Foch the Man | Page 9

Navarre. Houses of cards rather than houses of
permanence seemed to characterize her.
Yet she has always had her quota--a larger one, too, than that of any
other country--of those who look toward far to-morrows and seek to
build substantially and beautifully for them.
That forward-looking prayer of old Navarre, and recollection of the
centuries during which it had prevailed against destroying forces, was
undoubtedly an aid and comfort to the heavy-hearted youth who then
and there set himself to the study of that art of war wherewith he was to
serve France.
Among the two hundred and odd fellow-students of Foch at the
Polytechnic was another young man from the south--almost a neighbor
of his and his junior by just three months--Jacques Joseph Césaire
Joffre, who had entered the school in 1869, interrupted his studies to go
to war, and resumed them shortly before Ferdinand Foch entered the
Polytechnic.
Joffre graduated from the Polytechnic on September 21, 1872, and
went thence to the School of Applied Artillery at Fontainebleau.
Foch left the Polytechnic about six months later, and also went to
Fontainebleau for the same special training that Joffre was taking.
Both young men were hard students and tremendously in earnest. Both
were heavy-hearted for France. Both hoped the day would come when

they might serve her and help to restore to her that of which she had
been despoiled.
But if any one, indulging in the fantastic extravagancies of youth, had
ventured to forecast, then, even a tithe of what they have been called to
do for France, he would have been set down as madder than March
hares know how to be.

V
LEARNING TO BE A ROUGH RIDER
When Ferdinand Foch graduated, third in his class, from the artillery
school at Fontainebleau, instead of seeking to use what influence he
might have commanded to get an appointment in some garrison where
the town life or social life was gay for young officers, he asked to be
sent back to Tarbes.
No one, to my knowledge, has advanced an explanation for this move.
To so earnest and ambitious a student of military art (Foch will not
permit us to speak of it as "military science") sentimental reasons alone
would never have been allowed to control so important a choice.
That he always ardently loved the Pyrenean country, we know. But to a
young officer of such indomitable purpose as his was, even then, it
would have been inconceivable that he should elect to spend his first
years out of school in any other place than that one where he saw the
maximum opportunity for development.
"Development," mind you--not just "advancement." For Foch is, and
ever has been, the kind of man who would most abhor being advanced
faster than he developed.
He would infinitely rather be prepared for a promotion and fail to get it
than get a promotion for which he was not thoroughly prepared.

Nor is he the sort of individual who can comfortably deceive himself
about his fitness. He sustains himself by no illusions of the variety: "If I
had so-and-so to do, I'd probably get through as well as nine-tenths of
commanders would."
He is much more concerned to satisfy himself that his thoroughness is
as complete as he could possibly have made it, than he is to "get by"
and satisfy the powers that be!
So we know that it wasn't any mere longing for the scenes of his happy
childhood which directed his choice of Tarbes garrison when he left the
enchanting region of Fontainebleau, with its fairy forest, its delightful
old town, and its many memories of Napoleon.
His mind seems to have been fixed upon a course involving more
cavalry skill than was his on graduating. And after two years at Tarbes,
with much riding of the fine horses of Arabian breed which are the
specialty of that region, he went to the Cavalry School at Saumur, on
the Loire.
King René of Anjou, whose chronic poverty does not seem to have
interfered with his taste for having innumerable castles, had one at
Saumur, and it still dominates the town and lends it an air of
medievalism.
Toward the end of the sixteenth century Saumur was one of the chief
strongholds of Protestantism in France and the seat of a Protestant
university.
But the revocation of the Edict of Nantes granting tolerance to the
Huguenots, brought great reverses upon Saumur, whose inhabitants
were driven into exile. And thereupon (1685) the town fell into a
decline which was not arrested until Louis XV, in the latter part of his
reign, caused this cavalry school to be established there.
It is a large school, with about four hundred soldiers always in training
as cavalry officers and army riding masters. And the riding