Books: Bandages & Bitters

JOURNEY DOWN A BLIND ALLEY (364 pp.) —Mary Borden—Harper ($3.75).

This is a skillfully written account of an Anglo-French field-hospital unit—but its chief value is what it has to add to public 1 nowledge about the aloof and baffling General Charles de Gaulle.

Skinned Alive. Chicago-born Novelist Mary Borden (Mary of Nazareth, etc.) knew him well. Her husband, Major General Sir Edward L. Spears, went to France in 1940 as Winston Churchill's special liaison officer with Premier Reynaud. When he returned to England with De Gaulle after the fall of France, "almost no one in France or Great Britain knew [De Gaulle's] name;...