The Return

Across the choppy Channel plowed the French destroyer Combattante, with the Tricolor whipping smartly from her taffrail. From the bridge General Charles de Gaulle looked toward the shore of invaded Normandy. For him this was a solemn hour. He was coming back to la patrie. He had last trod its earth four years ago, when he fled from defeat to exile with the clarion call to his countrymen: "France has lost a battle, but France has not lost the war."

A U.S.-made duck carried Charles de Gaulle from ship to beach. A British-driven jeep bore him inland. The first Frenchmen the General spied were two gendarmes standing on a roadside. The jeep braked sharply. The gendarmes, seeing a French general, came over at a run.

Then they saw who it was. "De Gaulle! De Gaulle!"they stammered. One saluted with the wrong hand. The other stood rigid for a long moment, finally lunged into a ramrod salute.

The General smiled, gave them a message: "Please tell your chief that I am on my way to visit General Montgomery's headquarters and will be in Bayeux within an hour." People's Man. In Bayeux, first French town liberated by Anglo-American arms, loudspeakers blared the news of the General's coming. Hurriedly shops closed, Tricolors were unfurled. The people went into the streets. Children ran alongside their elders, pestered them with questions, heard only the words, "De Gaulle! General de Gaulle!"

At last the General appeared, his tall figure towering above everyone, his face taut and set. The bishop and the subprefect greeted him. The townsfolk trailed him to the park. There, bareheaded under a Tricolor mounted with the Gaullist Cross of Lorraine, flanked by the Union Jack and the Stars & Stripes, Charles de Gaulle said; "We will fight by the side of our Allies. . . . Our victory will be a victory of a free people. . . ." Then he sang La Marseillaise with his countrymen.

France's Man? Other towns and villages saw him. Then, after six hours in the homeland, Charles de Gaulle went back to Britain. He left behind, in one corner of France, a new Government. With no apparent objections from the Allied High Command, which had its own administrative setup, Algiers had appointed Franc,ois Coulet and Colonel Pierre de Chevigne administrators of liberated Normandy. With these Gaullist officials, Charles de Gaulle left instructions for the restoration of the republican regime. More than ever, the General was sure that he was France's man.

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