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... For Foch the saving of Ypres was a great personal victory. He had accomplished the improbable: he had fused together a true coalition that worked together to deny the Germans control of the continental side of the English Channel. King Albert developed tremendous confidence in him, proclaiming, "That man could make the dead fight." For his service in saving the BEF, King George V came to France personally to award Foch the Grand Cross of the Order of Bath.
Thus, in January 1915, the Allies agreed to give Foch the title of Commander of the Armies of the North, conferring on him a nominal joint authority not held by any other Allied commander, including Joffre. Foch found himself in an area with little precedent and he had to develop haphazard solutions to the new challenges of modern alliance warfare. His new title fell far short of bestowing upon him the powers of a commander-inchief and did not compensate for his relatively junior rank. He was certainly in no position to give orders to a Belgian king. Nor did the "victory" at Ypres bolster Sir John French's confidence. . .
Foch was therefore caught in a quandary he could not resolve. His experiences in the early weeks of the war seemed to undermine a lifetime of teaching. The offensive had not proven to be the master of the battlefield. In fact, just the reverse had come true-the defense was now supreme. Still, Foch, like Joffre, remained optimistic that a well-planned offensive, adequately supported by heavy artillery, could achieve a breakthrough and a rapid end to the war. He continued to believe that the war would be won or lost in France, and he objected to any proposals for operations in the Middle East or the Balkans. To that end, Foch spent the early months of 1915 planning an offensive against Vimy Ridge in the Artois region. Once again, however, the Germans beat him to the punch. Falkenhayn attacked Ypres again on April 22, 1915. At this battle, the Second Battle of Ypres, the Germans used a new weapon, chlorine gas, to open a four-mile gap in the Allied lines. German prisoners had warned the Allies of the new weapon, and one of them had even been captured with a crude respirator. Still, Foch had made no preparations for dealing with gas. Curiously, neither had Falkenhayn. He was unable to take advantage of the gap because he had devoted no reserves for exploitation. Though Foch later credited the speedy arrival of three French divisions for saving Ypres, the truth is that the Germans were uncharacteristically unprepared to build upon the early successes of the offensive. Still, the events of April 22 caught Foch quite by surprise. The fog and friction of the modern battlefield made the personal, Napoleonic style of command Foch had preached virtually impossible. "One knew nothing, one could know nothing, and if one waited until the next day it meant a break-through." The attacks struck most forcefully at the British, who were at the same time landing troops on the beaches of Turkey's Gallipoli Peninsula. French, buoyed by Foch, ordered bloody counterattacks that predictably failed to regain the lost ground. French soon recommended withdrawal to the west of the Ypres Canal, an action that would have given the town of Ypres to the Germans. Foch overrode him, and on April 30 and May 1, he ordered more costly counteroffensives.
Foch now pinned his hopes for penetrating the German lines near Arras. Just north of that town sat a salient that bulged into the area where the First British Army and Tenth French Army lines converged. Inside the German lines sat the Vimy Ridge, three hills of 160, 140, and 132 meters height, ranging north to south. Foch envisioned an intense artillery preparation that he hoped would cut paths through the German wire, followed by a direct assault on the German positions. Once dislodged from their trenches, Foch believed, French forces could achieve the long-awaited breakthrough and then outflank the Germans from the north and the south simultaneously. Once the French achieved this, Foch argued, he could win the war in three months! On May 3, Foch's artillery began a six-day bombardment. On May 9, the artillery stopped. After a two-minute silence, French troops left their trenches and began to cross the thousand yards of No Man's Land. They soon discovered that the French artillery had failed to cut the German wire. . . French troops quickly found that their progress was possible in part because the Germans has simply retired to another line of trenches farther back. French progress came to a halt. By May 15, the opportunity for even a limited breakthrough had passed. Still, Foch ordered the Tenth Army to continue the attacks and to prepare the cavalry to be ready to pass through the anticipated break in the German lines. By mid-June, France had suffered 100,000 casualties (twice the German losses) and had advanced no more than three miles. German reinforcements were already in place and were arriving much faster than French reserves. . . Still, Foch could not bring himself to abandon the offensive, despite the evidence in front of him. He argued that French forces had very nearly achieved the desired breakthrough and that another well-planned offensive would finish the job. He was preparing a renewed offensive in June when he received explicit instructions from Joffre to call the offensive off. French generals, such firm believers in the cult of the offensive before the war, now had to rethink their most cherished assumptions about the nature of war. French politicians, for their part, soon lost confidence in those generals, like Joffre and Foch, who argued that operations like the one at Arras had been worth the losses. More specifically, Arras led to a severe loss of faith in the Joffre-Foch team. Rather than being seen as an opportunity nearly missed, Arras was seen as a disaster that had produced no gain commensurate with French losses. Some French leaders advocated opening other fronts and directing efforts away from the west.
To prove his point, he planned to resume offensives around Arras in September. He convinced Wilson, French, and Kitchener that the offensives deserved another attempt. Joffre, less confident of a breakthrough at Arras, had directed that British and French attacks there would occur simultaneously with an offensive led by Castelnau in Champagne. As a sign of the diminution of his faith in Foch, Joffre allocated the bulk of French forces to Castelnau . . . Foch resumed the offensive on September 25 with no more success than he had had in May and June. Only one division reached the crest of Vimy Ridge itself, and that success was only temporary. Castelnau's attacks in Champagne were no more successful. French losses were 48,000 in Arras and 143,000 in Champagne to combined German losses of 120,000 . . . Foch and Joffre survived 1915, but not without criticism. The reputations of both men had been severely tarnished. Still, Foch continued to believe that with proper artillery support, infantry assaults were the best course to win the war. Foch was neither blind to the difficulties of the offensive nor was he insensitive to the enormous casualties. Rather, he continued to be caught in the dilemma of how to remove the hated enemy from the sacred soil of France. Blockades, fronts in Eastern Europe, and a negotiated peace were all out of the question for him. If he can be criticized for developing no original ideas on the tactical level in 1915, It must be noted that he was far from being alone in his inability to find a quick, cheap solution.  Foch - The Marshal
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