Foch the Man Part 10

How bitter was the disappointment to Foch we may guess but shall never know. But remaking plans in his genius.

"What have we to do here?" he asked himself.

Then, "in the twinkling of an eye," says one military historian, "General Foch found the solution to the defense problem wherewith he was so suddenly confronted when his offensive failed of support."

XIII

THE BATTLE OF LORRAINE

What is known as the battle of Lorraine began at the declaration of war and lasted till August 26--though the major part of it was fought in the last six of those days.

I shall not go into details about it here, except to recall that it was in this fighting that General Castelnau lost his oldest son, stricken almost at the father's side.

A German military telegram intercepted on August 27 said:

"On no account make known to our armies of the west [that is to say, the right wing, in Belgium] the checks sustained by our armies of the east [the left wing, in Lorraine]."

So much depended on those plans which Castelnau and Dubail and Foch--and very particularly Foch!--had frustrated.

Joffre realized what had been achieved. And on August 27 he issued the following "order of the day":

"The First and Second armies are at this moment giving an example of tenacity and of courage which the commander-in-chief is happy to bring to the knowledge of the troops under his orders.

"These two armies undertook a general offensive and met with brilliant success, until they hurled themselves at a barrier fortified and defended by very superior forces.

"After a retreat in perfect order, the two armies resumed the offensive and, combining their efforts, retook a great part of the territory they had given up.

"The enemy bent before them and his recoil enabled us to establish undeniably the very serious losses he had suffered.

"These armies have fought for fourteen days without a moment's respite, and with an unshakable confidence in victory as the reward of their tenacity.

"The general-in-chief knows that the other armies will be moved to follow the example of the First and Second armies."

Now, where were those other armies? And what were they doing?

France had then eight armies in the field, and was soon to have a ninth--commanded by General Foch.

There was the First army, under General Dubail; the Second, under General Castelnau; the Third, under General Sarrail; the Fourth, under General Langle de Cary; the Fifth, under General Franchet d'Esperey; the Sixth, under General Manoury; the Seventh and Eighth armies are not mentioned in the Battle of the Marne, and I have not been able to find out where they were in service.

The First and Second armies, fighting in Lorraine, we know about. They developed, in that battle, more than one great commander of whose abilities Joffre hastened to avail himself. On the day he issued that order commending the First and Second armies, the generalissimo called Manoury from the Lorraine front, where he had shown conspicuous leadership, and put him in command of the newly-created Sixth army, which was to play the leading part in routing Von Kluck. And on the next day (August 28) Joffre called Foch from Lorraine to head the new Ninth army, which was to hold the center at the Battle of the Marne and deal the smashing, decisive blow.

In two days, while his troops were retreating before an apparently irresistible force, Joffre created two new armies, put at the head of each a man of magnificent leadership, and intrusted to those two armies and their leaders the most vital positions in the great battle he was planning.

The German soldiers facing Joffre were acting on general orders printed for them eight years before, and under specific orders which had been worked out by their high command with the particularity of machine specifications. And all their presumptions were based on the French doing what Teutons would do in the same circ.u.mstances. Their extra-suspender-b.u.t.ton efficiency and preparedness were pitted against the flexible genius of a man who could a.s.semble his two "shock" armies in two days and put them under the command of men picked not from the top of his list of available commanders, but practically from the bottom.

The Third, Fourth and Fifth armies of Joffre were those which had sustained the terrific onslaught in the north and had been fighting in retreat, practically since the beginning.

On August 25 Joffre declared; "We have escaped envelopment"--thanks largely to the action in Lorraine, holding back the Bavarians--and, clearly seeing that he could not hope for favorable results from a great battle fought in the north, he gave the order for retreat which meant the abandonment of north-eastern France to the Hunnish hordes.

What anguish that order caused him we shall never know. He realized to the full what the people of that great, prosperous part of France would have to suffer. He was aware what the loss of those resources would mean to the French, and also what their gain would mean to the Germans.

He understood the effect of retreat upon the morale of his men. And he must have been aware of the panic his order would create throughout the yet-uninvaded parts of France where no one could know at what point the invasion would be checked. He knew that the nation's faith in him would be severely shaken, and that even his army's faith in him would be put to a supreme test.

But when a man trains himself to be a commander of men, he trains himself to go through, heroically and at any cost, what he believes must be done. To sacrifice one's self comes comparatively easy--given compelling circ.u.mstances and an obedient soul. But to sacrifice others never becomes easy to a man who respects the rights of others. And we shall never begin to comprehend men like Joffre and Foch until we shake ourselves free from any notion we may have that military expediency makes it easy for them to order great mental and physical suffering.

General Foch detached himself, on August 29, from his beloved Twentieth corps and betook himself to the little village of Machault, about twenty miles northeast of Chalons-sur-Marne, where he found a.s.sembled for his command an army made up of units from other armies. They were all more or less strange to one another and to him.

There was the Ninth army corps, from Tours, made up of Angevins (men such as Foch had learned to know when he was at Saumur) and Vendeans (the Bretons' south neighbors). Some of these men had been fighting without respite for nine days as they fell back, with the Fourth army, from the Belgian border. With them, since August 22, had been the remarkable Moroccan division under General Humbert.

Then there was the Eleventh corps of Bretons and Vendeans, which had been through the same terrible retreat.

And--not to enumerate too far--there was that Forty-second division of infantry which was destined to play one of the most dramatic, thrilling, forever-memorable parts in all warfare. It had been in the Ardennes, and had fallen back, fighting fiercely as it came.

To help him command these weary men whose hearts were heavy with forebodings for France, Foch had, as he himself has said, "a general staff of five or six officers, gathered in haste to start with, little or no working material, our note books and a few maps."

"Those who lived through these tragic hours near him," says Rene Puaux, "recall the chief questioning the liaison officers who did not know exactly where the different units were, punctuating his questions with: 'You don't know? Very well, then go and find out!'; putting together in his head the mosaic of which there were still so many pieces missing; gradually visioning a plan for bringing them together; calculating his effectives; estimating approximately his reserves of ammunition; discovering his bases of food supply."

And through all this stress he had the personal anguish of being unable to get word of his only son, Germain Foch, or of his son-in-law, Captain Becourt, both of whom had been fighting on the Belgian front.

"It was not, however," M. Puaux says, "the time for personal emotions.

The father effaced himself before the soldier. There was nothing to be thought of save the country."

Thus we see Ferdinand Foch, on the eve of the first Battle of the Marne.

XIV

THE FIRST VICTORY AT THE MARNE

It was Sat.u.r.day, August 29, 1914, when General Foch went to Machault to take command of the various units he was to weld into the Ninth army.

On the Tuesday following (September 1) Joffre was quartered with his general staff at the little old town of Bar-sur-Aube, fifty miles south of Chalons, and he had then determined the limits to which he would permit the retreat of his armies.

If a stand could be taken and an offensive launched further north than the Aube River, it should be done; but in no event would the withdrawal go beyond the Seine, the Aube and the region north of Bar-le-Duc.

He then placed his armies in the field in the relation in which he deemed they would be most effective: the First army, under General Dubail, was in the Vosges, and the Second army, under General Castelnau, was round about Nancy; the Third army, under General Sarrail, east and south of the Argonne in a kind of "elbow," joining the Fourth army, under General de Langle de Cary; then the Ninth army, under General Foch; then the Fifth army, under General Franchet d'Esperey; then the little British army of three corps, under General Sir John French; and then the new Sixth army, under General Manoury.

So Foch, on the third day of organizing his new command, received orders--at once terrible and immensely flattering--that he was to occupy the center of Joffre's battle line and to sustain the onslaught of Von Buelow and the famous Prussian Guards.

In the morning of Sat.u.r.day, September 5, all commanders received from Joffre the now historic message:

"The moment has come for the army to advance at all costs and allow itself to be slain where it stands rather than give way."

The men to whom this order was relayed by their commanders had, five-sixths of them, been ceaselessly engaged, without one single day's rest of any kind and much of the time without night rest either, for fourteen days, fighting as they fell back, and falling back as they fought; the skin was all worn from the soles of their feet, and what shoes they had left were stuck to their feet with blood.