Daily Inspiration Quote by Ferdinand Foch

A line like this is meant to sound like arithmetic because Foch is selling something morally un-sellable: the idea that mass death can be justified as a kind of tuition. The bluntness is the point. By reducing bodies to a training cost, he adopts the language of bureaucracy and industry, the idiom that made World War I possible at scale. It’s not poetry; it’s procurement.

The specific intent is twofold. First, it’s a grim reassurance to political leaders and fellow commanders that catastrophe has a payoff: even failed offensives are not “wasted” if they produce seasoned leadership. Second, it’s a disciplinary message to ambitious officers: competence is earned in the only classroom that matters, and the fee is paid by someone else. That “someone else” is, of course, the infantryman.

The subtext smuggles in an entire theory of command. Generals are not born; they’re forged under fire. The price tag implies inevitability, as if casualties were a natural resource to be consumed on the path to expertise. It also launderes responsibility. If 15,000 dead are simply the cost of creating a capable major general, then the slaughter becomes less a failure of imagination and more a rite of passage.

Context sharpens the cynicism. Foch comes out of the First World War’s attritional logic, when armies learned, too late and too slowly, how to coordinate artillery, movement, and communication. His remark reads like the dark corporate slogan of that era: leadership development, now with body counts.