Foch the Man | Page 6

was in a venerable building over whose portal there was, in Latin, an inscription recording the builder's prayer:
"May this house remain standing until the ant has drunk all the waves of the sea and the tortoise has crawled round the world."
Ferdinand was a hard student, serious beyond his years, but not conspicuous except for his earnestness and diligence.
When he was twelve years old, his fervor for Napoleon led him to read Thiers' "History of the Consulate and the Empire." And about this time his professor of mathematics remarked of him that "he has the stuff of a polytechnician."
The vacations of the Foch children were passed at the home of their paternal grandparents in Valentine, a large village about two miles from the town of St. Gaudens in the foothills of the Pyrénées. There they had the country pleasures of children of good circumstances, in a big, substantial house and a vicinity rich in tranquil beauty and outdoor opportunities. And there, as in the children's own home at Tarbes, one was ashamed not to be a very excellent child, and, so, worthy to be descended from a chevalier of the great Napoleon.
In the mid-sixties the family moved from Tarbes to Rodez--almost two hundred miles northeast of their old locality in which both parents had been born and where their ancestors had long lived.
It was quite an uprooting--due to the father's appointment as paymaster of the treasury at Rodez--and took the Foch family into an atmosphere very different from that of their old Gascon home, but one which also helped to vivify that history which was Ferdinand's passion.
There Ferdinand continued his studies, as also at Saint-étienne, near Lyons, whither the family moved in 1867 when the father was appointed tax collector there.
And in 1869 he was sent to Metz, to the Jesuit College of Saint Clément, to which students flocked from all parts of Europe.
He had been there a year and had been given, by unanimous vote of his fellow students, the grand prize for scholarly qualities, when the Franco-Prussian war began.
Immediately Ferdinand Foch enlisted for the duration of the war.

III
A YOUNG SOLDIER OF A LOST CAUSE
There is nothing to record of Ferdinand Foch's first soldiering except that from the dép?t of the Fourth Regiment of Infantry, in his home city of Saint-étienne, he was sent to Chalon-sur-Sa?ne, and there was discharged in January, 1871, after the capitulation of Paris.
He did not distinguish himself in any way. He was just one of a multitude of youths who rushed to the colors when France called, and did what they could in a time of sad confusion, when a weak government had paralyzed the effectiveness of the army--of the nation!
Whatever blows Ferdinand Foch struck in 1870 were without weight in helping to avert France's catastrophe. But he was like hundreds of thousands of other young Frenchmen similarly powerless in this: In the anguish he suffered because of what he could not do to save France from humiliation were laid the foundations of all that he has contributed to the glory of new France.
At the time when his Fall term should have been beginning at Saint Clément's College, Metz was under siege by the German army, and its garrison and inhabitants were suffering horribly from hunger and disease; Paris was surrounded; the German headquarters were at Versailles; and the imperial standards so dear to young Foch because of the great Napoleon were forever lowered when the white flag was hoisted at Sedan and an Emperor with a whole army passed into captivity.
How much the young soldier-student of the Sa?ne comprehended then of the needlessness of the shame and surrender of those inglorious days we do not know. He cannot have been sufficiently versed in military understanding to realize how much of the defeat France suffered was due to her failure to fight on, at this juncture and that, when a stiffer resistance would have turned the course of events.
But if he did not know then, he certainly knew later. And as soon as he got where he could impress his convictions upon other soldiers of the new France he began training them in his great maxim: "A battle is lost when you admit defeat."
What his devotion to Saint Clément's College was we may know from the fact of his return there to resume his interrupted studies under the same teachers, but in sadly different circumstances.
He found German troops quartered in parts of the college, and as he went to and from his classes the young man who had just laid off the uniform of a French soldier was obliged to pass and repass men of the victorious army of occupation.
The memory of his shame and suffering on those occasions has never faded. How much France and her allies owe to it we shall never be