Here Foch invites comparison with another of the dominant figures of the war--General French. For French is described by his biographer as "a worshipper of Napoleon," regarding him as the world's greatest strategist, and in following out and studying Napoleon's campaigns French personally covered and studied much of the ground in Belgium over which he has been fighting. French is a year younger than Foch. They are old friends, as are French and Joffre, and Joffre and Foch. The inclination of Foch to something of the Napoleonic is shown beyond the realm of strategy and tactics. Foch is credited with knowing the French soldier, his heart, his mind, his capabilities, and the method of getting the most out of those capabilities, in a way reminiscent of the winner of Jena. And Foch knows not only the privates, but the officers. When he went to the front he visited each commander; the Colonels he called by name; the corps commanders, without exception, had attended his lectures at the Ecole de Guerre. As for the men, Foch makes it his business to get into personal contact with them, as Napoleon used to do. Foch does not hobnob with them, there is no joking or familiarity, but he goes into the trenches and the occupied villages and looks the men over informally, inspects food or equipment, makes a useful comment or two, drops a phrase that is worth repeating, and leaves behind him enthusiasm and respect. The Paris Figaro says that he has the gift of setting souls afire, of arousing that élan in the French fighter which made that fighter perform military miracles when the "sun of Austerlitz" was high. It has been declared by a French writer that Foch knows the human element in the French Army better than any other man living. With all his knowledge of men, his power of inspiring them, Foch is quiet, retiring, non-communicative, with no taste for meeting people in social intercourse. His life has been monotonous--work and work and work. He has the reputation of being a driver; he used to be particularly severe on shirkers in the war college, and such, no matter what their influence, had no chance of getting a diploma leading to an attractive staff position when Foch was Director. When he was in command at Nancy and elsewhere he used to work his staffs hard, and they had to share much of the monotony of work which has been chiefly Foch's life. He did not go in for society, merely making the formal calls required by the etiquette of garrison towns on the chief garrison hostesses, and giving dinners two or three times a year to his staff. Foch, indeed, with his quiet ways and his hard work and his studying of Napoleon and Caesar, was characterized by some of the officers of the army as a pedant, a theorist, and these held that Foch had small chance of doing anything important in such a practical realm as that of real war.