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 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.