The war was over. France had concluded a shameful peace but one that was forced upon her. This sort of war had brought bitter disillusionment to a host of French boys, and they always thought in their hearts of the day of reckoning which must come later on--and hoped that they would be alive to see it. Such must have been the dream of Foch, the "sleeping firebrand." For the present, there was nothing for it, but to doff his uniform and take up his studies again. The college of St. Clement had ceased to be a hospital and was again full of classrooms. But over the old fort floated a strange flag--the black, white and red emblem of Germany, and German officers strutted everywhere on the streets. The French signs over the shops and on the street corners were rapidly disappearing. Soon came an official order from Berlin forbidding the teaching of French in the schools of Alsace and Lorraine. The work of benevolent assimilation was begun. Foch privately shook his fist at the broad backs of the swaggering conquerors, and set to work at his studies with renewed vim. French or German, the old Jesuit college was going to aid him in his task of becoming a soldier--and then his country would have one more recruit at any rate! We are not surprised to find, therefore, that he passed his entrance examinations with flying colors, and in November, 1871, donned his uniform as a cadet in the Ecole Polytechnique. This building, like the one at Metz, still bore evidences of the recent war. During the siege of Paris it had been used as a hospital; and in the civil war which followed the peace, when the Empire was overthrown, it had been through severe fighting. Shell holes were still to be seen in its roofs and walls. But such scars seemed to make it still more what it was in name, a military school. Foch already felt like a soldier. Among Foch's fellow students were two others who were destined to play a part in the World War. One was a cadet named Ruffey, who was destined to become a General, in command of the Third Army of France, during 1914. The other was a short, stocky fellow, who came from the Gascon country near Foch's home, and who had been more fortunate than he in seeing some actual fighting during the recent war. He had been in command of a battery of guns during the siege of Paris, and had also taken a physical part in the fighting. Foch looked at this strapping cadet, and then at his own much slighter frame, and a feeling akin to envy came over him, as he may have said to himself: "If only I could have got into it like that fellow Joffre!"