Ferdinand Foch entered the Polytechnic School at Paris on the 1st of November, 1871, just after he had completed his twentieth year.

This school, founded in 1794, is for the technical education of military and naval engineers, artillery officers, civil engineers in government employ, and telegraphists—­not mere operators, of course, but telegraph engineers and other specialists in electric communication.  It is conducted by a general, on military principles, and its students are soldiers on their way to becoming officers.

Its buildings cover a considerable space in the heart of the great school quarter of Parts.  The Sorbonne, with its traditions harking back to St. Louis (more than six centuries) and its swarming thousands of students, is hard by the Polytechnic.  So is the College de France, founded by Francis I. And, indeed, whichever way one turns, there are schools, schools, schools—­of fine arts and applied arts; of medicine in all its branches; of mining and engineering; of war; of theology; of languages; of commerce in its higher developments; of pedagogy; and what-not.

Nowhere else in the world is there possible to the young student, come to advance himself in his chosen field of knowledge, quite such a thrill as that which must be his when he matriculates at one of the scores of educational institutions in that quarter of Paris to which the ardent, aspiring youth of all the western world have been directing their eager feet from time immemorial.

Cloistral, scholastic atmosphere, with its grave beauty, as at Oxford and Cambridge, he will not find in the Paris Latin Quarter.

Paris does not segregate her students.  Conceiving them to be studying for life, she aids them to do it in the midst of life marvelously abundant.  They do not go out of the world—­so to speak—­to learn to live and work in the world.  They go, rather, into a life of extraordinary variety and fullness, out of which—­it is expected—­they will discover how to choose whatever is most needful to their success and well-being.

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.