Monsieur Foch

FOCH SPEAKS--Major Charles Bugnet --Dial ($3).

During his last eight years the late, great Foch was attended by Aide-de-Camp Bugnet, an efficient, obedient soldier, now an author who tries to reveal not Marshal Foch but Monsieur Foch. From the nature of the man as well as the Boswell, one could scarcely expect a record of daily life and opinions comparable in readability with, for example, Jean Jacques Brousson's record of Foch's brother-Academician, Anatole France. It was inevitable that people must learn that Foch's "private life was irreproachable" and that he considered "born believers" the world's happiest people. But it was not inevitable that a great nature's simplicity should have been made to seem dull. Author Bugnet can remember only five Foch anecdotes which seem to him worth telling. As for the Fochian philosophy--"Know what you will and do it. . . . One's value consists only in what one does"--it was, according to the Bugnet account, expressed only in countless bromides and repetitions.

This is the first, and one may hope worst, memoir of "the single individual who contributed most to the ending of the World War." If Foch was as Foch Speaks he was heroically inarticulate.