"Down the Ladder"

Below stairs in the dignified stone mansion of Marshal Ferdinand Foch, a group of Paris reporters completed, last week, their second month of fidgeting and fuming. The first month was the hardest. It climaxed in a duel between M. Georges Chapreau and M. le Marquis Henri de Sombrieul, both star reporters, who had rasped each other's nerves. However, since le Marquis fired into the ground, and M. Chapreau into the air--as Frenchmen will --the shots served happily to steady the nerves of all concerned. Last week the corps of reporters five was informed by the corps of physicians nine that quite possibly they would have to wait another two months, although of course they might not.

Above stairs lay the Generalissimo--the man who won the War if any one man did--dying by inches. Pathos was not in the simple room but instead a grand vitality, a dauntless courage.

They had called a priest, weeks ago, and the Generalissimo lived on. The Associated Press had reported "authoritatively" that he could live "one week or ten days at most," but already old Campaigner Ferdinand Foch had doubled that span. What matter if Death took him at the next clock-tick? Already he had fooled them all, and a man may call a joke a joke and die with all decorum and honor when he is 77.

Bare walls, and a plain French wooden bed. For 24 hours, last week, the Generalissimo tried out an "American bed"--with a crank and gadgets--then resumed his austere pallet. As he lay with fast-beating pulse, enduring alternate chills and fever, the man with the calm grey eyes would sometimes cast them for a long time on the richly embroidered Banner of all the Allied Nations, which hung above his head. Sometimes too he would call for his baton--the baton of a Marshal of France--and with the tips of his old fingers would caress along the shaft the hard and prickly stars.

Perfectly alert and mobile, the brain followed each move of the Mexican revolution (see MEXICO), as Mme. Foch read rapidly from latest editions of Le Temps. Ever and always the Generalissimo, her husband, who had long since lost all appetite, ordered his jaws to chew, his gullet to swallow, and so far as in him lay, his stomach to digest.

From the first day of his illness Marshal Foch demanded and received from all his doctors the minutest account of what was to be fought and how. Unlike His Majesty George V, who did not bring himself to chew and swallow solid food while his royal appetite was in abeyance (TIME, Jan. 14), the Generalissimo continued, even last week to eat with a precision which his doctors declared absolutely astounding in a patient thus far gone.

Tears for so splendid an old paladin seemed more than vain, yet they were not lacking, last week, when the nine doctors left the Marshal's room, after examining their patient with especial earnestness.

Brokenly the great Parisian heart specialist, Dr. de Gennes, exclaimed to the reporters: "Pray to heaven, gentlemen, that no further relapse occurs. Each leads our glorious patient a few steps further down the ladder of Life."