Foch left the Polytechnic about six months later, and also went to Fontainebleau 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.