have dulled the edge of fine ambitions. The little house in the narrow
Rue des Grangers where he was born, remains the symbol of his
simplicity. The humble bedroom, flanked by dining-room and kitchen,
where he first saw the light, the store-room above served by an outside
pulley for the raising of winter's stores--all this speaks of a
laborious and thrifty life such as the peasantry live hereabouts. The
future General was one of eleven children of a working cooper.
According to Joffre's sister, the family, of Spanish origin and called
Gouffre, is of noble descent; but its fortune had dwindled when
Grandfather Joffre, leaving his native country for political reasons,
started as a tradesman at Rivesaltes. He left no particular heritage to
his son Joseph, the offspring of middle age, whom he seems utterly to
have neglected. Joseph was little more than a working man with a patch
of vineyard close to the town. But for a friendly uncle, struck by his
intelligence, Joseph Jacques Cesar Joffre--our Joffre--would not have
enjoyed the education which was his at the _lycee_ at Perpignan and at
the Polytechnique in Paris.
It was to his stay in that admirable school for civil and military
engineers that he owes the groundwork upon which he has so successfully
built. It gave him an immense advantage at the start. Though he passed
into the school with the high number of fourteen and became, because of
it, a sergeant in his dormitory, charged with keeping order amongst
older lads--rather trying to his silent and unassertive character--he
did not consistently show the brilliancy that was expected of him. On
leaving, his number had fallen to thirty-five, which did not entitle him
to high civil employment under Government. Whether as a consequence of
it, or because of a pronounced vocation, he joined the Corps of
Engineers as lieutenant. Already he had had a taste of the life,
sufficiently discouraging, one would think, in the War of 1870, which
broke in upon his school career. He served for some months as a junior
subaltern in a fort round Paris. Even at that age, he was known for his
silent seriousness, and the memory of the national defeat seemed to have
sunk deeply into his soul. It made him a patriot, eager to work for
France and for her re-establishment. That, more than anything else,
fired his ambition, for he was not one to crouch at the feet of chance,
waiting, as an _arriviste_ waits, for his own advancement. Not until
the moment of his Soudan expedition, in early middle life, did he expand
to the full limit of his capacity, and then the call of country and the
consciousness of duty done for France were responsible. Before that, he
had not shown, I think, any great desire to progress beyond the common
mark. But when he saw that he could be useful to his time and
generation, a holy zeal possessed him to press on to the great
achievement. And his tranquil courage and perseverance were rewarded to
an extent that seemed incredible in his early years. But, even so, he
would not regard his position as head of the army with complacency or
self-satisfaction. "The war found me," he said to a lifelong friend; "I
did not seek it." That is the note of the man.
His Soudan campaign, which came when he was a Commandant at the age of
forty-three, gave him deserved renown, for it was a masterpiece of
organisation. Before that, he had done more or less humdrum work on
defences, gaining his captaincy that way, when working on the forts
round Paris; he continued in the provinces and in Upper Tonking, where
his constructions were aimed at the predatory Chinese. He fought them
from Formosa, whither he had gone as a change from spade and trowel
work, but partly, I suspect, to forget in change of scene the loss of a
beloved young wife. Admiral Courbet, most famous of pioneers in the
French Colonial domain, was then concluding the Tonking campaign, and
employed him to the general satisfaction. The future Generalissimo was
in fighting and fort building showing an equal talent. Finally, he
exhibited a new side to his character by organising an artistic and
industrial exhibition at Hanoi. Though wrapped up in his profession and
seeming, daily, to take a greater pleasure in it, he showed adaptability
and could turn his hand to anything.
His celebrated march to Timbuctoo again showed him as the all-round man,
for there he had to think of everything. He had gone out into the wilds
for a pacific object, for the building of the Soudan railway, destined
to link the Senegal to the Niger river. His new post did not, strictly
speaking, appeal to him. It interrupted his course of lectures on
fortifications at the School at Fontainebleau, which succeeded to his
command of the Railway Battalion of Engineers. It seemed to him like
his own first-class interment. Surely there was no glory in building a
railway in the desert; yet he was to find it there. At that moment
France had become conscious of her colonial possessions, and with it had
become the desire for development. A haphazard policy had been amended
into a settled plan of pacific penetration by means of the Niger. The
railway was to be the great instrument of civilisation, linking the two
great waterways and making the desert blossom as a rose. It had begun
at Kayes, the capital, under Colonel Gallieni, then commanding in Upper
Senegal, and had been pushed to the hundred and sixteenth kilometre.
Then yellow fever and a lack of credits from home brought it to an
abrupt stop. Commandant Joffre, with his habitual vigour, added
kilometre to kilometre until the hundred and fifty-ninth mark was
reached.
Thereafter came orders to undertake an expedition to Timbuctoo. The
mysterious city had been entered, just before, by Commandant Boiteaux,
who had gone up the river Niger in a flotilla of boats as far as Cabara
and there gained the city on foot. It was resolved to extend the French
dominion over it and over the loop of the river as it sweeps downward to
its ocean outlet. Joffre's duty was to support his superior, Colonel
Bonnier, who had given him a rendezvous outside the city's walls. The
Colonel was to go by river; Joffre followed the left bank with a force
of one thousand, three parts of which were bearers and servants. He
started from Segou, two days after Christmas 1893. The rendezvous never
took place. The Colonel having made quicker progress, turned back to
meet the Commandant, but failed to arrive; the column was assassinated.
Only one white officer, Captain Nigotte, escaped to tell the tale in
Timbuctoo, where fears were expressed for Joffre's safety. But the
latter had acted with great vigour and yet caution in his dealings with
the natives. He went quickly to the rescue of the few survivors of the
column, chastised the murderers, and then, on February 12, entered the
city without further fighting, carrying with him the bodies of the white
officers. At the moment when the news reached him, he was engaged in
crossing the river, in face of a hostile band of Tuaregs, who had burned
his boats at the habitual crossing-place.
More than 500 miles separated Segou from Timbuctoo, and the journey had
been beset with peril and difficulty, how difficult and how perilous is
admirably told in Joffre's own report of the expedition. He showed good
generalship by keeping his men in close order and by throwing out scouts
to protect his flanks and rear. At night a careful watch was set over
the camp, and the young Commander went the rounds to see that his black
sentinels did not sleep at their posts. Water was a great difficulty,
for there was either too much of it or not enough. Great flooded areas,
where the river had overflowed, left swamps which could only be passed
by circuitous marches in an unknown country. By contrast there was a
stark and staring need of wells in a burning desert, where bearers
dropped by the way for want of the precious liquid, and communications
were endangered because posts left in the rear could not obtain the
necessary water. In consequence, the young Commander had to scatter his
column through the villages, where existed a species of boycott, for the
natives had fled before the advance and had carried off all foodstuffs.
Joffre kept a stout heart and a cool head in these trying circumstances.
There was a good deal of fighting, especially in the later stages, but
Joffre took the offensive, as the safer way, and did not allow himself
to be attacked by the enemy. He fought to clear a path for his column.
His initiative and sense of responsibility shone in this crisis. When
he entered the city the engineer in him reappeared, and he planned and
plotted for the safety of the citizens. Strategic positions were seized
and upon them were placed forts and blockhouses. Then, in his turn, he
acted as political officer and received the submission of the tribesmen.
In the midst of these high occupations he received orders from the
Governor of the region to rejoin his railway at Kayes. For once in his
life he disobeyed and sent his reasons, which, of course, were accepted.
When, finally, he left Timbuctoo, he had made an excellent job of it.
He had established his reputation as an organiser and soldier-colonist,
and his reward was the red rosette which decorated his tunic of
Lieutenant-Colonel. His first grade in the Order had been gained in
Formosa. Timbuctoo closed the second colonial phase in Joffre's career.
The third was to open two years later when, as full Colonel, he was
given fortification work to do in Madagascar. It was at the moment of
British reverses in the Boer War. Certain memories, connected with
Fashoda and Dreyfus, rankled in French breasts. The Paris Government
felt it was as well to be prepared against possible enterprise on the
part of the British fleet in the Indian Ocean; and so the defences of
the big island were set hastily on foot. Diego Suarez, the naval base
to the north, was fortified by Joffre under the eye of the Governor,
General Gallieni, who was then gaining renown for his administration of
the island. It was there that the two met and fraternised, as
expatriated Frenchmen will, and learned to respect each other's
qualities.
Therewith closed the final chapter in Joffre's colonial life.
Henceforth he was to work in France, in the immediate path of the great
office to which destiny was hastening him. Successively he commanded
the 19th brigade of Artillery at Vincennes, and the 6th division of
Infantry at Lille, of which town he was the military governor; at
Amiens, he was head of the Second Army Corps. Between the stages of
Brigadier and General of Division, he was director of Artillery at the
Ministry of War. And so he performed the whole cycle of the military
art, before arriving at the Superior Council of War where he was to
receive the crown of the chief command. He had served in just the
capacities, colonial and metropolitan, which equipped him for his great
responsibility. No point in his experience could be considered useless
from the building of forts to the construction of railways; from the
organisation of a self-contained force on the Niger, to the command of
troops in France; from his lectures to military students, to his
direction of the artillery.
The supreme honour came to him on July 29, 1911. The _Panther_ had
dropped a noisy and menacing anchor in the quiet waters of Agadir. In
spite of assurances of peace from Germany and the fixity of the pacifist
idea in France, clear-sighted people saw the cloud of danger in the sky.
Joffre had no misgivings on the subject. One of the earliest questions
to occupy him was that of effectives. None but he and his charming
wife, whom he had married on returning to France, will ever realise how
hard he worked during the three years that intervened before the
outbreak of the war. Sundays and weekdays--it was an incessant round.
He was deeply convinced that the hour was approaching for the trial of
the French military institutions, to which he was called to supply not
merely the finishing touch, but, alas! a great deal of the foundation
work. That was the tragedy of it, the tragedy of an optimism, which had
ignored all German preparations. It had ignored the vast accumulations
of engines of war on the frontiers of Lorraine and Belgium, it had
ignored the meaning of the caves and subterranean passages prepared in
advance in the Champagne and the Soissons district, just as it ignored
the other phases of German activity, the systematic corruption, the
spying, and the rest.
Thus Joffre came to the post which his persistent work had made a just,
if onerous, reward. He was Generalissimo in new conditions. The old
duality, which allowed one man to lead in war and another to prepare for
it, was swept away. Parliament at last had awakened to its dangers, and
MM. Caillaux and Messimy, Premier and Minister of War, had submitted to
President Fallieres a new decree designating Joffre the Supreme
Commander in time of war and the Chief-of-Staff in peace.
It was an admirable choice. If it meant little to the public which had
forgotten all about the march on the Niger, it meant a great deal to the
army which felt comforted and relieved at the appointment of a sound and
thorough administrator. For Joffre, by long contact, knew every cog in
the military machine, which he was now called upon to direct. As
_divisionnaires_ went, he was the youngest of his rank in the army and
had still some years before him which he could count his own. Thus he
joined experience to a comparative youth, which was all in his favour.
Probably the defects rather than the qualities of the organisation
engaged his attention and stimulated his amazing energy to even greater
efforts. At the age of fifty-nine he was faced with a task to try the
strongest head, the steadiest nerves, the most robust health. Happily
he possessed all three and placed them unreservedly at the service of
the State. France was fortunate in her General-in-Chief. How he
succeeded in the colossal burden of the Great War may be left for
consideration to a future chapter.
*CHAPTER V*
*PREPARATION*
We have seen Joffre in the various stages of his career acquiring that
many-sided experience, which was to serve him in excellent stead when,
finally, he came to supreme power. Sometimes the engineer officer was
uppermost, sometimes the combatant. Though in the latter years, when
qualifying for the Council of War, he commanded troops over the very
ground where French and English were to oppose the invaders in
incredible battles, it is yet true that his experience, with the
exception of operations against the Chinese and the Tuaregs on the Niger
in his march to Timbuctoo, consisted in the main of engineering exploits
with a military aim. Thus he coaxed the desert into a railway track,
and thus he cast up mounds of earth and built defensive masonry around
Paris and in the provinces and at various strategic points in France
overseas. This contact with a larger _patrie_ and with the wider
aspects of his profession proved of immense service when, in the process
of time, he came to his great estate. It was in reviewing the work of
his early years, the period of his maturity and then of his later life
that he fully comprehended the character of his task. He realised all
the elements that make up France, all the elements that must be flung
into the crucible of a national army. "Vive la France" had a new
meaning for him, for it meant the France of Asia and Africa as well as
the France of metropolitan frontiers.
None the less, for all the pleasure of the prospect, he was sensible of
the weaknesses that lay underneath. None better. Had he not himself
said in his now famous speech to the Polytechnicians, that you could
improvise nothing in war? As a soldier, tried in the service of his
country, he was penetrated with that truth. There must be preparation
in war--that was the implacable verity. He was emphatic on the point in
a speech which must be regarded as one of the documents of the war. For
he was speaking to officers, past members of the famous school of which
he is a distinguished _alumnus_, and declared with that sense of reality
joined to idealism, which is as pleasing to the plain man as to those in
search of lofty generalisation, that preparation implied many things.
His auditors, at this Old Boys' gathering, strained their ears in the
expectation of hearing something removed from the banalities of the
usual chairman's utterance. And they were not disappointed. The speech
fitted the occasion like a glove; it was no common one, for the Balkan
War had broken out. The eventual Commander-in-Chief could not ignore a
subject fraught with such consequence to himself and to his hearers (for
the most part officers) and quietly aware, no doubt, of the curiosity he
had excited, dealt broadly, yet sufficiently, with the situation.
He began by arraying the forces one against the other in the theatre of
war. On the one side he said were numbers and on the other preparation.
You could tell by the way in which he insisted on the latter word how
much it meant to him. And yet the subject must have been painful, for
none realised better than this impressive-looking man, with brow rimmed
with white hair and the white of massive eyebrows, that France was not
prepared. In elaborating his theme, he told what preparation meant.
The whole of national life must co-operate in it. And what were the
factors of success? They were of three kinds: material, intellectual,
and moral. Under the first came the number and equipment of the troops,
under the second and third the capacity of leaders and the patriotism of
the people. It was clear that he felt the deep significance of the last
quality. Numbers and equipment were certainly important, but patriotism
was the soul of the army. "To be ready in our epoch," he insisted,
"implies a significance of which those who prepared and conducted war in
the past can realise only with difficulty. It would be illusory to
count upon the popular _elan_ though it exceeded that of the volunteers
of the Revolution, if it were not supported by a previous organisation.
'To be ready' to-day, one must have directed, in advance, all the
resources of the country and all its moral energy towards the unique
end, 'Victory.'" And then he proceeded to utter the phrases which have
become classical. They are a synthesis of Joffre's system, the
exposition of his inward faith. "One must have organised everything,
foreseen everything. Once hostilities are commenced, no improvisation
will be valid. What lacks then, will be definitely lacking. The least
omission may cause a disaster."
And he proceeds to particularise. The call to arms must reach those for
whom it is intended. Each man must know where to go and how to get there
and he must meet there his officers, his arms, and his effects. And
over this army which has been organised, equipped, and assembled must be
chiefs, military and administrative, imbued with the national theory of
the war. "But neither the material organisation of this army nor its
training would suffice to assure victory if to this intelligent and
strong body a soul were lacking. This soul is Patriotism." That he
should lay stress upon the word showed how deeply he had realised how
even elaborate schemes of mobilisation could come to naught without this
saving grace, without the faith which moves mountains. He seemed to
say: "We can save France, even if there are flaws in our preparations,
provided we possess Patriotism--the sacred flame." By this alone could
soldier and civilian summon the courage to resist reverses.
That Joffre himself accepted the heavy burden of office, showed that he,
too, was inspired by a strong love of country and faith in the unlimited
powers of French adaptability. He knew that his countrymen were capable
of heroic resistance and a persistent and yet strenuous effort, which
would astonish the world, because he had read in the heart of the
_piou-piou_ undying love for country, and because he had watched
silently the growth of that national spirit evoked by the brutal
provocation of Germany. He knew, also, the delicacy of fitting
discipline to democracy and a fierce national spirit of independence and
justice to the exigencies of a European War. Intuition and experience
told him that only by the finer emotions could the mass be moved, that
it would rebel against mechanical methods and harsh domination and yield
only to the influence of enlightened chiefs. Thus he was the man
destined to lead and to become the interpreter of the racial spirit of
France.
Joffre had established between himself and the soldier in the trenches
an irresistible current of sympathy. How, nobody knows, but, at the
very commencement, his benevolent activity for the common welfare was a
common saying endearing him to the legions under his control, and many
were the incidents quoted of his tenderness of heart. He had found a
swift way to the understanding and implicit obedience of his troops. By
his acts of kindness and consideration he had accumulated a stock of
allegiance from which to draw in the supreme hour, when he should say,
as on the eve of the battle of the Marne: "Now is the time to conquer or
to die." Had he learned these secret arts of sympathy in the wilds of
Africa or in the cloistered life he led, like the Pope in the Vatican,
when harnessed to his work of preparation at the Ministry of War? I do
not know, but I suspect that this trait, like the others, was inborn and
developed by urgent circumstance. However we explain it, he became the
most popular man in France, a god and a hero, a name to conjure with.
"Notre Joffre" was a symbol of success, and of popular confidence. The
"magnificent rumour" which had preceded him on the day of mobilisation
was crystallised into a solid renown when the public saw with what calm
and celerity he assembled troops and with what mastery he played upon
the railway keyboard. Napoleon had won his battles with the legs of his
soldiers, Joffre was going to win them with his railways.
It is not possible, of course, to repair defects of forty years in two
or three years even of unremitting labour; but knowing, as he did, the
tone and temper of the men he had to command and the miraculous
capacities of their nervous energy he did not doubt for a moment the
final triumph, and a species of sublime confidence radiated from him
whether at the Ministry or in the field. It was with his friend and
companion-in-arms, General Pau, that he began to work at the problems
belonging to his position, and the first of them was the effectives.
When the intentions of Germany could be no longer disguised, Joffre
resolved upon the only course compatible with his responsibilities. He
urged the Government to augment the army _pari passu_ with the increased
numbers on the other side of the Vosges, and, happily, he found in M.
Barthou, the Premier, a political leader as strongly impressed as he
with the high necessity of action. This admirable statesman became,
therefore, one of his collaborators in the national defence. A Deputy at
twenty-seven and a Minister at thirty-three, this lawyer and journalist
found full scope for his activities only in the wide region of national
politics. His quickness of comprehension astonished the experts, and
perhaps confirmed their uneasy suspicions that a lawyer knows
everything; but M. Barthou's enthusiasm and deep conviction were beyond
all question. Some reproached him for being a man of letters, guilty of
writing an excellent history of Mirabeau, but he sacrificed ruthlessly
his intellectual leisure and his love of reading on the altar of duty.
It would seem as if the figure of the Revolutionary aristocrat, which
glows from the pages of his book, had communicated his fire to his
accomplished and versatile biographer. So M. Barthou rose grandly to
the situation and became, with Generals Joffre and Pau, organiser of the
new military plan to save France from her disparity with the German
Army.