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.
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