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Dr. Clemenceau was 66 when he first became Prime Minister in 1906. He styled himself "an old debutant," worked passionately to achieve the Entente with England.
Few U. S. citizens realize that he went out of office in 1909, that he was not Prime Minister of France during the first three years of the war. As editor of L'Homme Libre and, when that was suppressed, of L'Homme Enchaine, he preached such deathless, rampant patriotism, printed such reckless denouncements of even highest government officials when he suspected them of pacifism, that at first some thought him mad. In the end. all France saw him as the incarnate Will to Victory. In 1917 the allied reverses and the fall of the Painleve Cabinet left President Raymond Poincare an alternative which Clemenceau described thus: "It was a case of Caillaux [pacifist] or myself. Had Poincare sent for Caillaux he would have had me arrested and made peace with Germany. He sent for me. I decided to have Caillaux arrested and to go on with the War."
Catholic v. Atheist. Ferdinand Foch and Georges Clemenceau: Devout Catholic and fiery Atheist. They had to clash. They could win the War without coming to an actual break, but not the Peace. Which was right? Foch will always get his due as Conqueror. Hear Clemenceau: "We disagreed entirely on the question of the Franco-German frontier. The Marshal wanted me to annex the Rhineland, and wrote me so. I did not want to have a new Alsace-Lorraine that would send protesting deputies to the French Chamber, as Alsatian deputies were sent to the Reichstag after 1871. So Woodrow Wilson, Lloyd George and myself drew the Franco-German frontier as it was in 1870.
"I would have gone up to the sea with the Rhine under my arm. But Germans, not Frenchmen, were living on the Rhine territory. If we had begun any annexing, other powers would have followed our example. It is easy to make war. It is more difficult to keep territories than to conquer them!"
Unfair of Foch. It was the ghost of Foch which kept Clemenceau writing night and day until he died, perhaps hastened his death. Journalist Raymond Recouly published last year Le Memorial de Foch, flaying Clemenceau's handling of the peace conference in words allegedly quoted from Foch. In almost a paroxysm of rage, Le Tigre began to write his reply, had it complete last week except for a few pages of revision. "It is unfair of Foch!" stormed Clemenceau again and again in the last few weeks. "He is no longer here to receive my reply! . . . I am finishing it for myself, not for humanity."
Equally egoistic was the funeral which Clemenceau demanded from France last week and which she humbly gave. "He asked that there be no state funeral," said Prime Minister Tardieu, "I need not say there will be none." In every French garrison, on every warship, in every French colony, cannon banged out a 21-gun salute while the Father of Victory was buried in a hole dug in a briar patch at his birthplace, Mouilleron-en-Pareds, a bleak region