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.