Joffre's first work at fort building had been so well done that immediately upon graduation the government set him to work. The memory of the stinging German defeat was with them stirring them to action. They wanted defenses everywhere. Joffre was employed upon them at Paris, Versailles, Montpellier, and even in faraway Brittany--until he was disposed to grumble at his fate. "This is all very fine," he said; "but I don't want to spend the rest of my days building forts. I want to command troops and see some real fighting." It was the Caesar cropping up in him again. Without question he was a born builder of fortifications. One day the great Marshal MacMahon came by on a tour of inspection, and was much delighted with a series of defenses he had built near Paris. "I congratulate you, Monsieur le Capitaine!" he said. By one sentence he had promoted the young lieutenant to a captaincy. It was about this time that a fall from his horse very nearly cut short his military career. He was so severely injured that the doctors feared that his mind was affected, and he was sent home for a complete rest. At home he did not complain--that was not his nature--but he spent several days pacing back and forth in his little upper room. Then came a day when he burst in to the downstairs room where sat his parents, his face beaming--showing the strain which he had overcome. "It's all right, mon pere!" he cried joyfully. "I have solved it. I will get well!" What he had been doing was to set himself an abstruse and difficult problem in mathematics, in order to see if his brain would respond. It did so, he solved it and thus had no more fears as to his own ultimate recovery. Another story told by his sister, of these early army days, shows further his power of mental abstraction. "My brother was always lost in thought," says Mme. Artus. "No matter what he did, his thoughts never left him. Once they caused his arrest as a spy." It seems that at Vauban, not far away from his home town of Rivesaltas, they were constructing a fort. Joffre sauntered over to inspect it. He was clad in civilian dress and he evinced so much interest in what was going on that the commanding officer promptly seized him for a suspicious character. "Did my brother protest? Not he. But when they brought him before the military court, his Catalonian brogue was enough to convince anybody as to where he was born. "'Why didn't you tell them who you were?' I asked him. "'Too busy thinking about the fort,' was his reply." One other anecdote of this time has come down to us and is worth repeating. His father had bought a piece of farm land that was badly in need of ditching, in order to drain it properly during the wet season, and irrigate it during the dry. The son sketched out a scheme of cross trenches, but his father demurred--then Joseph exploded: "Trenches! What the devil! I know all about trenches; trenches are my specialty."