Foch the Man Part 6

VII

JOFFRE AND FOCH

After quitting the School of War in 1887 (he graduated fourth in his cla.s.s, as he had at Saumur; he was third at Fontainebleau), Ferdinand Foch was sent to Montpellier as a probationer for the position of staff officer.

He remained at Montpellier for four years--first as a probationer and later as a staff officer in the Sixteenth Army Corps, whose headquarters are there.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Marshall Joffre, General Foch]

It is a coincidence--without special significance, but interesting--that Captain Joseph Joffre had spent several years at the School of Engineering in Montpellier; he left there in 1884, after the death of his young wife, to bury himself and his grief in Indo-China; so the two men did not meet in the southern city.[1]

Joffre returned from Indo-China in 1888, while Foch was at Montpellier, and after some time in the military railway service, and a promotion in rank (he was captain for thirteen years), received an appointment as professor of fortifications at Fontainebleau.

Some persons who claim to have known Joffre at Montpellier have manifested surprise at the greatness to which he attained thirty years later; he did not impress them as a man of destiny. That is quite as likely to be their fault as his. And also it is possible that Captain Joseph Joffre had not then begun to develop in himself those qualities which made him ready for greatness when the opportunity came.

If, however, any one has ever expressed surprise at Ferdinand Foch's attainment, I have not heard of it. He seems always to have impressed people with whom he came in contact as a man of tremendous energy, application, and thoroughness.

The opportunities for study at Montpellier are excellent, and the region is one of extraordinary richness for the lover of history. The splendor of the cities of Transalpine Gaul in this vicinity is attested by remains more numerous and in better preservation than Italy affords save in a very few places. And awe-inspiring evidences of medievalism's power flank one at every step and turn. Without doubt, Foch made the most of them.

Needless to remark, the commander-in-chief of the allied armies has not confided to me what were his favorite excursions during these four years at Montpellier. But I am quite sure that Aigues-Mortes was one of them.

And I like to think of him, as we know he looked then, pacing those battlements and pondering the warfare of those militant ages when this vast fortress in the wide salt marshes was one of the most formidable in the world. What fullness of detail there must have been in the mental pictures he was able to conjure of St. Louis embarking here on his two crusades? What particularity in his appreciation of those defenses!

The place is, to-day, the very epitome of desolation--much more so than if the fortifications were not so perfectly preserved. For they look as if yesterday they might have been bristling with men-at-arms--whereas not in centuries has their melancholy majesty served any other purpose than that of raising reflections in those to whom the past speaks through her monuments.

From Montpellier, Ferdinand Foch returned to Paris, in February, 1891, as major on the general army staff.

He and Joffre had now the same rank. Joffre became lieutenant colonel in 1894 and colonel in 1897; similar promotions came to Foch in 1896 and 1903. He was six years later than Joffre in attaining a colonelcy, and exactly that much later in becoming a general.

Neither man had a quick rise but Foch's was (as measurable in grades and pay) specially slow.

About the time that Major Joffre went to the Soudan, to superintend the building of a railway in the Sahara desert, Major Foch went to Vincennes as commander of the mounted group of the Thirteenth Artillery.

Vincennes is on the southeastern skirts of Paris, close by the confluence of the Seine and the Marne; about four miles or so from the Bastille, which was the city's southeastern gate for three hundred years or thereabouts, until the fortified inclosure on that side of the city was enlarged under Louis XIV.

The fort of Vincennes was founded in the twelfth century to guard the approach to Paris from the Marne valley. And on account of its pleasant situation--close to good hunting and also to their capital--the castle of Vincennes was a favorite residence of many early French kings.

It was there that St. Louis is said to have held his famous open-air court of justice, which he established so that his subjects might come direct to him with their troubles and he, besides settling them, might learn at first hand what reforms were needed.

Five Kings of France died there (among them Charles VI, the mad king, and Charles IX, haunted by the horrors of the ma.s.sacre on St. Bartholomew's eve), and one King of England, Harry Hotspur. King Charles V was born there.

From the days of Louis XI the castle has been used as a state prison.

Henry of Navarre was once a prisoner there, and so was the Grand Conde, and Diderot, and Mirabeau, and it was there that the young Duc d'Enghien was shot by Napoleon's orders and to Napoleon's everlasting regret.

The castle is now (and has been for many years) an a.r.s.enal and school of musketry, artillery, and other military services. Before its firing squad perish many traitors to France, whose last glimpse of the country they have betrayed is in the courtyard of this ancient castle.

The vicinity is very lovely. The Bois de Vincennes, on the edge of which the castle stands, is scarcely inferior to the Bois de Boulogne in charm.

We used to go out there, not infrequently, for luncheon, which we ate in a rustic summerhouse close to the edge of the lake, with many sociable ducks and swans bearing us company and clamoring for bits of bread.

It would be hard to imagine anything more idyllic, more sylvan, on the edge of a great city--anything more peaceful, restful, anywhere.

Yet the whole locality was, even then, a veritable camp of Mars--forts, barracks, fields for maneuvers and for artillery practice, infantry b.u.t.ts, rifle ranges, school of explosives; and what not.

France knew her need of protection--and none of us can ever be sufficiently grateful that she did!

But she did not obtrude her defensive measures. She seldom made one conscious of her military affairs.

In Germany, for many years before this war, remembrance of the army and reverence to the army was exacted of everyone almost at every breath.

Forever and forever and forever you were being made to bow down before the G.o.d of War.

In France, on the contrary, it was difficult to think about war--even in the very midst of a place like Vincennes--unless you were actually engaged in organizing and preparing the country's defenses.

After three years at Vincennes, Ferdinand Foch was recalled to the army staff in Paris. And on the 31st of October, 1895, he was made a.s.sociate professor of military history, strategy, and applied tactics, at the Superior School of War.

He had then just entered upon his forty-fifth year; and the thoroughness of his training was beginning to make itself felt at military headquarters.

[1] I have found it interesting to compare the careers of Joffre and Foch from the time they were at school together, and I daresay that others will like to know what steps forward he was taking who is not the subject of these chapters but inseparably bound up with him in many events and forever linked with him in glory.

VIII

THE SUPERIOR SCHOOL OF WAR

After a year's service as a.s.sociate professor of military history, strategy, and applied tactics at the Superior School of War in Paris, Ferdinand Foch was advanced to head professors.h.i.+p in those branches and at the same time he was made lieutenant-colonel. This was in 1896. He was forty-five years old and had been for exactly a quarter of a century a student of the art of warfare.

His old schoolfellow, Joseph Joffre, was then building fortifications in northern Madagascar; and his army rank was the same as that of Foch.

It was just twenty years after Foch entered upon his full-fledged professors.h.i.+p at the Superior School of War that Marshal Joffre, speaking at a dinner a.s.sembling the princ.i.p.al leaders of the government and of the army, declared that without the Superior School of War the victory of the Marne would have been impossible.

All the world knows this now, almost as well as Marshal Joffre knew it then. And all the world knows now as not even Marshal Joffre could have known then, how enormous far, far beyond the check of barbarism at the first battle of the Marne--is our debt and that of all posterity to the Superior School of War and, chiefly, to Ferdinand Foch.

It cannot have been prescience that called him there. It was just Providence, nothing less!

For that was a time when men like Ferdinand Foch (whose whole heart was in the army, making it such that nothing like the downfall of 1870 could ever again happen to France), were laboring under extreme difficulties.

The army was unpopular in France.

This was due, partly to the disclosures of the Dreyfus case; partly to a wave of internationalism and pacifism; partly to jealousy of the army among civil officials.

An unwarranted sense of security was also to blame. France had worked so hard to recoup her fortunes after the disaster of 1870 that her people--delighted with their ability as money makers, blinded by the glitter of great prosperity--grudged the expanse of keeping up a large army, grudged the time that compulsory military training took out of a young man's life. And this preoccupation with success and the arts and pleasures of prosperous peace made them incline their ears to the apostles of "Brotherhood" and "Federation" and "Arbitration instead of Armament."

Little by little legislation went against the army. The period of compulsory service was reduced from three years to two; that cut down the size of the army by one-third. The supreme command of the army was vested not in a general, but in a politician--the Minister of War. The generals in the highest commands not only had to yield precedence to the prefects of the provinces (like our governors of states), but were subject to removal if the prefects did not like their politics and the Minister of War wished the support of the prefects.

Even the superior war council of the nation might be politically made up, to pay the War Minister's scores rather than to protect the country.

All this can happen to a people lulled by a false sense of security--even to a people which has had to defend itself against the savage rapacity of its neighbors across the Rhine for two thousand years!

It was against these currents of popular opinion and of government opposition that Ferdinand Foch took up his work in the Superior School of War--that work which was to make possible the first victory of the Marne, to save England from invasion by holding Calais, and to do various other things vital to civilization, including the prodigious achievements of the days that have since followed.