Foch the Man Part 2

And when asked to write, for my countrymen, about General Foch, I felt honored in a supreme degree.

In due course we shall have many volumes about him: his life, his teachings, his writings, his great deeds will be studied in minutest details as long as that civilization endures which he did so much to preserve to mankind.

But just now, while all hearts are overflowing with gratefulness to him, it may be--I cannot help thinking--as valuable to us to know a little about him as it will be for us to know a great deal about him later on.

My sources of information are mainly French; and notable among them is a work recently published in Paris: "Foch, His Life, His Principles, His Work, as a Basis for Faith in Victory," by Rene Puaux, a French soldier-author who has served under the supreme commander in a capacity which enabled him to study the man as well as the General.

French, English and some few American periodicals have given me bits of impression and some information. French military and other writers have also helped. And noted war correspondents have contributed graphic fragments. The happy fortune which permitted me to know France, her history and her people, enabled me to "read into" these brief accounts much which does not appear to the reader without that acquaintance. And distinguished Frenchmen, scholars and soldiers, including several members of the French High Commission to the United States, have helped me greatly; most of them have not only close acquaintance with General Foch, having served as staff officers under him, but are eminent writers as well, with the highest powers of a.n.a.lysis and of expression.

Lieutenant-Colonel edouard Requin of the French General Staff, who was at General Foch's side from the day Foch was made commander of an army, has been especially kind to me in this undertaking; I am indebted to him, not only for many anecdotes and suggestions, but also for his patience in reading my ma.n.u.script for verification (or correction) of its details and its essential truthfulness.

And I want especially to record my gratefulness to M. Antonin Barthelemy, French Consul at Chicago, the extent and quality of whose helpfulness, not alone on this but on many occasions, I shall never be able to describe. Through him the Spirit of France has been potent in our community.

Thus aided and encouraged, I have done what I could to set before my countrymen a sketch of the great, dominant figure of the World War.

The thing about Foch that most impresses us as we come to know him is not primarily his greatness as a military genius, but his greatness as a spiritual force.

Those identical qualities in him which saved the world in war, will serve it no less in peace--if we study them to good purpose.

As a leader of men, his principles need little, if any, adaptation to meet the requirements of the re-born world from which, we hope, he has banished the sword.

Not to those only who would or who must captain their fellows, but to every individual soul fighting alone against weakness and despair and other foes, his life-story brings a rising tide of new courage, new strength, new faith.

For the young man or woman struggling with the principles of success; for the man or woman of middle life, fearful that the time for great service has gone by; to the preacher and the teacher and other moulders of ideals--to these, and to many more, he speaks at least as thrillingly as to the soldier.

This is what I have tried to make clear in my simple sketch here offered.

I

WHERE HE WAS BORN

Ferdinand Foch was born at Tarbes on October 2, 1851.

His father, of good old Pyrenean stock and modest fortune, was a provincial official whose office corresponded to that of secretary of state for one of our commonwealths. So the family lived in Tarbes, the capital of the department called the Upper Pyrenees.

The mother of Ferdinand was Sophie Dupre, born at Argeles, twenty miles south of Tarbes, nearer the Spanish border. Her father had been made a chevalier of the empire by Napoleon I for services in the war with Spain, and the great Emperor's memory was piously venerated in Sophie Dupre's new home as it had been in her old one. So her first-born son may be said to have inherited that pa.s.sion for Napoleon which has characterized his life and played so great a part in making him what he is.

There was a little sister in the family which welcomed Ferdinand. And in course of time two other boys came.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Room in Which Ferdinand Foch was Born.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: The House in Tarbes Where Foch was Born.]

These four children led the ordinary life of happy young folks in France. But there was much in their surroundings that was richly colorful, romantic. Probably they took it all for granted, the way children (and many who are not children) take their near and intimate world. But even if they did, it must have had its deep effect upon them.

To begin with, there was Tarbes.

Tarbes is a very ancient city. It is twenty-five miles southeast of Pau, where Henry of Navarre made his dramatic entry upon a highly dramatic career, and just half that distance northeast of Lourdes, whose famous pilgrimages began when Ferdinand Foch was a little boy of seven.

He must have heard many soul-stirring tales about little Bernadette, the peasant girl to whom the grotto's miraculous qualities were revealed by the Virgin, and whose stories were weighed by the Bishop of Tarbes before the Catholic Church sponsored them. The procession of sufferers through Tarbes on their way to Lourdes, and the joyful return of many, must have been part of the background of Ferdinand Foch's young days.

Many important highways converge at Tarbes, which lies in a rich, elevated plain on the left bank of the River Adour.

The town now has some 30,000 inhabitants, but when Ferdinand Foch was a little boy it had fewer than half that many.

For many centuries of eventful history it has consisted princ.i.p.ally of one very long street, running east and west over so wide a stretch of territory that the town was called Tarbes-the-Long. Here and there this "main street" is crossed by little streets running north and south and giving glimpses of mountains, green fields and orchards; and many of these are threaded by tiny waterways--small, meandering children of the Adour, which take themselves where they will, like the chickens in France, and n.o.body minds having to step over or around them, or building his house to humor their vagaries.

Tarbes was a prominent city of Gaul under the Romans. They, who could always be trusted to make the most of anything of the nature of baths, seem to have been duly appreciative of the hot springs in which that region abounds.

But nothing of stirring importance happened at or near Tarbes until after the battle of Poitiers (732), when the Saracens were falling back after the terrible defeat dealt them by Charles Martel.

Sullen and vengeful, they were pillaging and destroying as they went, and probably none of the communities through which they pa.s.sed felt able to offer resistance to their depredations--until they got to Tarbes. And there a valiant priest named Missolin hastily a.s.sembled some of the men of the vicinity and gave the infidels a good drubbing--killing many and hastening the flight, over the mountains, of the rest.

This encounter took place on a plain a little to the south of Tarbes which is still called the Heath of the Moors.

When Ferdinand Foch was a little boy, more than eleven hundred years after that battle, it was not uncommon for the spade or plowshare of some husbandman on the heath to uncover bones of Christian or infidel slain in what was probably the last conflict fought on French soil to preserve France against the Saracens. And there may still have been living some old, old men or women who could tell Ferdinand stories of the 24th of May (anniversary of the battle) as it was observed each year until the Revolution of 1789. At the southern extremity of the battlefield there stood for many generations a gigantic equestrian statue, of wood, representing the holy warrior, Missolin, rallying his flock to rout the unbelievers. And in the presence of a great concourse singing songs of grateful praise to Missolin, his statue was crowned with garlands by young maidens wearing the picturesque gala dress of that vicinity.

Some forty-odd years after Missolin's victory, Charlemagne went with his twelve knights and his great army through Tarbes on his way to Spain to fight the Moors. And when that ill-starred expedition was defeated and its warriors bold were fleeing back to France, Roland--so the story goes--finding no pa.s.s in the Pyrenees where he needed one desperately, cleaved one with his sword Durandal.

High up among the clouds (almost 10,000 feet) is that Breach of Roland--200 feet wide, 330 feet deep, and 165 feet long. A good slice-out for a single stroke! And when Roland had cut it, he dashed through it and across the chasm, his horse making a clean jump to the French side of the mountains. That no one might ever doubt this, the horse thoughtfully left the mark of one iron-shod hoof clearly imprinted in the rock just where he cleared it, and where it is still shown to the curious and the stout of wind.

It is a pity to remember that, in spite of such prowess of knight and devotion of beast. Roland perished on his flight from Spain.

But, like all brave warriors, he became mightier in death even than he had been in life, and furnished an ideal of valor which animated the most chivalrous youth of all Europe, throughout many centuries.

With such traditions is the country round about Tarbes impregnated.

It has been suggested that the name Foch (which, by the way, is p.r.o.nounced as if it rhymed with "hush") is derived from Foix--a town some sixty miles east of St. Gaudens, near which was the ancestral home of the Foch family.

Whatever the relatives of Ferdinand may have thought of this as a probability, it is certain that Ferdinand was well nurtured in the history of Foix and especially in those phases of it that Froissart relates.

Froissart, the genial gossip who first courted the favor of kings and princes and then was gently entreated by them so that his writing of them might be to their renown, was on his way to Blois when he heard of the magnificence of Gaston Phoebus, Count of Foix. Whereupon the chronicler turned him about and jogged on his way to Foix. Gaston Phoebus was not there, but at Orthez--150 miles west and north--and, nothing daunted, to Orthez went Froissart, by way of Tarbes, traveling in company with a knight named Espaing de Lyon, who was a graphic and charmful raconteur thoroughly acquainted with the country through which they were journeying. A fine, "that-reminds-me" gentleman was Espaing, and every turn of the road brought to his mind some stirring tale or doughty legend.

"Sainte Marie!" Froissart cried. "How pleasant are your tales, and how much do they profit me while you relate them. They shall all be set down in the history I am writing."

So they were! And of all Froissart's incomparable recitals, none are more fascinating than those of the countryside Ferdinand Foch grew up in.

II

BOYHOOD SURROUNDINGS

The country round about Tarbes has long been famed for its horses of an Arabian breed especially suitable for cavalry.