Foch the Man Part 11

"They had marched under a torrid sky," says Louis Madelin, "on scorching roads, parched and suffocated with dust. In reality they moved with their hearts rather than with their legs. According to Pierre La.s.serre's happy expression, 'Our bodies had beaten a retreat, but not our hearts,' . . . But when, worn out with fatigue, faces black with powder, blinded by the chalk of Champagne, almost dying, they learned Joffre's order announcing the offensive, then the faces of our troops from Paris to Verdun beamed with joy. They fought with tired limbs, and yet no army ever showed such strength, for their hearts were filled with faith and hope."

At daybreak on Sunday, the 6th, Foch pitched his headquarters in a modern chateau near the little village of Pleurs, which you probably will not find on any map except a military one, but it is some six miles southeast of Sezanne. And the front a.s.signed to Foch ran from Sezanne to the Camp de Mailly, twenty-five miles east by a little south. The Marne was twenty-five miles to north of him. Between him and its south bank were many towns and villages; the clay pocket (ten miles long) called the Marshes of St. Gond, but far from marshy in that parching heat; and north of that the forest of Epernay. His vanguards were north of the marshes. But as that Sunday wore on, the Prussian Guards drove Foch's Angevins and Vendeans of the Ninth Corps back and occupied the marshes. The Bretons on the east of Foch's line were obliged to dislodge, and the Moroccans and Forty-second Division had to yield on Foch's left.

Thus, at nightfall of the first day's fighting, Foch's new army had given ground practically everywhere.

The next day the German attack became fiercer, and it seemed that more ground must be yielded.

That was the day when Foch made his memorable deduction: "They are trying to throw us back with such fury I am sure that means things are going badly for them elsewhere and they are seeking compensation."

He was right! Von Kluck was retiring in a northeasterly direction under Manoury's blows; and even Von Buelow (whom Foch faced) was withdrawing parts of his troops from the line at Foch's left.

But the attempt to break through the center Foch held, waxed fiercer as the Germans realized the strength opposing them on their right.

And on Tuesday, the 8th, Foch was unable to hold--save at certain points--and had to move his headquarters eleven miles south, to Plancy.

He had now reached the Aube, beyond which Joffre had decreed that he must not retire. On its north bank his gallant army must, if it could not do otherwise, "allow itself to be slain where it stands rather than give way."

On that evening he sent Major Requin to the Forty-second Division with orders for the morrow. The most incredible orders!

The enemy had found his point of least resistance--on his right wing.

He ought to strengthen that wing, but he could not. All the reserves were engaged--and the enemy knew it as well as he did. And it is a fixed principle of war not to withdraw active troops from one part of the line to strengthen another.

Only one part of his army had had any success that day: Toward evening the Forty-second Division and the Moroccans had made an irresistible lunge forward and driven the enemy to the north edge of the marshes.

They were weary--those splendid troops--but they were exalted; they had advanced!

Foch believes in the power of the spirit. He appealed to the Forty-second to do an extraordinary thing--to march, weary as it was, from left to right of his long line and brace the weak spot. And to cover up the gap their withdrawal would make he asked General Franchet d'Esperey to stretch out the front covered by his right wing and adjoining Foch's left.

In a letter to me, Lieutenant-Colonel (then Major) Requin gives some graphic bits descriptive of that historic errand. He was a sort of liaison officer between General Grossetti, commanding the Forty-second Division, and the latter's chief, General Foch, his special duty being to carry General Foch's orders to General Grossetti and to keep the army chief informed, each evening, how his commands were being carried out.

"It was 10 P.M.," he writes, "when I roused General Grossetti from his sleep in the straw, in the miserable little sh.e.l.l-riddled farm of Chapton.

"The order astonished him; but like a disciplined leader, he started to execute it with all the energy of which this legendary soldier was capable."

The Forty-second came! While they were marching to the rescue the Prussian Guard in a colossal effort smashed through Foch's right. They were wild with joy. The French line was pierced. They at once began celebrating, at La Fere-Champenoise.

When this was announced to Foch he telegraphed to general headquarters:

"My center gives way, my right recedes; the situation is excellent. I shall attack."

For this, we must remember, is the man who says: "A battle won is a battle in which one is not able to believe one's self vanquished."

He gave the order to attack. Everything that he cared about in this world was at stake. This desperate maneuver would save it all--or it would not. He gave the order to attack--and then he went for a walk on the outskirts of the little village of Plancy. His companion was one of his staff officers, Lieutenant Fera.s.son of the artillery; and as they walked they discussed metallurgy and economics.

There could be nothing more typically French or more diametrically opposed to the conceptions of French character which prevailed in other countries before this war. And I hope that if Lieutenant Fera.s.son survives, he will accurately designate (if he can) exactly where Foch walked on that Wednesday afternoon, September 9, when, his center having given way, his right wing receded, he p.r.o.nounced the "situation excellent," gave the order for attack, and went out to discuss metallurgy.

Toward six o'clock on that evening the Germans, celebrating their certain victory, saw themselves confronted by a "new" French army pouring into the gap they had thought their road to Paris.

The Forty-second Division (more than half dead of fatigue, but their eyes blazing with such immensity and intensity of purpose it has been said the Germans fled, as before spirits, when they saw these men) had not only blocked the roundabout road to Paris; they had broken the morale of Von Buelow's crack troops. Without this brilliant maneuver and superb execution the successes of all the other armies must have gone for naught.

"To be victorious," said Napoleon, "it is necessary only to be stronger than your enemy at a given point and at a given moment."

Foch's preferred way to take advantage of that given point and moment is with reserves, which he called the reservoirs of force. "The art of war consists in having them when the enemy has none."

But as there were no reserves available at that first Battle of the Marne, he exemplified his other principle that conditions must be met as they arise.

"I still seem," says Rene Puaux, "to hear General Foch telling us, one evening after dinner at Ca.s.sel several months later, about that maneuver of September 9.

"He had put matches on the tablecloth"--some red matches which Colonel Requin treasures as a souvenir--"and he ill.u.s.trated with them the disposition of the troops engaged. For the Forty-second Division he had only half a match, which he moved here and there with his quick, deft fingers as he talked.

"The match representing the Twelfth German Corps (which with the Prussian Guard was cutting the gap in Foch's weak spot) was about to make a half-turn which would bring it in the rear of the French armies.

"The general, laying down the half-match that was the Forty-second Division, made an eloquent gesture with his hand, indicating the move that the Forty-second made.

"'It might succeed,' he said, laconically, 'or it might fail. It succeeded. Those men were exhausted; they won, nevertheless.'"

At nine o'clock the next morning (September 10) the Forty-second entered La Fere-Champenoise, where they found officers of the Prussian Guard lying, dead drunk, on the floors in the cantonments, surrounded by innumerable bottles of stolen champagne wherewith they had been celebrating their victory.

Two days later Foch was at Chalons, to direct in person the crossing of the Marne by his army in pursuit of the fleeing enemy.

"The cavalry, the artillery, the unending lines of supply wagons," says Colonel Requin, "the infantry in two columns on either side of the road; all this in close formation descending like a torrent to resume its place of battle above the pa.s.sage on the other side of the river; was an unforgettable sight and one that gave all who witnessed it an impression of the tremendous energy General Foch has for the command of enormous material difficulties."

XV

SENT NORTH TO SAVE THE CHANNEL PORTS

Germany's plan to enter France by the east gate, in Lorraine, was frustrated with the aid of Foch.

Her plan to smash through the center of the armies on the Marne was frustrated, with the very special aid of Foch.

Blocked in both these moves, there was just one other for Germany to make, then, on the western front.

And on September 14, Joffre, instead of celebrating the victory on the Marne, was deep in plans to forestall an advance upon the Channel ports, and began issuing orders for the transfer of his main fighting bodies to the north.

All this, of course, had to be done so as to leave no vulnerable spot in all that long battle line from Belfort to Calais.

Joffre had clearly foreseen the length of that line. He predicted it, as we have seen, in 1912. Doubtless he had foreseen also that it would be too long a line to direct from one viewpoint, from one general headquarters. What he was too wise to try to foresee before the war began was, which one of France's trained fighting men he would call to his aid as his second in command. He waited, and watched, before deciding that.

And late in the afternoon of October 4 he telegraphed to General Foch at Chalons, telling him that he was appointed first in command under the generalissimo, and asking him to leave at once for the north, there to coordinate the French, English and Belgian forces that were opposing the German march to the sea.

Five weeks previously Foch had been called to the vicinity of Chalons to a.s.semble an army just coming into existence. Now he was called to leave Chalons and that army he had come to know--that army of which he must have been so very, very proud--and go far away to another task of unknown factors.

But in a few hours he had his affairs in order and was ready to leave.

It was ten o'clock that Sunday night when he got into his automobile to be whirled from the Marne to the Somme.