This field is eleven hundred yards long and just half that wide. It occupies all the ground between the school buildings and the river.
Across the river is the height called the Trocadéro, on which Napoleon hoped to build a great palace for the little King of Rome; but whereon, many years after he and his son had ceased to need mansions made by hands, the French republic built a magnificent palace for the French people. This vast building, with its majestic gardens, was the principal feature of the French national exhibition of 1878, which, like its predecessor of 1867 and its successors of 1889 and 1900, was held on the Champ-de-Mars.
Facing the Trocadéro Palace, on the Champ-de-Mars, is the Eiffel Tower (nearly a thousand feet high) which was erected for the exposition of 1889, and has served, since, then-unimaginable purposes during the stress and strain of war as a wireless station. The "Ferris" wheel put up for the exposition of 1900 is close by. And a stone's throw from the military school are the Hôtel des Invalides, Napoleon's tomb, and the magnificent Esplanade des Invalides down which one looks straightway to the glinting Seine and over the superb Alexander III bridge toward the tree-embowered palaces of arts on the Champs-Élysées.
On the other side of the Hôtel des Invalides from that occupied by the military school and Champ-de-Mars is the principal diplomatic and departmental district of Paris, with many embassies (not ours, however, nor the British—which are across the river) and many administrative offices of the French nation.
Soldiers and government officials and foreign diplomats dominate the quarter—and homes of the old French aristocracy.
The Hotel des Invalides, founded by Louis XIV and designed to accommodate, as an old soldiers' home, some seven thousand veterans of his unending wars, has latterly served as headquarters for the military governor of Paris, and also—principally—as a war museum.
Here are housed collections of priceless worth and transcendent interest. The museum of artillery contains ten thousand specimens of weapons and armor of all kinds, ancient and modern. The historical museum, across the court of honor, was—in the years when I spent many fascinating hours there—extraordinarily rich in personal souvenirs of scores of illustrious personages.
What it must be now, after the tragic years of a world war, and what it will become as a treasure house for the years to come, is beyond my imagination.
It was into this enormously rich atmosphere, pregnant with everything that conserves France's most glorious military traditions, that Captain Ferdinand Foch was called in 1885 for two years of intensive training and study.