TWO GENERALS

Evening Star, Issue 21007, 22 January 1932, Page 12

TWO GENERALS

RACIAL CONTRAST FOCH THE EXCITABLE ABLE SMITH’DORRIEN ■ ' Born of a father whose name was Napoleon, Ferdinand Foch in his early life was overshadowed both by the influence of a religion deep-seated in the life of his family and by the image of the Little Corporal. Full of tradition, he was to turn to Napoleon for example and precept throughout his years of training, as throughout his whole life he turned to his religion for strength and comfort. ~ , „ , . The story of Foch, told by Captain Liddell Hart in ‘Foch, the Man of Orleans,’ is the military history of France from the days pf the FrancoPrussian War and the history of the Allipd Forces in France during the four years of the Great War. Wherever there sounded the jingle of spurs and the rustle of plans and maps there was Foch in the midst of it, says a writer in the ‘ Cape Times.’ Arriving at manhood in 1870, his whole life became coloured with the idea: “ Alsace-Lorraine must be regained; France must never again be defeated; I must be one of her liberators ’’—and in the light of this must be read his steady application to t task of fitting himself to be ready for the opportunity that might.never come, but did arrive when, in 1914, he was at the height of his powers; : His morning ride, winter and summer, was but a symptom of his constant personal training for the hour 6f emergency; yet with the declaration of war he was to cease to handle a horse, as, himself the founder'and the soul of the theory of the offensive, he was to bring to a successful conclusion a war that was pre-eminently defensive. ALTERED TEACHING, After all the legends that have grown up around Foch, the man of action, have faded away history will remember the young professor of military history at the War College, whose teaching altered the whole trend of military strategy in France. From the first day at his lecturer’s; desk he preached the theory of the offensive, always the offensive, and the destruction of the enemy’s main army the only moans to his goal. So forcefully did he preach that by 1912 the whole of the French Higher Command were his disciples, and the General Order issued in that year shows the extent to which his theory had infiltrated the very spirit of France. The French army no longer knows any other law than the offensive. . . . All attacks are to be pushed to the extreme with the firm resolution to charge the enemy with* the bayonet, ini order to destroy him. . . . This result can only be obtained at the expense of bloody’ sacrifices. Any other conception ought to be rejected as contrary to the very nature of war. From this spirit was born the notorious Plan Seventeen, which visualised an early general offensive, in which all the available active forces would hurl themselves qn the German armies via the Nancy zone, leaving out of all consideration the possibility of a German advance through neutral Belgium. And< the result of this single-mindedness was soon to be seen in the “ bloody sacrifices ” and terrible reverses of the French armies before the battle of the Marne brought temporary relief to the Allied cause. Captain Hart has dealt with the Marne in detail. If, in doing so, he has exploded for ever the legend of Foch as the saviour of the Marne—that Foch, whose report on the night of September 8 has been magnified into the dazzling epigram: “My right is .driven in: my centre gives way; situation excellent; I attack.”—he has done nothing to blur the conception of Foch the prophet inspired by his God, the man with the will to conquer. SAVED BY EVENTS. Beside such supreme confidence it hardly seems to matter that, unable to flog his troops into the attack, Foch was saved by the turn of events elsewhere—by the arrival of the four British divisions, and by the brilliance of Gallieni. So at First Ypres the author brings out the moral influence of Foch upon the battle *“ not less by his obstinate refusal to listen to reason than by the unconquerable strength of his will thjt never wilted,” as when at St. Omer, to French’s cry of “We’re all for it,” his lightning retort was “We shall see; in the meantime, hammer away, and you will get there. It’s surprising the results you obtain in this way.” What if his title in April, 1918, might have been, as Hart suggests, not commander-in-chief, but busybody-in-chief, wha£ does it matter when, unreasonable often, impetuous always, his unconquerable spirit was the tonic that kept the Allied commanders going through the grey days of the last German offensives. An undemonstrative race ourselves, we found it difficult to appreciate the anti-Semitic feeling that culminated in the Dreyfus case, and even more the

anti-Catholic reaction that followed and resulted in the loss in 1901 to the Catholic Foch of his professorship; so we are unmoved, irritated perhaps at times by the theatricalities—the byplay of exchanging hats with Henry Wilson whenever they met, or the forceful gestures with_ which he would drive home his striking metaphors—that were second nature to Foch, But an individuality that could so dominate the conference at Doullens in ’lB that all eyes turned naturally to him as the hope of the Allied Forces, and on whose active shoulders fell as if by divine right the cloak of the Supreme Command, surely bears the stamp of genius. AT BEAUVAIS. Captain Hart gives a finely vigorous picture of him in his 'two-roomed headquarters at Beauvais that is well worth the quoting:— ■ “ The most insignificant German colonel would have made ten times more show. Foch is still the same, in his grey-blue uniform, with his cavalryman’s walk, his short legs, his large head wrinkled and bronzed by the war, the searching glance, sometimes malicious'beneath the puckered eyelids, the heavy moustache, greyish and tobaccostained, and the mouth -which can take so many diverse expressions in a few minutes, from the most brutal vigour to an ironical good humour. His gestures are still prodigiously prompt, prodigiously expressive. “He showed me the map where, in diverse colours, was written the story of a battle nearing its end. He explained its phases. And then, ‘There! That’s past. What had we got to do? To stop them at all costs.’ He threw out his arms and drew them back gradually; the pocket seemed to grow before my eyes. ‘ And then to stand firm. That’s now!’ His two hands plunged towards the ground in a gesture that would have arrested the uni-, verse. ‘ And finally—this’ll come later —that!’ His arms thrown open anew, he brought his fists forward to crash round the venturesome foe.” Of the other figures in this superb piece of military analysis, a book that will stanl in the forefront of military biographies, the author deals fairly. “ MISCHIEF MAKER.” Joffre, with his narrow, dulled horizons, inevitably suffers by comparison, though Haig comes clearly out of the picture as one more than making up by his dourness for the absence of Gallic brilliance. But of Sir Henry Wilson, with his Infinite capacity for making trouble, hand in glove with Foch since the days before the war, when he pledged the strength of Britain to the fields of France and tied a military rope round the neck of British policy, all that can be said is that he comes out of the analysis as little more than a positionseeker and a mischief-maker. Wo cannot help carrying away from Hart’s masterpiece the depressing knowledge that from petty jealousies among those in high command, like that of Joffre for Gallieni and the active distrust French hold for Smith-Dorrien, arose a* undred and one of the muddles that cost the Allied armies many thousands of lives. It does not make pretty reading, except to reinforce the arguments of pacifists, and it is but poor consolation to be told that similar frictions wero occurring in the German High Command.

One of the most tragic of these controversies is dealt with in General Ballard’s recently-published 1 Smith-Dor-rien,’ written partly to defend that distinguished soldier from the attacks of Lord French in his ‘ 1914,’ a work of which the Hon. Sir J, Fortescue recently said that “the most charitable view_ is that it is the work of a monomaniac.’’ General Ballard is sincerely to be congratulated upon the quiet, reasoned way in which he sets about his task, with chapter and verso ready to support every lino of his argument. As a result the name of Sir Horace SmithDorrien is now completely cleared of the mud so unjustly slung by his late commander. TRIED SOLDIER. Unlike Poch, who had never seen an action until tne first shots were bred in August, 1914, Smith-Dorrien entered the war with active service in nearly every part of the Empire behind him, and with a wider knowledge of the feelings of men under fire, of their reactions to climate, fatigue, and hunger, than any other general in the French or British armies. Essentially a soldiers’ general, h'o was well equipped to make his famous decision to stand at Le Gateau ou August 26, 1914, a stand that not only brilliantly served its immediate purpose of checking the pursuit and of throwing the advancing Germans into disorder, but also had moral results far surpassing any that could have been surmised at the time. . Accustomed by training and inclination to accept unpleasant facts at their true value, he had too acute a mind and too much respect for the bodies of his men to have sympathy with Foch’s “ Attack, Attac’ !” when it was repeated parrot-like, without reference to local conditions. Black, indeed, was the day for the men in the ranks when French, himself hourly passing from heights of optimism to depths of despair, allowed his personal jealousy and potty dislike of Smith-Dorrien to colour liis mind to such an extent that he could look upon the soldierly', reasoned reports of his junior as “ unduly pessimistic,” and with this as his excuse have him removed to a command with the Home Forces. These are two books that, quite apart from their authoritative value as military histories, are of rare interest to the general reader in presenting so plainly two such opposite types of modern leaders. Foch, the legendary gesticulating Frenchman himself, a man of action, but speech his mode of action; and Smith-Dorrien, a man of action indeed, but one of few words, who by his inspired and personal leadership “ set the form ” for his little band of British Regulars who in their turn set the standard of the moral superiority by which at long last we achieved the victory.