asses the young man who had just laid off the
uniform of a French soldier was obliged to pass and repass men of the
victorious army of occupation.

The memory of his shame and suffering on those occasions has never
faded. How much France and her allies owe to it we shall never be able
to estimate.

For the effect on Foch was one of the first acid tests in which were
revealed the quality of his mind and soul. Instead of offering himself
a prey to sullen anger and resentment, or of flaring into fury when one
time for fury was past and another had not yet come, he used his sorrow
as a goad to study, and bent his energies to the discovery of why
France had failed and why Prussia had won. His analysis of those
reasons, and his application of what that analysis taught him, is what
has put him where he is to-day--and _us_ where _we_ are!

From Metz, Foch went to Nancy to take his examination for the
Polytechnic at Paris.

Just why this should have been deemed necessary I have not seen
explained. But it was, like a good many other things of apparent
inconsequence in this young man's life, destined to leave in him an
impress which had much to do with what he was to perform.

I have seldom, if ever, studied a life in which events "link up" so
marvelously and the present is so remarkably an extension of the past.

Nancy had been chosen by General Manteuffel, commander of the First
German Army Corps, as headquarters, pending the withdrawal of the
victors on the payment of the last sou in the billion-dollar indemnity
they exacted of France along with the ceding of Alsace-Lorraine. (For
three years France had to endure the insolent victors upon her soil.)

And with the fine feeling and magnanimity in which the German was then
as now peculiarly gifted General Manteuffel delighted in ordering his
military bands to play the "Retreat"--to taunt the sad inhabitants with
this reminder of their army's shame.

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 "S