"Rightly to Be Great . . ."

THE WAR MEMOIRS OF CHARLES DE GAULLE: VOL. IN, SALVATION 1944-1946 (346 pp.)--Simon & Schuster ($6).

Looking for a quotation to lead off a book he wrote almost 30 years ago (The Edge of the Sword, a philosophical discussion of command and warfare), a French army major named Charles de Gaulle found just what he wanted in Hamlet:

Rightly to be great

Is not to stir without great argument.

By that definition, General de Gaulle may easily be the greatest Frenchman of his century. Yet what irritates him most is to discover that his stirrings lead to argument at all. Because he acts from love of country, he often sounds as if he cannot understand why other Frenchmen--or his allies--should oppose him.

The first two volumes of his war memoirs, The Call to Honour (TIME, Oct. 31, 1955) and Unity (TIME, May 18, 1959), recorded De Gaulle's near-miraculous feat of creating a Free France from moral and military wreckage. Salvation, the third and last volume, covers the years between France's liberation (1944) and his resignation as France's first postwar Chief of State (1946). In a sense it is the most revealing book of the three. A hero at home and on the job is bound to lose some of the aura that surrounded him as a disembodied voice from abroad, and his difficult months as a peacetime leader give an excellent idea of what he meant by governing, by leadership, by duty.

Needed: a Leader. His villains are still the same: Churchill scheming to job France out of her rightful place in the Middle East; F.D.R. determined to reduce France to a minor power. De Gaulle categorically asserts that in May 1945, when victory in Europe had scarcely been won, Churchill sent telegrams to Harry Truman calling De Gaulle "an enemy of the Allies." Yet he is finally willing to admit that without Churchill's wartime leadership, "my efforts would have been futile from the start.'' When the retreating Germans rallied briefly in December 1944 and broke through the Allied lines in the Battle of the Bulge, De Gaulle coldly admits that he "did not deplore these setbacks"--because he knew it would give the Free French forces a larger role in the war.

De Gaulle's iciest contempt is reserved for French politicians. In his view, France needed a leader who could stand above the political squabbles that had given France 102 governments between 1875 and 1940 (while the U.S. made out with 14). He gave the Communists political rights, but refused to let them take over under the guise of Resistance patriots. He got France started on the way to economic recovery. Yet these and other accomplishments, says De Gaulle, meant less to the old-line politicians than their loss of freedom to hamstring him. In the end, he knew that he would have to step down, since he rejected the idea of an outright dictatorship while refusing to share his powers with a whole spectrum of ineffective parties. Some comfort lay in the fact that he could "withdraw from events before they withdrew from me."

History Incarnate. Like the first two volumes, Salvation is written in bold, sometimes eloquent prose that serves as an admirable carriage for all the De Gaulle qualities: his soldier's selflessness, his sometimes irritating sense of destiny, above all his incorruptible honesty. In another man it would seem intolerable if he wrote of himself in the third person: "Every Frenchman . . . had the troubling suspicion that with the General vanished something primordial, permanent and necessary which he incarnated in history." From De Gaulle such words have the ring of simple fact.

When he left, he believed that what he had to offer France was "a last resort selected in advance," which Frenchmen knew "could be invoked by common consent as soon as a new laceration threatened the nation." It took a dozen years to prove him right.

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