Books: The Third Gravedigger

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Reynaud, of course, like all French politicians, has always been right. He is a brilliant self-advocate, but has never understood that politics is the art of the possible, not the plausible. On his own showing, he won every argument including the last one—with the SS colonel who locked the door on his cell at Oranienburg concentration camp. Colonel: "The Russians would have shot you long ago." Reynaud: "I did not know that you took them as mentors."

The reader may accept much of Reynaud's picture of France. But the picture that really stays in the mind is the one he has drawn by inadvertence—the picture of men who would rather lose a war than an argument.