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.
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