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For the next 20 years De Gaulle's career was closely tied to the man who was one day to become his archenemy, the Pétain who "showed me the meaning of the art and gift of command." Captured by the Germans in 1916 in a hand-to-hand battle, during which he suffered his third wound of World War I, De Gaulle was cited for gallantry on Petain's recommendation. When he finally returned to France, after 32 months in prison camps and five vain attempts at escape, De Gaulle married Yvonne Vendroux, demure daughter of a biscuit manufacturer from Calais—and named his first child after Petain. In 1927 Petain, by then a marshal of France, appointed De Gaulle his aide-de-camp.
The break came in 1934, when De Gaulle published The Army of the Future, a prescient and skillfully written plea for a small professional army built around armored divisions capable of exploiting concentrated breakthroughs. Though it sold only 700 copies in France, the book went like hotcakes (7,000 copies) in Germany and was read aloud to Hitler on the advice of his generals. But to Petain, obsessed with the superiority of defensive strategy and massed infantry, the De Gaulle doctrine was heresy. French generals, wrote De Gaulle, "were growing old at their posts, wedded to errors that once constituted their glory." Backed only by a handful of admirers, including future Premier Paul Reynaud, lanky Colonel de Gaulle was regarded in Parisian society as a mechanized bore.
In another early book, The Sword's Edge, which was as fecklessly ignored as The Army of the Future, De Gaulle discussed the problems of military command in such a way as to etch a self-portrait. Items:
¶ "Evangelical perfection does not lead to empire. The man of action cannot be conceived of without a strong dose of egoism, pride, toughness and cunning."
¶ "Nothing enhances authority better than silence ... As all that comes from the leader is highly contagious, he creates calm and attention provided he remains silent."
¶ "It is necessary that the aim in which the leader absorbs himself should carry the mark of greatness."
Not Without Grandeur. World War II gave De Gaulle his first real chance to test his military theories in action. His doctrine of mechanized warfare was dramatically vindicated—both by the Germans, who used it to conquer France, and by De Gaulle himself, who, near Abbeville, with a pickup armored division, dealt the Nazis their only major setback during the invasion.
De Gaulle arrived in London in 1940, alone and an unknown, in a plane provided by the British. In absentia he was tried and condemned to death for treason by the Vichy government of Marshal Petain. He let out his famous rallying cry—"France has lost a battle, but France has not lost the war"—and thereafter, he and his Cross of Lorraine slowly became the symbols of France. (Symbole was in fact his Resistance code name.)