Brunswick and his fellow generals were to banquet with the King of
Prussia at the Tuileries. And the soldiers were bent upon the cafes of
the Palais Royal.
Foch showed his classes how Dumouriez, who had been training his raw
troops of disorganized France at Valenciennes, dashed with them into
the Argonne to intercept Brunswick; how this and that happened which I
will not repeat here because it is merely technical; and then how the
soldiers of the republic, rallied by the cry, "The country is in
danger," and thrilled by "The Marseillaise" (written only five months
before, but already it had changed the beat of nearly every heart in
France), made such a stand that it not only halted Prussia and her
allies, but so completely broke their conquering spirit that without
firing another shot they took themselves off beyond the Rhine.
"We," Foch used to tell his students, "are the successors of the
revolution and the empire, the inheritors of the art, new-born upon the
field of Valmy to astonish the old Europe, to surprise in particular
the Duke of Brunswick, the pupil of Frederick the Great, and to tear
from Goethe, before the immensity of a fresh horizon, this profound
cry: 'I tell you, from this place and this day comes a new era in the
history of the world!'"
It is that new era which Foch typifies--that new era which his
adversaries, deaf to Goethe's cry and blind to Goethe's vision, have
not yet realized.
Pages:
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73