he enemy has
no weak point?"

"If the enemy has no weak point," returned the commander, with a gleam
of the eye and an aggressive tilt of the chin, "make one."

The commander was Foch--Ferdinand Foch--who has suddenly flashed before
the world as the greatest leader in the French Army after Joffre, and
who in that remark at Nancy gave the index to the basic quality of his
character as a General. General Foch is today in command of the northern
armies of France, besides being the chief Lieutenant and confidant of
Joffre. Joffre conceives; Foch, master tactician, executes. He finds the
weak point; if there is no weak point, he creates or seeks to create
one.

When King George of England was at the front in France recently he
conferred the Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath--the highest military
distinction in the form of an order within the gift of the British
Crown--on two Frenchmen. Joffre was one. The other was Foch.

"Foch? Foch? Who is Foch?" asked the British public, perplexed, when the
newspapers printed the news of the granting of this signal honor.

"Foch is the General who was at the head of the French military mission
which followed our army manoeuvres three years ago," replied a few men
who happened to have been intimately acquainted with those manoeuvres.

"But what has that to do with the Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath?"
asked John Bull. And the manoeuvre experts not being able to reply, the
English newspapers demanded from their correspondents in France an
answer to the query, "Who is Foch? Why the Grand Cross?"

And the main features of the answers to that query were these:

Foch is the "greatest strategist in Europe and the humblest," in the
words of Joffre.

Foch is the hero of the Marne, the man who perceived on Sept. 9 that
there must be a gap between the Prussian Guard and the Saxon Army, and
who gathered enough artillery to crush the guard in the St. Gond marshes
and forced both the Prussians and the Saxons, now separated, to retreat.

Foch is the man of Ypres, the commander who was in general control of
the successful fight made by the French and the British, aided by the
Belgians, to prevent the Germans from breaking through to Calais.

Foch, in short, is one of the military geniuses of the war, so record
observers at the front. He is a General who has something of the
Napoleonic in his composition; the dramatic in war is for him--secrecy
and suddenness, gigantic and daring movem