During the month of September and the beginning of October there were several events which preoccupied the French of Algiers. For the initiates of the Yacht Club there was the surprise party which Isabelle Pélissier gave in honour of Captain Esclavier so that no one should fail to know that he was her lover. Bab-el-Oued, with the tactlessness, open-mindedness and good humour that were typical of this quarter, focused a sharp eye on the liaison between Concha Martinez and her paratroop colonel. The only thing that took temporary priority over this affair was the match between Racing Universitaire Algérois and Saint-Eugène; but from then on Bab-el-Oued became deeply attached to the colonel, it made him its hero at the same time as its adopted son and forced his name down the throat of the prudish, upper-class quarters of Algiers.
There also appeared, in what it is now customary to call the “fashionable circles,” a mysterious Mr. Arcinade. He was smooth and sociable, he loved sweet cakes, knew all the ins and outs of the Algerian question and appeared to have inside information on Parisian politics. Boisfeuras, who met him several times, could never make up his mind if he was a double agent, a police informer or a sincere patriot whose mind had been somewhat disturbed by reading too many thrillers and spy-stories.
But “Force A” which was due to land in Egypt, which had been standing by since 22 September and whose existence was now an open secret, had soon ceased to be of any interest to local society.
Every morning the people of Algiers would open their shutters, put their noses out to sniff the sea air and notice that the fifteen merchant ships that had been requisitioned for the transport of the troops were still in the harbour. Whereupon they would go off to their various occupations, shrugging their shoulders.
The taxi-driver Jules Pasdeuras, who kept his vehicle in the rank at the foot of the Rampe Bugeaud and held court in the Bar des Amis, summed the situation up twice daily in what was possibly a rather coarse manner, but at the time there was no one in Algiers who did not share his opinion:
“The Egyptian expedition? My ass!”
The phrase was accompanied by a magnificent gesture of derision. In a short time no one ever referred to Force A except as the “My Ass Expedition.”
It was only after the arrival at the Saint-Georges Hotel of two hundred civilian pilots, who were due to convoy the paratroops to Cyprus, that the people of Algiers began to take the matter a little more seriously.
On the other hand, with the exception of a few rare initiates of the rebellion, no one knew that a certain Khadder, who until then had fulfilled a very secondary role as a medical orderly up in the mountains, had just been posted to the autonomous zone of Algiers. Thanks to a government grant, he had previously received a sound education in the Faculty of Science. He had stooping shoulders and a whining voice and never stopped complaining of the pain he suffered from one of his vertebrae which had been displaced as a result of a fall; he harped on it continuously, like an old hypochondriac on his health or a general on his one and only victory, and thereby earned the nickname among his fellow-students of “Khadder the Vertebra.”
Khadder’s mind sometimes used to wander, he would forget where he was, what experiment was under way and which of his friends was with him. Mireau, who was his neighbour at the laboratory, would then give him a good kick in the behind.
“A boot in the ass is the poor man’s electric shock treatment,” he would bitterly observe.
Mireau was working his way through college and was reputed to have once shown leanings towards the Algerian Communist Party.
Pasfeuro had been recalled to Paris “for consultations.” The director of his paper, a man of considerable presence and with any amount of decorations, liked to endow his correspondents’ movements with the importance of a diplomatic posting. The Minister for Foreign Affairs having sent for his ambassadors and experts to question them on the possible repercussions of the Suez Expedition in the Middle East and the rest of the world, he promptly followed suit by summoning all his permanent representatives to the Quotidien head office. The ambassadors got the best part of their information from the Quotidien correspondents, who in their turn got it from the unofficial military and commercial attachés, the fake consuls and “box-wallahs” who were extremely well informed but with whom their Excellencies would never associate.
The two meetings took place on the same day, at the same time, one on the left bank of the river, the other on the right. The director of the Quotidien and the Minister for Foreign Affairs both had a “contact” in the rival establishment. They were both waiting, the latter to take a decision, the former to orientate the policy of his paper and cull the sensational news items which could not fail to emerge from these meetings.
Villèle had greater freedom of movement, the managing board of his paper having decided once and for all to stick by the opposition until such time as they were invited to take up the reins of office. To these uncomplicated souls, Paris was France; Jewish banking, the École Normale, Polytechnique and the 16th arrondissement were Paris; the cafés of Saint-Germain-des-Près were a school for thinkers, and progressivism a political ideal. Young, brilliant and well dressed, they had just the right amount of insolence, caddishness and cynicism to maintain the illusion.
Villèle, who was in Algiers, was therefore able to witness what later came to be called the “El Biar scandal.” He was the one who described it to Pasfeuro, in a report which was accurate enough in detail despite the somewhat “sneering” interpretation he gave it.
Pasfeuro had seen Jeanine in Paris and resumed his liaison with her. His director had congratulated him on “his very remarkable work in Algeria.” He had all at once forgotten to ask for the increase in salary that he had been promised for some time.
Reclining in a deck-chair in the garden of the Hotel Saint-Georges just as night was beginning to fall, drowsy and yawning with happiness, he was listening inattentively to his companion’s account. The name of Marindelle roused him from his torpor.
“Imagine,” Villèle told him, “one of those grand penthouse apartments, with a terrace all round it adorned with flower-pots, succulent plants, dwarf palm-trees and olcanders; big French windows overlooking the Bay of Algiers with all its twinkling lights; thick carpets, deep sofas, first-rate drinks. That big oaf Esclavier certainly knows how to choose his mistresses. Apart from the professional interest he arouses, I’m beginning to have quite a soft spot for him.
“I had met him the evening before in the Aletti bar and he had asked me to come . . . What an excellent introduction Indo-China is for all those army people! No matter what you write about them, provided you’ve once set foot in Viet-Nam you’re absolved, you’re one of the family.
“The official reason for the party was not, of course, because Captain Philippe Esclavier had given Isabelle Pélissier joy when she had always believed herself to be frigid. No, it was in honour of the officers of the Tenth Parachute Regiment who were just off to capture Cairo. Her husband was there: a narrow-chested little squirt, but not without intelligence. If I were the captain or his lady-love I’d be a bit more careful . . .
“The accepted hierarchy of Algiers was completely upside-down for once. Your cousin, Marindelle, for instance, had brought . . .”
“What’s that?”
“Ah, I thought that would wake you up! Marindelle turned up with a somewhat mature woman, a lecturer in Saharan ethnology at the Faculty. Neither he nor she left any room for doubt about the kind of relationship that united them. There was something incestuous about their liaison. Oedipus and his mother . . . Does that suit your book?”
“What a bastard you are!”
“Do you know, the role of the utter, out-and-out bastard is becoming more and more difficult to keep up in this dull, hypocritical, tolerant world of ours?
“The paratroops arrived in their camouflage uniform, with their sleeves rolled up and their collars undone. The Algerines were all in black ties, silk shirts and white shantung dinner-jackets; the women, for the most part, in cocktail dresses by the leading Paris designers.
“The local dignitaries made a big fuss of the mercenaries whom they badly needed in order to bring to heel the Arab League which was threatening their privileges. You remember Salammbo, the dinner at Megara, in Hamilcar’s garden. I kept thinking about it all the time . . . ‘The more they drank the more the mercenaries remembered the injustice of Carthage. Their efforts, viewed through a haze of drink, seemed prodigious and too poorly rewarded. They showed one another their wounds, they recounted their battles . . . Whereupon they felt alone and abandoned in spite of the crowd, and were suddenly afraid of the great city slumbering beneath them in the shadows, with its flights of stairs, its tall dark houses and its obscure gods who were even fiercer than the people themselves . . . ’”
“Do you know Flaubert by heart?”
“Yes, I could quote whole chapters at the age of fifteen. I had stolen the book from a stall; it was Salammbo—just imagine, if instead of Salammbo I had taken Les Mystères de Paris—and all at once I was forced to go to work for the Quotidien . . . Colonel Raspéguy turned up with a little tart from Bab-el-Oued, a luscious little piece, dressed up to kill, as common as they make them and stinking to high heaven of skewered meat and pimento. He believes in direct action, that chap. He noticed straightaway that the fine ladies of Algiers were rather discreetly made up, so he turned to his little marmoset who was plastered in red, blue and black, took her by the scruff of the neck, locked her up in the bathroom and gave her a good scrubbing. When she came back she was bright red, as through she had just been sand-papered. She was fuming and never opened her mouth for the rest of the evening except to say ‘shit’ each time a worthy gentleman offered her a glass of champagne or something to eat . . .
“At first the various groups kept apart. The paratroopers discussed the war, the settlers wine and citrus fruit, the business men money, the women clothes or the latest diet: and all of them, as they sipped their whisky or champagne, kept whispering about Isabelle and her paratrooper and casting sidelong glances at Paul Pélissier to see what attitude they should adopt towards the adulterous wife and her lover. For rarely have I seen two people proclaim so openly that they were in love and sleeping together. They left in their wake a warm, provocative aura of sex.
“Dia, the Negro, turned up a little later with his little chum Boisfeuras, that disturbing character with the grating voice. They looked as if they had already had a drink or two. They were followed by a big red-haired lieutenant with a set expression who distinguished himself by tripping over the edge of a mat. He measured his length on the floor, thereby provoking a caustic comment from Raspéguy:
“‘When you can’t hold more than a quart, Pinières, it’s best not to drink a barrel.’
“Dia gulped down a tumbler of neat whisky, gave a belch of satisfaction and affection, then put his arms round Esclavier and Isabelle and hugged them to his breast. Dia’s got the same sort of voice as Paul Robeson, rich, deep and melodious, a voice made for seducing women, children and slaves . . . which speaks to the heart and the guts. All the guests who were out on the terrace came inside again; that voice attracted them like wasps to a honey-pot.
“‘Philippe,’ he said to the captain, ‘I’m glad you’re in love with a woman who’s so like you, who’s your own sort, a real live woman . . . this time. What’s your name?’
“‘Isabelle.’
“‘Isabelle, this evening there’s something we’ve got to do; we’ve got to kill your little rival; she’s already died once, you know. Don’t be too frightened of her; she was a girl with plaits and a fibre helmet on her head. Little Souen, we all loved her, she was our Indo-China war, she was the one we had come to protect, although we didn’t know it, against the very people with whom she was fighting. We loved her like a little something outside time and space. Souen wasn’t lively like Isabelle. Indo-China wasn’t as real as Algeria . . . It was a place apart, where we lived by ourselves, in a war which we had invented for ourselves, where we crept away to die like those sick or wounded elephants who struggle off on their own feet to their secret burial grounds. With you, Isabelle, it’s much more simple. You’ve become Philippe’s girl so that he can come with his friends to protect your home . . . ’
“‘The nigger’s dead drunk!’ Paul Pélissier cried out in a shrill voice. ‘How dare he address my wife as “tu”! He’d better get out of here . . . he’s raving mad . . . ’
“Whereupon Raspéguy seized the husband by the arm.
“‘If you like, we can all go with him. With our nigger, we’ll go off and leave El Biar, Algiers, Algeria, the Sahara; we’ll leave you to deal with your Arabs whom you claim to know so well. But if it hadn’t been for us they would have thrown the whole lot of you into the sea ages ago.’
“At that moment, I promise you, everyone found it quite normal that Isabelle should be Esclavier’s mistress and even that she should advertise the fact, everyone, even her husband . . . What really shocked poor little Paul Pélissier was that Dia had addressed his wife by the familiar ‘tu’ and put his arms round her. As the evening wore on, and the glasses were emptied and refilled, the mercenaries began talking about the war, the Resistance, the prison-camps and Indo-China. I discovered a great deal about them that night.
“I now realize they’re a simple, rather pathetic lot, anxious to be loved and delighting in contempt for their country, capable of energy, tenacity and courage, but also inclined to abandon everything for a girl’s smile or the prospect of a good adventure. They revealed themselves to me in their true light: vain and disinterested, thirsty for knowledge but averse to instruction, sick at heart at being unable to follow a big, unjust and generous leader and being forced to attribute their reason for fighting to some political or economic theory . . . to take the place of the leader they haven’t been able to find.
“Those ‘reprobates’ who paid Isabelle the homage of their tales of bloodshed, their savage or nostalgic songs, their distant loves, their mad dreams of conquest, who tore off their medals and ornamental armour to cast them at her feet, were pathetic and at the same time exasperating. In Indo-China they had become adults, and suddenly, because they were about to be launched against Egypt in a good old war of reconquest, they were once more transformed into the pretentious, unbearable warriors they had been before.
“It was an absurd, heroic nightmare: Ubu turned hero. I could imagine that little fool Isabelle, while they were setting fire to the mosques and palaces of Cairo, licking her lips with the satisfaction of a well-fed cat.
“Do you know what I thought, Pasfeuro? For God’s sake listen, because it’s serious . . . much more serious than your sentimental problems. Those paratroops are all free and unattached, they’re on the look-out for a master. And the only ones capable of producing this master who would know how to break them and at the same time cover them with glory, inflict on them the discipline they’re longing for and give them back the admiration of the people which they feel they are being denied, are the Communists. That night they were passing through a phase of infantilism, the last in their lives perhaps. While they were fondling the girls, breaking the furniture and draining their glasses, while the Negro, banging on a copper pot he had discovered in the kitchen, kept urging them on before the horrified eyes of the men ‘responsible’ for those ladies who were now transformed into spectators and stood rooted to the spot, I was thinking of that story in Salammbo and of the orders the Senate of Carthage gave to Hamilcar to herd the mercenaries into a deep ravine and there exterminate them. Because one day those cohorts of yours will have to be exterminated, and a bourgeois government will have to take the responsibility for doing so.
“Pasfeuro, you can stand me a double whisky. I’ve just told you an extremely interesting story.”
“You told it me, because neither of us could use it as copy because no one would understand it . . . You don’t happen to know the name of that girl who was with Yves Marindelle, do you?”
• • •
Paul Pélissier met Arcinade the day after the “scandal,” at the house of some mutual friends. He was still somewhat fuddled from the night before; and his injured feelings and wounded vanity made him feel as though he had just been flayed alive.
Mr. Arcinade knew how to soothe wounds of this sort. His stout little body was carefully ensconced in the depths of a big arm-chair, and in his hand he was warming a glass of brandy.
“My dear fellow,” he said to Paul, “I’ve heard so much about you, your illustrious family which has been established here ever since the conquest of this land of Algeria from which they want to drive us out, and the influence you have in certain circles; that’s why I wanted to meet you. You’re no doubt aware of the vast plot which is threatening Algeria . . . a plot with countless ramifications . . . I know, you’re thinking at once of the left wing, the Communists . . . No, that aspect of the plot isn’t serious. There’s another side to it, an infinitely more pernicious side, which has gained ground with the middle class, among business circles and even part of the army . . .”
“Really?”
“Do you know Colonel Puysange? Only the other day he was telling me how uneasy he felt about it. A number of officers, including some of the best, contracted the virus out in Indo-China. Some of them didn’t even wait for Indo-China. You know Captain Esclavier, I believe?”
A hot flush rose into Paul’s cheeks, but Arcinade appeared not to notice it.
“A splendid war record, undoubtedly . . . but with de Gaulle and in the Resistance, which gives it a certain . . . political character . . . Above all there’s his family which has been associated for ages with international Communism. Captain Marindelle and Major de Glatigny appear to belong, like him, to an organization which is, shall we say”—he gave a scornful, superior pout—“liberal. Colonel Raspéguy takes a special pride in his working-class origin. Those aren’t the sort of defenders we need in Algeria. We need tough men with conviction, real soldiers of Christ and of France, who are settlers, merchants, labourers or officers by day . . . but at night-time are handy with a knife or submachine-gun . . . These men should be organized by specialists provided with arms, the latest technique and proper support, in Paris as much as in Algeria, in the army as well as the civilian population . . . But because these men are honest and sincere, they’re sometimes short of money . . .”
Paul gave a slight start. He had a reputation for “tight-fistedness” in spite of his great wealth. With his finger-nail Arcinade traced a heart surmounted by a cross on the table-top.
“That’s the sign of Charles de Foucauld,” he said, “but it’s also the sign of the Chouans.”
And in a piping voice, which recalled the noise of frogs on certain summer evenings, the astonishing Mr. Arcinade suddenly burst into the Chouans’ song.
Your remains will be flung to the waves,
And pledged to dishonour your names,
We’ve one honour alone in the world,
And that is to follow Our Lord.
The Bluecoats, while leading the dance,
Will lap up the blood of our heart,
We have only one heart in the world,
And that is the heart of Our Lord.
“I hope we shall meet again, my dear Pélissier, and very soon. I must ask you to keep all this to yourself, of course. By the way, did you know Captain Esclavier was a freemason? Quite a senior one, too . . . like our commander-in-chief and our resident minister.”
As he made his way home, Paul decided to see no more of this madman with his mealy-mouthed manner. The sound peasant sense he had inherited from his ancestors put him on his guard, but he had to admit that what Arcinade had to say was extremely disturbing and he seemed to be well informed.
As he got into his car, he whistled the Chouans’ song between his teeth:
The Bluecoats, while leading the dance,
Will lap up the blood of our heart . . .
The Bluecoats, that meant Esclavier . . . And all the suppressed romanticism of a rickety child rose to his lips.
• • •
On 20 October the paratroops of the 10th Regiment received orders to embark in the aircraft which were to fly them to Cyprus.
Colonel Raspéguy, in full uniform, with his badges of rank on his shoulders, and with two armed guards sitting behind him, drove up in his Jeep to say goodbye to Concha.
The whole of Bab-el-Oued was leaning out of the windows. The washing flapped in the blazing Mediterranean sun.
He kissed the young girl, gave her a pat on the behind and went off to capture Cairo amid the frenzied applause of a crowd in which Spaniards, Maltese, Arabs and Mahonnais rubbed shoulders with a handful of “Frenchmen by extraction.”
On 5 November, at six o’clock in the morning, the paratroops of the 10th Regiment were dropped just south of Port Said so as to seize the bridge over which the road and railway line led to Cairo. This bridge lay across a subsidiary canal connecting the Suez Canal to the Lake of Manzaleh, and the dropping zone consisted of a narrow strip of sand between two stretches of water.
The aircraft dropped them from a height of 400 feet, the minimum safety height being 350. They had to slow down to 125 miles an hour, thereby providing a splendid target for the Egyptian anti-aircraft batteries.
Anti-aircraft batteries which were massed round the bridge, opened up as soon as the first plane appeared in the sky, thereby revealing the position of their quick-firing cannon, twin pom-poms and heavy machine-guns. The aircraft had only dropped equipment: a couple of Jeeps and a recoilless 106 mm. gun, which had landed in the canal. In the still water the white parachutes looked like gigantic water-lilies that had just burst into bloom. The paratroops had jumped behind a smoke-screen and most of them managed to land on the strip of sand. Casualties were less heavy than had been anticipated.
Esclavier and his men had made for the company’s lock-chambers so as to approach the bridge from the rear. To achieve their objective, they had been obliged to cross a thicket held by the fedayin, Nasser’s suicide squads. Each of these fedayin, concealed behind a tree, was equipped with a regular miniature arsenal: submachine-gun, rifles and bazookas. They opened up on the French with all they had got, but without causing much damage, for their fire was hopelessly inaccurate and the paratroops knew how to make the best use of the slightest irregularity in the ground. Seeing that the paratroops, far from retreating, were continuing to advance, they suddenly broke off the engagement, abandoning a position from which it would have been difficult to shift them, together with their arms, uniforms and all their ammunition. While pursuing them, the paratroops crossed the bridge and actually went two hundred yards beyond it. The road to Cairo was open to them. But the other companies, who were having a harder time of it under heavy artillery fire, took several hours to catch up with them.
Glatigny doubled across the platform of the bridge which was once again being swept by machine-gun fire and flung himself into Esclavier’s fox-hole just as a mortar shell burst behind him.
“First of all,” he said, “many congratulations. Raspéguy asked me to tell you not to overreach yourself. We’re at the apex of the entire Allied force . . . for this time, at last, we’ve got an ally, which hasn’t happened to us since 1945. This is real war, Philippe, and it does one good.”
“Yes, real war, with Cairo as the final objective.”
“Do you know what Cairo means in Arabic? El Qahirah, the Victorious.”
“We’ll behave like Napoleon,” Esclavier grinned. “We’ll loot the museum. My father once told me it’s one of the richest in the world and the worst arranged: a real Ali Baba’s cave . . . The gold of Tutankhamen!”
“We haven’t got there yet.”
“What’s stopping us? A few bands of poor fellahin who don’t know what they’re meant to be defending, some theatrical warriors festooned with ammunition belts, who take to their heels at the very first shot—in other words, nothing. We’ll live in the Semiramis, on the banks of the Nile, we’ll climb the pyramids and go and visit the Valley of the Kings. We’ve at last escaped from that prison called Algeria . . .”
Another salvo of mortar shells burst near their fox-hole, raising a cloud of dust. But their only reaction was to laugh, because they had taken Cairo.
Pinières and fifty of his paratroops took the fedayin barracks of Port Fuad by storm. They killed or captured a hundred and fifty of them and collected enough arms and ammunition to equip an entire regiment.
“A fine war,” he said, mopping his brow.
Captain Marindelle and Lieutenant Orsini, with a truck-load of paratroops, forged ahead without orders down the El Kantara road and got to within a few miles of the town. There they were machine-gunned rather half-heartedly by some regular regiments who were rapidly retreating in the belief that the Israelis were already in the Egyptian capital. They took so many prisoners that they had to release them again, merely taking the precaution of removing their trousers.
Raspéguy established contact with the one-eyed general who was circling over them in his flying headquarters, a Dakota.
“The Suez road is free,” the colonel reported. “One of my units is just outside Kantara. What are we waiting for? Shall I go ahead?”
“We’re expecting orders at any minute.”
The Dakota went on circling over the company’s workshops, then suddenly made off in a northerly direction towards the sea and Cyprus.
“What the hell’s going on?” Raspéguy inquired, feeling suddenly uneasy.
It was the pilot who replied:
“Nothing. We’re going to refuel.”
A brief signal now came over the air: “The Franco-British troops are advancing on Suez.” All the strategists were making calculations on their maps: the tanks moved at sixteen miles an hour, but the French AMXs could do over sixty. Ismailia would be taken in the course of the night and Ismailia was just under a hundred miles from Cairo. The rout of the Egyptian Army was gaining momentum. Raspéguy was fuming with impatience. He was frightened another unit might go through ahead of him.
Next morning the navy started unloading the trucks, Jeeps and heavy material at Port Said and Port Fuad. Seething with rage, Raspéguy saw the vehicles of Fossey-François’s and Conan’s regiments being taken off first and then those of Bigeard’s, and it was not until the evening that he at last got hold of his “rolling stock.”
At ten o’clock that night the general in command of the parachute division sent him an urgent summons.
“Everyone ready to move off for Cairo in an hour’s time,” he barked. “No stores, no supplies, just weapons and ammunition. We’ll pick up what we need on the way.”
The general was boorish, not to say uncouth, but Raspéguy who did not like him at all—did he ever like anyone commanding him?—was willing to admit that “he had guts.”
“Sit down,” the general told him.
He handed him a glass and a bottle of whisky.
“Have a drink. No, a bigger one than that, for heaven’s sake!”
He was suddenly addressing Raspéguy as “tu,” which made the colonel realize that things were going badly.
“Now listen and don’t blow up . . . because I feel like blowing up myself. I’ve just received the order to cease fire. We’re pulling out.”
“But we’ve already won!”
“Eden has been forced to give in, Guy Mollet tried to save the situation but without much conviction. We haven’t won, we’ve lost. An ultimatum from the Russians, threats from the Americans. I don’t know what’s happening with the Russians, but it seems Hungary is up in arms.”
“I don’t give a damn about Hungary. Supposing we hadn’t received this order, we’d now be advancing on Cairo . . .”
“Do you think that hasn’t crossed my mind as well? But we’d have to be covered, anyway as far as the French command is concerned.”
“That could be done.”
“I’m afraid not. Our commander-in-chief is a graduate of the staff college, unlike you or me. He wages war with maps, statistics and sand-tables. He can’t believe that four parachute regiments on their own can send a whole tin-pot army packing . . .
“So get this into your head, Raspéguy: I forbid you to move an inch. But if you want to get drunk with your officers . . . I can send you a truck-load of whisky. There’s no shortage.”
“What’s in store for us after this?”
“Algeria again, though the solution to Algeria is probably to be found here . . .”
“Algeria, that shit-house!”
“Yes, we’re condemned to that shit-house again. Do you know the garrison of Port Said has just surrendered?”
“It’s a bad business, sir, giving up like this when victory was within our grasp . . . and we badly need a victory. It’s specially bad for our men. They thought they had escaped from prison. Now they’re going to be taken back to their cells under police escort . . .”
The paratroops of the 10th Regiment embarked on 14 November, a few hours before the arrival of the U.N. police, ninety Danish soldiers in blue caps. They had skin and hair the colour of butter, weapons which they had never used except on exercises, and complexions as clear as their consciences.
On 20 November the Regiment disembarked at Algiers in the dark. Colonel Raspéguy had arranged for them to be sent off at once into the mountains for he felt he had to take his men in hand again. A fellagha band had just been reported in the Blidian Atlas. On the very next day the lizards set off in pursuit of it.
• • •
On Saturday, 30 September, at five o’clock in the afternoon, while the streets were swarming with people, a bomb exploded in the milk bar on the corner of the Rue d’Isly and the Place Bugeaud, just opposite the flat which the commander-in-chief occupied in the headquarters building of Number Ten Area.
At the same time, in the cafeteria in the Rue Michelet, a second bomb went off. This one was made of the same primitive explosive as the first: “schneiderite,” manufactured from potassium chloride. The two bombs killed three people and injured forty-six. The casualties included a number of children who had their legs blown off.
At the cafeteria some medical orderlies had just laid a child, screaming with pain, on a stretcher; they were about to close the doors of the ambulance when one of them noticed he had left the child’s foot and shoe on the pavement. He threw both under the stretcher and, leaning against a tree, promptly vomited. He was called Maleski. Regularly once a week, at the Swiss Restaurant, he used to take a nurse, with whom he occasionally spent the night, out to dinner. He was a happy man and until that day had never been assailed by any political, moral or sentimental problem.
The fuse of another bomb placed in the main hall of the air terminal failed to function. It consisted of an alarm-clock connected to an electric battery, and contained the same explosive as the cafeteria and milk bar bombs: schneiderite.
On 5 October yet another bomb exploded in the Algiers-Tablat bus, killing nine Moslem passengers . . .
Horror reigned in Algiers, to the sound of wailing ambulance sirens and in the midst of shattered shop windows and pools of blood hastily sprinkled with sawdust.
Stretched to breaking-point, the nerves of the Algerines quivered at every rumour, at the most improbable report. But sometimes these very same men appeared to be unaffected by the most atrocious sights and, as they drank their anisette, would raise their glass to the next grenade of which they themselves might be the victims. Then they would work themselves into a frenzy over a conversation about football.
Horror was succeeded by fear and hatred. Moslems began to be beaten up without rhyme or reason, simply because they had a parcel in their hands or because they had “a nasty expression on their face.” Europeans got rid of their old Arab servants and fatmahs who had been part of the family for twenty years.
“You can’t trust any of them,” they would say. “One fine day we’ll wake up to find our throats cut and our children poisoned.”
Then they would quote the story of the baker who had been murdered by his assistant. The two men had worked together every night for over ten years; they had become close friends and were to be seen every morning emerging covered in flour from their bake-house. They would go and have lunch in a bistro on the other side of the street, taking their newly baked bread with them and ordering some ham to go with it.
Within a few days Bab-el-Oued witnessed a distinct rift between the Moslems on the one hand and the Jews and Europeans on the other. This was exactly what the F.L.N. wanted: to divide that ill-defined zone and split up its inhabitants who tended to resemble one another more and more, for they had so many things in common: a certain nonchalance, love of gossip, contempt for women, jealousy, irresponsibility and inclination to day-dream.
Villèle and Pasfeuro spent every night at the Écho d’Alger offices, where there was a W.T. tuned in on the police transmitter’s wave-length. They listened in to the calls and were thus able to ascertain the number of the outrages and the place where they had occurred. In November they averaged more than five a day and accounted for two hundred deaths.
In the early days the journalists would rush to the spot at once, by car, motor-cycle or taxi. There they would see a few bodies lying on the pavement and covered in an old blanket, some wounded being taken off to the Maillot Hospital, or the impotent rage of a man with a face distorted by hatred and misery; there they would hear a woman screaming as she went for the police or ambulance men with her claws. The Jewesses and Spanish women were the most uncontrolled of the lot.
Very soon the journalists could no longer bear to photograph these horrors, listen to these screams, and be taken to task as though it was they who were arming the terrorists.
Pasfeuro and Villèle had again attended a Government House Press conference. The spokesman had given a garbled version of the outrages and minimized the number of casualties; more often than not the outrages were modestly referred to as “incidents.” He had announced the arrest of several terrorists “whose identity could not be revealed,” promised that measures would be taken against them and reported the annihilation of a sizeable fellagha band in the Collo Peninsula, where a considerable amount of weapons had been seized.
Villèle had given a knowing smile and Pasfeuro had shrugged his shoulders in despair, which had succeeded in unleashing the spokesman’s anger:
“Are you again questioning the accuracy of my information?”
“Naturally,” Villèle calmly replied, rising to his feet.
“Come and see me in my office with Pasfeuro. We must thrash this out together once and for all.”
Their colleagues on the local Press watched the two bad boys enter the headmaster’s study with the satisfaction of goody-goodies who were beyond reproach.
As soon as he was alone with the two special correspondents, the spokesman changed his tune. He sank back into an arm-chair, his head lolling limply against the head-rest.
“Out with it,” he said wearily.
“To begin with,” said Villèle, “the outrages have caused seventeen victims and not six, not one arrest has been made, and the Government has no disciplinary measures in view . . .”
“Secondly,” Pasfeuro chipped in, “we got the worst of it in the Collo skirmish: fifteen dead and twenty-two wounded. The arms that were seized amounted to two sporting rifles. But what about the arms that were lost? They haven’t been mentioned in any report.”
The spokesman rose to his feet and started pacing up and down the thick office carpet, peering at the two confederates through his eyelashes, which were as curved and long as a woman’s; he had confused and tricked them so often that he was now reduced to treating them with a certain amount of frankness and honesty.
A minor civil servant who had embarked on his career in the wake of the Resident Minister, the spokesman had allowed himself to be carried away by the Algerian tragedy and, with all the resources of a nimble mind, with all the unscrupulousness of a pupil of Machiavelli who has pledged himself to a cause, he had set about defending Algeria inch by inch.
“All right,” he said, “there’s no point in deceiving you; your information’s quite correct. But what good would it do to make it public at this stage? It would only add to the general alarm. We’re on the brink of a catastrophe; anything could happen within the next few days. The crowd may get completely out of hand, Europeans and Moslems may start killing each other. But we can’t do a thing, our hands are tied by your friends, Villèle: they need the loss of Algeria in order to seize power . . . no matter if the whole of Algiers goes up in flames.”
“You’re exaggerating, Mr. Spokesman, we only want to save what can still be saved, by coming to terms with certain valid elements of the F.L.N.”
The telephone started ringing.
“What the hell does this bastard want, I wonder?”
Since living in the company of army men he had assumed a coarse manner of speech which he felt was demanded of him.
He lifted the receiver.
“Hallo? Oh, it’s you, Vivier . . . What’s that? Froger has just been killed? Where? On the steps of the Main Post Office . . . Serious? I should damn well think so. We’re in for it now, Vivier. No, it’s up to you to notify the chief. You’re the head of security, after all . . .”
Without waiting a moment longer, the two journalists dashed out of the room and raced down the marble stairs of Government House.
Amédée Froger, the President of the Interfederation of the Mayors of Algeria, had by virtue of his qualities and shortcomings become the standard-bearer of all the settlers. The F.L.N. had struck the Europeans right between the eyes. The repercussions were bound to be violent.
At eleven o’clock that night Pasfeuro, who had just filed his copy, joined Villèle in the Press Club, the only place that kept open after curfew. This tunnel, obscured by cigarette smoke, was a seething mass of journalists, police officials, pimps and informers, drug-pedlars, secret service agents, professional prostitutes and amateur tarts, the latter, like the former, on the look-out for a greenhorn who was drunk enough to see them home.
“Well,” Villèle inquired, “what’s the latest?”
“The funeral’s fixed for tomorrow, 28 December. The New Year’s getting off to a good start!”
“It will see the independence of Algeria, that’s inevitable. History, like a river, always flows in the same direction.”
“Balls!” said Pasfeuro. “Utter and complete balls, this irreversibility of history . . . Your little Commie chums were clever to appropriate destiny for themselves. What strength it gives them!”
“Do you think Algeria can be saved? Can’t you see that it’s rotten to the core? It appears sound enough, but that’s merely a façade which is going to be blown down in the gale of the general strike which Cairo and Tunis are threatening before the U.N.O. debate.
“We’ve got the same number of officials at Government House, rather more than last year in fact, and they all keep sending one another memoranda and publishing reports; but the machine’s working in a void, no one reads the things, no one acts on them. Meanwhile four hundred thousand soldiers are standing by, waiting to be able to go home.”
“You’re exaggerating, the army holds the hinterland.”
“Perhaps, but it doesn’t control a single town; its sphere of action ceases at the gates. And in the towns, what do you find? A few old flatfoots entangled in their peacetime regulations, who have got no information and are only too anxious to save their skins. The rebellion, like a worm, has insinuated itself into this defenceless fruit and devoured it from the inside.
“The F.L.N. is master of the towns, starting with Algiers itself: it has therefore won. Remember Morocco; the revolt there started in the medinas, after which the hinterland followed suit.”
“Why not put the army into the towns?”
“Out of the question, it’s illegal.”
“But legality now merely serves to protect a band of terrorists and assassins. The whole of Algiers is controlled by a few hundred killers, as you know perfectly well.”
“Those who are in favour of withdrawing from Algeria are very keen on the legal aspect. Legality is only interesting when it’s useful to us and is on our side.”
“You talk like Louis Veuillot, my dear Villèle: ‘The liberty which you demand from us in the name of your principles, we deny you in the name of ours.’”
A tart came and sat down at their table; her fair hair fell over her face, her breasts drooped and she smelt of drink.
Villèle gave her a smack on the behind with the palm of his hand:
“You see, Pasfeuro, I’m going off to sleep with her. More often than not one sleeps with whatever comes to hand.”
He rose to his feet and rested both fists on the wine-stained table-cloth:
“And perhaps it’s for the same reason that I sleep with the flow of history.”
• • •
Amédée Froger’s funeral gave rise to several incidents of violence, in the course of which a number of Moslems, who had nothing to do with the killing or with the F.L.N., were clubbed to death, knifed or shot by a raving mob. This sort of pogrom was commonly referred to as a “rat hunt.”
At seven in the evening Pasfeuro was standing outside the Aletti with Parston, one of his American colleagues, when the mob emerged from the Rue de la Liberté and the Rue Colonna d’Ornano, and swept up the little lanes and stairways towards the Rue d’Isly.
By the tobacconist’s stall on the other side of the street, an old Arab stood watching this milling crowd in amazement, wondering what mysterious reason there could possibly be behind it. Pasfeuro distinctly saw a man run up to the Arab and brain him with a heavy iron bar.
He dashed across the street, forcing a way through the crowd with his elbows, and began to pick the old man up. He was already dead, his skull bashed in, and the journalist withdrew his hands which were now covered in blood. But he could see a policeman who had witnessed the murder taking to his heels.
Pasfeuro straightened up slowly and his rage was so intense that he was trembling from head to foot.
“Some day I’m going to do in one of those bastards,” he said to the American who had come across and joined him.
Parston was an old hand who had been in every war and every revolution. He took Pasfeuro by the arm.
“It wasn’t a man who killed the Arab,” he said, “it was the mob. The mob’s a strange sort of beast which lashes out at random and then doesn’t remember a thing; it has a taste for murder, arson and plunder. The man who struck him down was probably a nice young chap who loves his mother and looks after his cats. I’ve studied the mob for a long time . . . Leave well alone . . . and come and wash your hands.”
“I hate the beast, I’d like to shoot it dead . . .”
“Everyone hates the mob, but everyone belongs to it.”
They went back to the Cintra and spent the rest of the night drinking. To calm Pasfeuro down, Parston treated him to a description of all the horrors he had witnessed in the last twenty years. He now talked about the mob as though it was some monstrous, mythical hydra, like the one whose heads and arms were chopped off by Hercules only to sprout anew immediately afterwards.
Pasfeuro then remembered the policeman he had seen taking to his heels; there was no more law and order, the hydra was prowling about Algiers in complete freedom. The F.L.N. would soon be able to put its men into the streets and launch the Kasbah against the European quarters.
Day by day armed commandos coming from the Wilaya IV were infiltrating in small groups into the Kasbah or going to ground in the suburbs of Algiers.
On their side, the Europeans were buying weapons and grenades regardless of the cost. Mr. Arcinade suddenly assumed great importance; one day all the walls appeared daubed with his emblem: a red heart surmounted by a cross.
The first meeting of the anti-terrorist commando he had created was held on the very evening of Amédée Froger’s gory funeral, at Telemmi, in a rented flat occupied by Puydebois, a little settler from Blida. Puydebois, a violent, tough, outspoken man with a thickset, powerful frame, close-cropped hair and a blue chin which he had to shave several times a day, kept saying over and over again:
“We’ve got to choose between a suitcase and a coffin. My choice is a coffin, but it had better be a big one because I plan to take quite a number with me.”
Paul Pélissier had come accompanied by Bert. He had been driven to action by a variety of sentiments. The desire to surprise his wife and win her back from Esclavier was mingled with the need “to do something,” and not feel so isolated and therefore so unhappy in the midst of this town which was collapsing in anarchy and bloodshed. Now that he carried a weapon he had the sensation of being at last the man of exception born in revolution and conspiracy.
Bert followed Paul as he had always done. He was a placid, handsome, rich young man, but there was no life in those 176 lb. of healthy flesh, in that beautiful statuesque head, no desire, not even the most commonplace envy, nothing but Paul to whom he had belonged since his childhood.
The medical orderly Maleski had been brought by Malavielle, a Government House employee recruited by Arcinade.
There was only one thing in the world that Malavielle feared: not being “in the thick of things.” He loved mystery as other men love sport, gambling or women, with passion, and suffered for the very reason that there was no mystery in the sort of life he led: the life of an exemplary minor official who boarded in a H.L.M. with his unassuming little wife and three over-well behaved little children.
Maleski could not dismiss from his mind the vision of the cafeteria, the ambulance and the injured child. He had haunting nightmares and hallucinations; women filled him with horror; he could no longer stomach a mouthful of meat or a single glass of wine. His hatred of the “rats” was akin to that of a teetotaller bent on preserving his chastity; it was cold and implacable, it manifested itself neither in word nor gesture, it verged on madness.
The student Adruguez was not quite sure how he came to be there. One falls into conversation with a stranger in a café one evening, one drinks a few anisettes, one accepts an invitation to dinner and one finds oneself involved in a plot. Since it was not the first time this sort of thing had happened to him, he was not unduly impressed.
Arcinade took up his position in front of a table on which lay a Bible and a revolver. He was in shirt-sleeves, with his collar open at the neck, chubby and glistening with high-quality sweat.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “we are on the brink of defeat. Tomorrow Algeria will cease to be French . . . unless we act promptly and decisively! Our organization already numbers hundreds of adherents, there is no lack of volunteers for printing pamphlets, bill-sticking, and collecting information; but that’s not enough; we now need men for killing.”
“As usual,” Adruguez said to himself, “we’ve got to kill, but whom? No one seems to agree on that score . . . there’s nothing but a lot of talk about rat-hunts and submachine-guns. If you’re not in the thick of things, there’s not a chance of getting a girl. Nowadays you’ve got to pack a pistol before you’re entitled to give them a smack on the behind.”
“Terror,” Arcinade went on, “must be answered by terror, outrage by outrage. That’s what you all think, isn’t it, Puydebois, isn’t it, Maleski?”
He raised his voice and thumped the table.
“Well, that’s not the solution! First and foremost, we’ve got to be efficient. It’s not enough to throw a few bombs of our own, what we’ve got to find out is who is throwing them. We’ve got to do the work which the police are incapable of doing and the army isn’t allowed to do: counter-terrorism.
“You, whom I’ve chosen for your devotion to the country, for your high moral qualities, your courage and self-denial, this evening I bring you . . .”
He thumped the table again.
“. . . the support of several important leaders of our army. We’re going to act in conjunction with the Secret G.H.Q.”
Adruguez sat up in his seat. This time things looked rather more serious than usual.
Arcinade believed implicitly in this Secret G.H.Q., a myth he had fondly cherished ever since he had been in touch with one of the countless clandestine organizations that flourished at Vichy during the occupation, for this deceiver of others succeeded also in deceiving himself.
He had met Colonel Puysange on three separate occasions and had spoken to him in guarded terms of “certain steps he was planning to take.” The least the colonel had been able to do was to “lend him the support of G.H.Q.”
Nothing more had been needed for Arcinade, who was always inclined to read between the lines, to imagine some vast collusion between his own organization and this great G.H.Q. of which Puysange could be none other than the Algiers representative.
“Before going any further, my friends, I’m going to ask you to take an oath on this Bible, as I shall now do in front of you.”
Arcinade squared his shoulders and, with a great show of emotion and sincerity, pledged himself as follows:
“In the name of Christ, in the name of France, so that Algeria shall remain French, I swear to fight to the death, to keep my activity secret, to carry out every order I am given, no matter what it may be. If I betray my oath, I shall expect to be executed like a traitor.”
The new adherents repeated the oath one after another, Puydebois quivering with emotion, Bert without understanding a word, Malavielle with delight, Maleski with the sombre conviction of someone possessed reciting a formula of exorcism, and Paul Pélissier with such deep anxiety that he stuttered from the effort.
Eugène Adruguez spoke in a strong, clear voice which impressed everyone; he did not believe in the oath for a moment.
“Now as far as action is concerned,” said Arcinade, “our friend Malavielle has a most important announcement to make.”
“It’s like this,” said Malavielle. “I’ve been keeping him under observation for the last three weeks and I now know that he’s one of the main leaders of the rebellion.”
“Who?” Puydebois asked.
“Ben Chihani, the cloth merchant in the Boulevard Laferrière.”
“Let’s be serious about this,” said Adruguez, who was twenty years old. “All Chihani thinks about is money; no doubt he contributes a little to the rebellion, like any other Moslem merchant . . .”
“I’m certain of what I’m saying,” said Malavielle. “I’ve got information.”
He was not certain of anything at all, but since he went past Chihani’s shop every day, the idea occurred to him to suspect this self-satisfied little fellow who was doing good business and stood in his doorway rubbing his hands together with pleasure.
“Then off we go,” said Puydebois. “We’ll take him to some quiet spot, beat him up and make him talk. That little bastard earns all his money from European customers.”
Arcinade chipped in.
“This first operation must be organized with great care and I must first of all refer it to . . . you know who. Any volunteers?”
“Me,” said Puydebois, “and besides, I’ve got a car.”
“Me too,” said Maleski.
Malavielle could not do otherwise than volunteer as well.
Adruguez, who had not taken this expedition against the cloth merchant seriously for a single moment, did not even see fit to warn him.
He was indebted to him. Chihani had lent some money to his mother when she became a widow.
Four days later, as Adruguez walked past Chihani’s shop, he did not see him in his doorway. He went inside; his son Lucien was at the cashier’s desk and he looked rather odd.
“Where’s your father?” Adruguez inquired, “there’s something I want to ask him.”
The young man came up to the student and, after glancing round the shop, whispered in his ear:
“He’s disappeared, he hasn’t been seen for the last two days. We know it’s neither the F.L.N. nor the French police.”
“Who can it be, then?”
“He received a telephone call about some business or other. This was the day before yesterday, at ten o’clock in the morning; that’s the last we heard of him. If you could possibly find out . . .”
“But how do you know it’s not the F.L.N.?”
Lucien Chihani suddenly looked extremely ill at ease.
“Because . . . because there’s nothing they could hold against us on any score whatsoever.”
It was not until the evening that Adruguez learnt the truth, when he managed to get hold of Arcinade. The little man was quite beside himself. Fate had willed that Chihani should be the treasurer of the whole of the autonomous zone of Algiers, entrusted by the rebels with the handling of funds exceeding a hundred and fifty million francs. Chihani knew most of the F.L.N. leaders and even the whereabouts of some of their hideouts, not to mention the whole politic-administrative organization.
After being dipped head first in a water tank by Puydebois, he had confessed everything.
“We must hand him over to the police at once,” Adruguez exclaimed.
Arcinade threw his little arms up in the air:
“Too late. He had a weak heart. Maybe we held him under too long and his heart gave out during the night. Maleski did all he could to revive him.”
“Couldn’t the information have been invented by the others?”
“No, Chihani told us about an arms dump in his villa in the Parc de Galland. We found twelve submachine-guns there and twenty million francs.”
“Twenty million!”
“Yes,” said Arcinade, modestly lowering his eyes. “Puydebois took the body off in his car and pitched it into a disused well near his farm.”
“I’m going out of my mind,” Adruguez said to himself, “I’m living in an absolute mad-house . . . What are you going to do now, Mr. Arcinade?”
“I’ve seen Colonel Puysange. The paratroops are moving into Algiers in two days’ time. He has advised me to have a word with the Intelligence officer of one of the regiments, a certain Captain Boisfeuras. I’ve arranged to meet him tonight.”
• • •
The decision to throw a parachute division of four regiments, which in fact amounted to four big battalions—five thousand men at the most—into Algiers had been discussed on 15 January at a dramatic meeting held in the big council chamber at Government House and attended by the members of the civil and military cabinets, the chiefs of police and the representatives of the commander-in-chief and of the Prefect of Algiers.
The Resident Minister was in Paris at the time. He was notified by telephone of the outcome of the meeting and that evening he obtained the President’s permission to adopt the measure “with all the risks it might entail.” The general commanding the division was forthwith invested “for the duration of the emergency” with full civil and military powers.
The régime was playing its last card in this affair. It threw it down on the table because it was reduced to this extremity, but with ill grace, as though it already realized that by taking such a decision it was condemning itself to death.
Villèle, in his turn, was summoned to Paris. His “boss” asked him what he thought of the paratroops.
“There’s a lot of good and a lot of bad in them,” he replied. “They’re dangerous because they go to any lengths and nothing will hold them back. They’ve assimilated the Marxist conception of enlisting the masses and, like the Communists, they are beyond the conventional notion of good and evil.”
He was then asked for his opinion on the 10th Colonial Parachute Regiment, its C.O. and its officers. He replied:
“It’s the regiment which will do best in this new form of warfare. One could almost say it was formed specifically with that aim in view.”
The boss produced a file dealing with the massacre in the mechtas of Rahlem.
“We’re building up a file on tortures and measures of oppression.”
“What about the F.L.N.s?”
“We’re not interested in them. What should we do about this file?”
“Wait and see.”
“Do you think you can stay on in Algiers without running too many risks.”
“Yes. The paratroops will look after me, because they feel the need to convince me, to win me over to their side. They’re like the Communists, they don’t yet consider me ‘irrecuperable.’”
“What chance have they got of succeeding?”
“Hardly any. The paratroops know nothing about the rebellion and its organization or about Algerian mentality. The police and the civil administration will do everything in their power to put a spoke in their wheel; from jealousy, because they can’t allow others to succeed where they themselves have failed. The rest of the army is envious of the airborne units and they all fall into rival camps according to whether they wear red, green or blue berets or forage caps.”
“Would you be able to meet any ‘political heads’ of the rebellion?”
“No. You sometimes forget that I come from Algiers and that my mother, brother and sisters might be blown up by a bomb any day.”
“When you meddle in politics, it’s best to rise above that sort of contingency.”
“That’s easy, when you’ve got your whole family living in the Avenue Foch.”
“I thought you had fallen out with yours?”
“You can’t keep that sort of thing up at a time like this.”
“Mr. Michel Esclavier wants to see you.”
“He can go and take a running jump at himself!”
“He’s a great friend of the firm, and for the first time we’ve got him in our clutches. He doesn’t want his name to be compromised in the business of the mechtas of Rahlem on account of his brother-in-law.”
“It’s not his name!”
“Just as Villèle isn’t your name. He is anxious to cover up for Captain Esclavier. You seem rather jumpy and aggressive . . . The air of Algiers perhaps? When are you going back?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Go and have a rest, then come and dine with us this evening. It should be quite an interesting party . . .”
“I already know who’s going to be there: an academician, three ambassadors, a few past, present and future ministers, some business tycoons and a title or two, an American Communist, an official from a people’s democracy who has just chosen freedom, a Dominican, some conscientious objectors, a syndicalist and a film star . . . An interesting party! I’d rather go and join that idiot Pasfeuro.”
“What are Pasfeuro’s views on the situation?”
“He doesn’t have any. He’s nothing but a journalist who reacts to every event and passes on his reactions to five hundred thousand readers. An idiotic, devoted hack.”
“Are you thinking of leaving us?”
“No, because you’re on the winning side.”
“You occasionally forget that I’m the one who made you.”
“I’ve served you well.”
“If there was any fighting in Algiers, would you go out into the streets?”
“I’d take to my heels, hoping that everything would go up in smoke, that there would be nothing left of the town . . . because, sir, I love Algiers. You once told me that a man who is attached to something, no matter what, a town, a woman, a country or an idea, can never have a great destiny.”
“I love my country, my wife and my children.”
“A country which is merely a reflection of yourself, your wife because she’s nothing but your shadow, your children because you cannot imagine they could ever be different from you.”
“I’m also fond of you, Villèle.”
“A contradictory emotion but an understandable one. You need a man on this paper who stands up to you, but only up to a certain point, merely as a stimulant, like a cup of coffee.”
“One day I’m going to make you a director.”
“I certainly hope so.”
“Do come and have dinner this evening.”
“What’s the name of that actress of yours?”
“Evelyn Forain. She’s free and unattached.”
“On the down grade?”
“On the contrary, a rising star.”
“Good, then I’ll come.”
The boss signed an expense voucher for Villèle. It was for double the amount he was usually given.
Villèle sneered:
“The four hundred thousand francs of Judas.”
• • •
On 20 January, the chief of staff of the division summoned all the regimental Intelligence officers to Algiers.
Boisfeuras and Marindelle took part in this strange conventicle, at which a dozen officers received orders to clean up Algiers as rapidly as possible, foil the strike, unearth the terrorist networks, take the whole organization of the town in hand and to do it in such a way as “to avoid too many casualties.”
“How does a town of seven hundred thousand inhabitants work?” Marindelle naïvely inquired.
“I’ve no idea,” the colonel replied with a shrug of his shoulders. “We were not taught that sort of thing at staff college.”
“Have we got any information on the rebellion, the way it’s organized, the names of its leaders?” a captain in a red beret inquired.
“Very little. Algiers is established as an autonomous zone, with a civil and military governor whose names we don’t know, tribunals, armed groups, a bomb network, committees and even, so they say, hospitals. You will be given a little pamphlet on the rebellion which I’ve had roneotyped for your benefit, the same pamphlet that’s handed out to the foreign journalists who come to Algeria. That’s all the police is willing to let us have.”
“How will the town be divided up?” Boisfeuras asked.
“In four sectors, one to each regiment. The Tenth, for instance, will have in its sector the west part of the Kasbah on the water-front, including Bab-el-Oued, of course.”
There was a burst of laughter, for the whole division knew about Raspéguy’s adventure.
“What about orders?” an elderly captain inquired.
“No written orders. Do as you see fit. You’ll be covered by the general, you’ve got his word for this.”
“That’s pretty meagre, the word of a brigadier-general in a matter of this importance,” a young major observed. “What about the Government?”
“It’s the Government that has given you the order to occupy Algiers and to act in such a way as to . . .”
“A written order?”
“We’re not here to discuss points of procedure but to fight. We’ve got to do this job irrespective of all legality and conventional method. The strike must be foiled, otherwise the F.L.N. will be able to show U.N. that they’re in control of Algiers. If we don’t achieve some rapid results against terrorism, the Europeans will come out into the streets, there will be massacres, and once again everyone will say that France is unable to maintain order in Algeria, that she must therefore be relieved, the problem put on an international footing and U.N. observers sent in, which will be tantamount to the victory of the F.L.N.”
“It still means,” the major went on, “that we’re now being asked to do a police job, after being forced to act as schoolmasters and wet-nurses. It’s extremely unpleasant.”
“Yes, but you’ve all been trained in operational intelligence. Look upon this Algiers business as a battle that you’ve got to win at any price, the most important of your battles, even though it isn’t normal campaigning. The stakes are even higher than at Dien-Bien-Phu.
“The regiments will enter Algiers after dark on 24 January. The population must wake up in the morning to a new town of which you will be the masters. The surprise, the shock, must be as violent for the Moslems as for the Europeans. You’ve got the right to requisition, you can enter any house, by day or by night, without a search warrant.”
“Who gives us this right?” Boisfeuras asked.
“You take it upon yourselves. The general will see all unit commanders at midnight on the 24th. Good hunting, gentlemen.”
Boisfeuras parted from Marindelle, who had decided to spend the night at Christiane Bellinger’s, and went to report to Colonel Puysange who had sent for him.
Boisfeuras was one of the few paratroop officers who was on good terms with him. The man did not inspire the captain with aversion despite his twisted mind, his love of intrigue, his lack of scruples, good faith and honour, his monstrous thirst for power which he could only quench in the shadow of his seniors in rank, which made him sly and at the same time embittered. Boisfeuras felt a certain attraction for people who, in the image of his father, pursued great aims by devious paths, the disciples of Machiavelli, Ignatius Loyola, Lenin and Stalin.
That day Puysange had assumed his expression of a sphinx with half-closed eyes. He was the initiate of great mysteries and was anxious to appear so.
“My dear Captain,” he said, “You’re being launched on an adventure in which there’s every chance of coming to grief. You know the deep regard I feel for Colonel Raspéguy, the finest soldier in the French Army, and for you yourself and your friends . . . So I’ve decided to come to your assistance by providing you with one of the keys of Algiers, which will enable you, while the others are marking time, to get a move on. This key is called Mr. Arcinade. He’ll be waiting for you at eight o’clock this evening at the Aletti bar; he’ll be wearing a grey suit and be ostentatiously reading Nouvelle France. From now on, my friend, it’s up to you!”
After the captain had left, Puysange allowed himself to smile as he drummed with his fingers on the glass slab covering his desk. He had got himself out of an embarrassing situation extremely cleverly, by ridding himself of that madman Arcinade, and at the same time he was settling an old score with Raspéguy by foisting him on to the colonel together with the cloth-merchant’s corpse.
After an hour’s conversation with Arcinade, Boisfeuras came to the conclusion that the man ought to be locked up and that Puysange, once again, had indulged in a manœuvre for which he could see no rhyme or reason. Arcinade maintained that the principal leader of the rebellion, Si Millial, was living in Algiers under the name of Amar, as well as Abbane, Krim Belkhacem, Ben M’Hidi and Dalhab Saad, his heads of the interior, and that he, Arcinade, had got hold of twenty million francs belonging to the rebels, not to mention the plan of the whole financial organization of the autonomous zone.
He had taken this plan out of his pocket, together with a list of the names of the merchants who were acting as cashiers.
“Money matters,” said Arcinade, “have always been the weak point of the F.L.N. Many of the collectors made off with the dough, so Chihani had decided to split the merchants up into groups of ten; having received the subscriptions from nine of them, the collector would then hand the funds over to the tenth, which avoided leaving large sums of money in the hands of young cut-throats . . .”
“If this crackpot story is true . . .” Boisfeuras suddenly reflected.
He pocketed the papers and asked Arcinade to assemble his team of “activists” on the following evening and also to bring the funds he had unearthed with him.
The word “activist” had a genuine revolutionary ring; Arcinade seized on it at once. He had discovered a new word with a certain amount of consistence, on to which he could fasten, as though they were so many coloured balloons, his most extravagant fantasies.
After leaving him, Boisfeuras rang up Inspector Poiston and asked:
“Which branch of the police handles the confidential information in connexion with the rebellion, in other words the rebels’ card index system?”
“The D.S.T.,” Poiston replied, “but nothing would persuade them to make it available, least of all to you.”
“Where’s the card index kept?”
“State Police Headquarters, third floor of the Prefecture, Room 417. Is that all you want to know? You’d better be quick about it, the card index is liable to be moved at any moment.”
“Thanks for the information, Poiston.”
“But I haven’t given you any information!”
On the evening of 20 January, Marindelle had called on Christiane Bellinger. He did not have time to let her know he was coming and found her in company with a Moslem friend, whom she introduced to him by the name of Amar. She had known him, she told him, for a long time, for he had been her guide on her first expedition to the Mzab. He had managed to get her into certain Ibadite circles and into Melika, the holy city, and had introduced her to an old cof official who had given her valuable information on the Immamate of Tiaret in the tenth century.
Christiane seemed restless and uneasy; she kept launching into technical terms and historical references to make Amar’s presence there more plausible.
At first the captain wondered if she slept with this Arab when he was away, but quickly realized this was highly improbable. With Christiane, Marindelle had found peace and happiness, the pleasure of long conversations, and affection too; all that Jeanine had been unable to give him. Christiane was not the sort of woman to conceal from him that she had another liaison if such was the case. She had frankly admitted far more embarrassing things to him, in particular the passion she had once had for one of her young female pupils, of which she had never been completely cured.
Amar seemed a rather odd little chap, with eyes that sparkled with intelligence, a broad forehead above a rather commonplace face, and chubby little hands like a child’s.
“I’m very pleased to meet you, Captain,” he said in his gentle voice, “Christiane has often spoken to me about you and your experiences out in Indo-China.
“Christiane’s a little uneasy because she thinks I’m not quite in order; I once spent five years in prison at Lambèse for . . . let’s call it nationalism . . . and there’s a rumour that you paratroops are soon going to be masters of Algiers, that you’re going to be invested with every power, including therefore the powers of the police.
“Don’t worry, though, my growing pains are over and there’s nothing that can be held against me now.”
“You’ll stay to dinner, won’t you, Yves?” Christiane asked. “We’ve all become rather on edge in Algiers. All this shooting in the streets, these bombs and searches . . . You see, I even ask you if you’ll stay to dinner when this house is just as much yours as mine! I’ve asked Amar to move in here. Up to now he’s been living in the Kasbah, where he’s exposed to all sorts of troubles. He’s like me, he has nothing to do with this war.”
After dinner Marindelle had a long conversation with Amar.
The uneasy atmosphere had lifted; Christiane had put Mozart’s Horn Concerto on the gramophone, which reminded Yves of their first awkward embraces. Amar sat with his eyes closed, puffing at his cigarette.
“How long were you a prisoner?” he asked the captain.
“Four years.”
“I was inside for five. What did you think about all that time? What enabled you . . . how shall I put it? . . . to remain yourself?”
“I made the best of it. The Vietminh taught me a number of things . . . among others, that the old world was doomed.”
“It’s doomed in Algeria just as much as in the Far East. Why are you fighting to preserve it?”
“My friend Boisfeuras would say: ‘To give the lie to History.’ History is on the side of the Nationalists, as it’s on the side of the Communists. Anyone who tries to turn man into a submissive robot is travelling with the flow of History. What I’m fighting against in Algeria is this mechanization of man.”
“If I were a rebel, I would say I was fighting for much the same reason. At one time I fought so that we Moslems should become French. It was a great mistake. It’s in themselves, in their history, that nations must seek their reasons for existing.”
“And when they haven’t any history?”
“They must invent it.”
“France is an offspring of Rome, but she’s not ashamed of it.”
“Algeria will also be an offspring of France. But the time has come to divorce, and one of the parents refuses to divorce, in the name of the past, in the name of moral rights, because her settlers cultivated the fallow land, built towns and apartment houses. The Vietminh must have taught you that History is ungrateful.”
“The Nationalists are going rather too far to obtain this divorce: outrages, arson, bombs, the massacre of children . . . culminating in Communism. If you think that History . . .”
“The weak have to use whatever weapons are at hand. The bomb may be the weapon of faith, and the just man (it was a Frenchman from Algeria who said this) may be the one who throws the bomb to destroy a tyranny, even if that bomb kills some innocent victims. If you granted us independence, perhaps we would come back to you.”
“You’re divided among yourselves by different languages and customs; the people of the mountains hate those of the plain . . . If we left you to your own devices, you’d be at each other’s throats. You’re not a nation.”
“I know. I’ve also said, like Ferhat Abbas: ‘I’ve looked for Algeria in books and cemeteries and I never found her.’ But since then you’ve filled our cemeteries sufficiently to create a history for us.”
“Do you believe the Algerian people will benefit from independence?”
“It’s too late to think about that. The Algerian people have been too scarred by war, their existence has been too disturbed to turn the clock back at this stage. You yourselves are creating Algeria through this war, by uniting all the races, Berbers, Arabs, Kabyles and Chaouias. The rebels should be almost grateful to you for the violent measures of repression you have taken.”
“And the million French?”
“Why do you think that we, who number eight million, should be forced to become like them, which they have always refused to allow in any case?”
“Very soon all men will be alike all over the world.”
“What interests us is today and not tomorrow.”
“And you, Christiane, what do you think?” Marindelle asked.
“All I want is peace,” she said, “and that the masses should have the right to account for themselves.”
“It’s always a mere handful of men who account for the masses, and nothing great, alas, has ever emerged from peace, neither a nation—as Amar has just pointed out—nor a great work. Peace has always been the reign of mediocrities, and pacificism the bleating of a herd of sheep which allow themselves to be led to the slaughter-house without defending themselves.”
“I never pictured you as an apostle of war, Yves, but then I keep forgetting you’re an officer.”
“You’ve just said,” Amar went on, “that it’s always a mere handful of men who account for the masses; that’s true. But these men still have to follow the basic direction of the masses. The handful of men that make up the F.L.N., either here or in Cairo, are moving, in my opinion, in that direction.”
“The side who’ll win, my dear Amar, is the one who’ll take the masses in hand: us . . . I’m referring to our own little army out here, which is numerically inferior to the fellaghas’ or to you.”
“I’m not a rebel. Can you see an impractical little intellectual like me at the head of a rebellion? But let’s pretend, for the sake of argument; let’s assume I am a rebel, a leader of the rebellion.”
Amar’s eyes sparkled with mischief. He went on:
“There’s only one word for me: Istiqlal, independence. It’s a deep, fine-sounding word and rings in the ears of the poor fellahin more loudly than poverty, social security or free medical assistance. We Algerians, steeped as we are in Islam, are in greater need of dreams and dignity than practical care. And you? What word have you got to offer? If it’s better than mine, then you’ve won.”
“We haven’t any, but we’re now going to start thinking seriously of one. Thanks for the advice.”
“Not at all, but you won’t be able to find it, for this word is unique and belongs to us. Let’s go on pretending, if you don’t mind, Captain. You’re just back from Egypt, I gather?”
“Yes.”
“You were beaten by the Egyptians.”
“Yet they ran pretty fast at the sight of us, leaving their weapons and sometimes their trousers behind.”
“That bunch of runaways, that tin-pot army incapable of using the arms which the Russians had given them, those officers with splendid moustaches who stripped down to their under-pants so as to run all the faster, nevertheless defeated you—you, the paratroops, who are said to be the finest force in the whole of free Europe—and they defeated you by taking to their heels! The whole world rose up against France and England, the Russians and Americans alike, because in Egypt you tried to play a game that is no longer in current usage. You’ve been allowed to play that game again in Algeria, but it won’t last much longer. Maybe within the next few days the general strike will ring the death knoll of French imperialism in the Maghreb.”
“If we break that strike . . .”
“We’ll start another one later, until the whole world supports us against you.”
“Is there no means of coming to an understanding?”
“Get out of the country, embark your soldiers as you did in Port Said. We’ll protect your settlers provided they observe our laws.”
“Get out of the country, leaving a million hostages behind . . .”
“The four hundred thousand Moslems living in France would also be hostages.”
“What régime would you like to establish in Algeria?”
“A democracy which wouldn’t have the blemishes of yours, with an infinitely stronger executive body, a collective administration operating within the framework of all the leading elements . . .”
“As I said before, the final outcome is bound to be Communism. Perhaps we are defending an out-of-date system, but your revolution is also out of date; it’s middle-class, and if it wants to succeed it will have to employ the only methods which are up to date, that is Communist methods—your collective administration is one example of this—unless your military get the upper hand . . .”
“We shall know how to protect ourselves against our military as well as against your Communists. But let’s stop this game. I’m only an unimportant little man called Amar. I’m going up to bed.”
“Just one more question: I’d like to know if you’re still a Moslem.”
“The only aspect of Islam that I’ve retained is a belief in baraka, that beneficent force which is enjoyed by those who have a destiny unlike that of others.”
Later on, when they were in bed, Yves Marindelle asked Christiane:
“I’m fascinated by Amar; he plays the role of the rebel leader with absolute conviction, he seems to be abreast of international politics. Where does he come from? What’s his background?”
“A police interrogation already?”
“There’s no need to be so touchy; I’m merely doing my duty to the best of my ability. I’d like to help Amar if he’s in any trouble, provided of course you give me your word that he’s not a member of the F.L.N.”
“Amar is from the Ksour Mountains and his family, who are extremely rich, send him enough money to live on. He reads and studies a great deal; his only interest in politics is theoretical. But it’s quite possible he sympathizes with the F.L.N.
“Yves, let’s forget the whole business, Amar and bombs and all the rest of it. Hold me in your arms. I’d be miserable if anything happened to separate us . . .”
• • •
It was on the night of the 25th that Boisfeuras managed to get hold of the card index system of the D.S.T. He had had to overcome Raspéguy’s scruples, but won him over by maintaining that if the 10th Parachute Regiment did not do the job, another regiment would pull it off and get all the credit. Escorted by a dozen paratroopers in battle dress, he went and “requested” the collaboration of the heads of that police branch, which in fact, acted as an intelligence service.
“If we refuse to let you have this card index system, what will happen?” asked the director of the D.S.T.
“We shall be forced to conclude that you’re covering up for the rebels, that you are their accomplices; by the same token we might be forced to regard you as traitors and, in order to avoid any scandal . . .”
He drew his attention to the submachine-guns.
“. . . wipe you out.”
“I submit in the face of force.”
“Please, let’s say in the face of reason.”
Boisfeuras took the card index system away with him and promptly sent back a letter signed by Raspéguy, thanking the D.S.T. for having so promptly displayed such a spirit of co-operation with the units responsible for the security of Algiers.
On 26 January, when they woke up in the morning, the people of Algiers discovered they were living in a new town.