leaned 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