FOCH—Capt. B. H. Liddell Hart—Lit-tle, Brown ($4).†
Vieux soldat, vieil imbecile—so say the French, but not of Foch. Though an oldish soldier (62) when the War began, he became before its close France's symbol and stimulant of undefeat. "The Man of Orleans," as Biographer Hart subtitles him, filled the role of national redeemer when the Kaiser was Satan and when, for a four-year wink of the Divine eye, God was French.
When on May n, 1871, Ferdinand Foch, a young student at the Jesuit College of St. Clement's at Metz, heard the classroom windows rattle to the guns' announcement that the city was now German, the nightmare of the Franco-Prussian War turned into a dream of revanche. He fed the dream with legends of Napoleon; his religious training gave him the very highest sanctions. From the Polytechnique he pushed through the Ecole d'Application, the Cavalry School at Saumur, Ecole Superieure de Guerre. In 1890 he was summoned to the General Staff at the Ministry of War. Here the dream of revanche took strategical form. "Adopting the offensive as the essential form of action, Foch's sequence of action was, first, to feel for one's enemy, then to grip him, finally to 'strike one supreme stroke on one point,' using one's reserves 'as a club'. . . This theory, essentially mechanistic or mathematical, was too simple for truth."
As professor and later as commandant of the Ecole de Guerre, from its high pulpit he taught the army's teachers his theories of military strategy. By books, by word of mouth he popularized the doctrine of Attack, until it became dogma to the French. "This theory, which really rested on the sentimental assumption that Frenchmen were braver than Germans, certainly simplified the role of the leader. For directly an enemy was sighted he had merely to give the order, 'Forward.' " Biographer Liddell Hart, more concerned with military strategy than patriotic ardors, puts the armies' battles, from the early battle of Morhange to the second battle of the Marne, down on maps; traces in tactical detail the errors of attack.
When at long last the awaited German invasion broke, Foch was on hand to put his theory into practice, watch the other generals do the same. In the face of the enemy's first crushing advance, the generals threw their men to death with a strictly impersonal elan. When Foch's subordinates warned of being exterminated, Foch enheartened them: "Get smashed to the last man, but hold on like leeches. No retirement. Every man to the attack." These tactics fed the soldiers so fast to the machine-guns that the Germans nearly broke through.