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In January 1940, while France was trying to sit out the war, Colonel de Gaulle again raised his voice. From his tank brigade in Lorraine he sent a 17-page memorandum to General Gamelin, Premier Daladier and 20 others: "The Maginot Line, however reinforced, can be crossed. . . . The defender who limits himself to resisting in a fixed position with antiquated weapons is doomed." Nobody paid any attention to De Gaulle.
On the day after the Germans broke through at Sedan De Gaulle was made a general in command of a hastily assembled armored division. He held up the Germans for four days at Laon, fought fiercely at Abbeville (and it was there that his men first called him Le Général). After that Premier Paul Reynaud made him Under Secretary of State for Defense. General de Gaulle helped to persuade Premier Reynaud to continue the war—against the arguments for armistice of Weygand, Pétain and others—and he flew to London to tell Winston Churchill that France would see it through. Weygand refused to shake hands with him when he returned. When Reynaud lost heart and resigned in favor of Pétain, De Gaulle flew to London for keeps. There is more than fiction to the legend told about him to Negroes in Cameroun:
De Gaulle was a corporal. He was dead. He had been dead for five years. In his grave he heard that a German corporal had taken Paris. He leaped from his grave shouting: "I am a general now and I'll show you something!"
Wearers of the Cross. In World War II De Gaulle was commander of the 507th Regiment of the Chars de Combat, drawn from the neighborhood of Metz in Lorraine. The two-barred Cross of Lorraine was a part of the badge. When General de Gaulle sought an emblem for Free France he chose the Cross of Lorraine, with the motto Honneur, Patrie. The former word is missing from Vichy-france's motto.
Said General de Gaulle in a broadcast to the U.S. last fortnight: "In the world's history the greatest deeds of the greatest peoples have been their struggles for freedom."
Free France knows it is struggling for France's freedom, and it is this knowledge that binds De Gaulle's men to his cause with fanatical loyalty. This loyalty has overcome De Gaulle's lack of personal magnetism; it has overcome his political inexperience. His supporters include Socialists, Monarchists and Republicans. He insists that he is not leading a political movement, that he is merely leading a military movement to restore France's freedom, that when that is accomplished he will render account to the chosen representatives of the French people.
It is no easy thing to be a Free Frenchman in 1941. As General Petit wrote, it is the most brutal, the most difficult choice. Most of the leaders have been condemned to death in absentia. Smaller fry who are caught get 15 years at hard labor. Most of the Free French have families living in France.