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“Like all ‘war orphans’, I am a war baby.” This is how the author introduces his story. After being a military child at the age of ten, then serving a full 50-year career in the armed forces, he wonders if because he was “born of war”, was he not “raised for war”, and therefore “destined for war?” He immediately suggests that the answer “is hard to reconcile with commonly held ideas”. His story relates the harmony of a life characterised by a love of France and a total dedication to its founding values. This love and total dedication were inspired by his father and his uncle, both Resistance fighters who died for France. These feelings were nourished and given life, first at the one-class school of his village, then at the Autun Military School in the 1950s and’60s, in the unique atmosphere inherited from the “military children’s maquis” ten years earlier, before accompanying him through a 50-year career in the armed forces.