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