There is no feeling of being shut in to a term of study. There is, rather, the feeling of being "turned loose" in a place of vast opportunity of which one may make as much use as he is able.
To a young man of Ferdinand Foch's naturally serious mind, deeply impressed by his country's tragedy, the Latin Quarter of Paris in those Fall days of 1871 was a sober place indeed.
Beautiful Paris, that Napoleon III had done so much to make splendid, was scarred and seared on every hand by the German bombardment and the fury of the communards, who had destroyed nearly two hundred and fifty public and other buildings. The government of France had deserted the capital and moved to Versailles—just evacuated by the Germans.
The blight of defeat lay on everything.
In May, preceding Foch's advent, the communards—led by a miserable little shoemaker who talked about shooting all the world—took possession of the buildings belonging to the Polytechnic, and were dislodged only after severe fighting by Marshal MacMahon's Versailles troops.
The cannon of the communards, set on the heights of Pére-Lachaise (the great city of the dead where the slumber of so many of earth's most illustrious imposed no respect upon the "Bolsheviki" of that cataclysm) aimed at the Pantheon, shot short and struck the Polytechnic. One shell burst in the midst of an improvised hospital there, gravely wounding a nurse.
At last, on May 24, the Polytechnic was taken from the revolutionists by assault, and many of the communards were seized.
In the days following, the great recreation court of the school was the scene of innumerable executions, as the wretched revolutionists paid the penalty of their crimes before the firing squad. And the students' billiard room was turned into a temporary morgue, filled with bodies of those who had sought to destroy Paris from within.
The number of Parisians slain in those days after the second siege of Paris has been variously estimated at from twenty thousand to thirty-six thousand. And all the while, encamped upon the heights round about Paris, were victorious German troops squatting like Semitic creditors in Russia, refusing to budge till their account was settled to the last farthing of extortion.
The most sacred spot in Paris to young Foch, in all the depression he found there, was undoubtedly the great Dôme des Invalides, where, bathed in an unearthly radiance and surrounded by faded battle flags, lies the great porphyry sarcophagus of Napoleon I.