VIII

THE SUPERIOR SCHOOL OF WAR

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.

His old schoolfellow, Joseph Joffre, was then building fortifications in northern Madagascar; and his army rank was the same as that of Foch.

It was just twenty years after Foch entered upon his full-fledged professorship at the Superior School of War that Marshal Joffre, speaking at a dinner assembling the principal leaders of the government and of the army, declared that without the Superior School of War the victory of the Marne would have been impossible.

All the world knows this now, almost as well as Marshal Joffre knew it then.  And all the world knows now as not even Marshal Joffre could have known then, how enormous far, far beyond the check of barbarism at the first battle of the Marne—­is our debt and that of all posterity to the Superior School of War and, chiefly, to Ferdinand Foch.

It cannot have been prescience that called him there.  It was just Providence, nothing less!

For that was a time when men like Ferdinand Foch (whose whole heart was in the army, making it such that nothing like the downfall of 1870 could ever again happen to France), were laboring under extreme difficulties.  The army was unpopular in France.

This was due, partly to the disclosures of the Dreyfus case; partly to a wave of internationalism and pacifism; partly to jealousy of the army among civil officials.

An unwarranted sense of security was also to blame.  France had worked so hard to recoup her fortunes after the disaster of 1870 that her people—­delighted with their ability as money makers, blinded by the glitter of great prosperity—­grudged the expanse of keeping up a large army, grudged the time that compulsory military training took out of a young man’s life.  And this preoccupation with success and the arts and pleasures of prosperous peace made them incline their ears to the apostles of “Brotherhood” and “Federation” and “Arbitration instead of Armament.”

Little by little legislation went against the army.  The period of compulsory service was reduced from three years to two; that cut down the size of the army by one-third.  The supreme command of the army was vested not in a general, but in a politician—­the Minister of War.  The generals in the highest commands not only had to yield precedence to the prefects of the provinces (like our governors of states), but were subject to removal if the prefects did not like their politics and the Minister of War wished the support of the prefects.