Ferdinand Foch's most famous battlefield message may never have been sent
Centre giving way, right flank falling back, so attack: that defiant report from the marshes of the Marne in 1914 came to symbolise French defiance and Ferdinand Foch's leadership, yet there is little evidence the signal was ever sent. His famous warning about Versailles is probably apocryphal too.
Foch was born in Tarbes, in the foothills of the Pyrenees, on 2 October 1851, into a modest and devout Catholic family. A Jesuit teacher in Metz judged him a geometric mind made for the Polytechnique, and he duly went there after enlisting at 19 during the Franco-Prussian War, in a regiment that never saw combat. His brother became a Jesuit priest, which may have slowed Foch's promotion under an anti-clerical republic.
His real influence began in the classroom. Teaching at the École Supérieure de Guerre and later running it, he revived interest in French military history and pressed the Clausewitzian idea that the will to win comes first, publishing his lectures in 1903 and 1904. He warned that reckless attack brings ruinous losses, but successors twisted his teaching into a cult of the all-out offensive, and his books were later blamed for assaults that pushed the French army toward mutiny in 1917.
War tested him personally and professionally. His only son Germain was killed in the frontier battles of 1914. Commanding the new Ninth Army on the Marne, he held off a German breakthrough and was hailed at liberated Châlons, where he answered thanks with a line from the psalms giving glory to God. Britain's Sir John French called him the best general in the world, while William Robertson dismissed him as a talkative professor.
Sidelined to Italy after the disappointing Somme, Foch returned as the German spring offensive broke in 1918 and was appointed commander of all Allied armies on 26 March. Coordinating French, British and American forces, he halted the advance at the Second Marne, became Marshal of France and directed the counter-offensive that won the war. He accepted Germany's armistice request on 11 November 1918, yet considered the eventual peace far too soft. He died in 1929.
Source: Ferdinand Foch
