The Bretons maintained their independence of France for a thousand years, and only became united with it through the marriage of their last sovereign, Duchess Anne, with Charles VIII, in 1491 and—­after his death—­with his successor, Louis XII.

And even to-day, after more than four centuries of political union, the people of Brittany are French in name and in spirit rather than in speech, customs, or temperament.  Many of them do not speak or understand the French language.  Few of them, outside of the cities, have conformed appreciably to French customs.  Quaint, sturdy, picturesque folk they are—­simple, for the most part, superstitious, tenacious of the old, suspicious of the new, and governable only by those who understand them.

Foch must have learned, in those seven years, not only to know the Bretons, but to like them and their rugged country very well.  For he has had, these many years past, his summer home near Morlaix on the north coast of Brittany.  It was from there that he was summoned into the great war on July 26, 1914.

In 1885 Captain Foch was called to Paris and entered the Superior School of War.

This institution, wherein he was destined to play in after years a part that profoundly affected the world’s destiny, was founded only in 1878 as a training school for officers, connected with the military school which Louis XV established in 1751 to “educate five hundred young gentlemen in all the sciences necessary and useful to an officer.”

One of the “young gentlemen” who profited by this instruction was the little Corsican whom Ferdinand Foch so ardently venerated.

The building covers an area of twenty-six acres and faces the vast Champ-de-Mars, which was laid out about 1770 for the military school’s use as a field for maneuvers.

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 Trocadero, 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 Trocadero 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 Hotel 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-Elysees.