ught said: Foch. So the
redoubtable old radical and anti-clerical summoned General Foch.

"I offer you command of the School of War."

"I thank you," Foch replied, "but you are doubtless unaware that one of
my brothers is a Jesuit."

"I know it very well," was Clemenceau's answer. "But you make good
officers, and that is the only thing which counts."

Thus was foreshadowed, in these two great men, that spirit of "all for
France" which, under the civil leadership of one and the military
leadership of the other, was to save the country and the world.

In 1911 Foch, at 60, was given command of the Thirteenth division at
Chaumont, just above the source of the Marne. On December 17, 1912, he
was placed at the head of the Eighth Army Corps, at Bourges. And on
August 23, 1913, he took command of the Twentieth corps at Nancy.

"When," says Marcel Knecht, "we in Nancy heard that Foch had been
chosen to command the best troops in France, the Twentieth Army Corps,
pride of our capital, everybody went wild with enthusiasm."

It is M. Knecht who tells us about the visit to General Foch at Nancy,
in the spring of 1914, of three British generals whose presence there
Foch utilized for two purposes: He showed them what he was doing to
strengthen Nancy's defensibility, and thereby urged upon them France's
conviction that an attack by Germany was imminent and unavoidable; and
he utilized the occasion to show the Lorrainers his warm friendliness
for England--which Lorraine was inclined still to blame for the death
of Joan of Arc. Foch knew that German propagandists were continually
fanning this resentment against England. And he made it part of his
business to overcome that prejudice by showing the honor in which he
held Great Britain's eminent soldiers.

XI

FORTIFYING FRANCE WITH GREAT PRINCIPLES

So much has been said about France's unreadiness for the war that it is
easy for those who do not know what the real situation was to suppose
that the French were something akin to fools. For twenty centuries the
Germans had been swarming over the Rhine in preying, ravaging hordes,
and France had been beating them back to save her national life. That
they would swarm again, more insolent and more rapacious than ever
after their triumph of 1870, was not to be doubted. Everyone in France
who had the slightest knowledge of the spirit that has animated the
Hohenzollern empire knew its envy of France, its cupidity of Franc