Part 26

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 God 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 attitude 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.

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 reconstitution 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 Cassel, 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 God, must needs have passed 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 associate with Ferdinand Foch as with the little Maid of France. Both fought for God 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-partitioned 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.

It is Foch's "likeness" to the myriad soldiers of France that France adores--not his difference from the rest. Her poilu is her beau ideal of faith and courage, of patriotism and devotion to the principles of human rights, of cheerfulness and hopefulness, of invincibility in that his cause is just. France is too essentially democratic to esteem one set of characteristics in the mass of men and another set in the leaders of men. Foch and Joffre will live always in the hearts of their countrymen because, like Jeanne d'Arc, they have so much to say to everyone--so much that illumines every path in life wherever it is laid.

On the 19th of December, 1918, Joffre took his seat among the Immortals of the French Academy. The vacancy to which he had been elected was that made by the death of Jules Claretie who, before his admission to the Academy and before his absorption in the affairs of La Comedie Francaise, had written several books about the leaders of the French Revolution.

It was Ernest Renan who delivered the address of welcome to Claretie (in February, 1889) and he said that it was still too soon to know whether those leaders of whom Claretie had written were supremely justified or were not.

"You are young," Renan said to the new Immortal, "and you will see this question solved, . . . some years hence it will be known; if in ten or twenty years France is prosperous and free, faithful to right, strong in the friendship of the free peoples of the world, then the cause of the young Revolutionists is won; the world will enjoy the fruits of their endeavor without having had to know their unripe bitterness."

Joffre quoted this part of Renan's address, in taking his seat. Claretie had not lived quite long enough to see, save with the eye of faith, that day Renan foretold; but Claretie's successor in the French Academy had seen it! And it was like him to say:

"I think, gentlemen, that in doing me the honor of receiving me into your august body, your desire is to pay homage to that glorious French army which has proved that the soul of France is steadfast for the rights of man, even unto death that men may be free."

Accepting the honor as paid through him to the men who had proved the worth of that Liberty, Equality and Fraternity the Revolution declared and decreed, Joffre asked permission to name those to whom, he deemed, the gratitude of France and of France's Immortals was due. And first among them he named Foch.

This was gracious; it was generous; but it was more than that. And though Joffre went on to name many leaders, many armies, many moral forces incarnate in many men as co-responsible for victory, no one could know quite so well as he how completely the France of which Renan dreamed as a glorious possibility, is realized and typified in the man whose name leads all the rest as having saved not France only but the liberties of mankind.

Bonaparte, although he was not French (save technically) and not a democrat, captured the hearts of France in spite of all he cost them; because he aggrandized France, made her supreme in many things besides extent and power. It is instinctive in every Frenchman (or woman, or child!) to revere anyone who does new credit to the name of France or brings new glory to it; for the passionate love of country is the primary religion of the French--they may or may not have another, but unless they are totally renegade they have that faith, that devotion.

In Ferdinand Foch they have a great leader who is in no sense an "accident" (as Bonaparte was), a sporadic development in their midst, a spectacular growth on an exotic stem. They have, rather, a quintessential Frenchman of to-day, even more widely representative of his countrymen than Lincoln was of ours.

"The fame of one man," says Henri Bordeaux, "is nothing unless its represents the obscure deeds of the anonymous multitude."

This is a typically modern idea, and typically French. France of to-day would not deny the worth of any development because it was singular, isolate; but what she is particularly interested in is the possibilities of development along the lines that are followed by the many and are open (broadly speaking) to all. Guynemer, for a shining instance, is the idol of every schoolchild in France, not for his daring alone, nor for the number of boche birds of prey he brought down; but because wealth and influence were unavailing to get him an opportunity beyond what the poorest, humblest youngster might have got in the same indomitable way; and because frail health and puny strength could not debar him from the sublimest exploits of daring for France. His circumstance--physical and material--tended to bind him to the soft places of earth. His desire to serve France gave him wings to fly far beyond the eagles. He has no grave. He rides the empyrean for all time, to tell the youth of France how surmountable is everything to one who loves his country and the rights of mankind.

Foch is of less legendary sort, but he, too, epitomizes France; and he will be increasingly potent as time goes on, irrespective of whether the sword is or is not superseded in the affairs of men.

"The obscure deeds of the anonymous multitude" are much like his own obscure deeds prior to the great day when France needed him and found him ready.