Part 28

A welcome change from this was a summons from headquarters to go to Timbuctoo, and help suppress a native rebellion. It was all the more welcome as here, for the first time, he was promised a chance to do some real fighting.

Timbuctoo was then being overrun by the Tuaregs, a tribe of terrible brigands called "the veiled men" of Western Soudan. They had massacred the European settlers, and ended by killing two French officers, Colonel Bonnier and Lieutenant Boiteux, who had recently headed expeditions against them. It was a wild and treacherous land, and the relief expedition would scarcely have child's play of it.

Joffre went at it without the slightest misgiving. Like many another soldier he was a firm believer in "Luck," and here certainly the fates were propitious. He set forth on his journey from Segou, on Christmas Day, 1893, commanding a force of thirty French and three hundred natives. They crossed deadly swamps and dry, trackless deserts. There were some deaths by the wayside, but Joffre pushed on. His progress was slow, as he stopped to make friends with native chiefs, and enlist their aid where possible.

At last they reached Timbuctoo, only to find orders awaiting them to "prepare for evacuation," in the face of a threatening Tuareg army. Joffre for once disobeyed orders, and decided, instead, to attack. He did so, and administered a crushing defeat to the brigands. He followed this up so thoroughly, that the whole district was restored to peace.

Then the soldier gave place to the engineer. He cleaned up the town (in another sense) and returned home.

"Luck was on my side," he said briefly after receiving official congratulations, and the rank of lieutenant colonel. "I might have met the fate of Bonnier and Boiteux, had the Goddess of Good Fortune not attended me."

But those who knew him believed that it was something more than luck.

That Joffre was a fatalist is evinced by another incident of this march in Soudan. An insect's sting had poisoned his left eye so severely that the sight was threatened. The doctor of the force advised him to wear a bandage. Joffre would not agree.

"I could not command my troops if I were blindfolded," he said.

"Then it must be blue glasses," said the doctor.

But eyeglass shops are not found in the desert, and Joffre went on without protection. A few days later a soldier received a packet from home and brought it to him. It was a pair of blue glasses!

"I told you that I was in luck," said Joffre.

However, he narrowly escaped blindness, and ever afterward a thin veil-like film covered the injured eye.

One result of the Timbuctoo campaign was an official report written by Joffre, and afterwards published in book form under the title (translated) "Operations of the Joffre Column before and after the Capture of Timbuctoo." The story is a straightforward soldierly narrative. One French critic recently said of it, apropos of Joffre's election to the French Academy, a rather unique honor: "I defy anybody who knows the pleasure which words can give us in evoking things, to deny that this report is a piece of most effective writing. . . . With Joffre who has no idea or desire to give us 'fine writing,' the effect produced is that of reality itself. The names of the tribes he meets or describes take on a strange virtue, as if we heard them on the spot. Even the French officers' names scattered over a narrative from which all attempt at picturesqueness is banished, produce picturesqueness. . . . On the whole he is a primitive, and with all the primitive's simple charm and power."

After the Soudanese adventure, came a trip to Madagascar--this time, more fort constructing, from which it seemed that he could never escape. The problem down there was a vexatious one, due to a do-nothing policy of a predecessor. Things were in bad shape. Joffre arrived, after a long sea voyage, gave one look around, and then things began to happen.

"If men are responsible for this disorder," he said sententiously, "it is easy to suppose that men can restore the needed order."

And the forts and barracks went up in record time.

"We never expected to see that job done," reports one soldier. "The thing was so old that it had cobwebs over it. When Joffre took hold it went up by magic."

They concocted another saying about him, down in that distant island, which was:

"There goes old man System!"

At another time an officer remarked: "Joffre wants what he wants when he wants it--and furthermore he knows why he wants it!"

In 1901, at the century's turn, and when he was rounding out his half century, his long-delayed promotions began to arrive. He was made Brigadier General, and thenceforth began to forge rapidly to the front. One reason for his slow advancement was that he was no politician or time-server. He never pushed himself forward. And so much of his work was done in remote provinces that the General Staff hardly knew him at all. We remember, too, that he had made no friends at school, who would follow his career, or speak a good word for him in official ears.

When he did at last receive recognition it was upon absolute merit. But when he reached the General Staff, the remark was frequently heard: "Who is this Joffre? We never heard of him."

It was not long, however, before he made his presence felt in Paris official circles. They came to depend more and more upon this stocky, hard-headed Gascon and his opinions. He never minced words and he went to the root of the matter.

In 1911, when the need was universally felt, of a thorough reorganization of the French army--a much-needed house-cleaning--they cast about for some man big enough for the job. In a conference General Pau, a warm adherent of Joffre, shook his single good fist in the faces of the Staff officers, and exclaimed: "There is only one man who can do the job!"

So they sent for Joffre and made him chief of the General Staff, with full power to reorganize. It was well for France that they did so, and fortunate that he had three full years to work before the blow fell, and the invaders were again at their gates.

"No German could be more thorough than Joffre," said one officer. "For him no lasting results can be obtained without the utmost care. He has limitless patience, joined with a wonderful breadth of view. His methods resemble the head of a great business."

In his intricate work of reconstructing the army, he revealed another, and surprising side to his nature. From being cold and aloof, he showed a human sympathy for his men, down to the last private. It was as though the man who had held himself aloof from intimates wanted to take the whole French army into his heart. And the men responded with an affection and a confidence which were later to produce the fine results of leadership in the War. He was no longer "Joffre the Silent," but "Papa Joffre."