“In a little office of the Hotel de Ville, a man is seated at a table.  His elbows are on a big military map.  A telephone is at his hand.  He waits—­to hear the results of orders he has given.  And while he waits he chews an unlighted cigar and divides his attention between the map and the clock—­an old Louis XVI timepiece with marble columns, which ticks off the minutes almost soundlessly.  How slowly its hands go round!  How interminable seems the wait for news!

“Someone knocks, and Colonel Weygand, chief of staff, enters; he has a paper in his hand:  ‘Telephoned from the Ninth army at 1.15 A.M.’ . . .

“The general has raised his head; his eyes are shining.

“‘Good! good!’

“His plans are working out successfully; the reinforcements he sent for have arrived in time.  There is nothing more he can do now; so he will go to bed.

“A last look at the map.  Then his eye-glasses, at the end of their string, are tucked away in the upper pocket of his coat.  The general puts on his black topcoat and his cap.

“In the hall, the gendarme on guard duty gets up, quickly, from the chair wherein he is dozing.

“The general salutes him with a brisk gesture, but with it he seems to say:  ‘Sleep on, my good fellow; I’m sorry to have disturbed you.’

“At the foot of the grand staircase, the sentry presents arms; and one of the staff officers joins the commander, to accompany him to the house of the notary who is extending him hospitality.

“A few hours later, very early in the morning, the general is back again at his office.”

Thus he was at Cassel, as he directed those operations on the Yser by which he checked the German attempt to reach Calais and Dunkirk, and revealed to the military world a new strategist of the first order.

By November 15 (six weeks after arriving in the north) Foch had the high command of the German army as completely thwarted in its design as it had been at the Marne.  It had fallen to Foch to defeat the German plan on the east (Lorraine), in the center (Marne) and on the west (Ypres).  And the consequences of this frustration that he dealt them in Flanders were calculated to be “at least equal to the victory of the Marne.”  Colonel Requin calls that Battle of the Yser “like a preface to the great victory of 1918.”

In the spring of 1915 Foch left Cassel and took up headquarters at Frevent, between Amiens and Doullens, whence he directed those engagements in Artois which demonstrated that though trench warfare was not the warfare he had studied and prepared for, and nearly all its problems were new, he was master of it not less than he would have been of a cavalry warfare.

In the autumn of 1915, Foch moved nearer to Amiens—­to the village of Dury in the immediate outskirts of the ancient capital of Picardy.  For the next chapter in his history was to be the campaign of the Somme including the first great offensive of France in the war, which, together with the Verdun defense, forced the Germans not only again to re-make their calculations, but to withdraw to the Hindenburg line.