In 1903 he was made colonel and sent to the Thirty-fifth artillery at Vannes, in Brittany.

Only two years later he was called to Orleans as chief of staff of the Fifth army corps.

On June 20, 1907, he was made Brigadier General and passed to the general staff of the French army at Paris.  Soon afterwards, Georges Clemenceau became Minister of War, and was seeking a new head for the Staff College.  Everyone whose advice he sought said:  Foch.  So the redoubtable old radical and anti-clerical summoned General Foch.

“I offer you command of the School of War.”

“I thank you,” Foch replied, “but you are doubtless unaware that one of my brothers is a Jesuit.”

“I know it very well,” was Clemenceau’s answer.  “But you make good officers, and that is the only thing which counts.”

Thus was foreshadowed, in these two great men, that spirit of “all for France” which, under the civil leadership of one and the military leadership of the other, was to save the country and the world.

In 1911 Foch, at 60, was given command of the Thirteenth division at Chaumont, just above the source of the Marne.  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.”

It is M. Knecht who tells us about the visit to General Foch at Nancy, in the spring of 1914, of three British generals whose presence there Foch utilized for two purposes:  He showed them what he was doing to strengthen Nancy’s defensibility, and thereby urged upon them France’s conviction that an attack by Germany was imminent and unavoidable; and he utilized the occasion to show the Lorrainers his warm friendliness for England—­which Lorraine was inclined still to blame for the death of Joan of Arc.  Foch knew that German propagandists were continually fanning this resentment against England.  And he made it part of his business to overcome that prejudice by showing the honor in which he held Great Britain’s eminent soldiers.

XI

FORTIFYING FRANCE WITH GREAT PRINCIPLES

So much has been said about France’s unreadiness for the war that it is easy for those who do not know what the real situation was to suppose that the French were something akin to fools.  For twenty centuries the Germans had been swarming over the Rhine in preying, ravaging hordes, and France had been beating them back to save her national life.  That they would swarm again, more insolent and more rapacious than ever after their triumph of 1870, was not to be doubted.  Everyone in France who had the slightest knowledge of the spirit that has animated the Hohenzollern empire knew its envy of France, its cupidity of France’s wealth, its hatred of France’s attractions for all the world.  Everyone who came in contact with the Germans felt the bullet-headed belligerence of their attitude which they were never at any pains to conceal.