Part 23

"I do not forget that it was to your insistence that I owe the position which I occupy to-day."

Foch's new responsibilities were laid upon him on March 26. By evening of the 28th he had the situation so well in hand that he was able to hold in check the German onslaught without even employing all the troops he had brought up for that purpose. He had averted what threatened to be the worst disaster of the war, and he had reserves in readiness against a new and augmented attack. This in two days!

On the 30th an official announcement told all the world that the destinies of the allied armies were by common consent confided to the general direction of Ferdinand Foch.

On that same day there was made public, by the French war authorities, something which had taken place and had contributed in a degree we are not yet able to state, to the investment of Foch with supreme power. This was a visit made by General Pershing to Foch. In the presence of Foch, Petain, Clemenceau and Loucheur (Minister of Munitions) Pershing made the following declaration:

"I come to tell you that the American people would hold it a great honor if our troops were engaged in the present battle. I ask you this in my name and in theirs. At this moment there is nothing to be thought of but combat. Infantry, artillery, aviation--all that we have is yours. Use them as you will. There are more to come--as many more as shall be needed. I am here solely to say to you that the American people will be proud to be engaged in the greatest and most glorious battle in history."

On April 5, a week after his appointment to the supreme command was announced, Foch granted an interview to a group of war correspondents. Their various accounts differ very slightly. Instead of quoting any one I will make a digest of them.

They found the general installed in a provincial mansion, place not named. The room he occupied was nearly bare; an old table, an armchair, a telephone, a huge war map, no profusion of papers, no "air of importance."

Foch was writing in a notebook. He rose, when he had finished his entry among those epoch-making memoranda, and received his visitors. He had but a few minutes to give, yet he realized the importance of the occasion and treated it accordingly. These men were to send to millions of people in the great democracies of France, Britain and America their pen pictures of the man just invested with the greatest military responsibility any man in the world's history has ever borne. Battles must be fought, but also those people had a right to such a sense of participation as only their press could give them; it was their issue; their attitude toward it was the foundation of their nation's morale. Foch has neither time nor taste for talk about himself, but he is no war autocrat; he is, as he constantly reiterates, a son of France, defending human liberties. He might not have much time to give journalists, but it is not in him to minimize their place in a world where the will of the majority prevails and the press does much to shape that will.

His manner on that occasion was calm, unhurried, but very direct, to the point.

"Well, gentlemen," said he, "our affairs are not going badly; are they? 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 asset that will prevail."

Major Stuart-Stephens had studied the "mental assets" 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?"