fter three years at Vincennes, Ferdinand Foch was recalled to the army
staff in Paris. And on the 31st of October, 1895, he was made associate
professor of military history, strategy, and applied tactics, at the
Superior School of War.

He had then just entered upon his forty-fifth year; and the thoroughness
of his training was beginning to make itself felt at military
headquarters.

[1] I have found it interesting to compare the careers of Joffre and Foch
from the time they were at school together, and I daresay that others
will like to know what steps forward he was taking who is not the subject
of these chapters but inseparably bound up with him in many events and
forever linked with him in glory.

VIII

THE SUPERIOR SCHOOL OF WAR

After a year's service as associate professor of military history,
strategy, and applied tactics at the Superior School of War in Paris,
Ferdinand Foch was advanced to head professorship in those branches and
at the same time he was made lieutenant-colonel. This was in 1896. He
was forty-five years old and had been for exactly a quarter of a century
a student of the art of warfare.

His old schoolfellow, Joseph Joffre, was then building fortifications in
northern Madagascar; and his army rank was the same as that of Foch.

It was just twenty years after Foch entered upon his full-fledged
professorship at the Superior School of War that Marshal Joffre, speaking
at a dinner assembling the principal leaders of the government and of the
army, declared that without the Superior School of War the victory of the
Marne would have been impossible.

All the world knows this now, almost as well as Marshal Joffre knew it
then. And all the world knows now as not even Marshal Joffre could have
known then, how enormous far, far beyond the check of barbarism at the
first battle of the Marne--is our debt and that of all posterity to the
Superior School of War and, chiefly, to Ferdinand Foch.

It cannot have been prescience that called him there. It was just
Providence, nothing less!

For that was a time when men like Ferdinand Foch (whose whole heart was
in the army, making it such that nothing like the downfall of 1870 could
ever again happen to France), were laboring under extreme difficulties.
The army was unpopular in France.

This was due, partly to the disclosures of the Dreyfus case; partly to a
wave of internationalism and pacifism; partly to jealousy of the army
among ci