VIII

THE SUPERIOR SCHOOL OF WAR

After a year's service as associate professor of military history,
strategy, and applied tactics at the Superior School of War in Paris,
Ferdinand Foch was advanced to head professorship in those branches and
at the same time he was made lieutenant-colonel. This was in 1896. He
was forty-five years old and had been for exactly a quarter of a century
a student of the art of warfare.

His old schoolfellow, Joseph Joffre, was then building fortifications in
northern Madagascar; and his army rank was the same as that of Foch.

It was just twenty years after Foch entered upon his full-fledged
professorship at the Superior School of War that Marshal Joffre, speaking
at a dinner assembling the principal leaders of the government and of the
army, declared that without the Superior School of War the victory of the
Marne would have been impossible.

All the world knows this now, almost as well as Marshal Joffre knew it
then. And all the world knows now as not even Marshal Joffre could have
known then, how enormous far, far beyond the check of barbarism at the
first battle of the Marne--is our debt and that of all posterity to the
Superior School of War and, chiefly, to Ferdinand Foch.