n
for his being somewhere else.

[Illustration: Ferdinand Foch. Showing His Insignia as a Marshal of
France, Consisting of Seven Stars on Each Sleeve and Four Rows of Oak
Leaves on His Cap.]

The business, military and executive, of seeing that the armistice
terms were fulfilled, was tremendous. Much of it devolved upon him and
made inconceivably great requisitions on that genius he has "for the
command of enormous material difficulties"--a genius he first displayed
in getting the Ninth Army across the Marne in pursuit of the fleeing
Germans, in September, 1914; and which he further evidenced in every
succeeding phase, beginning with the reconstitution of all the forces
fighting on the Yser.

The armistice period was a period of extreme demands on him. In it
there was scant opportunity to go here or there with his triumphant
armies. His work in the field, as a commanding general, had
practically ceased with his removal from the Ninth Army after little
more than a month of such command. From the time he took up his
headquarters on the hill at Cassel, he became "a desk man"; it was no
longer his function to execute orders; thenceforth he had the far more
trying duty of issuing orders--a truly awful responsibility and one
which demands much solitude, much soul-searching as well as
map-pondering and other weighing of the ponderable which is so easily
off-set by the imponderable, the unguessable.

There are few situations possible in life in which a man could be set
apart with his soul and have so much demanded of his communings as was
demanded of Foch from October, 1914, on to October, 1918. Every
decision he made involved lives--hundreds and thousands or hundreds of
thousands of lives--and not one pang of what must be suffered for each
life laid down was strange to him; his only son was among the first to
die for France and human liberties; and one of his daughters was
widowed; the home he "left in the joyousness of a midsummer Sunday" was
desolate, and it stood forever to him as a symbol of the homes in
France and latterly, in the lands of all the Allies, with whose
best-beloved he made this or that move in the war to preserve
civilization. Nor were the lives he staked all that were involved;
there were all that were incidentally menaced if his strategy
failed--all that must suffer immediately and all that must suffer
ultimately under the heel of the brute if the brute were not destroyed.

A man who has live