There is nothing to record of Ferdinand Foch's first soldiering except that from the dépôt of the Fourth Regiment of Infantry, in his home city of Saint-Étienne, he was sent to Chalon-sur-Saône, and there was discharged in January, 1871, after the capitulation of Paris.
He did not distinguish himself in any way. He was just one of a multitude of youths who rushed to the colors when France called, and did what they could in a time of sad confusion, when a weak government had paralyzed the effectiveness of the army—of the nation!
Whatever blows Ferdinand Foch struck in 1870 were without weight in helping to avert France's catastrophe. But he was like hundreds of thousands of other young Frenchmen similarly powerless in this: In the anguish he suffered because of what he could not do to save France from humiliation were laid the foundations of all that he has contributed to the glory of new France.
At the time when his Fall term should have been beginning at Saint Clément's College, Metz was under siege by the German army, and its garrison and inhabitants were suffering horribly from hunger and disease; Paris was surrounded; the German headquarters were at Versailles; and the imperial standards so dear to young Foch because of the great Napoleon were forever lowered when the white flag was hoisted at Sedan and an Emperor with a whole army passed into captivity.
How much the young soldier-student of the Saône comprehended then of the needlessness of the shame and surrender of those inglorious days we do not know. He cannot have been sufficiently versed in military understanding to realize how much of the defeat France suffered was due to her failure to fight on, at this juncture and that, when a stiffer resistance would have turned the course of events.
But if he did not know then, he certainly knew later. And as soon as he got where he could impress his convictions upon other soldiers of the new France he began training them in his great maxim: "A battle is lost when you admit defeat."
What his devotion to Saint Clément's College was we may know from the fact of his return there to resume his interrupted studies under the same teachers, but in sadly different circumstances.
He found German troops quartered in parts of the college, and as he went to and from his classes 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!