The attitude of Foch toward praise and plaudits and personal glory is, it seems to me, one of the supremely great things about him.  I cannot imagine him “ducking” shyly away from any place where he knew he ought to for fear of salvos of acclaim; it would be as unsoldierly to him to dodge cheers as to flee from battle, if that way his duty lay.  And, similarly, I cannot imagine him going anywhere to gratify his personal feelings and collect the praises due him, if there was an urgent reason for his being somewhere else.

[Illustration:  Ferdinand Foch.  Showing His Insignia as a Marshal of France, Consisting of Seven Stars on Each Sleeve and Four Rows of Oak Leaves on His Cap.]

The business, military and executive, of seeing that the armistice terms were fulfilled, was tremendous.  Much of it devolved upon him and made inconceivably great requisitions on that genius he has “for the command of enormous material difficulties”—­a genius he first displayed in getting the Ninth Army across the Marne in pursuit of the fleeing Germans, in September, 1914; and which he further evidenced in every succeeding phase, beginning with the reconstitution of all the forces fighting on the Yser.

The armistice period was a period of extreme demands on him.  In it there was scant opportunity to go here or there with his triumphant armies.  His work in the field, as a commanding general, had practically ceased with his removal from the Ninth Army after little more than a month of such command.  From the time he took up his headquarters on the hill at Cassel, he became “a desk man”; it was no longer his function to execute orders; thenceforth he had the far more trying duty of issuing orders—­a truly awful responsibility and one which demands much solitude, much soul-searching as well as map-pondering and other weighing of the ponderable which is so easily off-set by the imponderable, the unguessable.

There are few situations possible in life in which a man could be set apart with his soul and have so much demanded of his communings as was demanded of Foch from October, 1914, on to October, 1918.  Every decision he made involved lives—­hundreds and thousands or hundreds of thousands of lives—­and not one pang of what must be suffered for each life laid down was strange to him; his only son was among the first to die for France and human liberties; and one of his daughters was widowed; the home he “left in the joyousness of a midsummer Sunday” was desolate, and it stood forever to him as a symbol of the homes in France and latterly, in the lands of all the Allies, with whose best-beloved he made this or that move in the war to preserve civilization.  Nor were the lives he staked all that were involved; there were all that were incidentally menaced if his strategy failed—­all that must suffer immediately and all that must suffer ultimately under the heel of the brute if the brute were not destroyed.

A man who has lived thus for more than four years, sharing the awfulness of his burden only with Almighty God, must needs have passed to a spiritual plane whereon such self-considerations as still sway the rest of us have ceased to obtrude themselves.