Word: foche
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Those who expected to find in Foch's 530 pages an easy answer to their questions had a very imperfect knowledge of the character of the Allied Commander. Marshal Foch's book, which in the French edition bears the more precise title of Memoirs to Assist the History of the War, was to be his Apologia. And Marshal Foch, as a devout Catholic and a Latinist, knew that an apologia is not an apology but a defense. Therefore he penned a precise, colorless, painfully accurate account of what he had done from the outbreak of the War until the Allied...
Ferdinand Foch was a very modest man with a very level head. He realized perfectly well that it was important for the world to know what the Allied Commander-in-Chief had done in the War. He persisted in believing that the private opinions and experiences of Ferdinand Foch were of no interest to anyone. The result is a document to which might be applied the late great Gladstone's description of J. W. Cross's Life of George Eliot: "It is not a Life at all, it is a Reticence?in three volumes." Even so, many a significant fact...
...eyed boy was taking examinations for the Ecole Polytechnique, government military school at Paris. The professor of French composition, trembling with emotion, scrawled on the blackboard: "Develop this thought of Kl�ber's:? 'It is essential that the young train their faculties.' " Through the open window Student Ferdinand Foch heard the distant booming of Prussian cannon. He never forgot that afternoon...
Later a victorious Pomeranian regiment was quartered in the college with Ferdinand Foch and his schoolmates. The Pomeranians were great-bearded men. They smoked china pipes, smelled of beer and onions, scowled ferociously. Ferdinand Foch never forgot that either. It helped develop his faculties...
...Marshal Foch re-entered Alsace in November, 1918. He wrote in his memoirs: "On November 17 the Allied armies crossed the lines they held at the moment hostilities ceased. . . . On the 25th I entered Metz and on the 26th Strasbourg." He did not think it important to add one other fact. When he rode in triumph into Metz and Strasbourg, Marshal Foch car- ried in his hand the ancient curved sabre of General Kl?...