There Ferdinand Foch studied cavalry tactics, practiced "rough riding" and—by no means least important—learned to know another type of Frenchman, the men of old Anjou.
In our own country of magnificent distances and myriad racial strains we are apt to think of French people as a single race: "French is French."
This is very wide of the truth. French they all are, in sooth, with an intense national unity surpassed nowhere on earth if, indeed, it is anywhere equaled. But almost every one of them is intensely a provincial, too, and very "set" in the ways of his own section of country—which, usually, has been that of his forbears from time immemorial.
In the description I quoted in the second chapter, showing some of the types from the vicinity of Tarbes which frequent its horse market, one may get some idea of the extraordinary differences in the men of a single small region which is bordered by many little "pockets" wherein people go on and on, age after age, perpetuating their special traits without much admixture of other strains.
Not every part of France has so much variety in such small compass. But every province has its distinctive human qualities. And between the Norman and the Gascon, the Breton and the Provençal, the man of Picardy and the man of Languedoc, there are greater temperamental differences than one can find anywhere else on earth in an equal number of square miles—except in some of our American cities.
To the commander of General Foch's type (and as we begin to study his principles we shall, I believe, see that they apply to command in civil no less than in military life) knowledge of different men's minds and the way they work is absolutely fundamental to success.
And his preparation for this mastery was remarkably thorough.
At Saumur he learned not only to direct cavalry operations, but to know the Angevin characteristics.
In each school he attended, beginning with Metz, he had close class association with men from many provinces, men of many types. And this was valuable to him in preparing him to command under-officers in whom a rigorous uniformity of training could not obliterate bred-in-the-bone differences.
Many another young officer bent on "getting on" in the army would have felt that what he learned among his fellow officers of the provincial characteristics was enough.