“I’ve been old in all my ranks,” said Henri Philippe Pétain, created Marshal of France on December 8, 1918, at age 62. Indeed, in 1914, at the outbreak of World War I, he, like German General Paul von Hindenburg that same year, thought that his long military career was finished and was more concerned with buying a pair of gardening shears than donning his uniform once more.
An unmarried philanderer until the age of 64 (when he married at last), Pétain claimed to be still making love at 86 in 1942. In February 1916, when his moment of martial glory arrived at last and he was named commander of the French fortress city of Verdun for the battle with which his name will forever be linked, his boots were found next to those of a lady’s slippers outside a hotel door in Paris.
