fixed upon a course involving more cavalry
skill than was his on graduating. And after two years at Tarbes, with
much riding of the fine horses of Arabian breed which are the specialty
of that region, he went to the Cavalry School at Saumur, on the Loire.

King Rene of Anjou, whose chronic poverty does not seem to have
interfered with his taste for having innumerable castles, had one at
Saumur, and it still dominates the town and lends it an air of
medievalism.

Toward the end of the sixteenth century Saumur was one of the chief
strongholds of Protestantism in France and the seat of a Protestant
university.

But the revocation of the Edict of Nantes granting tolerance to the
Huguenots, brought great reverses upon Saumur, whose inhabitants were
driven into exile. And thereupon (1685) the town fell into a decline
which was not arrested until Louis XV, in the latter part of his reign,
caused this cavalry school to be established there.

It is a large school, with about four hundred soldiers always in
training as cavalry officers and army riding masters. And the riding
exhibitions which used to be given there in the latter part of August
were brilliant affairs, worth going many miles to see.

There Ferdinand Foch studied cavalry tactics, practiced "rough riding"
and--by no means least important--learned to know another type of
Frenchman, the men of old Anjou.

In our own country of magnificent distances and myriad racial strains
we are apt to think of French people as a single race: "French is
French."

This is very wide of the truth. French they all are, in sooth, with an
intense national unity surpassed nowhere on earth if, indeed, it is
anywhere equaled. But almost every one of them is intensely a
provincial, too, and very "set" in the ways of his own section of
country--which, usually, has been that of his forbears from time
immemorial.

In the description I quoted in the second chapter, showing some of the
types from the vicinity of Tarbes which frequent its horse market, one
may get some idea of the extraordinary differences in the men of a
single small region which is bordered by many little "pockets" wherein
people go on and on, age after age, perpetuating their special traits
without much admixture of other strains.

Not every part of France has so much variety in such small compass.
But every province has its distinctive human qualities. And between
the Norman and the Gascon, the Breton and the