Commission's Report

At a mid-morning hour last week, a crowd collected on the left bank of the Seine, scurried along the Quai d'Orsay, hung about the Ministere des Affairs fitrangeres or French Foreign Office. Up the steps was walking the Marquess of Crewe, British Ambassador to France. "Le voila," cried a voice, choking down a morsel of the yard of bread which he carried under his arm. "C'est le rol George." "Non, non," re- sponded another, "c'est I'ambassadeur britannique." "Je vous dis. ..." The honking of an automobile horn interrupted the incipient altercation. Out of the car stepped a man dressed in the sky-blue uniform of a French officer; on his head was a cap with a dome en- circled by hoops of gold. Evidently he was a Marshal of France. The crowd, surer of its ground, instantly recognized the Marshal and the air became thick with Vive le marechal! Five le generalissime!

Inside the Quai d'Orsay, in a gilded council chamber, a group of men awaited the coming of Marshal Foch and Premier Edouard Herriot. They were the Ambassadors and Ministers of the late Allied Powers and had come for a meeting of the Council of Ambassadors*, which was to consider a report from the Inter-Allied Military Commission /- of which Marshal Foch is Chairman.

Presently a number of chairs skidded slightly along the soft carpet as the sitters stood up to welcome the Premier and the Marshal. Premier Herriot, marching to the head of a long council table, requested the company to be seated. Marshal Foch placed a large portfolio of documents on the table and sat down.

Premier Herriot, as Chairman, called the meeting to order and stated that the Council had been convoked to hear a report from Marshal Foch on the state of German armaments as discovered by the Military Commission toward the end of last year. He called upon the Marshal to read his report.

Lord Crewe, the British Ambassador, half turned in his seat, propped his head on the table with one hand, tugged his moustache with the other, gazed expectantly at the Marshal. The other Ambassadors and Ministers sprawled in restful positions. Premier Herriot puffed his pipe.

The main facts which the Marshal dwelt upon in his eleven-page summary of the 380-page report of the Military Commission were:

1) That the old Imperial General Staff is still in existence.

2) That, despite the fact that the Treaty of Versailles prescribes for Germany a Reichswehr (Defense Force) of 100,000 men, Germany maintains by a system of short-term enlistments an effective Reserve estimate at 500,000.

3) That a certain amount of war material in excess of treaty limits was discovered.

4) That the German Government has passed no legislation limiting the armed forces of the German Republic in accordance with the Treaty of Versailles.

5) That a police force (Sicherheltspolizei, Public Safety Police, also known as the Green Police) of 150,000 men is kept on a military footing.

The Marshal therefore suggested that a treaty of security for France should be negotiated with British Powers (see INTERNATIONAL). Lord Crewe, British Ambassador to France, blocked further discussion with the cryptic remark that the Marshal's report did not constitute what was wanted. It was subsequently agreed by the assembled Ambassadors that M. Foch should prepare another report setting forth categorically the extent of Germany's violations of the disarmament provisions of the Treaty and make specific recommendations to oblige Germany to fulfill her technical defaultations.

Ferdinand Foch, like his soldier colleagues Marshal Joffre and General Castelnau, is from the Midi (South---not to be confused with the feminine midinette). It was at Tarbes in Gascony, under the shade of the Pyrenees, at 10 o'clock on the night of Oct. 2, 1851, that the future generalissimo of the Entente Armies was born. It was two months before Prince Louis Napoleon made his famed coup d'etat.

The Foches had long been in the wool trade. The grandfather, Dominique Foch (1733-1804), in addition to increasing his fortune from wool, had busied himself giving practical expression to his enthusiasm for Napoleon, after whom he christened his son (Marshal Foch's father) Bertrand Jules Napoleon. Foch pere did not continue in the wool business but, as the French say, entra dans I'Administration; in other words, he became a civil servant. In 1850, having married Marie Sophie Jacqueline Dupre, he was appointed by President Louis Napoleon Secretaire General de la Prefecture at Tarbes. Next year, to M. and Mme. Foch was born their third child, a boy whom they christened Ferdinand.

Ferdinand Foch did not revert to the wool business, but he shared his grandfather's enthusiasm for the great Napoleon whom he was never tired of studying. From the days of his early education at the lycee de Tarbes until his actual entrance into the Ecole Polytechnique at Paris, Ferdinand Foch studied hard to become a soldier.

In 1870, before he had left the College de Saint-Clement at Metz, the Franco-Prussian War broke out and, like young Joffre and Castelnau, he served France's lost cause. The next year, he went back to Metz and, in July, passed the entrance examinations for the Polytechnique at Nancy, which town was still occupied by the Germans. At the Polytechnique he was a classmate of Joffre, a few months his junior. It is not certain if they were close friends.

Much has been written about Marshal Foch in the War; how when he became 65 years of age in 1916, he was retired, as is usual with French Army officers of his rank and age; how, a year later, he was appointed to supreme command of the French Army in succession to General Nivelle-an appointment for which MM. Painleve and Clemenceau still claim the credit; how he became generalissimo of the Allied Armies on the Western Front at a time of acute stress; how his expert strategy succeeded in routing the Germans and how Premier Clemenceau recommended President Poincare to make him a Marshal of France, the pinnacle of a French soldier's fame* His last great act took place at 5 A. M. on the morning of Nov. 11, 1918. He received the German delegates in his railway car at Senlis and dictated the terms of the Armistice.

Although he had won the War by virtue of holding the unified command of all the Entente armies fighting in France, Marshal Foch was deprived of any power at the Paris Peace Conference. He could make speeches, say what ought to be done and what ought not to be done, but that was all. With all his might he counselled France to extend her northeast frontier to the historic and natural boundary of the Rhine; but the anti-Catholic Clemenceau, no lover of Catholic Foch, would not listen. Indeed, Clemenceau would not listen to much more that the Marshal said.

Marshal Foch survived these ordeals with a name that suffered no diminution of its greatness, as his visit to the U. S. and Canada in 1921 so well testified. His position today is in the nature of a technical adviser to the Allied Governments on military matters arising out of the Versailles Treaty and as such he is Chairman of the Inter-Allied Military Commission. Although he is in active service (as are all Marshals of France) at the age of 73, he is not Commander-in-Chief of the French Army; that honor belonging to Marshal Petain.

In appearance, the Marshal is slight, supple, short with the bandied legs of a cavalryman. His blue eyes, luminous, still retain much of their flash and his mental faculties are alert. He is difficult to converse with, being by nature taciturn, a strange virtue in a Gascon; but when he has a subject in hand to discuss, he begins willingly and almost invariably prefaces his remarks with "Let's get down to business." His aunt says of him: "I always wait until Ferdinand has chewed his third cigar before I look for him to come out of his thoughts and talk to us."

Like his comrade General Castelnau (whom many say is the greater soldier), Marshal Foch is a devout Catholic, but unlike him he does not mix in politics. M. Castelnau has been an administrator, a tactician. Foch is the theorist, the strategist. Castelnau organized the mobilization system that worked so wonderfully for France at the begin- ning of the War; he saved Nancy, which Foch was apparently unable to do; he saved Verdun, which Petain could not do. Foch became the greater general because, although a Catholic, he kept his political opinions to himself, which Castelnau did not.

--The Council of Ambassadors is composed of the Allied Ambassadors accredited for the time being to the President of the French Republic, meeting under the chairmanship of the French Minister of Foreign Affairs (at the present time Premier Edouard Herriot). It has been called "a body of vague authority and sporadic vitality."

/- The Inter-Allied Military Commission was appointed in 1919 by the Supreme War Council to see that Germany observed the disarmament provisions of the Treaty of Versailles. --The present French Marshals are: Joffre, Foch, Lyautey, Fayolle, Franchet, d'Esperey, Petain,