Ferdinand Foch, with his brilliant knowledge and high ideals of soldiering, was now past fifty and not yet a colonel.
Strong though his spirit was, sustained by faith in God and rewarded by those "secret satisfactions" which come to the man who loves his work and is conscious of having given it his best, he must have had hours, days, when he drank deep of the cup of bitterness. There are, though, bitters that shrivel and bitters that tone and invigorate. Or perhaps they are the same and the difference is in us.
At any rate, Foch was not poisoned at the cup of disappointment.
And when the armies under his command encircled the great rock whereon Laon is perched high above the surrounding plains I hope Foch was with them—in memory of the days when he was "dumped" there, so to speak, far away from his sphere of influence at the School of War.
In 1903 he was made colonel and sent to the Thirty-fifth artillery at Vannes, in Brittany.
Only two years later he was called to Orleans as chief of staff of the Fifth army corps.
On June 20, 1907, he was made Brigadier General and passed to the general staff of the French army at Paris. Soon afterwards, Georges Clemenceau became Minister of War, and was seeking a new head for the Staff College. Everyone whose advice he sought said: Foch. So the redoubtable old radical and anti-clerical summoned General Foch.
"I offer you command of the School of War."
"I thank you," Foch replied, "but you are doubtless unaware that one of my brothers is a Jesuit."
"I know it very well," was Clemenceau's answer. "But you make good officers, and that is the only thing which counts."