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This webpage reproduces part of Giraud and the African Scene by G. Ward Price The Macmillan Company, 1944 The text is in the public domain. This text has been carefully proofread and I believe it to be free of errors. If you find a mistake though, please let me know! next: Chapter 1

 p. v  Foreword

Plutarch held the view that history is made by powerful personalities. As a biographer, perhaps he was prejudiced.

Eighteen hundred years later, Thomas Carlyle supported him. "The history of the world is but the biography of great men," he wrote.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, his contemporary, put the same opinion into similar words: "All history resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons."

The converse theory — that great achievement is conditioned by opportunity — was set forth by Thomas Gray in his "Elegy in a Country Churchyard":

In these eventful times we are well placed to examine the problem as to whether greatness is an attribute or a function.

Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin have certainly exerted a powerful influence upon the course of history. So too, in a sinister way, have Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.

Did they, by strength of character, mould the destinies of humanity, or were they carried along by the forces of Fate?

Other names are being written on the scroll of world-affairs — of men whose authority is less vast, but who are yet leaving their mark upon our times.

The following pages deal with the latest figure to come to the forefront of the cosmic conditions around us.

Whether great men make history, or historical times produce great men, the destinies of France are now polarised around two individuals  p. vi  — Henri Giraud and Charles de Gaulle. For three-and‑a‑half years the record and personality of General de Gaulle have had wide publicity. The career and character of General Giraud are less familiar outside his own country.

He has played a vital part in North Africa. Fresh responsibilities now confront him. An army under his command is preparing for the most momentous feat of arms in the military history of France — the reconquest of her national territory.

Such an achievement would win deserved and undying fame for General Giraud. The aim of this book is to record, while facts are still fresh in mind, the chief incidents of a career which is leading up to that climax.

Autographed photograph of General Giraud

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