Foch the Man | Page 7

able to estimate.
For the effect on Foch was one of the first acid tests in which were revealed the quality of his mind and soul. Instead of offering himself a prey to sullen anger and resentment, or of flaring into fury when one time for fury was past and another had not yet come, he used his sorrow as a goad to study, and bent his energies to the discovery of why France had failed and why Prussia had won. His analysis of those reasons, and his application of what that analysis taught him, is what has put him where he is to-day--and us where we are!
From Metz, Foch went to Nancy to take his examination for the Polytechnic at Paris.
Just why this should have been deemed necessary I have not seen explained. But it was, like a good many other things of apparent inconsequence in this young man's life, destined to leave in him an impress which had much to do with what he was to perform.
I have seldom, if ever, studied a life in which events "link up" so marvelously and the present is so remarkably an extension of the past.
Nancy had been chosen by General Manteuffel, commander of the First German Army Corps, as headquarters, pending the withdrawal of the victors on the payment of the last sou in the billion-dollar indemnity they exacted of France along with the ceding of Alsace-Lorraine. (For three years France had to endure the insolent victors upon her soil.)
And with the fine feeling and magnanimity in which the German was then as now peculiarly gifted General Manteuffel delighted in ordering his military bands to play the "Retreat"--to taunt the sad inhabitants with this reminder of their army's shame.
Ferdinand Foch listened and thought and wrote his examinations for the school of war.
Forty-two years later--in August, 1913--a new commandant came to Nancy to take control of the Twentieth Army Corps, whose position there, guarding France's Eastern frontier, was considered one of the most important--if not the most important--to the safety of the nation.
The first order he gave was one that brought out the full band strength of six regiments quartered in the town. They were to play the "March Lorraine" and the "Sambre and Meuse." They were to fill Nancy with these stirring sounds. The clarion notes carrying these martial airs were to reach every cranny of the old town. It was a veritable tidal wave of triumphant sound that he wanted--for it had much to efface.
Nancy will never forget that night! It was Saturday, the 23d of August, 1913. And the new commandant's name was Ferdinand Foch!
Less than a year later he was fighting to save Nancy, and what lay beyond, from the Germans.
And this time there was to be a different story! Ferdinand Foch was foremost of those who assured it.

IV
PARIS AFTER THE GERMANS LEFT
Ferdinand Foch entered the Polytechnic School at Paris on the 1st of November, 1871, just after he had completed his twentieth year.
This school, founded in 1794, is for the technical education of military and naval engineers, artillery officers, civil engineers in government employ, and telegraphists--not mere operators, of course, but telegraph engineers and other specialists in electric communication. It is conducted by a general, on military principles, and its students are soldiers on their way to becoming officers.
Its buildings cover a considerable space in the heart of the great school quarter of Parts. The Sorbonne, with its traditions harking back to St. Louis (more than six centuries) and its swarming thousands of students, is hard by the Polytechnic. So is the College de France, founded by Francis I. And, indeed, whichever way one turns, there are schools, schools, schools--of fine arts and applied arts; of medicine in all its branches; of mining and engineering; of war; of theology; of languages; of commerce in its higher developments; of pedagogy; and what-not.
Nowhere else in the world is there possible to the young student, come to advance himself in his chosen field of knowledge, quite such a thrill as that which must be his when he matriculates at one of the scores of educational institutions in that quarter of Paris to which the ardent, aspiring youth of all the western world have been directing their eager feet from time immemorial.
Cloistral, scholastic atmosphere, with its grave beauty, as at Oxford and Cambridge, he will not find in the Paris Latin Quarter.
Paris does not segregate her students. Conceiving them to be studying for life, she aids them to do it in the midst of life marvelously abundant. They do not go out of the world--so to speak--to learn to live and work in the world. They go, rather, into a life of extraordinary variety and fullness, out of which--it is expected--they will discover how to choose whatever is most needful to their