As for the men, Foch makes it his business to get into personal contact with them, as Napoleon used to do.  Foch does not hobnob with them, there is no joking or familiarity, but he goes into the trenches and the occupied villages and looks the men over informally, inspects food or equipment, makes a useful comment or two, drops a phrase that is worth repeating, and leaves behind him enthusiasm and respect.  The Paris Figaro says that he has the gift of setting souls afire, of arousing that elan in the French fighter which made that fighter perform military miracles when the “sun of Austerlitz” was high.  It has been declared by a French writer that Foch knows the human element in the French Army better than any other man living.

With all his knowledge of men, his power of inspiring them, Foch is quiet, retiring, non-communicative, with no taste for meeting people in social intercourse.  His life has been monotonous—­work and work and work.  He has the reputation of being a driver; he used to be particularly severe on shirkers in the war college, and such, no matter what their influence, had no chance of getting a diploma leading to an attractive staff position when Foch was Director.  When he was in command at Nancy and elsewhere he used to work his staffs hard, and they had to share much of the monotony of work which has been chiefly Foch’s life.  He did not go in for society, merely making the formal calls required by the etiquette of garrison towns on the chief garrison hostesses, and giving dinners two or three times a year to his staff.

Foch, indeed, with his quiet ways and his hard work and his studying of Napoleon and Caesar, was characterized by some of the officers of the army as a pedant, a theorist, and these held that Foch had small chance of doing anything important in such a practical realm as that of real war.

Because of his Directorship of the Ecole de Guerre he was known to many officers, but as far as France at large was concerned his name was scarcely known at all last August.  Yet officers knew him in other lands besides his own.  His two great books, “Principles of War” and “Conduct of War,” have been translated into English, German, and Italian, and are highly regarded by military men.  He has been ranked by the Militaer-Wochenblatt, organ of the German General Staff, as one of the few strategists of first class ability among the Allies.

Foch is a slim man, with a great deal of nervous energy in his actions, being so quick and graceful in movement, indeed, that a recent English observer declares he carries himself more like a man of 40 than one of 64.  His gray blue eyes are particularly to be noticed, so keen are they.  His speech is quick, precise, logical.