On Leave

 

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way.
Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author's copyright, please notify the publisher at:
us.macmillanusa.com/piracy
.

 

To Sergeant X … Somewhere in Algeria

 

CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Dedication

Introduction by David Bellos

Acknowledgments

ON LEAVE

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Appendix: Daniel Anselme Interviewed by Maurice Pons

The Works of Daniel Anselme

Copyright

 

INTRODUCTION

La Permission
by Daniel Anselme, translated here as
On Leave
, was published in Paris in the spring of 1957. It had few readers and only a handful of reviews. It was never reprinted. In America, you can't find it in the Library of Congress or any major university collection. Save for an Italian translation,
On Leave
almost disappeared.

Yet it was an important book, and has become more precious with the passing of time. It tells in simple terms of the damage wrought by an unpopular and unwanted war on young men who are obliged to fight it. In 1957, as France's engagement in Algeria became ever more bloody,
On Leave
told French readers things they did not want to hear: the silence surrounding its publication speaks loudly of its power to disturb. This short novel was all the more unsettling because it is neither a testimony nor a polemic. In fact, it hardly mentions military action at all.

One remarkable feature of Anselme's novel is simply its date. The Algerian War ended in 1962. Almost everything there is to read on the subject nowadays was written later, with hindsight, in full knowledge of the story's end.
On Leave
tells us what a war is like in real time, with no outcome in sight. It rescues from oblivion states of mind and feeling that have been swept away by history, overlaid with later needs and priorities, swallowed whole by interpretation. That's a service that literature alone can provide.

The plot is not at all complicated. A sergeant, a corporal, and an infantryman are on their way back to Paris in December 1956 for home leave over Christmas and New Year's. In the ten days they spend in the city attempting to reconnect with their families and friends, they learn that they are now fish out of water. What they have to say can't be heard, can't even be spoken. The three conscripts return in anger, shame, and dismay to complete their military service, departing on a crowded troop train that leaves Paris almost secretly in the middle of the night.

The war they were fighting was both very old and very new. The French Navy had seized the fortress city of Algiers in 1830, in the last days of the reign of Charles X. At that time Algiers was an independent fiefdom nominally ruled by Ottoman overlords, and its principal business was piracy, which was what gave France its pretext to invade. Under the reign of Louis-Philippe the army waged a long war against insurgent tribes along the coastal strip and in the hinterland. The brutal pacification of Algeria was sullied further by the rampant corruption that looms in the background of Balzac's somber novel
Cousin Bette
(1846).

Two bizarre ideas supported France's grab of this slice of the Mediterranean's southern shore. The pirates and seafarers of the coastal towns still used
lingua franca
in the nineteenth century. Although this mysterious language (of which few written traces remain) was without doubt a pidgin of Arabic, with many words borrowed from Spanish and Italian as well as French, the name
franca
was enough to persuade people that it was somehow, originally, French. Secondly, long before it acquired its Arabic and Muslim population, Algeria had been an important Roman province. Its towns and deserts were littered with old stones inscribed with Latin epigraphs. France, which saw itself as a new Rome, felt entitled—if not duty-bound—to pursue its
mission civilisatrice
by reappropriating this part of the ancient empire.

The decision to turn this “empty space” into a settler colony came later, and was propounded most energetically by progressive and left-wing politicians. The project got under way in the 1850s and expanded greatly after 1870, when Alsace and Lorraine were ceded to a newly unified German empire. Many of the French speakers living in those two areas chose to leave and on arrival in France were encouraged to settle new lands in North Africa. Algeria was also a favored destination for the left-wing survivors of the Paris Commune and other political undesirables. The European population was boosted by immigration from Switzerland (still one of Europe's poorest nations), Spain, Italy, and Malta. By the end of the nineteenth century, all had blended into a French-speaking European community of Algerians, together with a sizable community of indigenous Jews (probably dating from Roman times) who had acquired French nationality and citizenship
en bloc
in 1870. At that time the “European” population was almost as large as the Arabic and Berber populations combined. French government policy was to foster their assimilation, too—that is to say, to make Frenchmen of them, so that the “native problem” would just melt away.

Algeria had no important mineral or other natural resources, but settlers established prosperous farms on the coastal plains. France set up a network of public services and schools in which a handful of Arabs were educated and turned into Frenchmen. The remainder of the non-European population had French nationality, but not citizenship. Giving them a vote in national elections remained a political impossibility until the end.

By the turn of the twentieth century, France had established protectorates over the neighboring states of Morocco and Tunisia, and also acquired an African empire, stretching from Senegal to the Congo, including the vast territories of present-day Chad, Mali, and Niger. In Morocco and Tunisia, traditional structures of legitimacy were left intact, though stripped of any real power. In the lands farther south and west, France created colonies under direct administration from Paris. But Algeria was a special case. It was not a protectorate (it had no indigenous political structure to “protect”), nor was it a colony. It was therefore conceived as an integral part of France. It was divided administratively into three
départements
, which returned members of parliament (unlike the colonies and the protectorates), and Paris in its turn sent
préfets
to oversee them, just like in metropolitan France. “French Algeria” was not a fiction—except that it excluded the majority population from national political life.

The first stirrings of a local independence movement came not from the Arab or Berber inhabitants but from the European Algerians themselves. They were suspicious of politicians in Paris who might force unwanted reforms on them. Many of them were not of French descent, of course, and few had ever visited France.

Algerians were conscripted irrespective of citizenship to defend France in World War I. Algerian regiments comprised exclusively of Muslims also played key roles in the liberation of France in 1944–45. Many of them thought that their role in assisting France in its hour of need would inspire generosity toward their own growing aspirations for political rights. However, a protest meeting in Sétif in May 1945 was brutally put down by French soldiers. The wanton violence at Sétif undoubtedly radicalized many and sowed the seeds of a more substantial rebellion.

What we now call the Algerian War began on November 1, 1954, when a few hundred lightly armed fighters attacked French soldiers and civilians in coordinated fashion in a number of different places. Casualties were light—nine killed and three injured—and the outrage was dismissed by most French officials of the time as a maneuver sponsored by Nasser's Egypt, which had its eye on that vital Anglo-French asset, the Suez Canal. The French leader, Pierre Mendès-France, and his Minister for the Interior, François Mitterand, responded with what they called a “police action.” “Algeria is France, not a foreign country under protection,” they declared. Political and economic reforms were accelerated and a new governor general, Jacques Soustelle, was installed. However, after their initial attack, the independence fighters considered themselves
Mujahedin
and began to turn their violence toward Muslim apostates and traitors to the cause—with great success. Paris declared a state of emergency to stem the rising tide of violence against Muslims who wished Algeria to remain part of France, and in May 1955 gave quite draconian powers to the military to deal with what were still called “the events in Algeria.” Although the word “war” remained taboo, the new rules meant that French soldiers could legally shoot anyone with a weapon on sight and gun down without warning anyone seen running away, whether armed or not. The new rules of engagement also made villages collectively responsible for any acts of violence or sabotage committed in them or by any of their members, which effectively gave the military license to destroy whole communities.

Torture was already widely used by the police and military. It would become one of the most divisive and shameful issues to arise from the Algerian conflict, but in the early period, when this novel is set, it remained an entirely unspoken blight.

The rebels' response was desperate and horribly effective. On August 20, 1955, the National Liberation Front carried out a blind raid on the town of Philippeville, killing 123 people (mostly French, but including some “Muslim traitors”), with the explicit aim of provoking French retaliation. The army's massive response killed thousands—maybe as many as 12,000—in a couple of days. The violence of the French conscript army alienated an even larger part of the Algerian population, which fell increasingly under the sway of the National Liberation Front. In Paris, reservists were called up, not without protest; military service was extended from 24 to 27 months (and, for some cohorts, to 30 months); the number of military in Algeria thus grew from 200,000 in January 1956 to 400,000 in July to a peak of 450,000 in January 1957. Among these troops were the three characters in Anselme's novel.

At this point two things happened. In Algiers, martial law was imposed and General Massu put down the revolt with efficient brutality. (The story of that counter-insurgency is told in Gillo Pontecorvo's harrowing film
La Battaglia di Algeri
[1966].) And in Paris, a left-wing journalist by the name of Daniel Anselme wrote this book.

Anselme was born in Paris in 1927, the son of a Dutch mother and a Russian father, Léon Rabinovitch, who was on his way to becoming a prosperous lawyer. At the outbreak of World War II in 1939, to keep them safe, Léon boarded his two sons at a school in Dieulefit, near Montélimar, in the Rhône Valley. He joined them there himself after the armistice of July 1940, which put Dieulefit in the Non-occupied Zone.

Daniel's father joined the Resistance and had a new identity forged for him by a secretary in the
mairie
who used names he could see out the window on the war memorial—and that is the simple origin of the name “Anselme.” Like many of the Free French, Léon Rabinovitch changed his name formally after the end of the war to match his wartime identity. As Daniel was over twenty-one by the time the paperwork was done, the name change did not apply to him (as it did to his younger brother) and he remained legally “Rabinovitch” for the rest of his life. But he was never known as anything other than Daniel Anselme.