Foch the Man | Page 4

long street, running east and west over so wide a stretch of territory that the town was called Tarbes-the-Long. Here and there this "main street" is crossed by little streets running north and south and giving glimpses of mountains, green fields and orchards; and many of these are threaded by tiny waterways--small, meandering children of the Adour, which take themselves where they will, like the chickens in France, and nobody minds having to step over or around them, or building his house to humor their vagaries.
Tarbes was a prominent city of Gaul under the Romans. They, who could always be trusted to make the most of anything of the nature of baths, seem to have been duly appreciative of the hot springs in which that region abounds.
But nothing of stirring importance happened at or near Tarbes until after the battle of Poitiers (732), when the Saracens were falling back after the terrible defeat dealt them by Charles Martel.
Sullen and vengeful, they were pillaging and destroying as they went, and probably none of the communities through which they passed felt able to offer resistance to their depredations--until they got to Tarbes. And there a valiant priest named Missolin hastily assembled some of the men of the vicinity and gave the infidels a good drubbing--killing many and hastening the flight, over the mountains, of the rest.
This encounter took place on a plain a little to the south of Tarbes which is still called the Heath of the Moors.
When Ferdinand Foch was a little boy, more than eleven hundred years after that battle, it was not uncommon for the spade or plowshare of some husbandman on the heath to uncover bones of Christian or infidel slain in what was probably the last conflict fought on French soil to preserve France against the Saracens. And there may still have been living some old, old men or women who could tell Ferdinand stories of the 24th of May (anniversary of the battle) as it was observed each year until the Revolution of 1789. At the southern extremity of the battlefield there stood for many generations a gigantic equestrian statue, of wood, representing the holy warrior, Missolin, rallying his flock to rout the unbelievers. And in the presence of a great concourse singing songs of grateful praise to Missolin, his statue was crowned with garlands by young maidens wearing the picturesque gala dress of that vicinity.
Some forty-odd years after Missolin's victory, Charlemagne went with his twelve knights and his great army through Tarbes on his way to Spain to fight the Moors. And when that ill-starred expedition was defeated and its warriors bold were fleeing back to France, Roland--so the story goes--finding no pass in the Pyrénées where he needed one desperately, cleaved one with his sword Durandal.
High up among the clouds (almost 10,000 feet) is that Breach of Roland--200 feet wide, 330 feet deep, and 165 feet long. A good slice-out for a single stroke! And when Roland had cut it, he dashed through it and across the chasm, his horse making a clean jump to the French side of the mountains. That no one might ever doubt this, the horse thoughtfully left the mark of one iron-shod hoof clearly imprinted in the rock just where he cleared it, and where it is still shown to the curious and the stout of wind.
It is a pity to remember that, in spite of such prowess of knight and devotion of beast. Roland perished on his flight from Spain.
But, like all brave warriors, he became mightier in death even than he had been in life, and furnished an ideal of valor which animated the most chivalrous youth of all Europe, throughout many centuries.
With such traditions is the country round about Tarbes impregnated.
It has been suggested that the name Foch (which, by the way, is pronounced as if it rhymed with "hush") is derived from Foix--a town some sixty miles east of St. Gaudens, near which was the ancestral home of the Foch family.
Whatever the relatives of Ferdinand may have thought of this as a probability, it is certain that Ferdinand was well nurtured in the history of Foix and especially in those phases of it that Froissart relates.
Froissart, the genial gossip who first courted the favor of kings and princes and then was gently entreated by them so that his writing of them might be to their renown, was on his way to Blois when he heard of the magnificence of Gaston Phoebus, Count of Foix. Whereupon the chronicler turned him about and jogged on his way to Foix. Gaston Phoebus was not there, but at Orthez--150 miles west and north--and, nothing daunted, to Orthez went Froissart, by way of Tarbes, traveling in company with a knight named Espaing de Lyon, who was a graphic and charmful