GAULLE Charles de. Autograph manuscript for La France et son armée, 1938; 2 pages fol. Unpublished draft of foreword, not retained in the edition. "This book is a biography. Its subject is France, militant, suffering and triumphant, whose age-old life it evokes with the aim of making us love her. But, as we only love what moves us, La France et son armée endeavours to highlight what is moving in the destiny of a nation that rises and falls at the same time as its military strength, and for immutable reasons. Of course, the conditions - above all the geographical ones - in which any people is placed impose an exceptionally dangerous life on it. Certain rocks are always battered by the sea. But it is in this people itself that we must seek the explanation of its glories and its sorrows, just as, for a man, the secret of his happiness or his tears. Now that the great threats are once again looming over our homeland, may this work humbly serve it, by helping to show what prodigious resources its genius has always been able to deploy in the trials of war, despite immense errors. The time has come to remind ourselves that, from Brennus to Foch, no sword has weighed more heavily than our own.