Pride & Prejudice

THE CALL TO HONOUR (319 pp.)--General Charles de Gaulle--Viking ($5).

On June 17, 1940 a British general leaned out of a taxiing plane on a Bordeaux airfield and hauled aboard a tense, tall Frenchman who was escaping from his defeatist colleagues. Years later, Winston Churchill was to write that the Frenchman, General Charles de Gaulle, "carried with him, in this small aeroplane, the honour of France." In all the world there is probably no one more certain of this than De Gaulle himself. In his story of World War II, The Call to Honour, he plainly sees himself as more savior than soldier and ends on a mystical note: "Poring over the gulf into which the country has fallen, I am her son, calling her, holding the light for her . . . I can hear France now, answering me . . . Ah! mother, such as we are, we are here to serve you."

General de Gaulle writes with a great deal of justification. When France fell, he was one of the few at the top with the courage and the faith to carry on the fight, and the fact that he is only too glad to trumpet his virtues should not obscure the simple truth. But The Call to Honour shows also why his British and U.S. allies found him so hard to get along with and how his personal sense of destiny could sometimes become a nuisance to Churchill and F.D.R., who were as destiny-conscious as the next fellow. Even Harry Truman once threatened to cut De Gaulle off from arms supplies unless he could learn to keep his place in the Allied camp. For De Gaulle seems even now to be obsessed by the idea that his big job was to keep Britain from undermining the French Empire while her ally was down. And nothing could convince him that the U.S. was not conniving with Vichy France to undermine him.

In a proud career soldier, embittered by the fall of his country and imbued with a passion to save her, some of these attitudes were understandable at the time. But to be suffering from niggling suspicions and intransigeance more than a decade later suggests that De Gaulle either has not consulted the record of the war now available or prefers to keep unbent the ramrod that seems always to have extended from his back through his mind. The Call to Honour carries the De Gaulle story only to mid-1942, but the tone is set, and it is as annoying as it is undoubtedly sincere. Even a hero's worshipers must be embarrassed to hear him refer to his wartime broadcasts as a "priestly duty," and to meet the mock-modest estimate: "In the struggle for liberation the one who answered for everything was still, in the last resort, my poor self."

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