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Updated: May 13, 2025
Two days later Foch was at Châlons, to direct in person the crossing of the Marne by his army in pursuit of the fleeing enemy.
To those heroic men who had left their beautiful country to the arch-fiends of destruction, their parents and wives and children to savages who befoul the name of beasts; who no longer had any possessions, nor munitions wherewith to make another stand on Belgian soil; to them Foch took fresh inspiration with his calm and tremendous personality; to them he sent his splendid Forty-second Division to swell their ranks so frightfully depleted in Honor's cause; to them he gave the suggestion of opening their sluices and drowning out of their last little corner of Belgium the enemy they could not otherwise dislodge.
With supreme command for the first time completely centralized under Marshal Foch, and with the support of American armies, the Allies were able to hold up the enemy drives, and on July 18 begin the forward movement which pushed the Germans back upon their frontiers.
On December 17, 1912, he was placed at the head of the Eighth Army Corps, at Bourges. And on August 23, 1913, he took command of the Twentieth corps at Nancy. "When," says Marcel Knecht, "we in Nancy heard that Foch had been chosen to command the best troops in France, the Twentieth Army Corps, pride of our capital, everybody went wild with enthusiasm."
Every black-smocked schoolboy in France loitering along historic highways to his gray-stuccoed school, may feel in himself a Foch of to-morrow and quicken his steps so that he may make himself a little more ready for his recitation.
Then he came to the business of my visit to obtain a permit to march with the French troops. "It is very difficult," said the Colonel. "General Foch would do all he could for you he loves the English but no French correspondents are allowed on the frontier, and we can hardly make a distinction in your favour. Still, I will put your appeal before the general.
Foch, but they were shouldered out with great slaughter by the Germans, who proceeded to lavish the last details of their military science upon the fortifications of the town. Givenchy, too, before which many British dead lie buried, was a stronghold upon which the Germans counted to stem any advance.
The rise of Generals Joffre, Castelnau and Foch and the retreat of the German invaders raised the Allies from the depths of despair to a degree of confidence bordering on presumption. After the departure of the Belgian Government to Antwerp, the occupation of Brussels, the defeat of the Austrian army by the Serbs and the rout of three German army corps by the Russians, the Western Allies conceived high hopes of the military prowess of the Slavs, and looked to them for the decisive action which would speedily bring the Teutons to their knees. And for a time Russia's continued progress seemed to justify these hopes. Her troops entered Insterburg and pushed on to Königsberg, which they invested and threatened, and in the south they scored a series of remarkable successes in Galicia. But in the west of Europe the Allies could at most but retard without arresting the advance of the Germans, whose aim was to defeat the French and then concentrate all their efforts on the invasion of the Tsardom. Despite assurances of an optimistic tenor there appeared to be no serious hope of defending Paris, nor were effective local measures adopted for the purpose; and on September 3 the French Government, against the insistent advice of three experienced Cabinet Ministers, suddenly moved to Bordeaux, and earned for itself the nickname of tournedos
"General Foch," he reminds his parents, "is a former commander of the School of War, where he played, on account of his great fitness, a very remarkable role. "What first strikes one about him is his clear gaze, penetrating, intellectual, but above all and in spite of his tremendous energy, luminous.
After a year's service as associate professor of military history, strategy, and applied tactics at the Superior School of War in Paris, Ferdinand Foch was advanced to head professorship in those branches and at the same time he was made lieutenant-colonel. This was in 1896. He was forty-five years old and had been for exactly a quarter of a century a student of the art of warfare.
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