Foch Quotes

The most powerful weapon on earth is the human soul on fire.

None but a coward dares to boast that he has never known fear.

My centre is giving way, my right is in retreat, situation excellent. I attack.

When Marshal Foch heard of the signing of the Peace Treaty of Versailles he observed with singular accuracy: “This is not Peace. It is an Armistice for twenty years.

Mon centre cède, ma droite recule. Situation excellente, j'attaque.

Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value.

To think meant to give room for freedom of initiative, for the imponderable to win over the material, for will to demonstrate its power over circumstance.

Victory is a thing of the will.

Regulations are all very well for drill, but in the hour of danger they are no more use. You have to learn to think.

We're at a dinner party in an apartment on Rue Paul Valéry between Avenue Foch and Avenue Victor Hugo and it's all rather subdued since a small percentage of the invited guests were blown up in the Ritz yesterday. For comfort people went shopping, which is understandable even if they bought things a little too enthusiastically. Tonight it's just wildflowers and white lilies, just W's Paris bureau chief, Donna Karan, Aerin Lauder, Ines de la Fressange and Christian Louboutin, who thinks I snubbed him and maybe I did but maybe I'm past the point of caring. Just Annette Bening and Michael Stipe in a tomato-red wig. Just Tammy on heroin, serene and glassy-eyed, her lips swollen from collagen injections, beeswax balm spread over her mouth, gliding through the party, stopping to listen to Kate Winslet, to Jean Reno, to Polly Walker, to Jacques Grange. Just the smell of shit, floating, its fumes spreading everywhere. Just another conversation with a chic sadist obsessed with origami. Just another armless man waving a stump and whispering excitedly, "Natasha's coming!" Just people tan and back from the Ariel Sands Beach Club in Bermuda, some of them looking reskinned. Just me, making connections based on fear, experiencing vertigo, drinking a Woo-Woo.

I am hard pressed on my right; my center is giving way; situation excellent. I am attacking.” General Ferdinand Foch

They stand as living proof of Marshal Ferdinand Foch’s words “The most powerful weapon on earth is the human soul on fire.

I had read the usual books (too many books), Clausewitz and Jomini, Mahan and Foch, had played at Napoleon’s campaigns, worked at Hannibal’s tactics, and the wars of Belisarius, like any other man at Oxford; but I had never thought myself into the mind of a real commander compelled to fight a campaign of his own.

You're mistaking this period when every nut is an individualist for a period of individualism. Wilson has only been powerful when he has represented; he's had to compromise over and over again. Just as soon as Trotsky and Lenin take a definite, consistent stand they'll become merely two-minute figures like Kerensky. Even Foch hasn't half the significance of Stonewall Jackson. War used to be the most individualistic pursuit of man, and yet the popular heroes of the war had neither authority nor responsibility: Guynemer and Sergeant York. How could a schoolboy make a hero of Pershing? A big man has no time really to do anything but just sit and be big.

the most powerful weapon on earth is the human soul on fire

Hard pressed on my right. My center is yielding. Impossible to maneuver. Situation excellent. I am attacking.

In Avenue Foch, however, in the Rue des Saussaies, we would hear from neighboring buildings, all day long and late into the night, cries of suffering and terror. There was nobody in Paris who did not have a relative or friend arrested or deported or shot. It appeared that there were hidden holes in the city and that it emptied itself through these holes as if from an internal and incurable hemorrhage.

The truth is, no study is possible on the battlefield. One does there simply what one can in order to apply what one knows. Therefore, in order to do even a little, one has already to know a great deal, and to know it well.

Foch never for a moment thought about the easy ways of bringing his name before the public and the political world, or even about acquiring a reputation for military insight among the chiefs of the French army. He never posed as a central figure at public functions; he was never interviewed by the press; he made no use of the professional reviews to bring his name before military readers. Ile never published a line until his chiefs suggested the publication of his lectures at the Staff College. From the day when he received his first commission he was a hard-working student of war, patiently preparing himself to do his duty when the opportunity came, and meanwhile content to put all his energies into the work assigned to him. Success in the career of arms is not always associated with high personal character or with this modest pursuit of duty for its own sake.

The power of a society is determined by its victory over other societies in still larger finite games. Its most treasured memories are those of the heroes fallen in victorious battles with other societies. Heroes of lost battles are almost never memorialized. Foch has his monument, but not Petain; Lincoln, but not Jefferson Davis; Lenin, but not Trotsky.

Development," mind you—not just "advancement." For Foch is, and ever has been, the kind of man who would most abhor being advanced faster than he developed. He would infinitely rather be prepared for a promotion and fail to get it than get a promotion for which he was not thoroughly prepared. Nor is he the sort of individual who can comfortably deceive himself about his fitness. He sustains himself by no illusions of the variety: "If I had so-and-so to do, I'd probably get through as well as nine-tenths

Almost his entire comprehension of war is based upon men and the way they act under certain stress—not the way they might be expected to act, but the way they actually do act, and the way they can be led to act under certain stimulus of soul. For Ferdinand Foch wins victories with men's souls—not just with their flesh and blood, nor even with their brains. And to command men's souls it is necessary to understand them.

Foch made the men who sat under him love their work for the work's sake and not for its rewards. He fired them with an ardor for military art which made them feel that in all the world there is nothing so fascinating, so worth while, as knowing how to defend one's country when she needs defense. He was able, in peace times when the military spirit was little applauded and much decried, to give his students an enthusiasm for "preparedness" which flamed as high and burned as pure as that which ordinarily is lighted only by a great national rush to arms to save the country from ravage.

Force that is not dominated by spirit is vain force. Victory, in his belief, goes to those who merit it by the greatest strength of will and intelligence. It was his endeavor, always, to develop in the hundreds of officers who were his students, that dual strength in which it seemed to him that victory could only lie: moral and intellectual ability to perceive what ought to be done, and intellectual and moral ability to do it. In his mind, it is impossible to be intelligent with the brain alone. The Germans do not comprehend this, and therein, to Ferdinand Foch, lies the key to all their failures. He believes that each of us must think with our soul's aid—that is to say, with our imagination, our emotions, our aspiration—and employ our intelligence to direct our feeling. And he asks this combination not from higher officers alone, but from all their men down to the humblest in the ranks.

The indestructible might “of all the German tribes” would rise once more and the unquenched fires of warrior Prussia glow and burn again. But the Rhine, the broad, deep, swift-flowing Rhine, once held and fortified by the French Army, would be a barrier and a shield behind which France could dwell and breathe for generations. Very different were the sentiments and views of the English-speaking world, without whose aid France must have succumbed. The territorial provisions of the Treaty of Versailles left Germany practically intact. She still remained the largest homogeneous racial block in Europe. When Marshal Foch heard of the signing of the Peace Treaty of Versailles he observed with singular accuracy: “This is not Peace. It is an Armistice for twenty years.

France had been bled white by the war. The generation that had dreamed since 1870 of a war of revenge had triumphed, but at a deadly cost in national life-strength. It was a haggard France that greeted the dawn of victory. Deep fear of Germany pervaded the French nation on the morrow of their dazzling success. It was this fear that had prompted Marshal Foch to demand the Rhine frontier for the safety of France against her far larger neighbour. But the British and American statesmen held that the absorption of German-populated districts in French territory was contrary to the Fourteen Points and to the principles of nationalism and self-determination upon which the Peace Treaty was to be based.

new and more terrible cause of quarrel than the imperialism of czars and kaisers became apparent in Europe. The Civil War in Russia ended in the absolute victory of the Bolshevik Revolution. The Soviet armies which advanced to subjugate Poland were indeed repulsed in the Battle of Warsaw, but Germany and Italy nearly succumbed to Communist propaganda and designs. Hungary actually fell for a while under the control of the Communist dictator, Bela Kun. Although Marshal Foch wisely observed that “Bolshevism had never crossed the frontiers of victory,” the foundations of European civilisation trembled in the early post-war years. Fascism was the shadow or ugly child of Communism. While Corporal Hitler was making himself useful to the German officer class in Munich by arousing soldiers and workers to fierce hatred of Jews and Communists, on whom he laid the blame of Germany’s defeat, another adventurer, Benito Mussolini, provided Italy with a new theme of government which, while it claimed to save the Italian people from Communism, raised himself to dictatorial power. As Fascism sprang from Communism, so Nazism developed from Fascism. Thus were set on foot those kindred movements which were destined soon to plunge the world into even more hideous strife, which none can say has ended with their destruction.

It was the Franco procedure all over again, and among the conspirators were Marshal Pétain, the hero of Verdun, and General Weygand, who had been Foch’s chief of staff; also Chiappe, the Corsican head of the Paris police, and Doriot, former Communist leader said to have sold out his party and bought himself an estate in Belgium with money got from the Nazis. CSAR was the name of this group

It was the Franco procedure all over again, and among the conspirators were Marshal Pétain, the hero of Verdun, and General Weygand, who had been Foch’s chief of staff; also Chiappe, the Corsican head of the Paris police, and Doriot, former Communist leader said to have sold out his party and bought himself an estate in Belgium with money got from the Nazis. CSAR was the name of this group—Comité pour Secret Action Révolutiormaire—

Pienso, mientras escribo estas líneas, en la crítica que se hace, después de las batallas, a los planes estratégicos de vencidos y vencedores. Recuerdo frases del mariscal Foch:  «La victoria se obtiene siempre con residuos, con restos. Al anochecer de la batalla todos están muy fatigados, los vencedores igual que los vencidos, pero con una diferencia, que el vencedor tiene más obstinación, más fuerza moral que el vencido».  Y pensar que ellas fueron entonces tan ignorantes que no repararon en mi absurdo deseo: de que aquellos únicos vestigios morales, aquellos que pueden convertirnos en los vencedores, me fueran destruidos.

I’d become friendly with Tom Courtenay on Doctor Zhivago. He was an English actor, based in London, and didn’t want the hassle of navigating Paris alone. To make things simple, he moved in with Omar Sharif and me in the Avenue Foch apartment provided by the production. With angular features and a conventionally English look, Tom was young, sensitive, and an avid supporter of Hull City football club. While shooting in Paris, he would dart back to England whenever he could to see them play. Once, upon returning to Paris, he discovered assorted pubic hairs in his bedsheets—telltale evidence that one of Omar’s sleepovers had made use of his room. Tom was enraged. He confronted Omar, and their relationship almost didn’t survive. Never in all my life have I seen someone so angry.

The time of Kafka's novel is the time of a humanity that has lost its continuity with humanity, of a human­ity that no longer knows anything and no longer remembers anything and lives in cities without names where the streets are without names or with names dif­ferent from those they had yesterday, because a name is continuity with the past and people without a past are people without a name. ... The street Tamina was born on was called Schwerinova Street. That was during the war, when Prague was occupied by the Germans. Her father was born on Cernokostelecka Avenue. That was under Austria-Hungary. When her mother married her father and moved in there, it was Marshal Foch Avenue. That was after the 1914-1918 war. Tamina spent her child­hood on Stalin Avenue, and it was on Vinohrady Avenue that her husband picked her up to take her to her new home. And yet it was always the same street, they just kept changing its name, brainwashing it into a half-wit.

Those people in the park - you - me - everyone - the greatest mistake we made was to imagine something magical separated us from Ludendorff and Kitchener and Foch. Our leaders, you see. Well - Churchill and Hitler, for that matter! (LAUGHTER) Why, such men are just the butcher and the grocer—selling us meat and potatoes across the counter. That's what binds us together. They appeal to our basest instincts. The lowest common denominator. And then we turn around and call them extraordinary! (HERE SHE TAPPED THE TABLE, RATTLING THE SHERRY GLASSES) See what I mean? You have to be awfully careful how you define the extraordinary. Especially nowadays. Robert Ross was no Hitler. That was his problem.

Had Marshal Foch accepted Matthias Erzberger’s plea to stop the fighting on November 8 while negotiations were under way, likely, 6,750 lives would have been spared and nearly 15,000 maimed, crippled, burned, blinded, and otherwise injured men would instead have gone home whole. All this sacrifice was made over scraps of land that the Germans, under the armistice, were compelled to surrender within two weeks.

The railroad car stood in the midst of French villages that the war had effaced from the earth. The Germans were confronting an Allied leader who had learned of the death in battle of his only son and his daughter’s husband in a single day. Foch remained cold to all entreaties, reflecting not only his own fixedness but orders from his equally unforgiving superior, Prime Minister Clemenceau.

Before them stood a small, erect man who fixed them with a withering gaze, Marshal Ferdinand Foch. After cool introductions, Foch opened the proceedings with a question that left the Germans agape. “Ask these gentlemen what they want,” he said to his interpreter. When the Germans had recovered, Erzberger answered that they understood they had been sent to discuss armistice terms. Foch stunned them again: “Tell these gentlemen that I have no proposals to make.

The invention of the telephone was also dismissed at first. Sir William Preece, the chief engineer of the British Post Office famously declared, "The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys."[cxxxv] In 1911, Ferdinand Foch the future Commander-in-Chief of the Allied Armies in WWI said, "Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value.

Ferdinand Foch said, “The most powerful weapon on earth is the human soul on fire.” What a tragedy to leave this life without a flicker of a legacy, without a flame of a witness.

French general Ferdinand Foch said, “The most powerful weapon on earth is the human soul on fire.

General Foch was unwilling to commit troops in the numbers required to retake the lost ground. He had talked to his British counterpart of massive reinforcements but had ordered his subordinate, Putz, to carry out the attacks without anything approaching the strength required, in either infantry or artillery. Thus none of the French counterattacks had the slightest chance of success.

Sir John French, for his part, had co-operated fully with an uncharacteristic gullible acceptance of Foch’s promises. It had soon become evident that the roles had become reversed; the British were now expected to retake the lost ground assisted by the French. Sir John had evidently begun to realize this and had even opposed the idea. Yet every time he had met with the bombastic Foch he had come away committed to yet another hasty and ill-prepared attack.

Foch consideraba las cosas desde un punto de vista más amplio, como correspondía a su esfera superior, y Haig las miraba más de cerca: «Desempeña bien tu parte; en ella está toda la gloria».

In the series of great offensive pressures which Joffre delivered during the whole of the spring and autumn of 1915, the French suffered nearly 1,300,000 casualties. They inflicted upon the Germans in the same period and the same operations 506,000 casualties. They gained no territory worth mentioning, and no strategic advantages of any kind. This was the worst year of the Joffre régime. Gross as were the mistakes of the Battle of the Frontiers, glaring as had been the errors of the First Shock, they were eclipsed by the insensate obstinacy and lack of comprehension which, without any large numerical superiority, without adequate artillery or munitions, without any novel mechanical method, without any pretence of surprise or manœuvre, without any reasonable hope of victory, continued to hurl the heroic but limited manhood of France at the strongest entrenchments, at uncut wire and innumerable machine guns served with cold skill. The responsibilities of this lamentable phase must be shared in a subordinate degree by Foch, who under Joffre’s orders, but as an ardent believer, conducted the prolonged Spring offensive in Artois, the most sterile and prodigal of all.

Though a profound student of Clausewitz, Foch did not, like Clausewitz’s German successors, believe in a foolproof schedule of battle worked out in advance. Rather he taught the necessity of perpetual adaptability and improvisation to fit circumstances. “Regulations,” he would say, “are all very well for drill but in the hour of danger they are no more use.… You have to learn to think.” To think meant to give room for freedom of initiative, for the imponderable to win over the material, for will to demonstrate its power over circumstance.

Alexander the Great would have found it difficult to succeed in forcing a breach in the German line in 1914-1915, and the defeats Haig's armies suffered in 1916 and 1917 - those notorious disasters on the Somme and at Passchendaele - should not obscure the fact that it was Haig who commanded the British armies that spearheaded the Allied victory in 1918 and showed the other armies how this war should be fought; even General Foch admitted that.

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