Foch the Man | Page 8

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 success and well-being.
There is no feeling of being shut in to a term of study. There is, rather,
the feeling of being "turned loose" in a place of vast opportunity of
which one may make as much use as he is able.
To a young man of Ferdinand Foch's naturally serious mind, deeply
impressed by his country's tragedy, the Latin Quarter of Paris in those
Fall days of 1871 was a sober place indeed.
Beautiful Paris, that Napoleon III had done so much to make splendid,
was scarred and seared on every hand by the German bombardment and
the fury of the communards, who had destroyed nearly two hundred
and fifty public and other buildings. The government of France had
deserted the capital and moved to Versailles--just evacuated by the
Germans.
The blight of defeat lay on everything.
In May, preceding Foch's advent, the communards--led by a miserable
little shoemaker who talked about shooting all the world--took
possession of the buildings belonging to the Polytechnic, and were
dislodged only after severe fighting by Marshal MacMahon's Versailles
troops.

The cannon of the communards, set on the heights of Pére-Lachaise
(the great city of the dead where the slumber of so many of earth's most
illustrious imposed no respect upon the "Bolsheviki" of that cataclysm)
aimed at the Pantheon, shot short and struck the Polytechnic. One shell
burst in the midst of an improvised hospital there, gravely wounding a
nurse.
At last, on May 24, the Polytechnic was taken from the revolutionists
by assault, and many of the communards were seized.
In the days following, the great recreation court of the school was the
scene of innumerable executions, as the wretched revolutionists paid
the penalty of their crimes before the firing squad. And the students'
billiard room was turned into a temporary morgue, filled with bodies of
those who had sought to destroy Paris from within.
The number of Parisians slain in those days after the second siege of
Paris has been variously estimated at from twenty thousand to thirty-six
thousand. And all the while, encamped upon the heights round about
Paris, were victorious German troops squatting like Semitic creditors in
Russia, refusing to budge till their account was settled to the last
farthing of extortion.
The most sacred spot in Paris to young Foch, in all the depression he
found there, was undoubtedly the great Dôme des Invalides, where,
bathed in an unearthly radiance and surrounded by faded battle flags,
lies the great porphyry sarcophagus of Napoleon I.
With what bitter reflections must the young man who had been
nurtured in the adoration of Bonaparte have returned from that majestic
tomb to the Polytechnic School for Warriors--to which, on the day after
his coronation as Emperor, Napoleon had given the following motto:
"Science and glory--all for country."
But, also, what must have been the young southerner's thought as he
lifted his gaze on entering the Polytechnic and read there that self-same
wish which was inscribed over the door of his first school in Tarbes:

"May this house remain standing until the ant has drunk all the waves
of the sea and the tortoise has crawled round the world."
The edifice in which part of the Polytechnic was housed was the
ancient College of Navarre, and a Navarrias poet of lang syne had
given to the Paris school for his countrymen this quaint wish, repeated
from the inscription he knew at Tarbes.
France had had twelve different governments in fourscore years when
Ferdinand Foch came to study in that old building which had once been
the college of