MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
THE death in Paris of General—now Marshal—de Lattre de Tassigny has aroused feelings of distress in every country forming part of the great Western Coalition. General Eisenhower was expressing a wide sentiment when he said that " France and the whole free world will feel the loss of this remarkable leader and outstanding personality." Lord Montgomery, who had experienced the full force of his colleague's ardour and persistence when serving with him at Fontainebleau, paid a more personal tribute. " The Western Powers," he said, " have lost a leader of great worth, France a great general, and I a true friend." There are moments when all admirers of the French feel a sense of despair at the ill fortune, so unmerited, that has dogged that magnificent nation since 1914. The Indo-China war is anything but a cold war; it is a scalding war, as relentless as our own war in Malaya. General De Lattre had done much to galvanise the composite French forces and to organise a definite and prescient plan of campaign. His immense prestige, his personal authority, the magnetism of his resolution, had changed the whole morale of the French troops and _their Viet Nam allies. The long, uncertain, hazardous, clandestine and seemingly inglorious war, that for all these years has drained so much of what is best in France and provided material for political dissension at home, was transformed by his mere physical presence from an unpopular side-show into a major national effort. „We-British are apt to under-estimate the value in all military campaigns of the personality of the leader, proving thereby that we are not military historians. The French make no such errors in psychology; they know that troops fight much better if they have a legendafy figure, possessing the magic quality of panache, at their head. French politicians are accustomed to the crises of conscience that this knowledge arouses. On the one.hand they want their armies to win; on the other hand they loathe the idea of Generals acquiring more popular support than is possessed by politicians. " You must realise,". a French friend once wrote to me, " that we French are warriors who dis- like soldiers "—" nous sonunes anti-militaristes mais guerriers." Such divided emotions are common in the Palais Bourbon.
4 * General De Lattre was exactly the sort of soldier whom the Trench politicians admire but distrust. He was a practising Catholic, and thereby suggested to the deputies that he must by nature be a reactionary. How fortunate it is that these denominational cancers do not infect our own body politic, and that we do not worry very much whether an Admiral be a Christian Scientist, or an Air Vice-Marshal a loyal member of the Church of Scotland. In France these loose ends of dissension still hang over, like forgotten swabs, to infect their many wounds. De Lattre again was an authoritarian man; when he spoke, he expected to be listened to, when he did not feel like speaking he expected others to remain silent. He would look at French politicians with a quizzical gaze. the sort of gaze that no politician in any democracy, or even tyranny, really enjoys. Perfectly polite he would be, perfectly con- ' ciliatory, yet always dancing in those active and intelligent eyes was a little glitter or spark like the spangles in aventurine. Was it amusement ? Was it contempt In any case it was most disconcerting. The French politicians were-, in one part of their souls, glad that France had again discovered a dynamic general; in the other part of their souls, they remained uncertain whether generals were ever really quite safe. Military glory was evidently preferable to military humiliation; but what harm had been done to France by the lure of military glory ! How useful, but how dangerous was panache ! * * * * • That was a quality that General De Lattre possessed naturally and exploited with great skill. He knew that it would not be an easy task to restore to the French armies the self- confidence that had been lost in 1940. In training his famous " Army B," later known as " The First French Army," he realised that the only hope was to make these young men feel that they were different from the old professional armies, and comparable to those ardent levies that had fought and won at Valmy. Instead of heavy army boots he gave them tennis shoes; instead of the stiff barrack-square drill they were made to play leap-frog naked; instead of the old barrack-square and mess- tins there were woods and water, and the stars above them at night, and in the morning a run down to the sea to bathe. It was when he was training his young conscripts in the hills behind Algiers that I first saw General de Lattre. He asked me to come out and give an address to his boys. I arrived late in the afternoon of a warm January day. The conscripts were gathered together in a semicircle on the hill-side and I spoke to them, with the General standing beside me, about the time of liberation _being at hand. What surprised me was that the General then asked for questions, a most unusual thing for any military commander to risk. The sun set behind me and the faces and brown bodies of the conscripts glowed with health; around us were the pine trees in the evening light with the .scent of pine in the air. The questions poured in one after the other. Then the sun set and the bugles rang out and we all gathered informally while the flag was lowered for the night.
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One would have had to possess the sensibilities of a Cephalodiscus not to be moved by the sight of " Army B " being trained under the personal supervision of General de Lattre among the pine woods of Algeria. Over there in France their families were being subjected to the ever-increasing oppression of the occupying forces; many of their immediate relations had taken to the maquis and their future was uncertain and fearful. These conscripts in their shorts and their berets, leaping and jumping among the pine trees, were the nucleus of the Army of Liberation. I was taken by the General into their tents and huts. He spoke to each one of them in sharp but, amic-. able terms, tapping at their chests with the back of his hand, even as Napoleon would tweak the cars of his veterans. Impressed and moved though I was at the time. I could not divest myself of the impression that there was something artificial about the whole atmosphere, something so deliberately dramatised as to be slightly unreal. I was wrong. Those young men became the real nucleus, the iron cohort, of " Army B "; that in its turn became the famous First French Army. How tremendous was their triumph and their revenge ! Capturing the island of Elba with the aid of the British Navy, General de Lattre on August 15th, 1944, landed his army on the French Riviera and occupied Marseilles and Toulon within a few days. Then followed his hilarious pursuit of the retreating Germans up the valleys of the Rhone and the Saone. In the end the First French Army utterly defeated the XIXth German army at Colmar, taking 20,000 prisoners. On they went, across the Rhine, across Germany, until they reached the Danube. On May 8th, '1945, at Berlin, General de Lattre, on behalf of the French army, signed the act of capitulation of the German Reich. Few men can have harvested so rich a retribution.
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In December, 1950, Monsieur Moch offered de Lattre the post of Commander-in-Chief in Indo-China. " I have nothing to gain," the latter replied characteristically, " I have everything to lose. I accept at once." His arrival, as I have said, immediately, transformed the situation. A few weeks after he assumed command, his only son was killed leading the Viet Nam troops in the Red River Delta. The sturdy Vendden, born in the-same village as Clemenceau, carried on broken-hearted, but resolute as ever. He returned on a visit to Paris to see his doctors and to arrange for more material to be sent out; his condition was mere serious than he had expected; he- was obliged to undergo two operations, from the results of which he died.
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