By 26 October First Army was breaking through, and on the night of 26/7 October the Germans pulled back 5 kilometres across most of First Army's front. Debeney had the honour of receiving the German ambassadors on 11 November for the Armistice. After the war he was Director of the "École de Guerre", where he introduced a new curriculum, and often had his students “walk the ground” of his 1918 campaigns. He was commandant of La Place de Paris and a member of the commission which wrote France's postwar doctrinal manual: "“Instruction provisoire sur l’emploi tactiques des grandes unités”" (1922). As Chief of the General Staff in 1923-30 he helped shape the Basic Laws of 1927 and 1928, which implemented a reduction in the term of conscription from eighteen months to one year and shaped the French Army of the 1930s and 1940. Philpott describes him as “the dominant figure in the French Army in the 1920s, after Foch and Pétain at least”. France, her birthrate badly depleted by the war, had a population of 40 million to face Germany with a population of 80 million. While France was to be defended by the Maginot Line and her network of allies in central Europe, the plan was for the main French army to defeat a German incursion through Belgium by "bataille conduite" (methodical battle). This was to be materiel-intensive fighting along a broad front, inspired by Foch's operations in 1918. A statue of Foch stands on the Bapaume-Peronne road, near the village of Bouchavesnes, at the point where Messimy’s "chasseurs" broke through on 12 September 1916. Debeney described the statue at its unveiling in 1926 as “the effigy of the conqueror of the Somme”, who had “reawakened the spirit of the offensive in our army and given it the confidence that success would follow from careful preparation and bold execution”. The Somme was “the first of the great massed battles, in which we asserted our tactical superiority over the enemy … After the Somme (Foch) began to abandon the simplistic idea of obtaining success by breaking a short section of the enemy’s front, replacing it with the more fruitful idea, which was to give us victory, of progressively dislocating the various sectors of the front”.