He probably never said it. "This is not a peace. It is an armistice for twenty years" is the most quoted prophecy of the century and it cannot be verified. It does not appear in print until Churchill's The Gathering Storm in 1948, twenty-nine years after Versailles, and the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations sources it to Paul Reynaud's memoirs, published in 1960. What Foch actually said about the treaty is on the record, and it is worse: a capitulation, a treason. He wanted the Rhineland occupied permanently and believed that without it France had bought nothing. He was not predicting the next war. He was objecting to the ending of this one.

The title on the box is wrong twice over. He was a Marshal of France, made so in 1918. The British gave him an honorary Field Marshal's baton only in 1919, after the shooting had stopped, and Poland gave him a third in 1923 — three countries, three batons, one man. Tradition has him in the horizon blue the French infantry were issued, with the red kepi and the brown boots. In a diorama he belongs beside the Armistice, where he is standing at the table in the railway carriage. The outbreak is the other end of the same shelf.

Tradition of London model 820. 54mm, white metal, hand-painted in gloss enamel. Single standing figure of Marshal Ferdinand Foch. Supplied in the Tradition Classic Red Box. Allow 2–3 weeks delivery.