Foch the Man Part 4

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 Sat.u.r.day, 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 a.s.sured 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 s.p.a.ce 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 inst.i.tutions 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 Pere-Lachaise (the great city of the dead where the slumber of so many of earth's most ill.u.s.trious imposed no respect upon the "Bolsheviki" of that cataclysm) aimed at the Pantheon, shot short and struck the Polytechnic. One sh.e.l.l 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 a.s.sault, 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 Dome 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 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 Cesaire 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 t.i.the 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 cla.s.s, 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."