Foch the Man Part 15

At last Foch was able to make war as he had for years contended that war should be made: The way to make war is to attack.

It was his plan, now that he had the men to make this possible, to keep the enemy busy by striking first at one point of the long line running from Belgium to the Piave, and then at another. And by the first of September the Allied line on the Western front was back where it ran in the deadlock of 1915-16 while the attack on Verdun was raging.

"General Pers.h.i.+ng," Foch has said, "wished to have his army concentrated, as far as possible, in an American sector. The Argonne and the heights of the Meuse were a sector hard to tackle. So I said to him: 'All right; your men have the devil's own punch. They will get away with it. Go to it.'"

And they went! That was the famous St. Mihiel salient. The American infantry started their advance there on September 26. They went forward with a rush. On their left, the French advanced as rapidly, and on October 1 re-took St. Quentin, which the Germans had held since the beginning of the war. October 2 the British, operating on the left of the French, reached Cambrai which also had been in German hands for more than four years.

October 4 the Hohenzollern King of Bulgaria deserted his doomed allies and his throne and began looking for a place of refuge.

And on that day the Hohenzollern government at Berlin had so little relish for the situation on all fronts, that it besought the President of the United States "to take in hand the restoration of peace, acquaint all the belligerent states with this request and invite them to send plenipotentiaries for the purpose of opening negotiations. . . . With a view to avoiding further bloodshed, the German Government requests the immediate conclusion of an armistice on land and water and in air."

October 10, Austria and Turkey joined Germany in appealing for peace terms. Notes continued to pa.s.s between the Germanic capitals and Was.h.i.+ngton, D. C.

But Foch fought on.

The Americans had cleared the last corner of the Argonne of German machine-gun nests and gunners, and were widening their offensive on the Meuse. The French had taken Laon, and were pus.h.i.+ng on. The British had taken Lens and Cambrai and were advancing on Douai and Lille.

On the 23rd of October the President of the United States referred the matter of the armistice to the Allies. On the 29th, the Allied War Council met at Versailles to fix the armistice conditions.

(Foch meanwhile had launched an offensive against the Austrians on the Piave.)

Now, an armistice is supposed to be a cessation of hostilities for an agreed period, all combatants to remain as they were; if the parley for peace is not successful, the struggle is to resume where it paused, neither side having gained or lost, except as delay may or may not have been favorable to them.

Foch had not the smallest intention of granting the hard-pushed enemy that sort of an armistice--time to recuperate, to parley while Winter came on and postponed the resumption of his offensive until Spring. To do that meant to prolong the war probably another year, at enormous cost in lives, suffering, materials.

What he would grant would be an armistice in which the enemy, so far from keeping his positions would abandon them all and retire far behind the Rhine; in which the Allies, so far from keeping their positions, would follow the retreating enemy into his own country, and police it; in which the enemy, so far from resting on his sword, would hand it over--his swords, and his cannon, and his machine-guns, and his fleet and his submarines and his aircraft and his locomotives; in which he would release all Allied prisoners and not ask the release of any of his captured men.

The terms were the most ignominious ever imposed upon a prostrate enemy.

The sole reason for referring to them as "armistice terms" was that peace terms are final and absolute, and these were not final--they would be made much worse if the Germans failed to satisfy their conquerors on every point.

When the Allied War Council had agreed with Foch on the armistice terms, he said:

"Within ten days or a fortnight I can break the German army in three, envelop a section of it, and take a million prisoners. Is there any condition which, in the opinion of any of you, could be imposed upon the enemy then, more conclusive than those of the armistice?"

No one could think of anything that might add a jot to the completeness of Germany's subjugation.

"Then, gentlemen," answered the Commander-in-Chief, "we will proceed with the armistice. When all is won that can be won for the safety and honor of France and her Allies, I cannot for the sake of prestige or gratification or personal glory, order action that would cost the life of any parents' young son, any little child's father. I am a bereaved father. I think of the fathers and mothers whom further fighting must bereave. The enveloping advance which our armies could make in ten to fourteen days would cost us thousands of lives, many maimed men. If those things must be to bring the triumph of Right, we can bear them again as we have borne them these years past. But not for any other reason!"

"The German high command," he said later, at Treves, "was not ignorant of the fact that it faced a colossal disaster. When it surrendered, everything was prepared for an offensive in which it would infallibly have succ.u.mbed. The Germans were lost. They capitulated. That is the whole story."

The German plenipotentiaries arrived at the French front at nine o'clock on the evening of November 7, and were escorted to the Chateau Francfort to spend the night. The next morning they were taken to Rethondes in the forest of Compiegne. There Foch (whose headquarters were at Semis, twenty-two miles nearer Paris) awaited them in his special train.

I may be quite wrong about his reason for receiving the German envoys in a railway carriage. But my surmise about it is that he did not want any fixed place a.s.sociated with Germany's humiliation until those empowered to act for the defunct empire of William I came to the Gallery of Mirrors at Versailles and there, where the German empire had been proclaimed, witnessed the formal degradation before the representatives of all civilization of their nation that was built on the principle that Might is Right.

Next to this in poetic justice would have been to summon those plenipotentiaries before him at Senlis where their troops had committed such insensate horrors in September, 1914. But for reasons of his own (which we may be sure had nothing to do with courtesy) Foch went part way to meet them.

They complained, afterwards, that he received them coldly. If he was able to keep his manner cold, it was only because his self-command is so great. For no other man in the world knows so well as he the extent and the enormity of the crimes those men and their masters and their minions are guilty of. A primitive man, or any undisciplined modern man, would have leaped at their throats. Instead, Foch treated them as if they were human though not humane beings, and read to them slowly and in a loud voice, the terms of the armistice for which they had asked.

Mathias Erzberger, their spokesman, requested a cessation of hostilities whilst a courier carried the terms to German General Headquarters at Spa.

There the Kaiser, Hindenburg and others awaited particulars.

Foch declined to cease hostilities. He knew his enemy too well.

As soon as the Kaiser learned what the terms were, he abdicated his throne and fled his country. When the courier had returned, and the German plenipotentiaries once more presented themselves before Foch (again in his car) the "War Lord" of all the world was cowering in a Holland hiding place, his blubbering heir was in another, and a Social Republic had been declared in Berlin.

How the Hohenzollerns knew the terms of the armistice full twenty-four hours before the courier's return to German Headquarters at Spa, I have not seen explained or heard any one conjecture.

From Rethondes to Spa is a matter of some two hundred and fifty miles, by road, and nearly forty-eight hours were consumed by the courier in covering that distance; he did not reach German Headquarters until ten o'clock Sunday morning, November 10. But the Kaiser abdicated and the Crown Prince renounced his claims to the throne, in Spa on Sat.u.r.day morning, and they were both out of the country when the courier was received, his papers were read, and he was sent back with word to the plenipotentiaries to get amelioration of some conditions, if possible, but in any event to sign.

If the press reports are not in error as to the time the courier arrived at Spa, then the terms of the armistice must have been made known to the Hohenzollerns by telegraph or other quick communication very early on Sat.u.r.day--probably as soon as the courier recrossed his own lines, which he could have done not many hours after quitting Compiegne forest. And Berlin seems to have known the terms at least as soon; for it was "the receipt of an urgent telegram" from Berlin, which the Kaiser is reported to have read with a s.h.i.+ver, that precipitated the abdication and flight.

These details are significant, even in so brief a sketch of Foch's life as this is; for in their very confusion and obscurity they tell a great story of what was either realized or feared in the German camps and in the German capital.

The magnitude of that which Foch was ready (and was by his enemies known to be ready) to do could not be better conveyed to us than by the panicky haste of those who knew themselves doomed, to make any concessions but at all costs to avert Foch's next move.

Shortly after midnight on Sunday, the German delegation (which had by Foch's orders been scrupulously served in the matter of their creature comforts) again presented itself before him in his railway car. Four hours were spent discussing the possibility of performing some of the conditions exacted, and modifications were made which in no degree altered the completeness of Germany's subjugation.

Then the papers were signed.

The Germans were punctiliously escorted to their own lines. I have not heard what Foch did; but it would not surprise me to learn that he went back to bed, and to sleep.

Perhaps, after giving orders for notifying his Government and her Allies, he sent a message to Madame Foch. But I am quite sure that otherwise he did not "celebrate," except that he gave G.o.d thanks for the victory.

XVIII

DURING THE ARMISTICE AND AFTER

When the French army rode into Metz, Foch was not at its head. There may or there may not be another man who could and would have foregone that satisfaction; but certainly there are not many.

It does not seem probable that he avoided the occasion; although it would be like him to take advantage of some good excuse for absence if he thought there was one of his generals who specially deserved and desired the honor of that triumphant entry into reclaimed Metz.

The att.i.tude of Foch toward praise and plaudits and personal glory is, it seems to me, one of the supremely great things about him. I cannot imagine him "ducking" shyly away from any place where he knew he ought to for fear of salvos of acclaim; it would be as unsoldierly to him to dodge cheers as to flee from battle, if that way his duty lay. And, similarly, I cannot imagine him going anywhere to gratify his personal feelings and collect the praises due him, if there was an urgent reason for his being somewhere else.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Ferdinand Foch. Showing His Insignia as a Marshal of France, Consisting of Seven Stars on Each Sleeve and Four Rows of Oak Leaves on His Cap.]

The business, military and executive, of seeing that the armistice terms were fulfilled, was tremendous. Much of it devolved upon him and made inconceivably great requisitions on that genius he has "for the command of enormous material difficulties"--a genius he first displayed in getting the Ninth Army across the Marne in pursuit of the fleeing Germans, in September, 1914; and which he further evidenced in every succeeding phase, beginning with the reconst.i.tution of all the forces fighting on the Yser.

The armistice period was a period of extreme demands on him. In it there was scant opportunity to go here or there with his triumphant armies. His work in the field, as a commanding general, had practically ceased with his removal from the Ninth Army after little more than a month of such command. From the time he took up his headquarters on the hill at Ca.s.sel, he became "a desk man"; it was no longer his function to execute orders; thenceforth he had the far more trying duty of issuing orders--a truly awful responsibility and one which demands much solitude, much soul-searching as well as map-pondering and other weighing of the ponderable which is so easily off-set by the imponderable, the unguessable.

There are few situations possible in life in which a man could be set apart with his soul and have so much demanded of his communings as was demanded of Foch from October, 1914, on to October, 1918. Every decision he made involved lives--hundreds and thousands or hundreds of thousands of lives--and not one pang of what must be suffered for each life laid down was strange to him; his only son was among the first to die for France and human liberties; and one of his daughters was widowed; the home he "left in the joyousness of a midsummer Sunday" was desolate, and it stood forever to him as a symbol of the homes in France and latterly, in the lands of all the Allies, with whose best-beloved he made this or that move in the war to preserve civilization. Nor were the lives he staked all that were involved; there were all that were incidentally menaced if his strategy failed--all that must suffer immediately and all that must suffer ultimately under the heel of the brute if the brute were not destroyed.

A man who has lived thus for more than four years, sharing the awfulness of his burden only with Almighty G.o.d, must needs have pa.s.sed to a spiritual plane whereon such self-considerations as still sway the rest of us have ceased to obtrude themselves.

The quest of personal glory is as hard to a.s.sociate with Ferdinand Foch as with the little Maid of France. Both fought for G.o.d and for France and for a Cause, as their Voices directed them; that he has one of the best brains of modern or of all times, and that she did "not know her A, B, C," sets them not so far apart as the materialist might imagine; for the thing that made both invincible was the power of their faith to create an unconquerable ardor in themselves and in their men. The churches in France wherein Foch knelt seeking guidance, beseeching strength, are likely to be doubly-consecrate, for ages, no less than those wherein Jeanne d'Arc prayed. She is venerated not as a military leader (though she was that) but as the one who awakened the soul of mediaeval, much-part.i.tioned France and made possible the nationalization of her country. He will be venerated (by the great majority) not as "the first stategist of Europe," but as the supreme incarnation of that spirit which makes modern France transcendent among nations vowed to democracy.