GAULLE Charles de. 2 L. A. S., Lyon 12 and 18 September 1914, to his mother Jeanne de Gaulle; 6 and 8 pages pet. in-8; some brown stains. Letters from the wounded officer, written from hospital, analysing the early stages of the war. Wounded on 15 August on the Dinant bridge, he was evacuated and operated on in Paris, then treated at the Desgenettes hospital in Lyon. He will rejoin the army at the beginning of October. 12 September. "The days pass very slowly here, brightened by the increasingly satisfied tone of the official communiqués. It now seems certain that the great battle begun again on the Marne and at new cost will be a pure and simple victory, a deserved revenge for our first failures in Belgium. Then it will be a question of winning the belle belle and the question will be settled. All the wounded officers who filled Lyon and who came from all over the battlefield agreed on the deep-rooted reasons for our early failures: everywhere our infantry attacked too quickly, which the artillery did not have time to support and which caused us to lose an enormous number of men; the inadequacy, which had long been known, of too many divisional and brigade generals who did not know how to use the different arms in conjunction with each other. Finally, from a strategic point of view, our mobilisation was significantly behind that of the Germans and, above all, the British were seriously behind at precisely the decisive point, on our extreme left. Fortunately, the extreme composure and decisiveness of our high command and the incomparable value of our artillery and infantry enabled us to get things back on track, and now, having learned from experience, we are bound to succeed. Moreover, it is generally agreed that the Germans have also often wasted their infantry and suffered enormous losses for mediocre results: only luck served them well at the beginning - if there is such a thing as luck"... He was impatient for his foot to heal: "They're going to give me electrical treatment to bring the damaged nerve back to life"... 18 September. "The days here are going by very dull and very sad, and I'm really beginning to think that my foot is going to stay the way it is indefinitely. For the last four days I have been treated with electricity and massage, but it is going very slowly. [...] After the battle of the Aisne, which I am convinced will end to our advantage, and whatever the state of the enemy army, I believe that ours will be absolutely obliged to suspend active operations for a few weeks, because the infantry losses are now fantastic. We face the very serious disadvantage of momentary exhaustion. After the gigantic efforts of these first weeks of the campaign, before we can resume large-scale operations in enemy country, we will have to wait until the class of 1914 and the voluntary recruits have been trained and can fill up our regiments a little, and also reconstitute the cadres. Above all, we must harden our hearts so that the peace proposals that the enemy will inevitably make to us are rejected with one voice by public opinion. Apart from basic loyalty, it is in our best interests not to lay down our arms until we have joined the Russian troops through Germany. Otherwise, we would be doing it all over again in ten years' time"... LNC, I, p. 89 and 91.