ambre and Meuse." They were to fill Nancy with
these stirring sounds. The clarion notes carrying these martial airs
were to reach every cranny of the old town. It was a veritable tidal
wave of triumphant sound that he wanted--for it had much to efface.

Nancy will never forget that night! It was Saturday, the 23d of
August, 1913. And the new commandant's name was Ferdinand Foch!

Less than a year later he was fighting to save Nancy, and what lay
beyond, from the Germans.

And _this_ time there was to be a different story! Ferdinand Foch was
foremost of those who assured it.

IV

PARIS AFTER THE GERMANS LEFT

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