Portraits and Miniatures(35)

Between the wars Captain de Gaulle, as he was in 1919, or Colonel de Gaulle, as he became in 1937, had an interesting career for a professional soldier grinding through the slow process of promotion in a peacetime army. He was a dedicated officer but an awkward one. He was an intellectual who devoted much of his interest to the four books, admittedly on military topics, that he produced during these years, and he positively enjoyed standing alone against the conventional wisdom. They were neither of them qualities that naturally eased his progress up the military ladder. The fact that they did not do his career more harm was largely because he had a most powerful patron in the surprising shape of Marshal Philippe Pétain.

Pétain had been his battalion commander at Arras. When de Gaulle was wounded and captured at Verdun Pétain was his commanding general and signed the citation that led to his decoration. Then in 1925 Pétain had de Gaulle recalled to work under him at the Supreme War Council from a dreary quartermaster staff job with the occupying forces in Germany to which he had been assigned after two not very successful years at the École Supérieure de Guerre. By then de Gaulle had already published his first book, La Discorde Chez l’Ennemi, a study of German military errors in 1914-18, and it was this that commended him to Pétain. In a very French way Pétain wished to sustain his then superb military reputation with an equivalent intellectual distinction, and in particular to surpass the literary output of Marshal Foch. De Gaulle he believed was the best writer in the army. He wanted him on his staff for this reason, and set him to work on a series of studies of the history of the French army with which the Marshal had been toying since 1921.

At first Pétain’s appreciation of de Gaulle’s literary talents brought mutual satisfaction. He even avenged de Gaulle’s semi-humiliation at the École Supérieure by arranging for him, still only a captain, to give three compulsorily attended lectures to the whole École with himself presiding over the first. These were to form the core of de Gaulle’s second book, Le Fil de l’Epée (The Sword’s Edge), which was published in 1932, and set out the qualities, many of which bore a flattering resemblance to those of Marshal Pétain, that would be required in a great captain general who could save France in a war of the future. The lectures were a plea, presented with much historical allusion and some shafts of iconoclastic wit, for the training of élite commanders disposed to improvisation as opposed to the doctrine of defence by the book which was then favoured by the French High Command. They caused considerable offence amongst the many officers far senior to himself who were forced to listen.

Even with Pétain relations began to fray, but more for reasons of literary jealousy than of strategic disagreement. Pétain wanted a ghost-writer but de Gaulle wanted a literary reputation of his own. When Pétain became War Minister in 1934 he recoiled from his original thought of making de Gaulle his directeur de cabinet because of warnings that de Gaulle had become too much his own man. De Gaulle was relieved because the post might have prevented him publishing his third and best-known pre-war book, Vers l’Armée de Métier (Towards a Professional Army). This was a plea for a small, highly trained, highly mobile corps of 100,000 men. Although it did not decry the supplementary use of fortifications, it was essentially hostile to the Maginot Line mentality.

It was, however, his fourth book, La France et son Armée, that provided the final irritable chapter in de Gaulle’s literary relations with Pétain. The basis of the book was the historical material that de Gaulle had prepared when working under Pétain in 1925-7, which Pétain had wanted to publish under his own name in 1928 but which de Gaulle had successfully resisted. Ten years later Pétain less successfully resisted de Gaulle’s claim to copyright and eventually agreed, subject to a negotiated dedication, the form of which de Gaulle slightly changed. Pétain was furious, and de Gaulle tried to appease him by promising that any second edition would carry the proper version. It was a supreme example of a storm in a teacup, particularly as publication took place at the height of the Munich crisis and was little noticed. Even without that diversion, however, the work would have been unlikely to sell much. All of de Gaulle’s books of that epoch had rippling repercussions but small sales - Vers l’Armée de Métier sold only 700. It was reminiscent of the joke that ‘the reason academic disputes are so bitter is that the stakes are so small’. In France at least the habits of the Champ de Mars could rival those of the groves of academe in this respect. But few professors achieve the positions that Pétain and de Gaulle were to do within two years of the fracas.