ection of it, and take a million prisoners. Is there any
condition which, in the opinion of any of you, could be imposed upon the
enemy then, more conclusive than those of the armistice?"

No one could think of anything that might add a jot to the completeness
of Germany's subjugation.

"Then, gentlemen," answered the Commander-in-Chief, "we will proceed with
the armistice. When all is won that can be won for the safety and honor
of France and her Allies, I cannot for the sake of prestige or
gratification or personal glory, order action that would cost the life of
any parents' young son, any little child's father. I am a bereaved
father. I think of the fathers and mothers whom further fighting must
bereave. The enveloping advance which our armies could make in ten to
fourteen days would cost us thousands of lives, many maimed men. If
those things must be to bring the triumph of Right, we can bear them
again as we have borne them these years past. But not for any other
reason!"

"The German high command," he said later, at Treves, "was not ignorant of
the fact that it faced a colossal disaster. When it surrendered,
everything was prepared for an offensive in which it would infallibly
have succumbed. The Germans were lost. They capitulated. That is the
whole story."

The German plenipotentiaries arrived at the French front at nine o'clock
on the evening of November 7, and were escorted to the Chateau Francfort
to spend the night. The next morning they were taken to Rethondes in the
forest of Compiegne. There Foch (whose headquarters were at Semis,
twenty-two miles nearer Paris) awaited them in his special train.

I may be quite wrong about his reason for receiving the German envoys in
a railway carriage. But my surmise about it is that he did not want any
fixed place associated with Germany's humiliation until those empowered
to act for the defunct empire of William I came to the Gallery of Mirrors
at Versailles and there, where the German empire had been proclaimed,
witnessed the formal degradation before the representatives of all
civilization of their nation that was built on the principle that Might
is Right.

Next to this in poetic justice would have been to summon those
plenipotentiaries before him at Senlis where their troops had committed
such insensate horrors in September, 1914. But for reasons of his own
(which we may be sure had nothing to do with courtesy) Foch went part way
to meet them