ross
its roseate reaches unending columns of marching men passed, under the
leadership of Ferdinand Foch, to liberate the captives the blind brute
has made and to strike down the strongholds of "old Europe" forever.

For nearly six years Foch taught such principles as these and others
which I shall recall in connection with great events which they made
possible later on.

Then came the anti-clerical wave in French politics, and on its crest a
new commandant to the School of War--a man elevated by the
anti-clericals and eager to keep his elevation by pleasing those who
put him there.

Foch adheres devoutly to the religious practices in which he was
reared, and one of his brothers belongs to the Jesuit order.

These conditions made his continuance at the school under its new head
impossible. Whether he resigned because he realized this, or was
superseded, I do not know. But he left his post and went as
lieutenant-colonel to the Twenty-ninth artillery, at Laon.

He was there two years and undoubtedly made a thorough study of the
country round Laon--which was for more than four years to be the key to
the German tenure in that part of France.

Ferdinand Foch, with his brilliant knowledge and high ideals of
soldiering, was now past fifty and not yet a colonel.

Strong though his spirit was, sustained by faith in God and rewarded by
those "secret satisfactions" which come to the man who loves his work
and is conscious of having given it his best, he must have had hours,
days, when he drank deep of the cup of bitterness. There are, though,
bitters that shrivel and bitters that tone and invigorate. Or perhaps
they are the same and the difference is in us.

At any rate, Foch was not poisoned at the cup of disappointment.

And when the armies under his command encircled the great rock whereon
Laon is perched high above the surrounding plains I hope Foch was with
them--in memory of the days when he was "dumped" there, so to speak,
far away from his sphere of influence at the School of War.

In 1903 he was made colonel and sent to the Thirty-fifth artillery at
Vannes, in Brittany.

Only two years later he was called to Orleans as chief of staff of the
Fifth army corps.

On June 20, 1907, he was made Brigadier General and passed to the
general staff of the French army at Paris. Soon afterwards, Georges
Clemenceau became Minister of War, and was seeking a new head for the
Staff College. Everyone whose advice he so