"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!"