Leclerc himself began to suffer nagging doubts or at least an awareness that the task ahead was complex. He reflected on something Mountbatten had told him in Ceylon, where Leclerc had stopped en route to Indochina: that postwar Asia was very different from the prewar variety, and there was no going back. Leclerc soon came to agree. “One does not kill ideas with bullets,” he told aides, and he warned superiors that France must avoid a large-scale war. Military action was necessary—troops had to be used to hold cities and lines of communication—but there could be no long-term military solution.
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