Too Young At Fifty

New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 55, 12 July 1940, Page 5

Too Young At Fifty

NE of the reasons given by senior French officers for laying down their arms was that General de Gaulle was too young to tell them to keep on fighting. It was better to obey an 84-year-old retired Marshal than to listen to a general who was still in his fifties. Well, France has had some glorious old men, as other countries have, but if the man in the street were asked when his confidence in the French army began to wane in the present war, he would probably answer "When it sent for an octogenarian soldier to tell it what to do." War is not what it was a century ago, or even a quarter of a century. Far less can we compare conditions to-day with the conditions faced by Caesar or by Alexander. But some things remain the same always, and one is the importance of imagination and boldness in the leaders. To turn for leadership to a man of eighty-four is to expect water to run up hill. The greatest soldier the French ever followed took command of four armies when he was 27. His best cavalry commander was only two years older. Marshal Ney was a general at 30, and almost as feared as Napoleon himself before he was 36. But there are more sensational figures than these in the history of war. Alexander began to be a conqueror at 22. Hannibal beat the Romans when he was 29, and just missed destroying the Roman Empire when he was 31. Gustavus Adolphus defeated Russia when he was 23,-and was master of Germany before he was 38. Another great Swedish soldier, Charles XII., beat Peter the Great of Russia at 18, beat him a second time, and nearly captured him at 26, and, after losing his army and the fruit of all his conquests at 32, attacked Norway, and was planning an assault on Scotland when he fell in battle at 36. It is true that armies in those days were usually compact bodies of fifty or sixty thousand men, all fighting under the eye of the commander; but it is also true that the battle for France last month was a battle of movement and not a struggle by engineers. The fact, of course, is that the French Sev. ernment did not turn to Marshal Petain for leadership. It gave in first and asked this bewildered and pathetic old man to cover its retreat.