"STRATFORD EVENING POST” SATURDAY, MARCH 23, 1920. LATE MARSHAL FOCH.'

Stratford Evening Post, Issue 67, 23 March 1929, Page 4

"STRATFORD EVENING POST” SATURDAY, MARCH 23, 1920. LATE MARSHAL FOCH.'

AVAR HISTORIANS such as Colonel Jehu Buchan have described th late Marshal Ferdinand Foch as the

greatest general of that tragic upheaval, and that opinion is shared 1)V many distinguished soldiers and

politicians some of whom credit him with being the greatest soldier France has ever known. In the first war with Germany, Ferdinand Foch was merely a lieute'/ant, and hjs Plica obscure, though his service

was marked by a merit which gave premise of greater achievements. At the end of that war his country was reduced to it's knees, and in the Palace of Versailles harsh terms of 1 peace were imposed by the Gerlman victors, whose army was arrogantly bivouaced outside the city of Paris. What a different situation it 1 was nearly half a century later, when the obscure subaltern of 1870 was the greatest figure of all, in the same palace, where he was the supreme army leader of all the Allied nations who saw the shamed representatives of a broken nation accept the terms of surrender and defeat. . Foch has been called “the symbol ot the victorious will.” There was something mystical in his worship of will in warfare. He even went so far as to say that in a material sense no battle could bo lost. He inherited the Napoleonic doctrine of the offensive, and possibly in his teaching of officers before the war pushed it a little too far. But with this strain of mysticism, this recognition of the value of the moral factor, went the quickest and most supple of French intellects. Ludenderff was a fine and probably a great soldier, ’ but 1 there is something in his heavy face that suggests the ponderosity of German thought and the Germany military method. Poch’s face was that of a man quick to think and act, of the man who wears learning lightly, of the soldier who regards war as at least as much an art as a science. He was most vehemently opposed to the idea that war was merely the mathematical moving of masses of taen. As a man he was devout, simple-living, and entirely free from unworthy ambition or vanity. The moment sufficient victory was achieved for the purposes of the Allies he ordered “Cease Fire.” To develop further his vast 1 success and add to the spectacular effect was not worth another life. “A great soldier and a great gentleman” would be a fitting short epitaph for the man who did so much t'o save the Allied cause and with it civilisation itself.