Anurag Jain's Blog
Saturday, April 24, 2004

Nice historical quote and some trivia!

The French general Ferdinand Foch (1851-1929) said this on Sep 5, 1914 (some accounts say Sep 8) during first World War in a message sent to General Joffre during Battle of the Marne:

"Ma droite est enfoncée, ma gauche cède-tout va bien-j'attaque!"
("My center is giving way, my right is in retreat; situation excellent. I shall attack." or "My right gives way, my left yields, everything's fine-I shall attack!")

Quoted in: B. H. Liddell Hart, Reputations, "Ferdinand Foch" (1928). This was in all likelihood apocryphal, originating in Foch's repeated refrain to his troops, Attaquez! According to Liddell Hart, his insistence decimated the companies under his command, and the eventual German withdrawal astonished the exhausted French troops.

Foch's slogan "j'attaque" became the war-cry of for the struggling French nation against Nazis. When the war ended, an armistice was signed between the Allied Forces and the Axis. In the signing ceremony which was held in a railway coach, General Foch was one of the key people present. Later, in World War II, when Germany defeated France, Hitler insisted on signing the surrender agreement in the same railway coach and thats where they actually did it.
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