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 Galliéni, 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.