The Sun 42 WYNDHAM STREET, AUCKLAND THURSDAY, MARCH 21, 1929. THE GREATEST SOLDIER

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 618, 21 March 1929, Page 8

The Sun 42 WYNDHAM STREET, AUCKLAND THURSDAY, MARCH 21, 1929. THE GREATEST SOLDIER

WAIi historians have noted that the late General Foch, Marshal of France, bore a surname probably derived from “fioch,” a local word meaning fire. If so, he had more than a reasonable share of the searching fire that tests the mettle of men. Twice in an arduous lifetime of seventy-eight years the greatest soldier of all nations in his own long day fought for his great nation against its ancient and formidable enemy. On each occasion the warfare was desperate (md ruthless, but the results were extremely different. In the first war with Germany, Ferdinand Foch was merely a lieutenant, a scholarly stripling whose place in the sharp conflict was relatively modest and even obscure, though his service was marked by a merit which held the promise of distinctive future achievement.

Victory tv as against his country, and the fire of Prussia ultimately swept over the noble ridge of St. Cloud until the conquerors arrogantly bivouacked amidst the beauty of Paris, a city of liglit for once in its vivid history deprived of its gaiety. And in the Palace of Versailles liarsh terms of peace were dictated and accepted, and the new German Empire proclaimed in the flush of militaristic triumph. Nearly half a century later, in the same shrine of regal and military glory, Field-Marshal Foch, supreme army leader of twenty-seven allied and associated nations, was the greatest of them all at the Peace Conference, and dominated with his quiet and powerful personality an international assembly which saw the shuddering- representatives of a broken Empire, then and noiv a Republic, accept the terms of surrender and defeat.

Those who then looked upon the chiselled, impassive face of the Marshal of France, the soldier for whom the magnificent new- title Generalissimo had to he found in order to fit the supremacy of his guiding power, could not fail to imagine that in the heart of the modest man there was a glowing fire of triumph.

Yet, through the full length of his splendid career Marshal Fpch was never so much a soldier as he was a teacher of great soldiers, a master of strategy, a professor and a precisian of warfare. The motto of his native town in Brittany was, “If they bite you, bite hack.” This he adopted as his own in the profession he adorned with the lustre of immortality, though, on occasion, he varied it in practice to the principle of biting first so that the backbite of the enemy would he less penetrating. As Professor of Military History, Strategy and Applied Tactics, the wise teacher of soldiers gave full vent to the value of his longstudies. It 3vas his habit to speak without gesture, but with a cold, clear logic and mathematical exactness which drove home the lesson beyond any chance of its being lost on students. Indeed, it was this faculty of penetrative acuteness of understanding and vision that enabled him to disconcert the political members of the Paris Peace Conference, when he critically tore the cumbersome treaty to rags. But not even Foch was strong enough to endow statesmen with clear wisdom. Observers of Foch’s life and career have said that he founded no new school of war, but rather breathed new life into the dry hones of what once had been the great school of Napoleon. That phase of his service and his outstanding example of the educated soldier may be left to military academicians for exact determination. What the laymen of all nations have observed with admiration ancl will remember with gratitude as long as memory lasts is the simpler truth that Ferdinand Foch was the man for the most terrible test of generals in modern warfare, and met it without a flaw in his judgment or weakness in his character. And now, the supreme soldier of our time has found peace at last, leaving to his own nation and the world a glorious fame which for ever will perpetuate his memory among friends and foes. He has won the tranquil reward of noble service and the enduring peace of a bivouac on higher fields.