DE GAULLE’S CAREER

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXXIII, 9 December 1940, Page 3

DE GAULLE’S CAREER

RELATIONS WITH VICHY THE SINISTER LAVAL It is the eternal miracle of France that she always finds at the necessary moment the men she needs to save her.” This remark was made in an article appearing in several Paris papers some 10 days before the French collapse, and recently reprinted by the “Courrier Australien.” The man picked out as the saviour of his country was Charles de Gaulle, who had been promoted from colonel to general, and had just been appointed Under-Secretary to the War Department. The full recognition of his talents had come too late, however, and the voice that had in the wilderness so long proclaimed the era of tanks and mechanised warfare did not get a chance to make itself effectively heard before the enemy was at the gates. Yet de Gaulle was not too late after all, perhaps, but was destined to save his country in another way, with the help of Britain, writes A. R. Chisholm in the Melbourne “Argus.” THE SOLDIER Like the then Colonel Petain. under whom he began his service in the 33rd Infantry Regiment in 1911,’0n graduating from the military college of St. Cyr, this 21-year-old second lieutenant came of conservative French stock, his father being a teacher in a Catholic school. The young man was an ardent patriot, with a strong belief in French tradition. His political tendencies, I understand, were, like those of Marshal Petain, royalist. The war broke out, and, still in the 33rd, de Gaulle was promoted to the command of a company after being wounded in the 1914 campaign. A captain by Stepmber, 1915, and three times mentioned in despatches, he was taken prisoner early in the following year after fighting at Verdun, and remained in captivity till the end of the war (the end? It has never finished). It was then, perhaps, that he learned to appreciate the barbaric ruthlessness of the Hun, and to realise the necessity of always maintaining the strongest possible armaments against the menace of future invasions. He had undoubtedly developed a special capacity for operational planning, and in 1924 was sent for a special course in the Higher Military School; he was subsequently appointed a staff officer. Destiny, or Petain’s recognition of his merits, sent him to the staff of his former colonel, now a marshal. His promotions and transfers were rapid; and after doing staff work on the Rhine and in Syria, he was appointed to the secretariat of the National War Council, and thence, in 1937, to the command of a tank regiment, with the rank of colonel. MAN OF VISION He had found the arm that appealed •to his imagination, but not the means of convincing his superiors of the supreme importance of that arm, though he preached it eloquently and often. The accuracy of his vision, based on sound technical knowledge, can be seen in the following lines that he wrote in 1934. Here, all that happened after the Germans broke through the Sedan area is described in advance, as if by an eye-witness: the swift-moving tanks, the demoralising dive-bombers, all the terrors of speed and mechanisation and brutality that swept France so rapidly from her place as a great Power into her mouldering prison of to-day. “A strongly armoured brigade,” he wrote, “running across country as swiftly as a galloping horse . . . . crossing ditches three yards wide, climbing 30ft embankments, bowling over trees, knocking down walls, crushing everything, will constitute the main echelon of large units. It will be their eye also, and their scout, under the continual protection of the air force.” I It was about at the same period that the then Colonel de Gaulle pointed out ; the dangerous opening that lay in the north-east through the Ardennes. “A ! terrible Preach,'’ he called it; and it was precisely through this breach that the hordes of the modern Attila swooped down on the smiling fields and fair cities that were France. But in 1934 France was too taken up with party politics to listen to the warning voice of a patriot. , HIS IMPORTANCE General de Gaulle, then, is no blundering, incompetent soldier; and he further showed great moral courage when, without hesitation, he decided to fight on after the debacle. Some outcry was made about his mistake at Dakar, but it must not be forgotten that he was anxious to avoid a bloody contest with his misguided compatriots, the second clause of Article 1 in his agreement (7th August) with His Majesty’s Government having stipulated that his forces were never to bear arms against France. Moreover, that mistake, if it was a mistake, has been redeemed by recent successes in French Equatorial Africa. In any case, the supreme importance of de Gaulle to-day is that he keeps alive a real France, and maintains a link between Britain and her fallen ally. It is that fact that makes it so difficult to understand why Vichy has condemned him to death. His act.was not one of rebellion against the French Government, but one of resistance against an invader who has always snapped his fingers at treaties. “There are circumstances in which disobedience is an obligation in the face of capitulation,” said the general in a recent speech. Though in natural anger 1 have said some bitter things at times about Marshal Petain, I have never been able to look on the Man of Verdun as a traitor, and I find it impossible to believe that Petain would, of his own volition, condemn to death a man whose merits he had appreciated merely because the latter refused to be beaten. Had not Petain himself taken that attitude at Verdun? The only ray of explicative light I can find in this sordid mystery is the surmise that Petain is not the real head of the Government, but the instrument of men less scrupulous, who have special reasons for hating the Free French movement. Men, in other words, who do not want France to be free. The sweet air of liberty does not foster the growth of their political monstrosities. LAVAL THE SINISTER Of these, the worst is probably Laval His Fascist sympathies are well known, and he is of the same stamp as his friend Mussolini: a man of low ex- : traction, who has changed his party views readily, as ihe . uce rid, to enJ large his sinister nothingness. While he | might tolerate an old soldier like i Petain, because he could use him, as Mussolini used the King of Italy, to further his own ends, he could not guffer a de Gaulle. He might even secretly hate Petain for having won his distinction so easily by virtue of the natural distinction that was in him. and yet find it profitable to swallow his dislikes; but de Gaulle is i. younger man than Petain, with the same sort of natural distinction, and he is beyond Laval’s reach both geographically and morally. If that theory is right, it would also explain the sabotage of the Royalist

movement, with which Petain was associated. For the real Royalist movement, as represented by men like Maurras and Bainville, aimed at a socialist but not a demagogic France, and its principle of royalty was inseparable from the idea of liberty and patriotism. The Due de Guise, the claimant to the throne, who died recently, always asserted that he would accept the crown only with the free consent of the French people. LAVAL AND ROYALTY His son, the Comte de Paris, took the same line. He published in 1936 a book which showed his strong socialist tendencies, running counter to the policy which Laval is now so anxious to foster. If, then, there is any truth in recent reports that Laval is aiming at the Comte’s accession to the throne, it is for a reason altogether different from that envisaged by Maurras. His dream is rather to induce the young claimant to become his puppet, with Hitler in the background to see that royalty does pot become too royal, but remains subservient to the ideals of the adventurer and the morality of Europe’s gangsters. But while de Gaulle and his movement exist there is always a voice to proclaim that France is France and Hitler is a barbarian. And Laval cannot prevent that voice from being heard by the French people and by the Comte de Paris. Meanwhile the only sword that can cut through this Gordian knot of intrigues is held in Britain’s dauntless hand, and the moral to be drawn from all the vicissitudes of the Petain Administration is this: Break the savage, corrosive power of the Hun. Then, and then only, real values will be discernible again in France, and Europe will breathe that unpolluted air in which she grew to her resplendent maturity.