Having read again Charles de Gaulle’s war memoirs, I am again struck by these, his final words of that three-volume work:
“Old Earth, worn by the ages, wracked by rain and storm, exhausted yet ever ready to produce what life must have to go on!
“Old France, weighed down with history, prostrated by wars and revolutions, endlessly vacillating from greatness to decline, but revived, century after century, by the genius of renewal!
“Old man, exhausted by ordeal, detached fro human deeds, feeling the approach of the eternal cold, but always watching in the shadows for the gleam of hope!”
If you are not familiar with de Gaulle’s life story, I can only assure you that if it were the plot of a novel, no one would find it believable. Beginning in June 1940 alone, with nothing, he step by step planned and brought into effect the reconstitution of the French state beginning from a state of entire collapse. An amazing story, an amazing man.