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!