Chapter 22

I entered the place--what was left of it. Most of the walls were standing. Walls built in the twelfth century do not break easily, even with modern artillery. But the modern roof and seventeenth century inner walls were all demolished. Not a single article of furniture or decoration remained. But the destruction showed some of the same freaks--similar to that little house left untouched by fire on the summit of the hill.

For instance, the Bourbon coat of arms above the grand staircase was untouched, while the staircase itself was just splintered bits of marble. On another fragment of a wall there still hung a magnificent stag's antlers. Strewed about in the corners I saw fragments of vases that had been priceless. Even the remnants were valuable. In the ruined music room I found a piece of fresh, clean music, (an Alsatian waltz,) lying on the mantelpiece. I went out to the front of the building, where the great park sweeps down to the edge of the river. An old gardener in one of the side paths saw me. We immediately established cordial relations with a cigarette.

He told me how, after the chasseurs retreated beyond the town, the Germans--reduced over a thousand of their original number by the activities of the day--swept over the barricades of the bridge and into the town. Yes, the old woman I had talked with was right about it. They were very angry. They were ferociously angry at being held eight hours at that bridge by a force so ridiculously small.

The first civilians they met they killed, and then they began to fire the houses. One young man, half witted, came out of one of the houses near the bridge. They hanged him in the garden behind the house. Then they called his mother to see. A mob came piling into the château headed by four officers. All the furniture and valuables that were not destroyed they piled into a wagon and sent back to Lunéville. Of the gardener who was telling me the story they demanded the keys of the wine cellars. No; they did not injure him. They just held him by the arms while several dozen of the soldiers spat in his face.

While the drunken crew were reeling about the place, one of them accidentally stumbled upon the secret underground passage leading to the famous grottoes. These grottoes and the underground connection from the château were built in the fifteenth century. They are a half mile away, situated only half above ground, the entrance looking out on a smooth lawn that extends to the edge of the river. Several giant trees, the trunks of which are covered with vines, semi-shelter the entrance, which is also obscured by climbing ivy. The interior was one of the treasures of France. The vaulted ceilings were done in wonderful mosaic. The walls decorated with marbles and rare sea shells. In every nook were marble pedestals and antique statuary, while the fountain in the centre, supplied from an underground stream, was of porphyry inlaid with mosaic.

The Germans looked upon it with appreciative eyes and cultured minds. But it did not please them. They were still very angry. Its destruction was a necessity of war. It could not be destroyed by artillery because it was half underground and screened by the giant trees. But it could be destroyed by picks and axes. A squad of soldiers was detailed to the job. They did it thoroughly. The gardener took me there to see. Not a scrap of the mosaic remained. The fountain was smashed to bits. A headless Venus and a smashed and battered Adonis were lying prone upon the ground.

The visitors to the château and environs afterward joined their comrades in firing the town. Night had come. Also across the bridge waited the hundred and fifty thousand reinforcements come from Lunéville. The five hundred of the two thousand inhabitants who remained were herded to the upper end of the town near the station. That portion was not to be destroyed because the German General would make his headquarters there.

The inhabitants were to be given a treat. They were to witness the entrance of the hundred and fifty thousand--the power and might of Germany was to be exhibited to them. So while the flames leaped high from the burning city, reddening the sky for miles, while old men prayed, while women wept, while little children whimpered, the sound of martial music was heard down the street near the bridge. The infantry packed in close formation, the red light from the fire shining on their helmets, were doing the goose step up the main street to the station--the great German army had entered the city of Gerbéviller with the honors of war.

General Foch, the Man of Ypres

An Account of France's New Master of War

[From THE NEW YORK TIMES, April, 1915.]

"Find out the weak point of your enemy and deliver your blow there," said the Commander of the Twentieth French Army Corps at Nancy at a staff banquet in 1913.

"But suppose, General," said an artillery officer, "that the enemy has no weak point?"

"If the enemy has no weak point," returned the commander, with a gleam of the eye and an aggressive tilt of the chin, "make one."

The commander was Foch--Ferdinand Foch--who has suddenly flashed before the world as the greatest leader in the French Army after Joffre, and who in that remark at Nancy gave the index to the basic quality of his character as a General. General Foch is today in command of the northern armies of France, besides being the chief Lieutenant and confidant of Joffre. Joffre conceives; Foch, master tactician, executes. He finds the weak point; if there is no weak point, he creates or seeks to create one.

When King George of England was at the front in France recently he conferred the Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath--the highest military distinction in the form of an order within the gift of the British Crown--on two Frenchmen. Joffre was one. The other was Foch.

"Foch? Foch? Who is Foch?" asked the British public, perplexed, when the newspapers printed the news of the granting of this signal honor.

"Foch is the General who was at the head of the French military mission which followed our army manoeuvres three years ago," replied a few men who happened to have been intimately acquainted with those manoeuvres.

"But what has that to do with the Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath?" asked John Bull. And the manoeuvre experts not being able to reply, the English newspapers demanded from their correspondents in France an answer to the query, "Who is Foch? Why the Grand Cross?"

And the main features of the answers to that query were these:

Foch is the "greatest strategist in Europe and the humblest," in the words of Joffre.

Foch is the hero of the Marne, the man who perceived on Sept. 9 that there must be a gap between the Prussian Guard and the Saxon Army, and who gathered enough artillery to crush the guard in the St. Gond marshes and forced both the Prussians and the Saxons, now separated, to retreat.

Foch is the man of Ypres, the commander who was in general control of the successful fight made by the French and the British, aided by the Belgians, to prevent the Germans from breaking through to Calais.

Foch, in short, is one of the military geniuses of the war, so record observers at the front. He is a General who has something of the Napoleonic in his composition; the dramatic in war is for him--secrecy and suddenness, gigantic and daring movements; fiery, yet coldly calculated attacks; vast strategic conceptions carried out by swift, unfaltering tactics. Foch has a tendency to the impetuous, but he is impetuous scientifically. He has, however, taken all in all, much more of the dash and nervousness and warmth of the Southern Latin than has Joffre--cool, cautious, taciturn Joffre. Yet both men are from the south of France. They were born within a few miles of one another, within three months of one another, Foch being born on Oct. 2, 1851, and Joffre on Jan. 12, 1852.

Most writers who have dealt with Foch agree on this as one of his paramount characteristics--the Napoleonic mode of military thought. When Foch was director of the Ecole de Guerre, where he had much to do with shaping the military views of many of the men who are now commanding units of the French Armies, he was considered to be possessed of almost an obsession on the subject of Napoleon. He studied Napoleon's campaigns, and restudied them. He went back much further, however, in his choice of a master, and gave intense application to the campaigns of Caesar. Napoleon and Caesar--these were the minds from which the mind of the Marne and Ypres has learned some of its lessons of success.

Here Foch invites comparison with another of the dominant figures of the war--General French. For French is described by his biographer as "a worshipper of Napoleon," regarding him as the world's greatest strategist, and in following out and studying Napoleon's campaigns French personally covered and studied much of the ground in Belgium over which he has been fighting. French is a year younger than Foch. They are old friends, as are French and Joffre, and Joffre and Foch.

The inclination of Foch to something of the Napoleonic is shown beyond the realm of strategy and tactics. Foch is credited with knowing the French soldier, his heart, his mind, his capabilities, and the method of getting the most out of those capabilities, in a way reminiscent of the winner of Jena. And Foch knows not only the privates, but the officers. When he went to the front he visited each commander; the Colonels he called by name; the corps commanders, without exception, had attended his lectures at the Ecole de Guerre.

As for the men, Foch makes it his business to get into personal contact with them, as Napoleon used to do. Foch does not hobnob with them, there is no joking or familiarity, but he goes into the trenches and the occupied villages and looks the men over informally, inspects food or equipment, makes a useful comment or two, drops a phrase that is worth repeating, and leaves behind him enthusiasm and respect. The Paris Figaro says that he has the gift of setting souls afire, of arousing that élan in the French fighter which made that fighter perform military miracles when the "sun of Austerlitz" was high. It has been declared by a French writer that Foch knows the human element in the French Army better than any other man living.

With all his knowledge of men, his power of inspiring them, Foch is quiet, retiring, non-communicative, with no taste for meeting people in social intercourse. His life has been monotonous--work and work and work. He has the reputation of being a driver; he used to be particularly severe on shirkers in the war college, and such, no matter what their influence, had no chance of getting a diploma leading to an attractive staff position when Foch was Director. When he was in command at Nancy and elsewhere he used to work his staffs hard, and they had to share much of the monotony of work which has been chiefly Foch's life. He did not go in for society, merely making the formal calls required by the etiquette of garrison towns on the chief garrison hostesses, and giving dinners two or three times a year to his staff.

Foch, indeed, with his quiet ways and his hard work and his studying of Napoleon and Caesar, was characterized by some of the officers of the army as a pedant, a theorist, and these held that Foch had small chance of doing anything important in such a practical realm as that of real war.

Because of his Directorship of the Ecole de Guerre he was known to many officers, but as far as France at large was concerned his name was scarcely known at all last August. Yet officers knew him in other lands besides his own. His two great books, "Principles of War" and "Conduct of War," have been translated into English, German, and Italian, and are highly regarded by military men. He has been ranked by the Militär-Wochenblatt, organ of the German General Staff, as one of the few strategists of first class ability among the Allies.

Foch is a slim man, with a great deal of nervous energy in his actions, being so quick and graceful in movement, indeed, that a recent English observer declares he carries himself more like a man of 40 than one of 64. His gray blue eyes are particularly to be noticed, so keen are they. His speech is quick, precise, logical.

So little has Foch been known to the French public that it has been stated time and again that he is an Alsatian. He is not, but comes of a Basque family which has lived for many generations in the territory which is now the Department of the Hautes-Pyrénées, directly on the border of Spain. Foch was born in the town of Tarbes in that department. Joffre was born in the Department Pyrénées-Orientales, on the Spanish border to the east. Foch's father, Napoleon Foch, was a Bonapartist and Secretary of the Prefecture at Tarbes under Napoleon III. One of his two brothers, a lawyer, is also called Napoleon. The other is a Jesuit priest. Foch and these brothers attended the local college, and then turned to their professions.

In 1870 Foch served as a subaltern against the Germans, as did Joffre. After the war Foch began to win recognition as a man of brains, and at 26 he was given a commission as artillery Captain. Later he became Professor of Tactics in the Ecole de Guerre, with the title of Commandant, where he remained for five years, and then returned to regimental work. It was when Foch reached the grade of Brigadier General that he went back to the War College, this time as Director, one of the most confidential positions in the War Department. From this post he went to the command of the Thirteenth Division, thence to the command of the Eighth Corps at Bourges, and thence to the command of the Twentieth Corps at Nancy.

At the time that Foch was appointed Director of the Ecole de Guerre, Clemenceau was Premier, and upon the latter fell the task of choosing an officer for the important Directorship. There was keen competition for the position, many influential Generals desiring the appointment, and in consequence much wire-pulling went on. The story goes that Clemenceau, a man of action, became impatient of the intrigues for the post, and determined to make his own choice unhampered.

According to the story, Clemenceau, after a conference one day upon routine business with Foch, asked the latter to dine. The Ecole de Guerre was not mentioned during the meal, the men chatting upon general topics. But as the coffee was being brought on, the Premier turned suddenly to the General and said, brusquely:

"By the way, I've a good bit of news for you. You're nominated Director of the Ecole de Guerre."

"Director of the Ecole de Guerre! But I'm not a candidate for the post."

"That is possible. But you're appointed all the same, and I know you will do excellent work in the position."

Foch thanked the Premier, but he still had some doubts, and added:

"I fear you don't know all my family connections. I have a brother who is a Jesuit."

"Jesuit be d-----!" the Premier is reported to have roared in reply. "Oh, I beg your pardon, Mr. Director! You are the Director of the Ecole de Guerre. All the Jesuits in creation won't alter that--it is a fait accompli."

Among the confidential bits of work worthy of note that Foch has done for the War Department is the report he made upon the larger guns of the French field artillery, which have done such execution in the present war. For many weeks Foch went around the great Creusot gun works in the blouse of a workman, testing, watching, experimenting, analyzing.

Foch was one of the high officers in France who was not in the least surprised by the war and who had personally been holding himself in readiness for it for years. He felt, and often said, that a great war was inevitable; so much used he to dwell upon the certainty of war that some persons regarded him as an alarmist when he kept declaring that French officers should take every step within their power to get themselves and the troops ready for active service at an instant's notice. He also held that France as a nation should prepare to the utmost of her power for the assured conflict.

In a recent issue of The London Times there was a description of Foch by a Times correspondent who had been at Foch's headquarters in the north of France. The correspondent's remarks are prefaced by the statement that in a late dispatch General French mentions General Foch as one of those whose help he has "once more gratefully to acknowledge." The correspondent writes in part:

What Ernest Lavisse has clone for civilian New France in his direction of the Ecole Normale General Foch has done in a large measure for the officers of New France by his teaching of strategy and tactics at the Ecole de Guerre. He left his mark upon the whole teaching of general tactics.

I had the honor of being received recently by General Foch at his headquarters in the north of France--a house built for very different purposes many years ago, when Flemish civil architecture was in its flower. The quiet atmosphere of Flemish ease and burgomaster comfort has completely vanished. The building hums with activity, as does the whole town. A fleet of motor cars is ready for instant action. Officers and orderlies hurry constantly to and fro. There is an occasional British uniform, a naval airman's armored car, and above all the noise of this bustle, though lower in tone, the sound of guns in the distance from Ypres.

The director of all this activity is General Foch. There in the north he is putting his theories of war to the test with as much success as he did at the outbreak of hostilities in Lorraine and later in the centre during the battle of the Marne. Although born with the brain of a mathematician, General Foch's ideas upon war are by no means purely scientific. He refuses, indeed, to regard war, and more especially modern war, as an exact science. The developments of science have, indeed, but increased the mental and moral effort required of each participant, and it is only in the passions aroused in each man by the conflict of conception of life that the combatant finds the strength of will to withstand the horrors of modern warfare.

General Foch is a philosopher as well as a fighter. He is one of the rare philosophers who have proved the accuracy of their ideas in the fire of battle. A typical instance of this is given by "Miles" in a recent number of the Correspondant. During the battle of the Marne the Germans made repeated efforts to cut through the centre where General Foch commanded between Sézanne and Mailly. On three consecutive days General Foch was forced to retire. Every morning he resumed the offensive, with the result that his obstinacy won the day. He was able to profit by a false step by the enemy to take him in the flank and defeat him.

General Foch's whole life and teaching were proved true in those days. He has resolved the art of war into three fundamental ideas--preparation, the formation of a mass, and the multiplication of this mass in its use. In order to derive the full benefit of the mass created it is necessary to have freedom of action, and that is only obtained by intellectual discipline. General Foch has written:

"Discipline for a leader does not mean the execution of orders received in so far as they seem suitable, just reasonable, or even possible. It means that you have entirely grasped the ideas of the leader who has given the order and that you take every possible means of satisfying him. Discipline does not mean silence, abstention, only doing what appears to you possible without compromising yourself; it is not the practice of the art of avoiding responsibilities. On the contrary, it is action in the sense of orders received."

Fifteen years ago at the Ecole de Guerre General Foch was fond of quoting Joseph de Maistre's remark, "A battle lost is a battle which one believes to have lost, for battles are not lost materially," and of adding, "Battles are therefore lost morally, and it is therefore morally that they are won." The aphorism can be extended by this one: "A battle won is a battle in which one will not admit one's self vanquished." As "Miles" remarks, "He did as he had said."

Ernest Dimnet in The London Saturday Review has this to say in part about Foch and his two widely known books:

During his two terms of service at the Ecole de Guerre he produced two considerable works, "Principes de la Guerre" and "De la Conduite de La Guerre," which give a high idea of their author's character and talent. There is nothing in them that ought to scare away the average reader. Their style has the geometrical lucidity which is the polytechnician's birthright, but in spite of the deliberate impersonality generally attached to that style of writing, there emanates from it a curious quality which gradually shows us the author as a living person.

We have the impression of a vast mental capacity turned to the lifelong study of a fascinating subject and acquiring in it the dignity of attitude and the naturalness which mastery inevitably produces. War has been the constant meditation of this powerful brain. In "La Conduite de la Guerre" this meditation is the minute historical examination of the battles of the First Empire and 1870. "Nothing can replace the experience of war," writes the author, "except the history of war," and it is clear that he understands the word "history" as all those who go to the past for a lesson in greatness understand it.

"Les Principes de la Guerre" is more immediately technical, yet it strikes one as being less a speculation than a visualizing of what modern war was sure to be. If the reader did not feel that he lacks the background which only the contemplation a million times repeated of concrete details can create, he would be tempted to marvel at the extraordinary simplicity of these views. But a good judge who was very near the General until a wound removed him for a while from the--to him--fascinating scene tells me that this simplicity and directness--which marked the action of Foch at the battle of the Marne as they formerly marked his teaching--are the perfection to which only a few can aspire.

THE UNREMEMBERED DEAD

By ELLA A. FANNING.

"For those who die in war, and have none to pray for them."--Litany.

We lay a wreath of laurel on the sward, Where rest our loved ones in a deep repose Unvexed by dreams of any earthly care, And, checking not our tears, we breathe a prayer, Grateful for even the comfort which is ours-- That we may kneel and sob our sorrow there, And place the deathless leaf, the rarest flowers.

Though Winter's cruel fingers brown the sod, It's dearer far than all the world beside! Forms live again--we gaze in love and pride On youthful faces prest close to our own. Eyes smile to ours; we hear each tender tone, Grief's smart is softened--less the sense of loss. This grave we have, at least; we're not alone!

And they must know of our unchanging love-- Our tender thought--our memory--our prayers! And in our constancy, ah! each one shares To whom death comes on distant battlefields, When life's last breath not even the solace yields-- "There's one who'll mourn for me--whose tears will flow!"-- Not even a grave is theirs, unnamed, unwept! God rest their souls--the dead we do not know!

Canada and Britain's War Union

By Edward W. Thomson, F.R.S.L., F.R.S.C.

[From THE NEW YORK TIMES, April, 1915.]