Bandages & Bitters

JOURNEY DOWN A BLIND ALLEY (364 pp.) --Mary Borden--Harper ($3.75).

This is a skillfully written account of an Anglo-French field-hospital unit--but its chief value is what it has to add to public 1 nowledge about the aloof and baffling General Charles de Gaulle.

Skinned Alive. Chicago-born Novelist Mary Borden (Mary of Nazareth, etc.) knew him well. Her husband, Major General Sir Edward L. Spears, went to France in 1940 as Winston Churchill's special liaison officer with Premier Reynaud. When he returned to England with De Gaulle after the fall of France, "almost no one in France or Great Britain knew [De Gaulle's] name; nor did the French in England receive him kindly."

"Le Grand Charlie" was tall and solemn. What was he like inside? Author Borden could only guess:

"He brought Madame de Gaulle to dine with us. . . .I realized at once . . . that I would never know him, that here was a man whom it would be impossible to call a friend. ... No flicker of interest lifted his hooded eyelids. . . . When I looked full at him I saw nothing, nothing but a lifeless figure, wrapped in a palpable coldness that hid him as a damp cloth hides a sculptor's clay. . . .

"I believe pride is the basis of his character. I think he felt the dishonor of France as few men can feel anything. . . . To come to the British as a suppliant . . . was intolerable. But he could look to no one else. . . .

"He was like a man . . . who had been skinned alive. . . . The slightest contact with friendly, well-meaning people got him on the raw to such an extent that he wanted to bite, as a dog that has been run over will bite in its agony any would-be friend. . . . The weaker his position, the more arrogant he became. Very well, let the British help him. They needed him as much as or more than he needed them. But let there be no pretense of friendliness or sentiment about it. The Prime Minister and General Spears were using him, he would use them."

Mary Borden's story of the Hadfield-Spears hospital unit, in the Levant, North Africa, Italy and France, casts many a sidelight on the "fanatic" Charles de Gaulle. The picture that remains is of the "pitiable business when a great man suddenly becomes small."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.