It must have been a lonely life that young Joffre led--but we have no direct evidence that he ever felt lonely. His books and his day dreams seem always to have made up for a lack of human companionship. The other fellows contented themselves with saying of him: "He is too slow, and methodical to amount to much."
He did not, indeed, make a specially brilliant record in his entrance examinations to the Polytechnique; but his stumbling block was not mathematics or science, it was--German! He never could abide the language!
Joseph Joffre entered this famous military training school in 1869, at the age of seventeen. Within a few months the school course was broken up by the German invasion, and Joffre with other cadets promptly volunteered for service. Much to the delight of his family, he was made a second lieutenant, attached to the Engineering Corps. His first practical field work was in throwing up fortifications in defence of Paris. But the Germans were not to be stopped by Joffre in their march on the French capital at this time. That was reserved for a later day and another war.
The short but terrible conflict of 1870 over, Joffre returned to college, and graduated therefrom in 1872, with the rank of full lieutenant. One of his cla.s.smates of this time was Ferdinand Foch, but if the two future Marshals there became acquainted no story of their meeting has come down to us.
Joffre"s first work at fort building had been so well done that immediately upon graduation the government set him to work. The memory of the stinging German defeat was with them stirring them to action.
They wanted defenses everywhere. Joffre was employed upon them at Paris, Versailles, Montpellier, and even in faraway Brittany--until he was disposed to grumble at his fate.
"This is all very fine," he said; "but I don"t want to spend the rest of my days building forts. I want to command troops and see some real fighting."
It was the Caesar cropping up in him again.
Without question he was a born builder of fortifications. One day the great Marshal MacMahon came by on a tour of inspection, and was much delighted with a series of defenses he had built near Paris.
"I congratulate you, Monsieur le Capitaine!" he said.
By one sentence he had promoted the young lieutenant to a captaincy.
It was about this time that a fall from his horse very nearly cut short his military career. He was so severely injured that the doctors feared that his mind was affected, and he was sent home for a complete rest.
At home he did not complain--that was not his nature--but he spent several days pacing back and forth in his little upper room. Then came a day when he burst in to the downstairs room where sat his parents, his face beaming--showing the strain which he had overcome.
"It"s all right, mon pere!" he cried joyfully. "I have solved it. I will get well!"
What he had been doing was to set himself an abstruse and difficult problem in mathematics, in order to see if his brain would respond. It did so, he solved it and thus had no more fears as to his own ultimate recovery.
Another story told by his sister, of these early army days, shows further his power of mental abstraction.
"My brother was always lost in thought," says Mme. Artus. "No matter what he did, his thoughts never left him. Once they caused his arrest as a spy."
It seems that at Vauban, not far away from his home town of Rivesaltas, they were constructing a fort. Joffre sauntered over to inspect it. He was clad in civilian dress and he evinced so much interest in what was going on that the commanding officer promptly seized him for a suspicious character.
"Did my brother protest? Not he. But when they brought him before the military court, his Catalonian brogue was enough to convince anybody as to where he was born.
""Why didn"t you tell them who you were?" I asked him.
""Too busy thinking about the fort," was his reply."
One other anecdote of this time has come down to us and is worth repeating. His father had bought a piece of farm land that was badly in need of ditching, in order to drain it properly during the wet season, and irrigate it during the dry. The son sketched out a scheme of cross trenches, but his father demurred--then Joseph exploded:
"Trenches! What the devil! I know all about trenches; trenches are my specialty."
The Great War of later years was to show whether or not this confidence in his own abilities was misplaced.
By the year 1884, his reputation as a builder of trenches and forts was firmly established, although official promotion had come slowly. When Admiral Courbet telegraphed to the Home Office from the Isle of Formosa for a reliable officer to place in charge of this work, Joffre was sent.
He spent nearly a year there and it was a year of the hardest kind of work. He could get only indifferent help, so he worked early and late to make up the deficit.
From there he was sent on similar work to the province of Tonkin, Indo-China. Here he practically rebuilt the town of Hanoi, clearing and guttering the streets, draining the neighboring marshes which had made the settlement a pest-hole, and building permanent roads. The town of Vietri was similarly cleaned up.
For these important labors he received the first recognition in nearly ten years. He was given official thanks, and decorated with the cross of the Legion of Honor.
A fellow officer who knew him at this time says: "Captain Joffre was a solidly-built Pyrenean, calm and clear-headed, with a firm walk and a hard blue eye. He seldom smiled and he spoke still more rarely. He never punished except in extreme cases, and then hard. Natives feared him for his silence, but loved him for his justice."
This portrait of him about a quarter of a century before the Great War is easily recognizable in the commander of the later day.
In 1891 he paralleled the career of General Foch somewhat by taking a professor"s chair. He was appointed instructor in fortifications at the Military School at Fontainebleau, where he remained for two years. The work did not appeal to him particularly and he is spoken of there as a thorough teacher, but not popular. He had not mingled enough with others to get their point of view.
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 ma.s.sacred 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 G.o.ddess 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 gla.s.ses," said the doctor.
But eyegla.s.s 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 gla.s.ses!
"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 t.i.tle (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: