11/15/2023 0 Comments Charles de gaulle books![]() But after toiling away on the book for a couple of years, de Gaulle discovered to his fury that Pétain had asked another officer to draft the section on the Great War: the plainspoken Pétain found his ghost’s adjectives ‘ridiculous’ – ‘like the silk sashes worn by officers in comic-opera armies’.Īmong other causes of disagreement, there was a clash on a seemingly trivial point of subediting, which in retrospect seems to sum up the gulf between them. Despite this heroic record, he greeted the armistice in low spirits, writing to his colonel that ‘the great joy I share with you is mixed for me, more bitter than ever, with the indescribable regret at not having played a greater role.’ In one letter from captivity, he described himself to his mother as ‘one of the living dead’.Īfter the war, Pétain, impressed by his protégé’s sweeping lectures on military strategy, brought him into his cabinet and chose him as his ghostwriter for a book on the French army. In fact, he had been taken prisoner and for the rest of the war was held in German camps, from which he escaped five times, his awkward height always leading to his recapture. A peerless officer in all respects.’ Even in de Gaulle’s first, and, as it turned out, erroneous, appearance on the record, the word ‘honour’ catches the eye. Pétain issued a posthumous citation, declaring that Captain de Gaulle had ‘led his men in a furious assault and fierce hand-to-hand fighting, the only solution he considered compatible with his sentiment of military honour. In the first terrible bombardment at Verdun, de Gaulle’s whole company was wiped out, and he was thought to have been killed too. That is to say, we talked about them the whole time.’ What a peculiar pair they must have made, the ungainly subaltern giraffe and the dapper colonel with the mesmerising blue eyes, out on the razzle together. He must have caught the colonel’s eye quickly, because he told a later biographer that as early as 1913 the distance in rank had not prevented them from taking the train to Paris together each weekend to chase girls: ‘Pétain liked women as one likes women when one is in one’s fifties and I despised them as one despises them when one is twenty. Passing on the news to de Gaulle, Georges Pompidou, his directeur de cabinet and a former Rothschild banker, remarked: ‘The affair is now over, once and for all.’ De Gaulle disagreed: ‘No, it was a great historical drama, and a historical drama is never over.’ What an extraordinary drama it was, the relationship between the two men, played out over nearly forty years, encapsulating the whole agony of France, and leaving behind resentments and divisions that are not quite dead even now.īefore graduating from St Cyr in 1912, de Gaulle had chosen to serve in the 33rd Infantry stationed at Arras, under Pétain’s command. By lunchtime two days later, he was being hustled underground at the Port-Joinville cemetery on the island. Even so, ministers in Paris were anxious to see the back of him. At the time of his death, he was 95 years old and wandering in his wits. Since then Pétain had been banged up on the Ile d’Yeu, 11 miles off the Vendée coast. The hero of Verdun was sentenced to death by one vote, but the court asked for the sentence to be commuted to life imprisonment in view of the marshal’s great age, which was a relief to de Gaulle. ![]() He had been tried for treason in 1945, while General de Gaulle was still in his first spell of power. ![]() ‘C’est le maréchal, il est mort, là-bas,’ the man of the family said, pointing to the horizon. ‘Qu’est-ce que c’est?’ my father asked the family next to us. I was conscious of a feeling of great unease all around me, of people not knowing how to react to whatever it was. Some of the men got up and stood in awkward attitudes, several with their hands by their sides, more or less at attention, others shading their eyes and staring out to sea at the gleam on the horizon. ![]() We had not been on the beach long before the radios seemed to be squawking louder than usual, and there was a strange commotion around us. Several of them had those early portable radios, chunky wooden boxes covered in rexine (I had just been given a dark-green one for my 12th birthday but had left it at home). The other families staying at St-Gilles-Croix-de-Vie in the summer of 1951 were mostly French.
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