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 Rene 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 exhibitions which used to be given there in the latter part of August were brilliant affairs, worth going many miles to see.

There Ferdinand Foch studied cavalry tactics, practiced “rough riding” and—­by no means least important—­learned to know another type of Frenchman, the men of old Anjou.

In our own country of magnificent distances and myriad racial strains we are apt to think of French people as a single race:  “French is French.”

This is very wide of the truth.  French they all are, in sooth, with an intense national unity surpassed nowhere on earth if, indeed, it is anywhere equaled.  But almost every one of them is intensely a provincial, too, and very “set” in the ways of his own section of country—­which, usually, has been that of his forbears from time immemorial.

In the description I quoted in the second chapter, showing some of the types from the vicinity of Tarbes which frequent its horse market, one may get some idea of the extraordinary differences in the men of a single small region which is bordered by many little “pockets” wherein people go on and on, age after age, perpetuating their special traits without much admixture of other strains.

Not every part of France has so much variety in such small compass.  But every province has its distinctive human qualities.  And between the Norman and the Gascon, the Breton and the Provencal, the man of Picardy and the man of Languedoc, there are greater temperamental differences than one can find anywhere else on earth in an equal number of square miles—­except in some of our American cities.

To the commander of General Foch’s type (and as we begin to study his principles we shall, I believe, see that they apply to command in civil no less than in military life) knowledge of different men’s minds and the way they work is absolutely fundamental to success.