FROM
Charles de Gaulle was born in 1890, and after attending St. Cyr, joined an infantry regiment under the command of Philippe Pitain. He was taken prisoner at Verdun in 1916 and became a lecturer at St. Cyr after the Armistice. His views aroused considerable interest and some official opposition. At the outbreak of World War II he commanded a tank brigade and then an armored division on the Western Front. After the German breakthrough he was appointed Under-Secretary of War and after the Armistice put himself at the head of the Free French forces in London. He formed a provisional government after the liberation but resigned in 1946 in a disagreement over the constitutional arrangements for the Fourth Republic. He eventually returned to power in 1958 during the Algerian crisis, suppressed the generals' revolt and granted Algeria independence. As first president of the Fifth Republic he embarked on a program of domestic reform and military strength, including nuclear weapons. He resigned in 1969 and died in 1971.
The Edge of the Sword was published prophetically in 1932.
Great war-leaders have always been aware of the importance of instinct. Was not what Alexander called his “hope," Caesar his “luck" and Napoleon his "star" simply the fact that they knew they had a particular gift of making contact with realities sufficiently closely to dominate them? For those who are greatly gifted, this faculty often shines through their personalities. There may be nothing in itself exceptional about what they say or their way of saying it, but other men in their presence have the impression of a natural force destined to master events. Flaubert expresses this feeling when he describes the still adolescent Hannibal as already clothed "in the undefinable splendour of those who are destined for great enterprises."
However, while no work or action can be conceived without the promptings of instinct, these promptings are not sufficient to give conception a precise form. The very fact that they are "gifts of nature" means that they are simple, crude and sometimes confused. Now, a general
Charles de Gaulle
commands an army, that is to say a system of complex forces with its own properties and disciplines, which can develop its power only by following a certain pattern. It is here that the intelligence comes into its own. Taking possession of the raw material of instinct, it elaborates it, gives it a specific shape, and makes of it a clearly defined and coherent whole.. . .
If a commander is to grasp the essentials and reject the inessentials; if he is to split his general operation into a number of complementary actions in such a way that all shall combine to achieve the purpose common to every one of them, he must be able to see the situation as a whole, to attribute to each object its relative importance, to grasp the connections between each factor in the situation and to recognize its limits. All this implies a gift of synthesis which, in itself, demands a high degree of intellectual capacity. The general who has to free the essentials of his problem from the confused mass of their attendant details, resembles the user of a stereoscope who has to concentrate his eyes upon the image before he can see it in relief. That is why great men of action have always been of the meditative type. They have, without exception, possessed, to a very high degree, the faculty of withdrawing into themselves. As Napoleon said: 'The military leader must be capable of giving intense, extended and indefatigable consideration to a single group of objects."
If the conceiving of an action is to be valid, which means adapted to the circumstances of the case, it calls for a combined effort of intelligence and instinct. Critics of action in warfare have, however, rarely been willing to admit that these two faculties have each a necessary part to play, though no one of them is able to do without the other. Often, the critic has seen fit arbitrarily to break the balance between the two faculties and has attributed to one of them alone the whole responsibility for having produced the concept of action in question.
Certain critics, recognizing the powerlessness of reason alone to solve the many problems involved, have gone so far as to maintain that it is impossible, in war, for any leader to dominate events, since, no matter how great his intellectual gifts may be, he cannot control the action itself. 'There is no such thing"—they say—"as an art of war, since, in the last analysis, it is chance alone, that determines the outcome of battles." Philosophers and writers are only too willing to adopt this sceptical attitude, and this is not hard to explain. Minds exclusively devoted to speculation lose the sense of what action requires. Armed with the one instrument they are familiar with, that of the pure intelligence, they fail to penetrate into the inner sense of the action, and convert their failure to comprehend into disdain.
Thus, Socrates, when engaged in argument with Nicomachides who was complaining that the Assembly had appointed an incompetent citizen to be their general, maintained that it did not matter at all, since events would have taken the same course even if some able and conscientious commander had been chosen. It is true, however, that the same Socrates,
The Twentieth Century
when questioned by Pericles about the causes of indiscipline among the Athenian troops, placed the responsibility for this state of affairs on the officers unfit to exercise command.
A similar attitude led Tolstoy, in War and Peace, to describe Bagration at Hollabrunn as letting events, which he thought he could not change, take their course, and confining his efforts "to making what was the result of chance, look as though everything had happened in accordance with his orders or his intentions."
So, too, Anatole France makes Jerome Coignard say: "When two hostile armies meet, one is bound to be defeated, whence it follows that the other must necessarily be victorious, though its commander lack some, or, indeed, all of the qualities that make a great leader. How, then, is it possible"—concludes the philosophical abbe—"to distinguish in such combats what is the effect of art from what is the gift of fortune?"
Nor must we forget King Ubu who won a victory just because he had taken no preliminary steps of any kind.
It is true that military men, exaggerating the relative powerlessness of the intelligence, will sometimes neglect to make use of it at all. Here the line of least resistance comes into its own. There have been examples of commanders avoiding all intellectual effort and even despising it on principle. Every great victory is usually followed by this kind of mental decline. The Prussian Army after the death of Frederick the Great is an instance of this. In other cases, the military men note the inadequacy of knowledge and therefore trust to inspiration alone or to the dictates of fate. That was the prevalent state of mind of the French Army at the time of the Second Empire: 'We shall muddle through, somehow."
Often, on the other hand, the intellect is unwilling to allow instinct its proper share. Absolute master in the field of speculation, intelligence refuses to share the empire of action and attempts to impose itself alone. When this happens, the true nature of war is completely misunderstood, and those responsible for its conduct try to apply to it a rigid and therefore arbitrary set of rules.
Accustomed to working from "solid" premises, the unaided intelligence wants to deduce its conception from constants known in advance, whereas what is needed is to induce the conception from contingent and variable facts in each individual case.
This tendency, it is true, exercises a special attraction over the French mind. Inquisitive and quick in the uptake, the Frenchman feels the need for logic, likes linking a series of facts by a process of reasoning, and trusts more readily to theory than to experience.
This natural slant is accentuated by the categorical nature of military discipline and reinforced by the dogmatism inherent in education. Con-
Charles de Gaulle
sequently "schools of thought" flourish in France more than in any other country. Their absolute and speculative character render these schools of thought attractive and dangerous, and they have already cost us dear.
—Gerard Hopkins (translator)