WHAT SAVED GERMANY

Hawera Star, Volume LI, 3 January 1931, Page 9

WHAT SAVED GERMANY

\ FEW weeks before the armistice was signed on November IT, 19'liS, Marshal Foch, Generalissimo of the Allied Armies, was preparing for a 1919 campaign, and had drawn plans, complete to the smallest detail, for opening a great drive by Americans and French which was to have taken the Allies well across the German frontier. 'Three days before the date set for the beginning of the drive the armistice was signed. 'So says the Paris correspondent of the New York “Herald Tribune."

The scope of this spectacular plan, which would have been carried out by General Pershing and General Mangin, will be revealed, together with many other much-discussed episodes on the western front, when Marshal Foch’s memoirs are made public next January. They are now being translated by 'Colonel T. Bentley Mott, formerly military attache of the American Embassy at Paris, and after appearing in periodical form will be published in two volumes in March. Foch’s first intention was to write a history of the entire war, but after consideration he abandoned this for an account of the operations in which he took part.

Before his death Foch said that his work should not. be published until several years after his death, and a tentative date between ten and fifteen years distant was set at first, by his widow. Mme. Foch, however, gave way to the persistency of friends, who urged that in fifteen years many of the men who had known Foch best would no longer be alive, and that in justice to the marshal the memoirs should be issued now.

While his family make no mention of the attacks contained in Olenieneeau - s ‘ ‘.Grandeurs and Miseries of Victory,” which appeared after Foch’s

Victory Drive Just Averted

death, their friends feel that in justice (to the marshal his book should appear now. Not that it could contain a reply or counter-invective —Foch was not 1 of that type—but because it mentions I the controversies which arose during • the course of operations, giving the : views of each party' and the reasons for the decision taken. I Although for two years of the war I Foch was not on active service, but in Paris as chief of the general staff, he was intimately' concerned with the two critical phases of the war, the battles of the Alarne and Yser, where the German torrent was first checked and then ! damned in 1914, and the final phase when the Allies united their commands to turn the last German advance into defeat and collapse.

‘ He was in the thick of fighting as . leader of the Ninth Army, which held ' a central position at the Battle of the 1 Marne. In connection with this first j turning point of the war, Foch ’s ! modesty and sure appraisal are seen in I a later remark to a friend that he himI self would not have been equal to this I struggle at the time. Marshal Joffre, ' he held, was the only man in France ! who could have done what he did. Joffre alone of the prominent generals had political backing, which enabled him to take the risk. Foch disliked politicians, but. by the time he came to the chief command politicians liad begun to learn their place.

It is known that Foch was in continuous ill-health towards the end of the war, but he makes no mention of his sufferings. It is perhaps not so well known that he was a very devout man, and that before every great action lr> would retire to a neighbouring church to pray. He docs not notice this either, for his memoirs are concerned with the World War primarily, and only afterward with the marshal who led the victorious armies.