In conclusion

Summary

The postwar damage to Foch’s reputation among the Allies shows how little real understanding there was of Foch’s achievements and, more generally, of the role of supreme commander. There was no body of dispatches, no battle plans, no series of orders to Allied commanders to show what Foch had done as Allied commander-in-chief. His 1918 ‘directives’ are merely generalities. His methods – tact and diplomacy – proved ineffective in preserving his achievements for posterity. The damage began with Foch’s attempts to enshrine the Rhine frontier in France’s security arrangements in the peace treaty; his failure to influence either the treaty or the postwar defence debates reflects the limits on the supreme command.

Foch never ceased his criticisms of the Versailles treaty. On 18 December 1921, returning to France from America, Foch gave an interview to French journalist Stéphane Lauzanne, who cited him as saying: ‘The treaty is a bad treaty, bad because it does not give to France its guarantees of security and its guarantees of payment … I said it, and repeated it, but no one listened.’ A few days later, the New York Times reported the attempts to hose down reaction to this interview when Foch reached France: ‘the Marshal’s words and allusions had been incorrectly interpreted and … what he had said about M. Clemenceau deserving to be hauled before a high court was in the nature of a joke’.