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De Lattre can be moody, and he is touchy about honor—both France's and General de Lattre's. During the Battle of the Colmar pocket, De Lattre's superior, U.S. General Jacob Devers, peppered him with suggestions over the field telephone. The badgered Frenchman finally exploded: "If you want me to run this battle, leave me alone! If you want to run it, come here and take over!" A firm admirer of De Lattre's talents, Devers hung up and remarked: "I was wondering how soon he would say that."
Once, at an Allied banquet, De Lattre refused to eat or drink because Russia's Marshal Georgi Zhukov failed to mention France in a toast praising Allied armies. Informed of his oversight, Zhukov proposed a special toast to France. De Lattre, appeased, began to eat and drink.
General Charles de Gaulle sent De Lattre to Berlin to sign the Armistice, although France had not been invited to the ceremonies. De Lattre signed as a witness, then issued a lyrical order of the day: "Victory has arrived . . . radiant victory of springtime, which gives back to our France her youth, her strength and her hope . . ."
Toward Resurrection. De Lattre belongs to a France that long ago dropped out of the headlines. His is not the France of falling cabinets and rising black-marketeers, nor an envious France, nor a timid France. But to drop from the headlines is not to die. De Lattre's France is, perhaps, more deeply alive than the France that twitches uncertainly through the news. To De Lattre's France belongs a great military tradition in which the word Patrie means as much today as it did at Marengo and Verdun.
De Lattre uses grand words, because they are the words that match his feelings. The rhetoric of the dedicated French soldier is as genuine and essential a part of his military character as General McAuliffe's cry, "Nuts!" is a part of the American military character. Men like
De Lattre talk big because they feel the bigness of the France that for generations has been hidden, more often than not, beneath the coattails of little men. When De Lattre speaks of la France he means a country so large that all the men of Western civilization have a home there.
De Lattre's first big postwar job was to revive the moribund French army. As chief of staff, he called the country's youth to "a national resurrection." He scrapped the old training methods, which had centered around the dank barracks known as the caserne, parade-ground drill and obsolete maneuvers, and set up the camp léger (light camp), which gave the recruit realistic and toughening field exercises.
Late in 1948, De Lattre got his second big postwar job: commander in chief of Western Union land forces. Created by the Brussels pact of 1948, which brought Britain, France and the Benelux powers into a defensive alliance, Western Union was the prelude to the broader North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The boldest voice in the debate over Europe's proper strategy was raised by De Lattre; he favored "offensive defense," i.e., a highly mobile and mechanized army that would tear around an invader's columns, carry the battle to his flanks and rear.