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.

His mind seems to have been