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Updated: June 13, 2025
In the distance a solitary church spire marked the site of Péronne, a fortress surrounded by its moat of three streams. General Foch had planned his advance in the same methodical manner as the British command. At half past 7 on the morning of July 1, 1916, the French infantry dashed forward to assault the German trenches.
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 principally of one very long street, running east and west over so wide a stretch of territory that the town was called Tarbes-the-Long.
They fought with the French through Belleau Wood, heartening the brave, tired, discouraged poilus, and after they came out upon the other side the name of the battlefield was changed to the 'Wood of the American Marines. Mr. Gibbons says that when Marshal Foch began his great offensive, which in cosmic importance is second only to creation, he selected the units in which he had the most faith.
The Marne might be crossed and the railway to Nancy and Verdun cut, as they had been in 1914, but the further advance for which he could hope from his attack on Reims would bring him no nearer to Paris, to breaking the Entente connexion, or to damming that fatal flow of American reinforcements which was providing Foch with as many reserves a month as Germany could recruit in a year.
He said that "the presence of these two eminent men gave a great interest" to the events he described. And the impression made upon him by Foch is so remarkable that his letter is likely to become one of the small classics of the war endlessly reproduced whenever the story of Foch is told.
Since March 23rd the tread of the Hun had been coming steadily nearer to Paris. Belleau Wood and Chateau-Thierry had not yet struck the true ring from our metal and put into the hands of Foch the one further weapon that he needed. French morale was burning very low and blue. Yet even in such an hour, people apparently American and apparently grown up, were talking against England, our ally.
"The man who has been consecrated by destiny to the saving from Moloch of this globe's civilization, is he who will prove once more that in the conflict between the finely tempered sword and the finely tempered brain, it is the mental asset that will prevail." Major Stuart-Stephens had studied the "mental assets" of Ferdinand Foch.
Punctuality and neatness no doubt are due to his long military training, for General Foch has always been a soldier. Many of the officers of France owe their knowledge of strategy and tactics to his teaching at the École de Guerre. General Foch led the conversation. Owing to the rapidity of his speech, it was necessary to translate much of it for me.
In the spring of 1915 Foch left Cassel and took up headquarters at Frévent, between Amiens and Doullens, whence he directed those engagements in Artois which demonstrated that though trench warfare was not the warfare he had studied and prepared for, and nearly all its problems were new, he was master of it not less than he would have been of a cavalry warfare.
German power in war, Foch taught his students, lay in the great masses of their effective troops and their perfect organization for moving men and supplies. German weakness was in the absolute autocracy of great headquarters, building its plans as an architect builds a house and unable to modify them if something happens to make a change necessary.
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