Foch the Man: A Life of the Supreme Commander of the Allied ArmiesLaughlin, Clara E. (Clara Elizabeth)
History
Foch the Man: A Life of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Armies
Laughlin, Clara E. (Clara Elizabeth)
Foch, Ferdinand, 1851-1929
"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,
shelling 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 fortitude.
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
shelling 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 attitude 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!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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