"As a child I had many dreams," René Cogny once recalled. "I was in love with the history of great French soldiers, and I read all I could about them." Cogny's own quest for glory was long frustrated by a run of bad luck. Born in April 1904, son of a civil servant in a Norman fishing village, he swept through high school and military academy with high grades (except for discipline); he graduated, class of 1929, from the Fontainebleau artillery school. Despite a long series of routine assignments, Cogny lost none of his enthusiasm. "I love troops," he once cried,...
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