X
A COLONEL AT FIFTY
"It was not," Napoleon wrote, "the Roman legions which conquered Gaul, but Caesar. It was not the Carthaginian soldiers who made Rome tremble, but Hannibal. It was not the Macedonian phalanx which penetrated India, but Alexander. It was not the French army which reached the Weser and the Inn, but Turenne. It was not the Prussian soldiers who defended their country for seven years against the three most formidable powers in Europe; it was Frederick the Great."
And already it has been suggested that historians will write of this war: "It was not the allied armies, struggling hopelessly for four years, that finally drove the Germans across the Rhine, but Ferdinand Foch."
But I am sure that Foch would not wish this said of him in the same sense that Napoleon said it of earlier generals.
For Foch has a greater vision of generalship than was possible to any commander of long ago.
His strategy is based upon a close study of theirs; for he says that though the forms of making war evolve, the directing principles do not change, and there is need for every officer to make a.n.a.lyses of Xenophon and Caesar and Hannibal as close as those he makes of Frederick and Napoleon.
But his conception of military leadership is permeated with the ideals of democracy and justice for which he fights.
One of his great lectures to student-officers was that in which he made them realize what, besides the route of the Prussians, happened at Valmy in September, 1792.
On his big military map of that region (it is on the western edge of the Argonne) Foch would show his students how the Prussians, Hessians and some Austrian troops; under the Duke of Brunswick, crossed the French frontier on August 19 and came swaggering toward Paris, braggartly announcing their intentions of "celebrating" in Paris in September.
Brunswick and his fellow generals were to banquet with the King of Prussia at the Tuileries. And the soldiers were bent upon the cafes of the Palais Royal.
Foch showed his cla.s.ses how Dumouriez, who had been training his raw troops of disorganized France at Valenciennes, dashed with them into the Argonne to intercept Brunswick; how this and that happened which I will not repeat here because it is merely technical; and then how the soldiers of the republic, rallied by the cry, "The country is in danger," and thrilled by "The Ma.r.s.eillaise" (written only five months before, but already it had changed the beat of nearly every heart in France), made such a stand that it not only halted Prussia and her allies, but so completely broke their conquering spirit that without firing another shot they took themselves off beyond the Rhine.
"We," Foch used to tell his students, "are the successors of the revolution and the empire, the inheritors of the art, new-born upon the field of Valmy to astonish the old Europe, to surprise in particular the Duke of Brunswick, the pupil of Frederick the Great, and to tear from Goethe, before the immensity of a fresh horizon, this profound cry: "I tell you, from this place and this day comes a new era in the history of the world!""
It is that new era which Foch typifies--that new era which his adversaries, deaf to Goethe"s cry and blind to Goethe"s vision, have not yet realized.
It was "the old Europe" against which Foch fought--the old Europe which learned nothing at Valmy and had learned nothing since; the old Europe that fought as Frederick the Great fought and that had not yet seen the dawn of that new day which our nation and the French nation greeted with glad hails much more than a century ago.
In 1792 Prussia measured her military skill and her ma.s.ses of trained men against France"s disorganization--and overlooked "The Ma.r.s.eillaise."
In 1914 she weighed her might against what she knew of the might of France--and omitted to weigh certain spiritual differences which she could not comprehend, but which she felt at the first battle of the Marne, has been feeling ever since, and before which she had to retire, beaten but still blind.
In 1918 she estimated the probable force of those "raw recruits" whom we were sending overseas--and laughed. She based her calculations on our lack of military tradition, our hastily trained officers, our "soft," ease-loving men uneducated in those ideals of blood and iron wherein she has reared her youth always. She overlooked that spiritual force which the "new era" develops and which made our men so responsive to the command of Foch at Chateau Thierry and later.
"The immensity of a fresh horizon" whereon Goethe saw the new era dawning, is still veiled from the vision of his countrymen. But across its roseate reaches unending columns of marching men pa.s.sed, under the leadership of Ferdinand Foch, to liberate the captives the blind brute has made and to strike down the strongholds of "old Europe" forever.
For nearly six years Foch taught such principles as these and others which I shall recall in connection with great events which they made possible later on.
Then came the anti-clerical wave in French politics, and on its crest a new commandant to the School of War--a man elevated by the anti-clericals and eager to keep his elevation by pleasing those who put him there.
Foch adheres devoutly to the religious practices in which he was reared, and one of his brothers belongs to the Jesuit order.
These conditions made his continuance at the school under its new head impossible. Whether he resigned because he realized this, or was superseded, I do not know. But he left his post and went as lieutenant-colonel to the Twenty-ninth artillery, at Laon.
He was there two years and undoubtedly made a thorough study of the country round Laon--which was for more than four years to be the key to the German tenure in that part of France.
Ferdinand Foch, with his brilliant knowledge and high ideals of soldiering, was now past fifty and not yet a colonel.
Strong though his spirit was, sustained by faith in G.o.d and rewarded by those "secret satisfactions" which come to the man who loves his work and is conscious of having given it his best, he must have had hours, days, when he drank deep of the cup of bitterness. There are, though, bitters that shrivel and bitters that tone and invigorate. Or perhaps they are the same and the difference is in us.
At any rate, Foch was not poisoned at the cup of disappointment.
And when the armies under his command encircled the great rock whereon Laon is perched high above the surrounding plains I hope Foch was with them--in memory of the days when he was "dumped" there, so to speak, far away from his sphere of influence at the School of War.
In 1903 he was made colonel and sent to the Thirty-fifth artillery at Vannes, in Brittany.
Only two years later he was called to Orleans as chief of staff of the Fifth army corps.
On June 20, 1907, he was made Brigadier General and pa.s.sed to the general staff of the French army at Paris. Soon afterwards, Georges Clemenceau became Minister of War, and was seeking a new head for the Staff College. Everyone whose advice he sought said: Foch. So the redoubtable old radical and anti-clerical summoned General Foch.
"I offer you command of the School of War."
"I thank you," Foch replied, "but you are doubtless unaware that one of my brothers is a Jesuit."
"I know it very well," was Clemenceau"s answer. "But you make good officers, and that is the only thing which counts."
Thus was foreshadowed, in these two great men, that spirit of "all for France" which, under the civil leadership of one and the military leadership of the other, was to save the country and the world.
In 1911 Foch, at 60, was given command of the Thirteenth division at Chaumont, just above the source of the Marne. On December 17, 1912, he was placed at the head of the Eighth Army Corps, at Bourges. And on August 23, 1913, he took command of the Twentieth corps at Nancy.
"When," says Marcel Knecht, "we in Nancy heard that Foch had been chosen to command the best troops in France, the Twentieth Army Corps, pride of our capital, everybody went wild with enthusiasm."
It is M. Knecht who tells us about the visit to General Foch at Nancy, in the spring of 1914, of three British generals whose presence there Foch utilized for two purposes: He showed them what he was doing to strengthen Nancy"s defensibility, and thereby urged upon them France"s conviction that an attack by Germany was imminent and unavoidable; and he utilized the occasion to show the Lorrainers his warm friendliness for England--which Lorraine was inclined still to blame for the death of Joan of Arc. Foch knew that German propagandists were continually fanning this resentment against England. And he made it part of his business to overcome that prejudice by showing the honor in which he held Great Britain"s eminent soldiers.
XI
FORTIFYING FRANCE WITH GREAT PRINCIPLES
So much has been said about France"s unreadiness for the war that it is easy for those who do not know what the real situation was to suppose that the French were something akin to fools. For twenty centuries the Germans had been swarming over the Rhine in preying, ravaging hordes, and France had been beating them back to save her national life. That they would swarm again, more insolent and more rapacious than ever after their triumph of 1870, was not to be doubted. Everyone in France who had the slightest knowledge of the spirit that has animated the Hohenzollern empire knew its envy of France, its cupidity of France"s wealth, its hatred of France"s attractions for all the world. Everyone who came in contact with the Germans felt the bullet-headed belligerence of their att.i.tude which they were never at any pains to conceal.
The military men of France knew that Germany had for years been preparing for aggression on a large scale. They knew that she would strike when she felt that she was readiest and her opponents of the Triple Entente were least ready.
The state of mind of the civilians--busy, prosperous, peace-loving, concerned with conversational warfare about a mult.i.tude of petty internal affairs--is difficult to describe. But I think it may not be impertinent to say of it that it was something like the state of mind of a congregation, well fed, comfortable, conscious of many pleasant virtues and few corroding sins, before whom a preacher holds up the last judgment. None of them hopes to escape it, none of them can tell at what moment he may be called to his account, none of them would wish to go in just his present state, and yet none of them does anything when he leaves church to put himself more definitely in readiness for that great decision which is to determine where he shall spend eternity.
In 1911 it seemed for a brief while that the irruption from the east was at hand. But Germany did not feel quite ready; she "d.i.c.kered"; and things went on seemingly as before.
France seemed to forget. But she was not so completely abandoned to hopefulness as was England--England, who turned her deafest ear to Lord Roberts" impa.s.sioned pleas for preparedness.
France has an inst.i.tution called the Superior War Council. It is the supreme organ of military authority and the center of national defense; it consists of eleven members supposed to be the ablest commanding generals in the nation. The president of this council is the Minister of War; the vice president is known as the generalissimo of the French army.
In 1910 General Joseph Joffre became a member of the Superior War Council, and in 1911 he became generalissimo.
It was because the Council felt the imminence of war with Germany that General Pau--to whom the vice presidency should have gone by right of his priority and also of his eminent fitness--patriotically waived the honor, because in two years he would be sixty-five and would have to retire; he felt that the defense of the country needed a younger man who could remain more years in service. So Joffre was chosen and almost immediately he began to justify the choice.
Joffre and his a.s.sociates of the council not only foresaw the war, but they quite clearly previsioned its extent and something of its character. In 1912 Joffre declared "the fighting front will extend from four hundred to five hundred miles." He talked little, but he worked prodigiously; and always his insistence was: "We must be prepared!"