Foch takes command in Flanders

The British chronicle of the war records under 8 October 1914 that General Ferdinand Foch was appointed to command the Allied forces, except the Belgians, defending the Flanders coast. In reality the matter was more complicated. Foch had received his mission a few days earlier, and he never had formal authority over the British and Belgian armies. Even so, over the following weeks it was he who in practice directed the defence of Flanders.

The mission of 4 October

On the afternoon of 4 October the Commander-in-Chief of the French Army, General Joseph Joffre, summoned Foch, commander of the Ninth Army, to his headquarters at Romilly-sur-Seine. He explained that the attempts to outflank the German wing in the north had not succeeded, and that the French commanders in that area were hesitating and thinking of retreat. The British army was also moving north from the Aisne, and cooperation with the Belgian army, still holding out in Antwerp, would soon have to be arranged. Joffre ordered Foch to go north at once, take over the direction of the French operations and coordinate them with the Allies. Foch was given the title of deputy commander-in-chief.

That same evening Foch handed over the Ninth Army to General Humbert and at 10 p.m. left Châlons by car. On the morning of 5 October he was already with General Noël de Castelnau at Breteuil, and then he went on to General de Maud’huy, who was defending Arras. He set up his headquarters at Doullens, halfway between the two armies. As he recalled, in the first 57 hours of his new mission he covered more than 850 kilometres.

Which date?

Sources date Foch’s appointment differently. Foch himself in his memoirs and the French military archives give 4 October. The same date is taken as the beginning of the grouping of French armies in the north, later called the Provisional Northern Army Group. The British official history states that at first Foch acted as “delegate of the Commander-in-Chief”, and that on 11 October he became commander of the Northern Group of Armies. The date of 8 October, given by the British chronicle and some of Foch’s biographers, may be connected with his first contacts with the British. It was precisely then that the corps of the British Expeditionary Force, transferred from the Aisne, began to arrive in Flanders.

The meeting at Doullens

According to Foch’s memoirs, on 8 October he was visited at Doullens by the commander of the British Expeditionary Force, Field Marshal John French, who had just moved his headquarters to Abbeville. He was accompanied by French’s deputy chief of staff, General Henry Wilson, an old friend of Foch, who before the war, as Director of Military Operations at the War Office, had prepared the cooperation of the two armies. Foch wrote that French brought news of the fall of Antwerp and asked how to respond to an event that delivered Belgium into German hands. The British official history, by contrast, mentions a conference between Foch and French at Doullens on 10 October, when Antwerp had actually capitulated. It was then agreed that the French and British forces would try to strike east together, and that the British would move north of Lille. Foch may, years later, have merged two meetings in his memory.

Foch wasted no time. As early as 7 October he gave orders to prepare Dunkirk for defence and to flood the surrounding land with water from the canals and, if necessary, also from the sea. He also sent Territorial brigades to cover the detraining of British troops around Saint-Omer.

Authority without authority

Contrary to what the British chronicle suggests, Foch did not command the British or the Belgians. The British official history stresses that formally he could only send their commanders copies of the orders issued to the French troops and propose joint action. In practice, however, his influence was enormous. French, and after the Belgian army withdrew to the Yser also King Albert I, generally accepted his proposals. In the heavy fighting at Ypres units of three armies fought side by side, and Foch moved French reinforcements to wherever the front was most threatened.

On 24 October Foch moved his headquarters closer to the front, to Cassel, from where he directed the fighting in Flanders until it died down in November. The experience of cooperation with the Allies in the autumn of 1914 was to weigh on his later career. In March 1918, during the great German offensive, at a conference in the same Doullens he was entrusted with coordinating the operations of all the Allied armies on the Western Front, and soon afterwards he was appointed their commander-in-chief.