This complete readiness was beyond his power to effect.  But in his province—­the army—­he achieved marvels that were almost miracles.

It was France’s good fortune (and that of her allies) that in all he undertook for the purification and strengthening of the army Joffre had, from January, 1912, the complete co-operation of the Minister of War, M. Millerand.  Together, these two men, brilliantly supported by some of Joffre’s colleagues in the Superior Council—­notably Pau and Castelnau—­achieved results that have been pronounced “unparalleled in the history of the Third Republic.”  They freed the army from the worst effects of political influence, made it once more a popular institution, and organized it into an effectiveness which needs, now, no comment.

When Foch was put in command of the Twentieth army corps at Nancy it was in the expectation that Nancy would sustain the first shock of the German invasion when it came.  The opinion prevailed that Nancy could not be held.  Whether Joffre was of this opinion or not, I do not know.  If he was, he probably felt that Foch would give it up only after harder fighting than any other general.  But Foch believed that Nancy could be defended, and so did his immediate superior, the gallant General Castelnau, in command of the Second Army of Lorraine.

For nearly a year following upon his appointment to Nancy, Foch labored mightily to strengthen Nancy against the attack which was impending.  He seems never to have doubted that Germany would make her first aggression there, only seventeen miles from her own border, and with Metz and Strassburg to back the invading army.

But that there were other opinions, even at Nancy, I happen to know.  For, one day while the war was still new, I chanced in rooting in an old bookstall in Paris, to find a book which was written by an officer of the Twentieth Corps, in 1911.[1]

The officer was, if I mistake not, of the artillery, and he wrote this “forecast” to entertain the members of his mess or battery.

He predicted with amazing accuracy the successive events which happened nearly three years later, only he “guessed” the order for mobilization in France to fall on August 14, instead of August 1; and all his subsequent dates were just about two weeks later than the actualities.  But he “foresaw” the invasion of Belgium, the resistance at Liege and Namur, the fall of Brussels, the invasion of France by her northeastern portals.  Almost—­at the time I read this book—­it might have served as history instead of prophecy.  I would that I had it now!  But I clearly remember that it located the final battle of the war in Westphalia, describing the location exactly.  And that it said the Emperor would perish in that downfall of his empire.  And it cited two prophecies current in Germany—­the long-standing one to the effect that Germany’s greatest disaster would come to her under an Emperor with a withered arm, and one made in Strassburg in 1870, declaring that the new empire would dissolve under its third Emperor.