Word: foch
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When on May n, 1871, Ferdinand Foch, a young student at the Jesuit College of St. Clement's at Metz, heard the classroom windows rattle to the guns' announcement that the city was now German, the nightmare of the Franco-Prussian War turned into a dream of revanche. He fed the dream with legends of Napoleon; his religious training gave him the very highest sanctions. From the Polytechnique he pushed through the Ecole d'Application, the Cavalry School at Saumur, Ecole Superieure de Guerre. In 1890 he was summoned to the General Staff at the Ministry...
...FOCH-Capt. B. H. Liddell Hart-Lit-tle, Brown...
Vieux soldat, vieil imbecile-so say the French, but not of Foch. Though an oldish soldier (62) when the War began, he became before its close France's symbol and stimulant of undefeat. "The Man of Orleans," as Biographer Hart subtitles him, filled the role of national redeemer when the Kaiser was Satan and when, for a four-year wink of the Divine eye, God was French...
When at long last the awaited German invasion broke, Foch was on hand to put his theory into practice, watch the other generals do the same. In the face of the enemy's first crushing advance, the generals threw their men to death with a strictly impersonal elan. When Foch's subordinates warned of being exterminated, Foch enheartened them: "Get smashed to the last man, but hold on like leeches. No retirement. Every man to the attack." These tactics fed the soldiers so fast to the machine-guns that the Germans nearly broke through...
...promotion beyond a sergeant's stripes. Always immaculately dressed, formidable champion of the French militarists, Sergeant Maginot carried his sabre-rattling beyond politics. Despite his wooden leg he was an excellent fencer. France buried him last week with all the funeral honors she had bestowed on Marshal Foch. In the church St. Louis-des-Invalides, Premier Laval delivered the oration...