Colonel E. Requin of the French general staff, who has fought under Foch in some of the latter’s greatest engagements, says: 

“Foch has been for forty years the incarnation of the French military spirit.”  For forty years!  That means ever since he left the cavalry school at Saumur and went, as captain of the Tenth regiment of artillery, to Rennes.  “Through his teachings and his example,” Colonel Requin goes on to say, in a 1918 number of the World’s Work, “he was the moral director of the French general staff before becoming the supreme chief of the allied armies.  Upon each one of us he has imprinted his strong mark.  We owe to him in time of peace that unity of doctrine which was our strength.  Since the war we owe to him the highest lessons of intellectual discipline and moral energy.

“As a professor he applied the method which consists in taking as the base of all strategical and tactical instruction the study of history completed by the study of military history—­that is to say, field operations, orders given, actions, results, and criticisms to be made and the instructions to be drawn from them.  He also used concrete cases—­that is to say, problems laid by the director on the map or on the actual ground.

“By this intellectual training he accustomed the officers to solving all problems, not by giving them ready-made solutions, but by making them find the logical solution to each individual case.

“His mind was trained through so many years of study that no war situation could disturb him.  In the most difficult ones, he quickly pointed out the goal to be reached and the means to employ, and each one of us felt that it must be right.”

But best of all the things said about Foch in that period of his life, I like this, by Charles Dawbarn, in the Fortnightly Review: 

“Such was”—­in spite of many disappointments—­“his fine confidence in life, that he communicated to others not his grievances, but his secret satisfactions.”

IX

THE GREAT TEACHER

Foch made the men who sat under him love their work for the work’s sake and not for its rewards.  He fired them with an ardor for military art which made them feel that in all the world there is nothing so fascinating, so worth while, as knowing how to defend one’s country when she needs defense.

He was able, in peace times when the military spirit was little applauded and much decried, to give his students an enthusiasm for “preparedness” which flamed as high and burned as pure as that which ordinarily is lighted only by a great national rush to arms to save the country from ravage.

It was tremendously, incalculably important for France and for all of us that Ferdinand Foch was eager and able to impart this enthusiasm for military skill.

But also it is immensely important, to-day, when the war is won, and in all days and all walks of life, that there be those who can kindle and keep alight the enthusiasm of their fellows; who can overlook the failure of their own ardor and faithfulness to win its fair reward, and convey to others only the alluring glow of their “secret satisfactions.”