The Centurions (46 page)

The reservists slowly came forward, their weapons in their hands, and formed a silent circle. They did not move but stood riveted by the scene.

Bucelier was trembling from head to foot; he no longer felt any pain in his shoulder.

“Give me your submachine-gun,” he said to Mongins, “I'm going into the
mechtas
.”

The men murmured:

“We're all coming with you.”

Captain Esclavier appeared in the centre of the circle and never had the men seen him look so tall and redoubtable. Without a word, he unbuckled his belt and stripped off his equipment and revolver, keeping only his knife in his hand.

“Only the men,” he said in his dry voice. “Don't touch the women or children, only the men, and only with knives—so that those who've got the guts can at least defend themselves.”

“The
fellaghas
who did the job have gone off,” Dia gently observed. “Those chaps in there don't amount to much.”

Following Esclavier's example, the men were taking off their equipment, discarding their rifles, submachine-guns and grenades, keeping only their knives.

Their rage, the thirst for blood and vengeance which had seized them, was so strong that they were almost calm and detached.

They advanced slowly towards the silent
mechtas
; they felt nothing but a faint fatigue, a sort of strange hunger which drove them forward.

Esclavier broke the door down with a thrust of his shoulder. Not one of the Arabs offered any resistance.

 • • • 

The sun was rising by the time Raspéguy, who had been notified by Dia, turned up pensively sucking his pipe. Twenty-seven Moslem bodies were lined up together, their throats cut, their heads turned towards the West, in the direction of Rome. Flies were already buzzing around them, sipping the blood.

“What a filthy business!” he said.

Esclavier sat leaning against the trunk of an olive-tree. He was very pale, his features were drawn, and there were dark circles under his eyes, as though he had just recovered from a long illness: he was shivering a little and felt icy cold.

Raspéguy came up and approached him gently, as though he was frightened of startling him:

“Philippe . . . Philippe . . .”

“Yes, sir.”

“That's not very pretty, what you've done.”

“But for that, they would have massacred the lot, women and children included . . . and I wouldn't have been able to hold them back.”

“I should have preferred grenades and submachine-guns, and the whole lot wiped out. Knives turn warfare into murder. And here we are doing what they do, soiling our hands like them.

“But perhaps it was necessary and we had to begin somewhere, since we were forced to come down from the heights into the plain and because we've been outraged in our manly honour by the mutilation of Merle and Fleur de Nave. It was primitive man, not the soldier, who reacted by subscribing to this holocaust.

“Call the men together, Philippe, I've got to talk to them.”

Raspéguy climbed up on to a rock above the bodies. The First Company faced him, a hundred and fifty men shattered by disgust, fear and hatred of war, on the point of mutiny, ready for anything in order to forget what they had just done, and at the same time feeling closer to one another than they had ever felt before, bound together by bloodshed and horror.

Raspéguy started speaking in a low voice, staring down at his boots.

“Gentlemen . . .”

By addressing them as gentlemen he was restoring a little of their lost dignity.

“Gentlemen, you acted in the heat of anger, but myself, this morning I feel cold. After thinking it over carefully, I should have given orders for every grown man in this
douar
to be shot, and you would have been responsible for their execution. In that respect, the incident is closed.”

He thrust his head forward like a falcon about to take flight and slowly glanced down the ranks in front of him.

“Because you were fond of Lieutenant Merle and little Bistenave, it's you I entrust with avenging them, because that”—he pointed to the bodies—“isn't vengeance; it's merely a reprisal. I'm giving you Si Lahcen's band. It's yours with its rifles and submachine-guns; but the next time you'll need more than your knives. That's all.”

The soldiers felt as though they had been relieved of a heavy burden. They experienced a new feeling towards the colonel, in which admiration was mixed with gratitude and embarrassment.

“What do we do with the bodies?” asked Sergeant-Major Mourlier.

“Leave them there till this evening,” Raspéguy replied. “They may as well be of some use.”

Thus was born the cruel legend of the “lizards in caps,” of the warriors with knives who were more redoubtable than the shock troops of the F.L.N. In the depths of the
douars
they began to be regarded as demons impervious to bullets, sons of Alek and Azrael, the angel of death.

 • • • 

“Quickly, Captain,” said Min to Boisfeuras.

“What did you find out?”

“Ahmed has been to the post office and drawn out all his savings. Yesterday evening he had a long talk with Lieutenant Merle.”

Ahmed lived alone in a small house on the outskirts of the town: two bare rooms. In one stood a camp bed with army sheets and blankets, in the other a table and, next to the sink, a spirit lamp.

Mash' Allah!
The dice had come up badly.

The interpreter started stuffing tins of food and packets of cigarettes into a haversack. In spite of all the precautions he had taken, the job would be traced back to him in no time. He had abandoned his paratrooper's uniform for cloth trousers, a flowing shirt and a striped
jellaba
.

He bent down, lifted up a tile and drew out some documents and money, two hundred thousand francs in big blue notes.

When he raised his head again, Min stood in front of him, his revolver aimed straight at him. With the end of the barrel he motioned him to stand up and put his hands above his head. Boisfeuras came in; he took the money, the documents and papers and then sat down astride a chair.

“Now look,” he said to Ahmed, “either you tell me the whole story, or Min will deal with you.”

“I don't understand. I did all I could to stop Lieutenant Merle setting off in the middle of the night. I tried to notify you.”

“This money from your post office savings account . . . the haversack . . . We're wasting time, Ahmed. And also these documents!”

Boisfeuras whistled in admiration; he had just glanced through a typewritten document in French and Arabic, dated from Cairo, bearing all sorts of red and blue seals, and confirming that Ahmed was the political commissar of the zone.

“I underestimated you.”

Ahmed sprang forward to grab Min's revolver, but a chair came smashing down on his head.

When he came to, he found himself sitting on his bed, with his wrists tied to the metal bars with telephone wire.

“To hell with you,” he calmly said to Boisfeuras, “you and your Chinaman as well. I'm not talking.”

“You've got your reasons, I've got mine; I could be in your place, you could be in mine. That's fate.”

“The dice rolling,” Ahmed reflected.

“I'm not sentimental, but in Indo-China I saved young Merle's life and I was very fond of him. But I can forget him. Only, by cutting his throat like a dog, you've insulted us all. Unforgivable.

“We now want Si Lahcen and his band. It's become a personal matter.”

“If you want Si Lahcen, go and look for him up in the mountains.

“Once again, Captain Boisfeuras, to hell with you. I'm not talking. But one day we're going to throw you out of here and chase you right back to where you came from. Then we'll give ourselves a treat with all your wives, all your daughters and your precious selves as well.”

“What the hell do I care?” Boisfeuras replied, quite calmly. “I want to know how your town organization works, I want names, the whereabouts of the hide-outs and your contacts with Si Lahcen.”

“No.”

“What's more, I'm in a hurry. When you've had enough of Min, just let me know.”

Min went out, then came back again with a sock filled with fine sand dangling from his hand. Without striking too hard, he started hammering Ahmed's head, as the Viet's had taught him, always on the same spot—but in those days it was the Vietminh who administered the blows and Min who was on the receiving end!

Ahmed endured it for four hours—three hours less than Min. That evening Boisfeuras had a complete list of the members of the political organization of P ——. They were arrested forthwith. As for Si Lahcen, he had long ago taken to the hills.

Colonel Quarterolles was fuming when he called on Raspéguy.

“What the hell's going on?” he asked. “No one tells me a thing. It seems that one of your subalterns has been killed and in return you've wiped out twenty-seven
fellaghas
. You've arrested Ahmed, the interpreter, the caid and his brother . . . and all the shops are being searched. What's it all about?”

“In a week from now, Colonel, Si Lahcen's band will have ceased to exist, I'll bet you anything you like. We'll both of us be able to go back to Algiers.”

“Why both of us?”

“Because no one here will have any further reason to maintain you in your command. The whole town, the whole administration, was rotten to the core and in the basement of the town hall we found three cases of ammunition earmarked for the rebels.

“Here's something else you might like to hear . . . Si Lahcen had been living here, in P ——, the whole time; Ahmed, your right-hand man, was the political leader of the rebellion; and the mayor—the worthy Vesselier—he paid the Wogs to keep their mouths shut . . .

“Our men have had to wade through all this muck and little Lieutenant Merle has had his balls cut off. It was I who brought Merle out here, he belonged to me, he was part of me.

“You killed him with your stupidity and incapacity. We're burying him tomorrow, but I forbid you to come to the funeral. If you do I'll knock you down in front of everyone.”

 • • • 

“Well?” Dia asked Esclavier.

The captain was holding his head between his hands; he was unshaven and he and the M.O. had just polished off a half-bottle of brandy.

“Well, nothing.”

“Don't you know? I've had a letter from Lescure. Guess what he's up to. During the day he follows a course of ethnology at the Sorbonne and at night he thumps a piano in a night-club. He says he's very happy.”

“Dia, what about yesterday?”

“I think you limited the damage.”

“Dia!”

“You're ashamed because you let the black panther escape. It was sleeping peacefully deep inside you; it was the others that roused it, then it came and lay down again, its muzzle and claws full of blood.

“I've also got my panther, and it was growling very loudly when I saw Merle's body but it didn't escape.

“Marindelle, as you know, is never like the others; he can't believe that we've all got a panther sleeping deep down inside us. He said to me: ‘Objectively speaking, the reprisal wasn't a bad job. Fear has changed sides, tongues have been loosened, our soldiers now want to fight it out. We obtained more in a day than in six months fighting, and more with twenty-seven dead than with several hundreds.'

“I don't understand the word ‘objectively.'”

Esclavier pulled a copy of
Zero and the Infinite
out of his pocket.

“Look what Boisfeuras has given me to read.”

He opened the book at a page which had been turned down: a quotation from the German bishop, Dietrich von Nieheim, who lived in the fourteenth century.

“When her existence is threatened, the Church is absolved of all moral commandments. Unity as an aim sanctifies every means, cunning, treachery, violence, simony, imprisonment and death. For all order exists for the purpose of the community, and the individual must be sacrificed for the general good.”

“Boisfeuras had just had Ahmed shot, after dining and getting drunk with him. He even promised to look after his wife.”

“Well,” said Dia, “we're going to go on getting drunk together and I'm very glad it was your black panther that made you kill rather than that old bishop's maunderings. I drink, Esclavier, to your black panther and also to mine.”

“What's Glatigny doing?” Esclavier suddenly asked.

“He's in church, saying his prayers.”

A week after Ahmed's arrest Si Lahcen and his band were driven off the plain and forced to take refuge in the mountains. The rebels had had to abandon their dumps and their hide-outs which were no longer secure. Information became scarce and supplies were no longer available from P —— where the whole political and administrative organization of the rebellion had been decapitated.

The headmen of the
douars
came up one after another to see Si Lahcen near the cave where he had set up his headquarters. They all had the same thing to say:

“Si Lahcen, we are aware of your courage and your strength, but take your band of
moujahidines
away from our
douar
, for the French are bound to hear about it sooner or later; then they'll burn down our
mechtas
, slit our throats and shoot your men.”

Si Lahcen did his best to stem their panic. He ordered some spectacular executions, but the hundred or so men and women he had shot down or butchered could not wipe out the memory of the
mechtas
of Rahlem. The only remorse he felt was when he realized this massacre had been completely useless.

Sitting near his cave, with a blanket round his shoulders to protect him from the early-morning dew, he let himself be carried away by his memories.

His best friend in Indo-China had been Sergeant Piras, a lively, skinny little chap who had worked at every kind of job and read every book. He used to wink as he rolled himself a cigarette and he kept his tobacco in a sort of round metal tin.

Each time they ran across each other in the course of an operation, Piras would wink and ask him:

“Well, Lahcen, how's your destiny?”

If Piras had not been killed during Operation Atlante, he might perhaps now be fighting against him, disguised as a lizard. He imagined holding him in the sights of his rifle while Piras, standing like an ibex on a rock, took out his tobacco tin and greedily rolled himself a cigarette.

He would fire, but to one side, in order to scare him: Piras had been his friend. He realized all of a sudden that all his friends were in this army he was fighting against, whereas his own people, on the contrary, were alien to him and some of them, like Ahmed, disgusted him. Ahmed died as he had lived, not as a soldier but as a stool-pigeon. Captured, he had given away everything he knew.

A sentry came to inform him that a liasion agent, a certain Ibrahim, had just arrived from P ——.

Ibrahim may have been fifty years old or he may have been sixty: his full beard was speckled with grey; he was dressed in European clothes, with a watch-chain stretched across his waist-coat, but on his head he wore a turban made of some sort of linen and his feet were bare. He was a wise, cruel and self-possessed man. For a long time he had been in command of the small group of killers who by night controlled P —— and the surrounding
douars
: it was a miracle he had not yet been caught when all his men had already fallen to the Frenchmen's bullets.

Ibrahim came and squatted down beside Si Lahcen and offered him a cigarette.

“What is it?” asked the rebel leader. “I told you to stay down at P —— and reorganize your group.”

“Si Lahcen, there's not a single lizard left in the town. They all disappeared in the night. They're hunting you up in the mountains and they know where you are.”

“Who gave me away?”

“Yesterday evening they caught three of your
moujahidines
as they were leaving a
mechta
to come and join you. One of them preferred to die, but the two others talked.”

“The lookouts haven't signalled any trucks on the road.”

“The lizards are making war as we do; they've marched all night and are now less than two miles from your cave. As they advance they look under every stone and behind every bush to make sure there isn't a hide-out there.”

“Do you think I can still get through by way of Oued Chahir?”

“That's the route they've taken. They're there already. I almost ran into one of their patrols which had laid an ambush and was moving up the river-bed at dawn. I hid under some branches and waited; then I took off my shoes and came up here, taking great care not to dislodge any pebbles.”

Si Lahcen rose to his feet and, followed by Ibrahim who was still barefoot, he inspected his position. He could not have chosen a better one. He had encamped with his band on a sort of peak overlooking a little pebbly plain as flat as a glacis, an open bit of ground hemmed in by the mountains, into which his assailants would be forced to venture.

Behind him rose a sheer cliff, on his left was the crevice up which Ibrahim had climbed and which could be easily defended with a few cases of grenades. Only his right flank was vulnerable: it formed a fairly gentle slope bristling with natural obstacles, and led towards the west. But it was a narrow approach; with his machine-gun, his three F.M.s and his mortar it would be easy for him to foil the attack of an enemy who would be unable to deploy and would therefore be obliged to advance in file.

“We'll wait for them here,” Si Lahcen decided. “If they want a fight, I'll take them on.”

The sun had risen; it shone straight into Ibrahim's eyes, forcing him to screw them up, which gave him the rather sly expression of an old Berri peasant. He stroked his beard:

“
Allah-i-chouf
.
*
Let me have a rifle.”

Si Lahcen had about a hundred men at his disposal, the rest of the band having failed to join him. He made each one of them—and it was a difficult task—dig into a prepared position and build a little parapet of stones to protect himself. He gave orders not to fire unless certain of scoring a hit and to save ammunition, for they would have to hold out until nightfall before being able to withdraw towards the heights. He positioned the automatic weapons himself, gave each of them a definite mission, set up the mortar, then retired inside his cave. At the entrance to it he noticed a curious patch of sunlight which kept alternately appearing and vanishing.

Si Lahcen rummaged in his sack for a bar of chocolate. He pulled out a little leather case containing his Military Medal. He looked at this for several minutes. The ribbon was the same warm colour as the patch of sunlight.

Yes, he had certainly earned his medal out in Indo-China! The post overlooked the Red River. It was made of logs and the watch tower, soaring high on its stilts, looked like one of those stands which are put up in the middle of a vineyard when the grape is ripe.

The post commander was a lieutenant with a long neck and prominent Adam's apple who wore spectacles; every morning he would sadly ask:

“But why the hell don't the Viets attack? They can mop us up whenever they like.”

The post was, in fact, completely isolated; it relied entirely on parachute drops; but more often than not a proportion of the containers fell into the river.

Lieutenant Barbier and Sergeant-Major Lahcen were in command of a hundred or so partisans and a dozen Europeans. The partisans had been suborned by Vietminh propaganda and were only waiting for a favourable moment to turn traitor. Wasted by fever, laid low by the damp climate, the Frenchmen were incapable of repelling a fresh attack. Lieutenant Barbier was no longer quite right in the head; he kept imagining that someone was going to murder him; at the slightest sound he would draw his revolver and fire it. He also killed all the house lizards, which bring good luck, and squashed them against the walls of his room, using his shoe as a hammer; it was a bad sign.

One night the Vietminh had landed on the bank of the river below the post. Another group had occupied the village. At four in the morning they had attacked from both directions, while the partisans mutinied.

Lieutenant Barbier had been killed in his bed. He usually woke up at the slightest sound but this time he had not heard his murderer approaching. Lahcen and the white men who were left had taken refuge in the central block-house; they had held out for six hours against a whole Vietminh battalion.

A
dinassault
*
sailing up the river with its armoured barges had come to their rescue when they were down to their last hand grenade. Lahcen had received a bullet in the lung and he still remembered the pinkish froth that had clung to his lips like toothpaste; but this froth had a sickly, salty taste: the taste of his own blood.

He had been evacuated to Hanoi by helicopter. He had been operated on straightaway and three days later, in a bed with snow-white sheets, a general had come to present him with his Military Medal and announce that he had been promoted. There were flowers on the table; the nurses wiped his face whenever he was too hot. Piras had come to see him, with a bottle of brandy hidden under his coat. Hospital regulations, just like the Koran, forbade all alcohol.

Lahcen had been happy; he was properly looked after, he was equal to the other Frenchmen; he had the same rights, the same friends. He laughed at the same jokes as his comrades. On his first night out some sergeant-majors like himself, but with names like Le Guen, Portal and Duval, had got him blind drunk in a bistro and had then dragged him off to a brothel.

Today, if he was wounded, he would not be entitled to a helicopter or to a hospital, and if he was taken prisoner he would finish up with a bullet in his head fired by Le Guen, Portal or Duval, if any of them happened to be present.

To them he was nothing but a renegade, worse than a Viet. If the administrator of P —— had not brutally reminded him that he was just a desert-rat, if he had not stolen from him, then he would have stayed on the side of the French . . . or would he?

No, on second thoughts, he would have gone over to the other side just the same, to avenge a number of other injustices, to remind the French that the Algerian also was entitled to be treated with respect.

Two bursts from a F.M. and the explosion of three grenades interrupted his soliloquy. Si Lahcen slipped the Military Medal into his pocket and ran out of the cave. A platoon of Frenchmen approaching up the crevice had been well and truly engaged.

The group leader, Mahmoud, motioned Si Lahcen to come forward and showed him, a hundred yards farther down, the bodies of two paratroopers, pathetic little mounds of camouflage cloth, and, a little farther on, the wounded W.T. operator with his set attached to his back; he was signalling to his comrades who had taken cover behind some rocks.

“Just watch, Si Lahcen,” said Mahmoud, “like hunting game . . .” A paratrooper had rushed forward and was trying to drag the W.T. operator back, while his comrades opened up with all they had got to give him covering fire. The group leader calmly took aim. Hit full in the head, the lizard collapsed on top of his comrade.

“Would you like the next one?” asked Mahmoud.

Si Lahcen took up a rifle and finished off the W.T. operator. Then he turned back towards the cave. Information had just come in that on his right flank the paratroops were beginning in creep forward and were now holding the ridge overlooking the open ground.

Ibrahim came and joined him in the cave. Sitting cross-legged on the ground, he lit a cigarette, then drew his watch out of his waistcoat pocket; it was a big silver hunter which had been given him by his boss, a settler on the outskirts of P ——. He was quite fond of him but destiny had willed that the
roumi
should be inside the farmhouse with his wife and children when it was set on fire. He put the watch carefully back in his pocket.

“Ten o'clock in the morning, Si Lahcen, and it won't be dark till ten o'clock at night; it's going to be a long wait. They will have all the time in the world to send for their aircraft and perhaps some artillery as well.”

“We could have made for the heights and then dispersed, but only at dawn and you arrived too late.”

Si Lahcen sent for his five group leaders and told them his plan:

“We shall hang on until nightfall, then attempt a break-out at the weakest point of the ‘enemy lines' and make for the river-bed.” For technical words or expressions, Si Lahcen invariably used French and he took a certain pleasure in displaying his military knowledge in front of his subordinates. “We're cut off from the mountains . . . Anyone attempting to surrender will be shot out of hand; the wounded will have to be abandoned. We may be attacked from the air, so dig in more deeply, and be quick about it . . .”

The group leaders started to embark on one of those endless discussions during which no problem is ever solved but which provides an excuse for killing time and exchanging cigarettes, noble thoughts and, occasionally, insults.

Three mortar shells landed in front of the cave, putting an end to the
chikaia
. There was a scream from a man who had been wounded. The group leaders rushed back to their men who were firing like lunatics; their bullets whined and ricocheted off the bare rocks.

Another company was now doubling across the open ground under the spasmodic and therefore rather ineffective fire of the rebel automatic weapons. Si Lahcen gave orders for the mortar to fire, but the shells fell well beyond.

From the top of the peak the long files of soldiers looked like columns of clumsy, stubborn ants as they stumbled over the obstacles or vanished behind them and reappeared again. The Tyrolean rucksack which the paratroopers wore on their backs gave them enormous thoraces and spindly little legs.

Lying flat on his stomach outside the cave, Si Lahcen kept them under observation. The leading sections presently arrived at the foot of the peak and disappeared from view.

A reconnaissance plane appeared in the sky, little bigger than a fly and insistently buzzing like a fly. It turned and, growing larger, became a bird of prey whose savage shadow swept the rocks. In spite of his orders, the
moujahidines
fired at it, thereby giving away their positions. The aircraft appeared to be hit, it dipped one wing and swooped down towards the plain with the slow, graceful movement of a wounded sea bird.