Foch the Man Part 14

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 a.s.set that will prevail."

Major Stuart-Stephens had studied the "mental a.s.sets" 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.

And he also knew that victory after victory which he had won had not only failed to increase his might but had, somehow, weakened him; country after country had fallen before his sword or before his poison-propaganda--or both!--his plunder was vast, his accessions in fighting men available for the Western front were formidable--yet something in his vitals was wrong, terribly wrong; he must stop, soon, and look to his health, or he would be too far-gone for recovery. But not now! not now! "They" must be crushed now or never!

So he fought like a maddened beast whose usual cunning has given place to frenzied desperation.

Again and again and again he lunged--now here, now there. And the defenders of civilization fell back and back, before him.

Where was that calm, quiet man who had said: "Well, gentlemen, our affairs are not going badly; are they?"

"The boche," he had said, "has been halted . . . now we shall endeavor to do better."

What had happened? The boche was _not_ halted! He was, in fact, sh.e.l.ling Paris!

It was in those days that the "soldier-saint," as Major Stuart-Stephens has called him, must have had need of all his faith and all his fort.i.tude.

We don't know much, yet, except of a very superficial sort, about those days. We know what happened in them insofar as army movements are concerned, and the heartbreaking re-occupation of towns and villages where French and American restoration squads were working to make habitable those places the Huns had laid waste; and the continued sh.e.l.ling of Paris by the "mystery gun"; and the great exodus of civilians from the capital as the ravaging hordes drew nearer and always nearer.

These things we know; but not what Foch was thinking--except that he was not thinking of defeat.

If there was a true heart in France that ever for a moment doubted the outcome of the war, or dreamed of abandoning the conflict before it had made the future safe, I have never heard of that one.

Certainly the man who was leading them never doubted. Nor was it on his own skill that his faith was founded. He knew Who would give his cause the victory.

In the fifth German drive of 1918 the enemy crossed the Marne! Paris was almost in sight--Paris! where millions of French were celebrating the fall of the Bastille and the birth of freedom as if the leering, jeering enemies of all freemen were not so close to the gates of the Capital that the gleam of their tusks might almost have been seen from the city's outermost ramparts. Certainly the drunken fools within--drunk with their deep draughts of liberty--could hear the snarling and snapping of the approaching wolves, the baying of Big Bertha, the barking of her smaller sisters! But it would be like those crazy French to dance and sing and celebrate the overthrow of autocracy, while an autocracy the like of which no French King had ever exercised was on the eve of engulfing them.

So the German General Staff said, sneering, as it laid its plans for the final drive on Paris. They would start that drive on the night of July 14, while the fools were celebrating, when they were least expecting an attack. Probably most of them would be drunk. Oh, almost certainly!

Their resistance would be weak, And for all time thereafter it would make an impressive tale for schoolbooks throughout the Pan-Germanized world, that democracy was dispatched in her last orgy of exultation.

As clearly as if he were not only present in the councils of German Headquarters, but present inside the thick round skulls about the council table, this boche att.i.tude and intent was comprehended by the small frail man at Mormant, where his Headquarters then were.

On that night of July 14 he began the great offensive which never stopped until the whining boche was east of the Rhine!

His Intelligence Department told him that the German drive would probably begin at ten minutes past midnight. They might be quite wrong, but that was their guess. Foch was all-but sure they were not wrong; that it was not in German nature to reason other than as I have described.

An hour before midnight the Germans were (doubtless) surprised by some lively action of French artillery. Strange! But it couldn't mean anything, of course! So the boche came on. The behavior of the French was not quite what he had expected; one thing after another happened that was not in his calculations. But that did not argue aught against the calculations! It was the exasperating habit of the French to do unexpected things. Most annoying! But not able to affect the outcome, of course.

On July 18th they got "more unexpected still"--they and sundry "green"

troops from the flaccid, fatuous U. S. A.! Some "hounds of the devil"

were let loose upon the gray-clad armies of righteousness. It was outrageous the way those sons of Satan fought! They rushed upon the legions of the Lord's anointed as if killing Germans were the n.o.blest work a man could be about.

So many things happened that were not down on paper--in the plans of the German General Headquarters! It became distressingly evident that these Yanks knew as little, and cared as little, what was expected of them as the stupid Britishers or the mercurial French or the suicidal Belgians.

They didn't know how to fight--they couldn't know--they had never done any fighting, and whom had they had to teach them warfare? They were absurd. They didn't know the simplest rules of war--they didn't know enough to surrender when they were surrounded, cut off, outnumbered.

They fought on! They didn't know how to fight; but Lord! how they could kill Germans. And then they were such fools that their medical corps came out onto the battlefield and when they found a German who wasn't dead but was suffering, their doctors bound up his wounds and gave him water to quench his raging thirst, and left him for his own comrades to carry away and nurse--that, instead of gouging his eyes out with a bayonet's end or bas.h.i.+ng in his skull with the b.u.t.t of a gun! Strange people! They never could become good slaves of Kultur; so the wounded Germans whose agonies they had a.s.suaged, rose up on their elbows and shot them dead.

In six hours the Allies, not only reinforced but recreated by this tide of new life, new eagerness, re-took twice as much ground on the Soissons-Rheims salient as the Germans had won in six days' desperate advance.

When the word to fight came to the men of the American army, it was less like a command to them than like a release, a long-desired permission.

Many, if not most, of them had for nearly four years been straining at the leash which held them from the place where their sense of honor told them they should be.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Marshal Foch, Executive Head of the Allied Forces]

"They were superb," Marshal Foch has said, paying wholehearted tribute to them. "There is no other word. Our armies were fatigued by years of relentless struggle and the mantle of war lay heavily upon them. We were magnificently comforted by the virility of the Americans. The youth of the United States brought a renewal of the hope that hastened victory.

Not only was this moral factor of the highest importance, but also the enormous material aid placed at our disposal. n.o.body among us will ever forget what America did."

Let us hope that neither will any among us ever forget for a single instant how much was paid for us in blood and anguish by those who held the beast at bay from us for long years before we put forth a stroke in our own defense or in friendly help or in support of our ideals.

That our aid arrived in time to help turn the tide, that our men were magnificent when their opportunity was given them, is cause not for vaunting ourselves, but only for gratefulness that our honor remains to us--that we have not had to accept life and liberty at other men's hands while our hands stayed in our pockets.

Our fighting men redeemed us in our own eyes; they restored our souls'

dignity; for this we can never be grateful enough to them. But we can never be braggart about it. It might so easily have come too late!

On August 6, Foch was made Marshal of France.

And two days later, the British, on the Somme, launched the first really successful offensive of the war--not stopping a drive, but inaugurating one.