A Historian Who Made History

...author, "A World History of Our Own Times" From General de Gaulle's war memoirs emerges a man greater than the sum of his considerable parts...

...Of Petain: "The whole career of that exceptional man had been one long effort of repression...

...He was a widely read man who enlivened his technical discussions of warfare with quotations from Paul Valery, and who dedicated one of his first books, Le Fil de l'Epee, to the colonel under whom he first served: Henri Philippe Petain...

...Of Molotov: "Nothing would move him, make him laugh, or irritate him...

...But it had not satisfied him, since it had not loved him alone...

...Suffice it to say that its factual details do justice to its author and his cause...

...Indeed, the role of historian may yet prove to be the ultimate one that de Gaulle was born to play, since it provides infinite scope to his passion for perfection, his solitary assurance, his sense of destiny that sometimes impeded his military and political careers...

...Of Eden: "This diplomat entirely devoted to his country's interests did not entirely despise those of others, and remained careful of international morality in the midst of the cynical brutalities of his time...

...The power of his intellect alone anticipated the German General Staff, with its pooled experience, and Winston Churchill, with his unrivaled sources of information, in recognizing that the internal combustion engine had restored to the offensive the advantage it had lost during the First World War...

...but he played it--that is the point...

...on one condition, however: that he should accept disaster as his elevation's escutcheon and should adorn it with his glory...

...Sun applies equally to General de Gaulle, who "did that presumptuous thing, so rarely done that we think of it as daring: He assumed a role in history and played it to the end, in spots ineffectively, even incompetently, sometimes pompously, sometimes tragically...

...Sun Yat-sen, and a passage in Lyon Sharman's sensitive biography of Dr...

...Nor is he the memorialist whose only talent is an ability to recapture his own past...

...What happened to de Gaulle at this juncture resembles almost exactly what happened to the no less extraordinary Dr...

...No summary of the events this volume covers can do justice to its quality...

...who then made himself into a statesman, at a supreme crisis in his country's history...

...Too proud for intrigue, too forceful for mediocrity, too ambitious to be a time-server, he nourished in his solitude a passion for domination, which had long been hardened by his consciousness of his own value, the setbacks he had encountered, and the contempt he had for others...

...I paid tribute to its greatness...

...In these and other sketches of the men with whom he dealt, General de Gaulle displays a psychological insight that his military and political duties rarely brought into play...

...Military glory had already lavished on him its bitter caresses...

...General de Gaulle, in his war memoirs, emerges as a writer of history with perhaps less imagination than Churchill, but with equal intellect and a more disciplined style...

...But however much of what was at the bottom might remain hidden from me, I could feel the melancholy of it...

...General de Gaulle lived to see France emerge from the 1940 defeat...

...Sun devoted the major part of his life to a revolution that he did not live to see completed...

...To his original profession as soldier, de Gaulle brought a clear, bold and creative mind...

...The catastrophe that overcame France in 1940 convinced him that the future of his country depended on him and him alone...

...And here, in the extreme winter of his life, events were offering to his gifts and pride the opportunity--so long awaited!--to expand without limits...

...Dr...

...How he got in touch with the great Director of the drama we call History, and learned how the play was to be plotted, is the mystical core of his life--mystical but not mysterious to those who agree with its fundamental assumptions...

...This volume of his memoirs does not cover that full story, but it appears a decade and more after the events that it describes occurred, and if postwar France has not assumed the shape that de Gaulle hoped it would take, he, too, has assumed a new role in the interim...

...and who finally emerges as a great historian because in that role all the facets of his genius enjoy their fullest play...

...For in these memoirs de Gaulle is no longer the professional soldier nor yet the dedicated statesman...

...But de Gaulle was always more than a professional soldier of the first order...

...Having devoted himself to the practice, study and exposition of the art of war, de Gaulle assumed in middle life a new career that at once became a mission...

...I admired not only his brilliant intelligence, his knowledge of affairs, and the charm of his manners, but also the art he had of creating and maintaining around the negotiation a sympathetic atmosphere which favored agreement when that was possible and avoided wounds when it was not...

...Its flavor, however, can best be conveyed by quoting some of its author's judgments...

...Whatever problem was raised, one felt that he knew the file about it, that he was registering faultlessly the new elements added to it by the conversation, that he was formulating his official position exactly, but that he would not depart from what had been prepared and decided elsewhere...

...But this is the heart of his complex nature, which is at last revealed as that of a man of letters whom destiny first made into a soldier, in spite of himself...

...In Molotov, who was and wanted to be merely a perfectly adjusted cog in an implacable machine, I thought I had identified a complete success of the totalitarian system...