been for exactly a quarter of a century a student of the art of warfare.

His old schoolfellow, Joseph Joffre, was then building fortifications in northern Madagascar; and his army rank was the same as that of Foch.

It was just twenty years after Foch entered upon his full-fledged professorship at the Superior School of War that Marshal Joffre, speaking at a dinner assembling the principal leaders of the government and of the army, declared that without the Superior School of War the victory of the Marne would have been impossible.

All the world knows this now, almost as well as Marshal Joffre knew it then. And all the world knows now as not even Marshal Joffre could have known then, how enormous far, far beyond the check of barbarism at the first battle of the Marne--is our debt and that of all posterity to the Superior School of War and, chiefly, to Ferdinand Foch.

It cannot have been prescience that called him there. It was just Providence, nothing less!

For that was a time when men like Ferdinand Foch (whose whole heart was in the army, making it such that nothing like the downfall of 1870 could ever again happen to France), were laboring under extreme difficulties. The army was unpopular in France.

This was due, partly to the disclosures of the Dreyfus case; partly to a wave of internationalism and pacifism; partly to jealousy of the army among civil officials.

An unwarranted sense of security was also to blame. France had worked so hard to recoup her fortunes after the disaster of 1870 that her people--delighted with their ability as money makers, blinded by the glitter of great prosperity--grudged the expanse of keeping up a large army, grudged the time that compulsory military training took out of a young man's life. And this preoccupation with success and the arts and pleasures of prosperous peace made them incline their ears to the apostles of "Brotherhood" and "Federation" and "Arbitration instead of Armament."

Little by little legislation went against the army. The period of compulsory service was reduced from three years to two; that cut down the size of the army by one-third. The supreme command of the army was vested not in a general, but in a politician--the Minister of War. The generals in the highest commands not only had to yield precedence to the prefects of the provinces (like our governors of states), but were subject to removal if the prefects did not like their politics and the Minister of War wished the support of the prefects.

Even the superior war council of the nation might be politically made up, to pay the War Minister's scores rather than to protect the country.

All this can happen to a people lulled by a false sense of security--even to a people which has had to defend itself against the savage rapacity of its neighbors across the Rhine for two thousand years!

It was against these currents of popular opinion and of government opposition that Ferdinand Foch took up his work in the Superior School of War--that work which was to make possible the first victory of the Marne, to save England from invasion by holding Calais, and to do various other things vital to civilization, including the prodigious achievements of the days that have since followed.

Foch foresaw that these things would have to be done and, with absolute consecration to his task, he set himself not only to train officers for France when she should need them, but to inspire them with a unity of action which has saved the world.

I have various word-pictures of him as he then appeared to, and impressed, his students.

One is by a military writer who uses the pseudonym of "Miles."

"The officers who succeeded one another at the school of war between 1896 and 1901," he says, referring to the first term of Foch as instructor there, "will never forget the impressions made upon them by their professor of strategy and of general tactics. It was this course that was looked forward to with the keenest curiosity as the foundational instruction given by the school. It enjoyed the prestige given it by the eminent authorities who had held it; and the eighty officers who came to the school at each promotion, intensely desirous of developing their skill and judgment, were always impatient to see and hear the man who was to instruct them in these branches.

"Lieutenant-Colonel Foch did not disappoint their expectations. Thin, elegant, of distinguished bearing, he at once struck the beholder with his expression--full of energy, of calm, of rectitude.

"His forehead was high, his nose straight and prominent, his gray-blue eyes looked one full in the face. He spoke without gestures, with an air of authority and conviction; his voice serious, harsh, a little monotonous; amplifying his phrases to press home in every possible way a rigorous reasoning; provoking discussion; always appealing to the logic of his hearers; sometimes difficult to follow, because his discourse was so rich in ideas; but always holding attention by the penetration of his surveys as well as by his tone of sincerity.

"The most profound and the most original of the professors at the school of war, which at that time counted in its teaching corps many very distinguished minds and brilliant lecturers: such Lieutenant-Colonel Foch seemed to his students, all eager from the first to give themselves up to the enjoyment of his lessons and the acceptance of his inspiration."

Colonel E. Réquin of the French general staff, who has fought under Foch in some of the latter's greatest engagements, says:

"Foch has been for forty years the incarnation of the French military spirit." For forty years! That means ever since he left the cavalry school at Saumur and went, as captain of the Tenth regiment of artillery, to Rennes. "Through his teachings and his example," Colonel Réquin goes on to say, in a 1918 number of the _World's Work_, "he was the moral director of the French general staff before becoming the supreme chief of the allied armies. Upon each one of us he has imprinted his strong mark. We owe to him in time of peace that unity of doctrine which was our strength. Since the war we owe to him the highest lessons of intellectual discipline and moral energy.

"As a professor he applied the method which consists in taking as the base of all strategical and tactical instruction the study of history completed by the study of military history--that is to say, field operations, orders given, actions, results, and criticisms to be made and the instructions to be drawn from them. He also used concrete cases--that is to say, problems laid by the director on the map or on the actual ground.

"By this intellectual training he accustomed the officers to solving all problems, not by giving them ready-made solutions, but by making them find the logical solution to each individual case.

"His mind was trained through so many years of study that no war situation could disturb him. In the most difficult ones, he quickly pointed out the goal to be reached and the means to employ, and each one of us felt that it must be right."

But best of all the things said about Foch in that period of his life, I like this, by Charles Dawbarn, in the _Fortnightly Review_:

"Such was"--in spite of many disappointments--"_his fine confidence in life, that he communicated to others not his grievances, but his secret satisfactions_."

IX

THE GREAT TEACHER

Foch made the men who sat under him love their work for the work's sake and not for its rewards. He fired them with an ardor for military art which made them feel that in all the world there is nothing so fascinating, so worth while, as knowing how to defend one's country when she needs defense.

He was able, in peace times when the military spirit was little applauded and much decried, to give his students an enthusiasm for "preparedness" which flamed as high and burned as pure as that which ordinarily is lighted only by a great national rush to arms to save the country from ravage.

It was tremendously, incalculably important for France and for all of us that Ferdinand Foch was eager and able to impart this enthusiasm for military skill.

But also it is immensely important, to-day, when the war is won, and in all days and all walks of life, that there be those who can kindle and keep alight the enthusiasm of their fellows; who can overlook the failure of their own ardor and faithfulness to win its fair reward, and convey to others only the alluring glow of their "secret satisfactions."

In the five years, 1895-1901 (his work at the school was interrupted by politics in 1901), "many hundreds of officers," as René Puaux says, "the very elite of the general staffs of our army, followed his teaching and were imbued with it; and as they practically all, at the beginning of the war, occupied high positions of command, one may estimate as he can the profound and far reaching influence of this one grand spirit."

Let us try to get some idea of the sort of thing that Foch taught those hundreds of French army officers, not only about war but about life.

From all his study, he repeatedly declared, one dominant conviction has evolved: Force that is not dominated by spirit is vain force.

Victory, in his belief, goes to those who merit it by the greatest strength of will and intelligence.

It was his endeavor, always, to develop in the hundreds of officers who were his students, that dual strength in which it seemed to him that victory could only lie: moral and intellectual ability to perceive what ought to be done, and intellectual and moral ability to do it.

In his mind, it is impossible to be intelligent with the brain alone. The Germans do not comprehend this, and therein, to Ferdinand Foch, lies the key to all their failures.

He believes that each of us must think with our soul's aid--that is to say, with our imagination, our emotions, our aspiration--and employ our intelligence to direct our feeling.

And he asks this combination not from higher officers alone, but from all their men down to the humblest in the ranks.

He believes in the invincibility of men fighting for a principle dearer to them than life--but he knows that ardor without leadership means a lost cause; that men must know how to fight for their ideals, their principles; but that their officers are charged with the sacred responsibility of making the men's ardor and valor count.

At the beginning of his celebrated course of lectures on tactics he always admonished his students thus:

"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!

To him, the leadership of units is not a simple question of organization, of careful plans, of strategic and tactical intelligence, but a problem involving enormous adaptability.