in Ireland. In 1659, after Cromwell’s death, he was
named commander in chief of the army. When Charles
II, son of the executed King Charles I, returned to En-
gland and was restored to the throne in 1660, Fleet-
wood, who had had no role in the murder of Charles’s
father, was allowed to retire without being punished.
He died in obscurity in Stoke Newington in Lon-
don on 4 October 1692, the last of the Parliamentary
commanders.
References: Marshall, J. A., The ‘Godly Praetorian’: The
Political Life and Activities of Lieutenant-General Charles
Fleetwood in the Destruction of Richard Cromwell’s Protec-
torate and the Demise of the English Republic, September
1658–December 1659, Master’s thesis, University of Lan-
caster (U.K.), 1985; An Outcry after the Late Lieutenant
General Fleetwood (London: Hen. Mason, 1660).
Foch, Ferdinand (1851–1929) marshal of France
Ferdinand Foch was born the son of parents of Basque
heritage in Tarbes, in the Hautes-Pyrénnées region of
France on 2 October 1851. When he was 19, he joined
the French army to fight in the Franco-Prussian War of
1870, but the war ended before he could be sent to the
front. Nevertheless, his limited military experience gave
him the impetus to make the army his career. He gained
admittance to the École Polytechnique, after which he
went to the École d’Application de l’Artillerie (Artillery
Training Institute). He received a commission as an ar-
tilleryman in 1873.
After an undistinguished career, in 1885 Foch was
sent to the École Superiéure de Guerre (War College),
completing his training in two years. In 1894, he re-
turned to this institution as an instructor in military
history and strategy; his lectures there were published
in 1897 as The Principles of War (English translation,
1918), and The Conduct of War (1899). In 1905, he
was made a regimental commander of artillery. In 1907,
with the rank of general, he returned to the École de
Guerre, where he served as director until 1911.
When the First World War began in August 1914,
Foch, as commander of the XX Corps at Nancy, mo-
bilized French forces and helped to halt the German
advance at the Marne (20–24 August 1914). Germany
sent thousands of its crack soldiers across the Belgian
border into France from Amiens to Verdun. As com-
mander of the newly formed French Ninth Army, Foch,
working with General Michel Maunoury’s Sixth Army,
General Franchet d’Esperey’s Fifth Army, and British
general Sir John french’s British Expeditionary Force,
blocked the Germans, breaking the lines of the German
generals Karl von Bülow and Max Clemens von Hausen
and leaving some 800,000 German casualties and more
than a million combined French and British dead and
wounded. The battle would become just the first step
in the horrific campaign of trench warfare that was to
mark the war on the western front in the next four years
of the conflict.
Foch’s command of French forces at the first battle
of Ypres (14 October–11 November 1915), as well as at
the Somme (1 July–18 November 1916), made him the
dominant French commander, although he was blamed
for the frightful French losses at the latter battle and
sent to the Italian front. However, when French general
Robert-Georges niVelle’s haphazard offensive failed in
April 1917, he was replaced by General Phillipe Pétain,
who named Foch as chief of the French army General
Staff. Less than a year later, on 26 March 1918, Foch
was named commander in chief of the Allied armies, the
combined force of American, British, and French troops
in western Europe. He planned a massive counteroffen-
sive to push back the German advance. On 6 August
1918, and in September he directed the Allied coun-
teroffensive. By November 1918, Germany was finished
and sued for peace. Historians believe that Foch’s 1918
drive against the Germans was responsible for the end
of the conflict after four years of bloodletting. For his
services, Foch was named marshal of France in 1919.
Returning to Paris as a hero, Foch was given a pa-
rade in his honor on 14 July 1919 in which he rode
under the Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile in front of the
men he led into battle. Great Britain subsequently also
honored him with a field marshal’s baton. In 1921, he
visited the United States, where he attended the opening
of the Washington Conference on Disarmament, held to
demobilize the world’s armies following the end of the
First World War.
Foch died in Paris on 20 March 1929, age 77, and
was buried in the Invalides, near the tomb of naPo-
leon, with full military honors. Although he has been
praised for his leadership of French and Allied forces in
the First World War, British historian Sir James Mar-
shall-Cornwall blames Foch for the massive number of
French and British casualties at the Marne, Ypres, and
the Somme: “There is little doubt... that his doctrine Foch, FeRDinAnD