Charles de Gaulle has always been a rather enigmatic figure, and from his earliest days as an officer he carefully cultivated this image of himself. In one of his books he wrote that it is the leader's destiny to remain aloof and shoulder silently the burden of responsibility. And he considered himself as the future leader of France back in the late 1920's when one day he confided to a fellow officer his premonition that the country would yet call upon him to save her.

To his contemporaries. the enigma seemed more often than not ominous. Once in the mid-30's Leon Blum named him in a warning to the National Assembly against setting up an armée de metier, an elite corps of motorized troops “ready for any adventure.” Blum added that M. de Gaulle copied the idea from experiments in the German army, a statement that certainly did not endear the politician to the colonel. The latter claimed-to have been an innovator in the matter of using rapid armored divisions in a future war.