Friendly Fire by Steve Hawes

inspired by the book De Gaulle et Churchill :
la mésentente cordiale by François Kersaudy,

“A marriage bred in the gales of adversity may
founder once the winds stand fair.”   [Stendhal, De l’amour]

When they meet for the first time in June 1940 Churchill has been Prime Minister for no more than a month and de Gaulle is a junior member of the French War Cabinet of only a few days’ standing.  Churchill is 65, de Gaulle 49.

Churchill is instinctively a Francophile, as de Gaulle, by reflex, is an Anglophobe.  But they see the soldier in each other.  When old France falls to the German advance and no one more senior steps forward, Churchill recognises de Gaulle as leader of the new Free French, and makes him a promise, “Before our stories end, you will return to Paris and we will walk together, side by side, victorious, the length of the Champs Elysées.”

There is a honeymoon when early suspicion gives way to mutual admiration.  Churchill is beguiled by de Gaulle’s resolve just as, in spite of himself, de Gaulle succumbs to Churchill’s charm.  Neither is secure in his position.  Their backs to the wall, they scheme and strategize war together.

But suspicion returns, like toothache, and is never without justification.  Churchill still secretly hopes to lure into the alliance someone more senior from the Vichy regime across the Channel, the same regime that has pronounced sentence of death on de Gaulle.   Churchill denies it, of course, but de Gaulle knows.  “There are two camps,” says de Gaulle to an intermediary, “and he is in both of them.”  Admiration turns to recrimination.  

There begins a sequence of violent quarrels, patched up by one intermediary after another, only to resume again ever more intensively at the next slight or reversal.  Then, as bombs rain on London, like old lovers, they fall into each other’s arms and swear eternal allegiance, for they know each other better than any intermediary ever can.  “You get angry when you're in the right, “ says Churchill, beaming devotedly through cigar smoke and whisky haze, “and I only get angry when I'm in the wrong!”

But it doesn’t last.  Things go from bad to worse as the tide of  war changes in their favour.  The climax of their antagonism occurs as the Allies launch the D-Day landings and Churchill makes one last attempt to bring de Gaulle to heel.  It seems terminal.  Churchill orders de Gaulle’s incarceration in the Tower of London.

Can the intermediary effect one final reconciliation in time for the victory parade down the Champs Elysées four years after Churchill’s fateful promise?  To the last, it is touch and go.