Tarbes had suffered so much in civil and religious wars, for many centuries, that not many of her ancient buildings were left.  The old castle, with its associations with the Black Prince and other renowned warriors, was a ramshackle prison in Ferdinand Foch’s youth.  The old palace of the bishops was used as the prefecture, where Ferdinand’s father had his office.

There were two old churches, much restored and of no great beauty, but very dear to the people of Tarbes nevertheless.

Ferdinand and his brothers and sister were very piously reared, and at an early age learned to love the church and to seek it for exaltation and consolation.

Later on in these chapters we shall see that phase of a little French boy’s training in its due relation to a marechal of France, directing the greatest army the world has ever seen.

The college of Tarbes, where Ferdinand began his school days, was in a venerable building over whose portal there was, in Latin, an inscription recording the builder’s prayer: 

“May this house remain standing until the ant has drunk all the waves of the sea and the tortoise has crawled round the world.”

Ferdinand was a hard student, serious beyond his years, but not conspicuous except for his earnestness and diligence.

When he was twelve years old, his fervor for Napoleon led him to read Thiers’ “History of the Consulate and the Empire.”  And about this time his professor of mathematics remarked of him that “he has the stuff of a polytechnician.”

The vacations of the Foch children were passed at the home of their paternal grandparents in Valentine, a large village about two miles from the town of St. Gaudens in the foothills of the Pyrenees.  There they had the country pleasures of children of good circumstances, in a big, substantial house and a vicinity rich in tranquil beauty and outdoor opportunities.  And there, as in the children’s own home at Tarbes, one was ashamed not to be a very excellent child, and, so, worthy to be descended from a chevalier of the great Napoleon.

In the mid-sixties the family moved from Tarbes to Rodez—­almost two hundred miles northeast of their old locality in which both parents had been born and where their ancestors had long lived.

It was quite an uprooting—­due to the father’s appointment as paymaster of the treasury at Rodez—­and took the Foch family into an atmosphere very different from that of their old Gascon home, but one which also helped to vivify that history which was Ferdinand’s passion.

There Ferdinand continued his studies, as also at Saint-Etienne, near Lyons, whither the family moved in 1867 when the father was appointed tax collector there.

And in 1869 he was sent to Metz, to the Jesuit College of Saint Clement, to which students flocked from all parts of Europe.

He had been there a year and had been given, by unanimous vote of his fellow students, the grand prize for scholarly qualities, when the Franco-Prussian war began.