Too Poor to Bow

THE COMPLETE WAR MEMOIRS OF CHARLES DEGAULLE (1940-1946). 1,048 pages. Simon & Schuster. $12.50.

When Charles de Gaulle fled his prostrate country in 1940, he was all that the Free French had--and he had nothing: "Not the shadow of a force or of an organization at my side. In France, no following and no reputation. Abroad, neither credit nor standing." Four years later, the obscure and penniless general had helped liberate France, become its first postwar President, and taken his place among world statesmen of the first rank. History records no more telling example of the will to power.

De Gaulle's three volumes of war time memoirs, published for the first time in their entirety, are a rung-by-rung account of that ascent. There were no mysteries about it, and De Gaulle makes none. He has been accused of melodrama, egocentricity and arrogance, but his memoirs are written in an eloquently understated, supremely lucid style. As to the familiar gibe about his Joan of Arc complex, le grand Charles has never believed that he or his beloved France had any special claim to divine protection. True, he was superbly, even illogically confident. But above all else, De Gaulle has al ways been a realist. In his serene, eminently aristocratic view of human affairs, man is an infinitely corruptible, infrequently brilliant creature. It was the task of Charles de Gaulle, as he saw it, to make the children of darkness see the light. But in the years of France's humiliation it took all the patience, compassion and perseverance of which he was capable.

"Limitless Fury." A soldier's son, De Gaulle grew up in Paris with an all-consuming love of country. "France," he decided in early youth, "cannot be France without greatness." As an army colonel in the 1930s, he was keenly aware of his country's disavowal of that destiny. Petty partisan squabbling and interminable changes of government kept France's defenses in a shambles. While Hitler armed to the teeth, the French staked all on their grande illusion, the Maginot Line. Risking his career, De Gaulle badgered his superiors to create a mechanized army capable of swift, massive attack. Only Hitler took his advice. France's capitulation, he writes, was the expression of a "profound national renunciation."

De Gaulle's reaction was "limitless fury." He vowed: "If I live, I will fight, wherever I must, as long as I must, until the enemy is defeated and the national stain washed clean." De Gaulle tried to persuade the Vichy government to carry on the war from French North Africa, but no one of any eminence followed him into exile. "At this moment, the worst in her history," De Gaulle realized, "it was for me to assume the burden of France."

For six years he shouldered that burden without a day of rest. To many it seemed preposterous that a middle-echelon army officer should presume to reverse the verdict of war. But De Gaulle effectively enforced his claim with impassioned broadcasts, with tireless journeying to all parts of the French Empire, with his insistence in Allied councils that French sovereignty be everywhere respected. The U.S. protested the Gaullist seizure of Vichy-ruled islands off Newfoundland, even threatened to send in cruisers; De Gaulle replied that he would open fire on them. When a British general hauled clown the Tricolor at a French outpost in Syria, De Gaulle dispatched a column of French troops to raise it again.

Heavy Burden. Roosevelt and Churchill were frequently exasperated by their difficult ally. Cool and lofty, a master of the calculated insult, the general did nothing to allay their anger. De Gaulle was accused of sabotaging the war effort, of planning to set himself up as dictator of France. The leader of Britain's Labor Party, among others, had his misgivings about the general. De Gaulle recalls: "I can still see Mr. Attlee coming softly into my office, asking for the reassurance needed to relieve his conscience as a democrat, and then, after he had heard me, withdrawing with a smile on his face."

In one of those conversations that seem to sum up the men and the epoch, Churchill urged De Gaulle not to be so intransigent with the U.S. Said the Prime Minister: "Look at the way I yield and rise up again, turn and turn about." Replied De Gaulle: "You can because you are seated on a solid state, an assembled nation, a united empire, large armies. But I! Where are my resources? And yet I, as you know, am responsible for the interests and destiny of France. It is too heavy a burden, and I am too poor to be able to bow."

Take & Hold. Without ever consulting De Gaulle, F.D.R. tried to bring the Vichy forces in North Africa over to the Allied side, undercut his authority by setting up General Henri Giraud in Algiers as the Free French commander-in-chief. But De Gaulle journeyed to Algiers, "swallowed up" Giraud, in Churchill's phrase, and retained undisputed command of the ever-growing Free French movement. Gradually, grudgingly, the Allies recognized De Gaulle as his nation's de facto leader. When the Allies invaded France, they were astounded at the fervor with which he was regarded by most Frenchmen. Moreover, his wartime policy was triumphantly vindicated when he managed to restore order to the war-ravaged nation and prevent the powerful Communists from seizing control in a single city.

Actually, as the rest of the world was to learn, Charles de Gaulle had a shrewd understanding of the postwar world. Contemptuous of F.D.R.'s vague idealism, horrified by the surrender of Poland to Stalin at the Yalta Conference, De Gaulle expressed his philosophy with customary bite: "In foreign affairs, logic and sentiment do not weigh heavily in comparison with the realities of power; what matters is what one takes and what one can hold on to."

"Bitter Serenity." It was his own dream to preside as a powerful executive over a united France. He was foiled by France, the "most mercurial and intractable nation in the world." The "parties of yesteryear," as he dubbed them later, returned to their old, irresponsible ways. Rather than be embroiled in their machinations, De Gaulle resigned as President of France only two months after his election in 1946 and, retiring in "bitter serenity" to his country home outside Paris, wrote these memoirs.

"Every Frenchman, whatever his tendencies," De Gaulle concludes, "had the troubling suspicion that with the general vanished something primordial, permanent and necessary which he incarnated in history and which the regime of parties could not represent. But they knew it could be invoked by common consent as soon as a new laceration threatened the nation." Like so many of the general's grand pronouncements, it turned out to be a simple statement of fact. In 1958, on the brink of civil war, France did indeed turn again to the primordial force that is Charles de Gaulle.

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