But it did
substantially the same work then as now, and among its faculty Foch
undoubtedly found many who could give him able aid in his perpetual study
of the past.

Rennes especially cherishes the memory of Bertrand du Guesclin, the great
constable of France under King Charles V and the victorious adversary of
Edward III. This brilliant warrior, who drove the English, with their
claims on French sovereignty, out of France, was a native of that
vicinity. And we may be sure that whatever special opportunity Rennes
afforded of studying documents relating to his campaigns was fully
improved by Captain Foch.

In that time, also, Foch had ample occasion to know the Bretons, who are,
in some respects, the least French of all French provincials--being much
more Celtic still than Gallic, although it is a matter of some fifteen
hundred years since their ancestors, driven out of Britain by the
Teutonic invasions, came over and settled "Little Britain," or Brittany.

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.