Commander of Isabelle
By BERNARD FERGUSSON IN January, 1939, as an instructor at Sandhurst, I took twenty gentlemen-cadets for a fortnight's attachment to the 6th Battalion of the Chasseurs Alpins at Grenoble. At Grenoble itself we spent only the first and last evenings of our stay; the rest of the time we visited on skis the various detachments along the Italian frontier. Of these the most memorable was the little post on the Col du Lautaret, com- manded by an eager and attractive young lieutenant called Andre Lalande. Attached to him for the time being were a number of the best skiers in the French Army, practising for the army championships which were shortly to be decided; and another character with whom our cadets made great friends was the elderly NCO whose job it was to look after the skiing equipment. We had several good skiers among our num- ber, notably Terence Gossage (now a major in the KOYLI), Alastair Telfer-Smollett (who was to be killed in The Black Watch at St. Valery eighteen months later) and Chris Garvey, Who became, I think, an Inniskilling Fusilier; and these challenged the French skiers on their own ground, and aroused their admiration. It was with great regret that we left Le Lautaret and its snowy slopes to return via Grenoble to Sandhurst In the autumn of 1940 I went to the camp of the Free French volunteers at Old Dean Common, near Camberley, to see whether among them there were any of the friends I had made during three attachments to the French Army. I found that the 6th Chasseurs Alpins, who had fought in Norway, had contri- buted more volunteers for the Free French than any other unit—six officers and ninety men; and among them were Andre Lalande and the old NCO from the ski stores. I asked Andre and another (afterwards killed at Bir Hakeim) to spend Christ- mas at my home in Scotland; but by that time I was on my Way to the Middle East: Yet our paths crossed twice during the war: once in Syria, just after the fall of Damascus in 1941, and once on Castel Benito airfield near Tripoli in 1943; I met him again by chance in the ' Ecu de France ' in Jermyn Street in 1946, when he was in company with Marshal de Lattre de Tassigny, and again by design on my honeymoon in Faris in 1950. From then on we saw each other frequently; and indeed from 1951 to 1953 we often worked with each other, fci I was at SHAPE and he on the staff of Marshal Juin at Fontainebleau.
Like other French officers who had made the same difficult Spectator Ltd., 99 Gower Street, W.C.t choice in 1940, for Lalande the years of the war had been numerous, and the hard-fought campaigns of Syria and North Africa caused casualties among them out of all proportion to their numbers. Their eagerness, their personal anxieties and their conviction that the honour of France was for the time being largely in their hands drove them to special efforts. There were some among the. Free French whose minds were ravaged by political worries of every sort and kind, and one was conscious of little eddies and cross-currents here and there, among those who looked forward to this or that form of govern- ment after the war, or who were anxious to .press this or that policy during it. But Lalande was outstanding among those who were not interested in these considerations. He was con- cerned only with the honour of France in the field. Nor did he ever waver in his certainty that his widowed mother in Paris, with whom he was unable to communicate, would fully approve of his original choice, or of his subsequent actions. His integrity was as much beyond question as his courage and his professional ability. Others might with good reason adopt noms de guerre until such time as France was once more free; brave and patriotic soldiers like de Hauteclocque and Maugret- Vemerin became Leclerc and Montclar for the time being, and made those assumed names illustrious; but Lalande, like de Gaulle and Koenig and many others, chose to fight under his own.
Throughout the war Lalande developed and added to those qualities which had so attracted our Sandhurst party at Le Lauteret, the command which he had enthusiastically described to us as "the best job in the whole Army." And after it he brought to the rebuilding of the French Army the same radiant energy as he used of old to display on skis. His heart was in the open air, and he would laugh ruefully when encountered burdened with files, hurrying along the corridors of Fontaine- bleau; and would break out with oaths against paperasserie. But somehow he kept himself as fit as ever, his laugh was as infectious as ever, and all his colleagues, whether French, British, American, Dutch or Belgian, rejoiced in it as much as the British cadets on Le Lautaret. His long-deferred meeting with my mother, postponed from Christmas 1940, took place in 1952 in Versailles; and on another evening we went together with our wives to see Gaby Morlay in Lorsque l'Enfant Pardit, when his laughter nearly held up the play.
We had arranged to spend a weekend together in the country in September last year, before he sailed for Indo-China; but I went on leave instead, and wished him good luck on the telephone. He was rejoicing in being freed at last from his paperasserie. No better choice could have been made than Andre Lalande for the command of Isabelle, the last strong- point of Dien Bien Phu to remain inviolate. It was in character that, after the fall of the main position under General de Castries, Andre Lalande should have attempted a final break- out with his men. We know that it failed, and that in his last signal he declared that he was going to blow everything up. Whether or not we ever learn what fate befell him, I can be sure that I shall never know a better officer or a finer man. He had become a lover of Britain, and he will surely be for ever a hero of France.
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