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For six years he shouldered that burden without a day of rest. To many it seemed preposterous that a middle-echelon army officer should presume to reverse the verdict of war. But De Gaulle effectively enforced his claim with impassioned broadcasts, with tireless journeying to all parts of the French Empire, with his insistence in Allied councils that French sovereignty be everywhere respected. The U.S. protested the Gaullist seizure of Vichy-ruled islands off Newfoundland, even threatened to send in cruisers; De Gaulle replied that he would open fire on them. When a British general hauled clown the Tricolor at a French outpost in Syria, De Gaulle dispatched a column of French troops to raise it again.
Heavy Burden. Roosevelt and Churchill were frequently exasperated by their difficult ally. Cool and lofty, a master of the calculated insult, the general did nothing to allay their anger. De Gaulle was accused of sabotaging the war effort, of planning to set himself up as dictator of France. The leader of Britain's Labor Party, among others, had his misgivings about the general. De Gaulle recalls: "I can still see Mr. Attlee coming softly into my office, asking for the reassurance needed to relieve his conscience as a democrat, and then, after he had heard me, withdrawing with a smile on his face."
In one of those conversations that seem to sum up the men and the epoch, Churchill urged De Gaulle not to be so intransigent with the U.S. Said the Prime Minister: "Look at the way I yield and rise up again, turn and turn about." Replied De Gaulle: "You can because you are seated on a solid state, an assembled nation, a united empire, large armies. But I! Where are my resources? And yet I, as you know, am responsible for the interests and destiny of France. It is too heavy a burden, and I am too poor to be able to bow."
Take & Hold. Without ever consulting De Gaulle, F.D.R. tried to bring the Vichy forces in North Africa over to the Allied side, undercut his authority by setting up General Henri Giraud in Algiers as the Free French commander-in-chief. But De Gaulle journeyed to Algiers, "swallowed up" Giraud, in Churchill's phrase, and retained undisputed command of the ever-growing Free French movement. Gradually, grudgingly, the Allies recognized De Gaulle as his nation's de facto leader. When the Allies invaded France, they were astounded at the fervor with which he was regarded by most Frenchmen. Moreover, his wartime policy was triumphantly vindicated when he managed to restore order to the war-ravaged nation and prevent the powerful Communists from seizing control in a single city.
Actually, as the rest of the world was to learn, Charles de Gaulle had a shrewd understanding of the postwar world. Contemptuous of F.D.R.'s vague idealism, horrified by the surrender of Poland to Stalin at the Yalta Conference, De Gaulle expressed his philosophy with customary bite: "In foreign affairs, logic and sentiment do not weigh heavily in comparison with the realities of power; what matters is what one takes and what one can hold on to."