Chapter 6

At six o'clock Foch was under way again--to Amiens, Doullens, St. Pol, and then, at nine, to Aubigny, where General Maud'huy had the headquarters of his army, holding the line north of Castelnau's.

The difficulties of Foch's new undertaking were not military alone, but diplomatic. He had to take account of the English and Belgian armies, each under independent command, and each small. It was the fitness of Foch for the diplomacy needed here, as well as his fitness for the great military task of barring the enemy from the Channel ports, that determined Joffre in nominating him to the place.

In 1912 General Foch had been the head of the French military commission sent to witness the British army maneuvers at Cambridge.

He speaks no English; and not many British generals at that time spoke much French. Yet he somehow managed to get on, with the aid of interpreters, so that his relations with the British officers were not only cordial, in a superficial social way, but important in their results of deepened understanding on his part and of respect on theirs.

His study of what seemed to him the military strength and weakness of France's great neighbor and ally was minute and comprehensive.

In his opinion, the soldiers of Britain were excellent; but he was fearful that their commanders lacked seasoned skill to direct them effectively. This lack he laid to that apparent inability to believe in the imminence of war, which was even more prevalent in Britain, with her centuries of inviolate security, than in France.

Two years before the long-suspended sword fell, Foch foresaw clearly what would be the difficulties in the way of England when she should gird herself for land conflict. Doubtless he had resolved in his mind plans for helping her to meet and to overcome them.

Now he was placed where he could render aid--where he _must_ render aid.

After the Battle of the Marne Sir John French wanted his army moved up north, nearer to its channel communications--that is to say, to its source of supplies. And on October 1 Joffre began to facilitate this movement. It was just well under way when Foch arrived in the north.

And on October 9 the gallant Belgian army withdrew from Antwerp and made its way to the Yser under cover of French and British troops.

Foch soon saw that an allied offensive would not be possible then; that the most they could hope to do was to hold back the invading forces.

Until October 24 he remained at Doullens, twenty miles north of Amiens. Then he removed his headquarters to the ancient town of Cassel, about eighteen miles west and a little south of Ypres.

From there he was able to reach in a few hours' time any strategic part of the north front and from this actual watch-tower (Cassel is on an isolated hill more than 500 feet high, and commands views of portions of France, Belgium, and even--on a clear day--of the chalky cliffs of England; St. Omer, Dunkirk, Ypres, and Ostend are all visible from its heights), he was to direct movements affecting the destinies of all three nations.

The Belgians, whose sublime stand had thwarted Germany's murderous plan against an unready world, were a sad little army when they reached the Yser about mid October. It was not what they had endured that contributed most to break their spirit; but what they had been unable to prevent.

To those heroic men who had left their beautiful country to the arch-fiends of destruction, their parents and wives and children to savages who befoul the name of beasts; who no longer had any possessions, nor munitions wherewith to make another stand on Belgian soil; to them Foch took fresh inspiration with his calm and tremendous personality; to them he sent his splendid Forty-second Division to swell their ranks so frightfully depleted in Honor's cause; to them he gave the suggestion of opening their sluices and drowning out of their last little corner of Belgium the enemy they could not otherwise dislodge.

This done, the next problem of Foch was to establish relations with Sir John French whereby the most cordial and complete cooperation might be insured between the British Field Marshal and the French commander of the armies in the north.

There are several graphic accounts of interviews which took place between these generals.

It was on October 28 that Foch saw the success of the opened sluices and the consequent salvation to the heroic Belgians of a corner of their own earth whereon to maintain their sovereignty.

On the 30th the English suffered severe reverses in spite of the aid lent them by eight battalions of French soldiers and artillery reinforcements. In consequence, they had had to cede considerable ground, their line was pierced, and the flank of General Dubois' army, adjoining theirs, was menaced.

When word of this disaster reached Foch that night he at once set out from Cassel for French's headquarters at Saint Omer.

It was 1 A.M. when he arrived. Marshal French was asleep. He was waked to receive his visitor.

"Marshal," said Foch, "your line is cracked?"

"Yes."

"Have you any resources?"

"I have none."

"Then I give you mine; the gap must be stopped at once; if we allow our lines to be pierced at a single point we are lost, because of the masses our enemy has to pour through it. I have eight battalions of the Thirty-second Division that General Joffre has sent me. Take them and go forward!"

The offer was most gratefully received. At two o'clock the orders were given; the gap was stopped.

Nevertheless, the British despaired of their ability to hold. Marshal French had no reserves, and decided to fall back.

A liaison officer hastened to notify General Dubois that the British were about to retire, and General Dubois betook himself in all speed to Vlamertinghe, the Belgian headquarters, to notify their commanding general. Foch happened to be with the Belgian general. And while these three were conferring, the liaison officer (Jamet) saw the automobile of Marshal French pass by.

Realizing the importance of the British commander's presence at that interview, Jamet ventured to stop him and suggest his attendance.

Foch implored French to prevent retreat. French declared there was nothing else for him to do--his men were exhausted, he had no reserves. Foch pointed out to him the incalculable consequences of yielding.

"It is necessary to hold in spite of everything!" he cried; "to hold until death. What you propose would mean a catastrophe. Hold on! I'll help you."

And as he talked he wrote his suggestions on a piece of paper he found on the table before him, and passed it to the British commander.

Marshal French read what was written, at once added to it, "execute the order of General Foch," signed it, and gave it to one of his staff officers.

And the Channel ports were saved.

But a greater thing even than that was foreshadowed: Foch had begun to demonstrate what was in him before which not only the men of his command must bow but the generals of other nations also.

One of the staff officers of General Foch who was closely associated with him there in the north in that time of great anxiety, has given us a pen-picture of the chief as his aides often saw him then. Doubtless it is a good picture also, except for differences in trifling details, of the great commander as he has been on many and many a night since, while the destinies of millions hung in the balance of his decisions.

"All is silence. The little town of Cassel is early asleep. On the rough pavement of the Grande Place, occasional footsteps break the stillness. Now they are those of a staff officer on his way to his billet. Now it is the sentry moving about to warm himself up a bit. Then silence again.

"In a little office of the Hotel de Ville, a man is seated at a table. His elbows are on a big military map. A telephone is at his hand. He waits--to hear the results of orders he has given. And while he waits he chews an unlighted cigar and divides his attention between the map and the clock--an old Louis XVI timepiece with marble columns, which ticks off the minutes almost soundlessly. How slowly its hands go round! How interminable seems the wait for news!

"Someone knocks, and Colonel Weygand, chief of staff, enters; he has a paper in his hand: 'Telephoned from the Ninth army at 1.15 A.M.' . . .

"The general has raised his head; his eyes are shining.

"'Good! good!'

"His plans are working out successfully; the reinforcements he sent for have arrived in time. There is nothing more he can do now; so he will go to bed.

"A last look at the map. Then his eye-glasses, at the end of their string, are tucked away in the upper pocket of his coat. The general puts on his black topcoat and his cap.

"In the hall, the gendarme on guard duty gets up, quickly, from the chair wherein he is dozing.

"The general salutes him with a brisk gesture, but with it he seems to say: 'Sleep on, my good fellow; I'm sorry to have disturbed you.'

"At the foot of the grand staircase, the sentry presents arms; and one of the staff officers joins the commander, to accompany him to the house of the notary who is extending him hospitality.

"A few hours later, very early in the morning, the general is back again at his office."

Thus he was at Cassel, as he directed those operations on the Yser by which he checked the German attempt to reach Calais and Dunkirk, and revealed to the military world a new strategist of the first order.

By November 15 (six weeks after arriving in the north) Foch had the high command of the German army as completely thwarted in its design as it had been at the Marne. It had fallen to Foch to defeat the German plan on the east (Lorraine), in the center (Marne) and on the west (Ypres). And the consequences of this frustration that he dealt them in Flanders were calculated to be "at least equal to the victory of the Marne." Colonel Réquin calls that Battle of the Yser "like a preface to the great victory of 1918."

In the spring of 1915 Foch left Cassel and took up headquarters at Frévent, between Amiens and Doullens, whence he directed those engagements in Artois which demonstrated that though trench warfare was not the warfare he had studied and prepared for, and nearly all its problems were new, he was master of it not less than he would have been of a cavalry warfare.

In the autumn of 1915, Foch moved nearer to Amiens--to the village of Dury in the immediate outskirts of the ancient capital of Picardy. For the next chapter in his history was to be the campaign of the Somme including the first great offensive of France in the war, which, together with the Verdun defense, forced the Germans not only again to re-make their calculations, but to withdraw to the Hindenburg line.

On September 30, 1916 (just before his sixty-fifth birthday, on which his retirement from active service was due), he was "retained without age limit" in the first section of the general staff of the French army.

Honors were beginning to crowd upon him as the debt of France and of her allies to his genius began to be realized. Responsibility vested in him became heavier and heavier as he demonstrated his ability to bear it. But always, say those who were nearest him, "a great, religious serenity pervaded and illumined his soul."

This is a serenity not of physical calm. Foch is intensely nervous, almost ceaselessly active. His body is frail, racked with suffering, worn down by the enormous strains imposed upon it. But the self-mastery _within_ is always apparent; and it inspires confidence, and renewed effort, in all who come in contact with him.

XVI

THE SUPREME COMMANDER OF THE ALLIED ARMIES

After his position in the first section of the General Staff had been made independent of age limits, General Foch was relieved (for the autumn and winter at least, during which time no operations of importance were expected) of active command of a group of armies; and at once began the organization of a bureau devoted to the study of great military questions affecting not the French lines alone but those of France's allies.

At first the headquarters of this bureau were at Senlis, near Paris. Then they were moved close to France's eastern border where Foch and his associates studied ways and means of meeting a possible attack through Switzerland--if Germany resolved to add that crime to her category--or across northern Italy.

So clearly had Foch foreseen what would happen in the Venetian plain, that he had his plan of French reinforcement perfected long in advance, even to the schedule for dispatching troop trains to the Piave front.

In January, 1917, Marshal Joffre reached the age of retirement (65). He was venerated and loved throughout France as few men have ever been. Gratitude for his great gifts and great character filled every heart to overflowing. His country had no honor great enough to express its sense of his service to France. Yet it was felt that for the operations of the future, the interests of France and of her allies would be best furthered with another strategist in command of the armies in the field. Joffre's retirement was therefore effected.

Joffre is an engineer, a master-builder of fortifications, a great defense soldier. But defense would not end the war. France must look to her greatest offensive strategist.

There could be no question who that strategist was. No one knew it quite so well as Marshal Joffre. And one of the most splendid things about that mighty and noble man is the spirit in which he concurred in (if, indeed, he did not suggest) the change which meant that another should lead the armies of France to victory.

The appointment of General Foch as head of the General Staff was made on May 15, 1917, while Marshal Joffre was in the United States to confer with our officials regarding our part in the war. On the same date General Philippe Pétain, the heroic defender of Verdun, who had been Chief of Staff for a month, was appointed Commander-in-Chief of all French armies operating on the French front.

General Foch installed himself at the Invalides, and addressed himself to the study of all the allies' fronts, the assembling American army, and to another task for which he was signally fitted: that of coordinating the plans and purposes of the Generalissimo and the government.

Wherever General Foch goes, one finds him creating harmony and, through harmony, doubling everyone's strength.

He "gets on" with everybody, but not in the way that sort of thing is too generally done--not by methods which have come to be called diplomatic and which involve a great deal of surface affability, of wordy beating about the bush and concealing one's real purposes from persons who see his hand and wonder if they are bluffing him about theirs.

Foch has no stomach for this sort of thing. His whole bent is toward discovering the right thing to do and then making it so plain to others that it is the right thing that they adopt it gladly and cooperate in it with ardor.

In council he is still the great teacher striving always not merely to make his principles remembered, but to have them shared.

The eminent French painter, Lucien Jonas, who has served in Artois, at Verdun, on the Somme and in Italy, and has been appointed painter of the Army Museum at Des Invalides, was commissioned to make a picture of General Foch holding an allies' council of war at Versailles.

It was, of course, impossible for Jonas to be actually present at a council meeting. But it was arranged that he should sit outside a glass door through which he could see all, but hear nothing.

"General Foch," he tells us, "held his auditors in a sort of fascination. One felt that in his explanations there was not a flaw, not a hesitancy. All seemed clear, plain, irresistible."

This power was his in great degree in the years before the war. But now men who listen to him know that his perceptions are not merely logical--they are workable. His performances prove the worth of his theories.

On March 21, 1918, Ludendorff launched his great offensive against the British army. The line bent; it cracked. Amiens seemed doomed; the British in France were threatened with severance from their allies--with envelopment!

After four days of onrushing disaster a conference was called to meet at Doullens--a conference of representatives of the allied governments. Something must be done to coordinate the various "fronts," to put them under a supreme command.

Foch was hastily empowered to order whatever he deemed advisable to prevent the separation of the English and French armies. It is apparent that the wide powers thus hurriedly given to him were bestowed with the approval of every member of the conference. In October, 1918, however, in responding to a note of greeting from Lloyd-George on the occasion of his sixty-seventh birthday, Foch recognized the weight of the British Prime Minister's influence at the conference:

"I am greatly touched," he replied, "by your congratulations and thank you sincerely.

"I do not forget that it was to your insistence that I owe the position which I occupy to-day."

Foch's new responsibilities were laid upon him on March 26. By evening of the 28th he had the situation so well in hand that he was able to hold in check the German onslaught without even employing all the troops he had brought up for that purpose. He had averted what threatened to be the worst disaster of the war, and he had reserves in readiness against a new and augmented attack. This in two days!

On the 30th an official announcement told all the world that the destinies of the allied armies were by common consent confided to the general direction of Ferdinand Foch.

On that same day there was made public, by the French war authorities, something which had taken place and had contributed in a degree we are not yet able to state, to the investment of Foch with supreme power. This was a visit made by General Pershing to Foch. In the presence of Foch, Pétain, Clemenceau and Loucheur (Minister of Munitions) Pershing made the following declaration:

"I come to tell you that the American people would hold it a great honor if our troops were engaged in the present battle. I ask you this in my name and in theirs. At this moment there is nothing to be thought of but combat. Infantry, artillery, aviation--all that we have is yours. Use them as you will. There are more to come--as many more as shall be needed. I am here solely to say to you that the American people will be proud to be engaged in the greatest and most glorious battle in history."

On April 5, a week after his appointment to the supreme command was announced, Foch granted an interview to a group of war correspondents. Their various accounts differ very slightly. Instead of quoting any one I will make a digest of them.

They found the general installed in a provincial mansion, place not named. The room he occupied was nearly bare; an old table, an armchair, a telephone, a huge war map, no profusion of papers, no "air of importance."

Foch was writing in a notebook. He rose, when he had finished his entry among those epoch-making memoranda, and received his visitors. He had but a few minutes to give, yet he realized the importance of the occasion and treated it accordingly. These men were to send to millions of people in the great democracies of France, Britain and America their pen pictures of the man just invested with the greatest military responsibility any man in the world's history has ever borne. Battles must be fought, but also those people had a right to such a sense of participation as only their press could give them; it was their issue; their attitude toward it was the foundation of their nation's morale. Foch has neither time nor taste for talk about himself, but he is no war autocrat; he is, as he constantly reiterates, a son of France, defending human liberties. He might not have much time to give journalists, but it is not in him to minimize their place in a world where the will of the majority prevails and the press does much to shape that will.

His manner on that occasion was calm, unhurried, but very direct, to the point.

"Well, gentlemen," said he, "our affairs are not going badly; are they? The boche has been halted since March 27. He has, doubtless, encountered some obstacle. We have stopped him. Now we shall endeavor to do better. I do not see that there is anything more to say.

"But as to yourselves, keep at your task. It is a time when everyone ought to work steadfastly. Work with your pens. We will go on working with our arms."

"I regret," wrote Lieutenant d'Entraygues in the Paris _Temps_, "only one thing: that all the people of France were not able to see and hear this soldier as he spoke to us. They would know why it is not possible to doubt our victory."

It was probably about that time that Major Darnley Stuart-Stephens wrote of Foch, for the _English Review_.

"The man who has been consecrated by destiny to the saving from Moloch of this globe's civilization, is he who will prove once more that in the conflict between the finely tempered sword and the finely tempered brain, it is the mental asset that will prevail."

Major Stuart-Stephens had studied the "mental assets" of Ferdinand Foch.

"Now and again at his lectures." he wrote, "I have noticed that far-away look of the mystic in his eyes that I remember so well in those of that other soldier-saint, Charles Gordon."

It was that spiritual greatness in Foch which everyone felt, on which everyone brought into contact with him based his unfaltering faith in the outcome.

"We do not know," says an editorial writer in the New York _Evening Sun_, "what the judgments of the military critics will be when they have carefully studied and sifted the evidence, but to a layman it looks as if Foch was not merely a very great general but one of the greatest generals of all recorded history . . . as great a general as Napoleon or Caesar or Hannibal or Alexander."

But whether they put him, as a military man, on a par with Napoleon, or come sapiently to the conclusion that he was no more than a very able general fortunate in being in command at the time the Germanic morale was breaking, it will never be possible to disprove that he was a supreme leader of men in a great war of ideals--an incarnation of all those qualities of faith and fervor, of self-mastery and dependence on the Divine, of self-realization and with it devotion to the rights and progress of others, which are embodied in the Christian democracy for whose preservation millions have gladly died.

XVII

BRINGING GERMANY TO ITS KNEES

Faith in the ability of Foch to lead us all to victory was, however, not to endure without its grave tests.

The German drive of March 21 was checked by his co-ordination of Allied forces. But checking the enemy just before he reached the key of the Channel ports was not defeating him; preventing him from driving a wedge between the British and French armies was only diverting him to another point of attack. He was desperate--that enemy! He knew that he must win a decisive victory soon, or see his own maladies destroy him.

He knew the genius of Foch; he knew the immense increase in strength that the Allies had achieved in unifying their command. He may have underestimated the worth in battle of our American fighters; but it is scarcely probable that he underestimated the worth, behind the lines, of our army of railroad builders, harbor constructors, supply handlers, and the like. He knew that whether we could fight or not, we had money and men and were pouring both into France to help win the war.