Hero Unashamed

THE WAR MEMOIRS OF CHARLES DE GAULLE: UNITY 1942-1944 (378 pp.)--Simon & Schusfer ($6).

Most of the great figures of World War II have now written their memoirs, and most of the books are touched with a let-bygones-be-bygones air that often puts the reader at one remove from reality. Not so The War Memoirs of Charles de Gaulle. His love of country, his ego, his antipathies, his glory in victory stand from the page like freshly stirred passions. A decade and a half later, perhaps he alone of the surviving architects of victory could write without embarrassment a passage such as this: "Since each of all those here had chosen Charles de Gaulle in his heart as the refuge against his agony and the symbol of his hopes, we must permit the man to be seen, familiar and fraternal, in order that at this sight the national unity should shine forth."

Symbol of unity he certainly was, but familiar never, and fraternal only under a massive reserve that not even his closest associates could penetrate.

This second volume of his brilliantly written Memoirs (the third and last is promised for 1960) has the same theme as the first: Charles de Gaulle is France; France is Charles de Gaulle. A little known army career man who expatriated himself to London in 1940, condemned to death by the Vichy government, he worked and dreamed toward one shining vision: France, risen from the shame of defeat under the leadership of General de Gaulle. If he does not hestitate to take the role of hero, neither does he back off from naming his villains: Britain's Churchill and Macmillan, the U.S.'s Franklin Roosevelt and Robert Murphy. His book is a step-by-step account (1942-44) of how he frustrated what he regarded as his allies' machinations to use France for their own political purposes.

Given De Gaulle's fierce intransigence, it is not hard to appreciate the annoyance of Churchill, F.D.R. and, later, Harry Truman. To them, and especially to F.D.R., he was an intractable beggar in the name of a beaten and dishonored nation. According to him, it was Roosevelt, "now fulfilling his destiny, impelled as he was by the secret admonition of death" who was determined that France "should recognize him [meaning Roosevelt] as its savior and arbiter." Churchill he sees as an American pawn, whose irascibility could make him say furiously to De Gaulle: "You claim to be France! You are not France! I do not recognize you as France!" And Eisenhower, whom he admired, was a man who sympathized with De Gaulle, but "complied, yielding to Roosevelt's authority, influenced by the advisers the latter sent to him, spied on by his peers--his rivals ..."

It is hard not to sympathize with De Gaulle's aims, difficult not to admire his fight against fearsome odds. Perhaps he failed to see clearly enough the U.S. and British difficulties, but to him it was always France first. What is surprising is De Gaulle's charity toward his old antagonists. F.D.R., Petain and a few lesser lights come off badly to the end. But even in the case of so unpleasant a figure as double-dealing Pierre Laval, De Gaulle searches for understanding: "Laval had played. He had lost. He had the courage to admit that he must answer for the consequences ... he sought, somehow, to serve his country. Let that be left to his credit!"

De Gaulle shows proudly and clearly how, when the time came near war's end to rescue France, he demanded and won the right to be what he had always said he was: the symbol of French rebirth. The De Gaulle who now once again heads his country is recognizable as the unashamed hero, who in this book describes his task at the moment of personal victory:" Gradually, the call was heard. Slowly, severely, unity was forged. Now the people and the leader, helping each other, were to begin the journey to salvation."

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