. He rose, when he had finished his
entry among those epoch-making memoranda, and received his visitors.
He had but a few minutes to give, yet he realized the importance of the
occasion and treated it accordingly. These men were to send to
millions of people in the great democracies of France, Britain and
America their pen pictures of the man just invested with the greatest
military responsibility any man in the world's history has ever borne.
Battles must be fought, but also those people had a right to such a
sense of participation as only their press could give them; it was
their issue; their attitude toward it was the foundation of their
nation's morale. Foch has neither time nor taste for talk about
himself, but he is no war autocrat; he is, as he constantly reiterates,
a son of France, defending human liberties. He might not have much
time to give journalists, but it is not in him to minimize their place
in a world where the will of the majority prevails and the press does
much to shape that will.

His manner on that occasion was calm, unhurried, but very direct, to
the point.

"Well, gentlemen," said he, "our affairs are not going badly; are they?
The boche has been halted since March 27. He has, doubtless,
encountered some obstacle. We have stopped him. Now we shall endeavor
to do better. I do not see that there is anything more to say.

"But as to yourselves, keep at your task. It is a time when everyone
ought to work steadfastly. Work with your pens. We will go on working
with our arms."

"I regret," wrote Lieutenant d'Entraygues in the Paris _Temps_, "only
one thing: that all the people of France were not able to see and hear
this soldier as he spoke to us. They would know why it is not possible
to doubt our victory."

It was probably about that time that Major Darnley Stuart-Stephens
wrote of Foch, for the _English Review_.

"The man who has been consecrated by destiny to the saving from Moloch
of this globe's civilization, is he who will prove once more that in
the conflict between the finely tempered sword and the finely tempered
brain, it is the mental asset that will prevail."

Major Stuart-Stephens had studied the "mental assets" of Ferdinand Foch.

"Now and again at his lectures." he wrote, "I have noticed that
far-away look of the mystic in his eyes that I remember so well in
those of that other soldier-saint, Charles Gordon."

It was that spiritual greatness in Foch which everyo