r the Western front were formidable--yet
something in his vitals was wrong, terribly wrong; he must stop, soon,
and look to his health, or he would be too far-gone for recovery. But
not now! not now! "They" must be crushed now or never!

So he fought like a maddened beast whose usual cunning has given place to
frenzied desperation.

Again and again and again he lunged--now here, now there. And the
defenders of civilization fell back and back, before him.

Where was that calm, quiet man who had said: "Well, gentlemen, our
affairs are not going badly; are they?"

"The boche," he had said, "has been halted . . . now we shall endeavor to
do better."

What had happened? The boche was _not_ halted! He was, in fact,
shelling Paris!

It was in those days that the "soldier-saint," as Major Stuart-Stephens
has called him, must have had need of all his faith and all his fortitude.

We don't know much, yet, except of a very superficial sort, about those
days. We know what happened in them insofar as army movements are
concerned, and the heartbreaking re-occupation of towns and villages
where French and American restoration squads were working to make
habitable those places the Huns had laid waste; and the continued
shelling of Paris by the "mystery gun"; and the great exodus of civilians
from the capital as the ravaging hordes drew nearer and always nearer.

These things we know; but not what Foch was thinking--except that he was
not thinking of defeat.

If there was a true heart in France that ever for a moment doubted the
outcome of the war, or dreamed of abandoning the conflict before it had
made the future safe, I have never heard of that one.

Certainly the man who was leading them never doubted. Nor was it on his
own skill that his faith was founded. He knew Who would give his cause
the victory.

In the fifth German drive of 1918 the enemy crossed the Marne! Paris was
almost in sight--Paris! where millions of French were celebrating the
fall of the Bastille and the birth of freedom as if the leering, jeering
enemies of all freemen were not so close to the gates of the Capital that
the gleam of their tusks might almost have been seen from the city's
outermost ramparts. Certainly the drunken fools within--drunk with their
deep draughts of liberty--could hear the snarling and snapping of the
approaching wolves, the baying of Big Bertha, the barking of her smaller
sisters! But it would be like those craz