The Centurions (64 page)

Marindelle no longer slept at night. His past life stuck in his gullet until it almost choked him. That evening, while in the room next door Aicha and Glatigny kept embracing and recoiling, loving and hating each other, he tried to imagine the bonds that linked them together and the motives which had driven the young girl to go even farther in her submission to her lover, farther even than Glatigny wanted. It was she who had asked to attend the parade of suspects. Sitting at a school desk, with her head concealed in a coarse hessian sack which had been pierced with two holes for her to see through, she had picked out the members of the F.L.N. organization from among the men who were marched past for identification.

Aicha was consumed by a fire, the fire of her love, and she was feeding it with everything in her past life that had been of any importance. When she had nothing more left, she would plunge into the flames herself.

This state of mind could be traced to her inordinate and passionate nature, but still more to her spirit of rebellion against the social system in which she had lived. Even in a sophisticated family like Caid Tletla's some traces of a nomad, warrior society still survived, and a woman, even if she wore Paris dresses, was regarded solely as a source of pleasure and as booty.

For the first time in her life Aicha felt she was being treated as an equal by a man who was at once her lover and her enemy. She had just discovered that dignity had the lean face of Glatigny, his slightly pursed mouth and his frequently sad eyes.

Through the medium of Aicha Marindelle realized what immense power lay in this spirit of rebellion which had been stored up for centuries by millions of women. There was enough explosive there to blow the whole of the Maghreb sky-high. The Algerian F.L.N., like the Tunisian Neo-Destour and the Moroccan Istiqlal, had been frightened of it and had not dared touch it, even in their struggle for independence.

How could one awaken the Moslem women, how could one make them feel that their emancipation might come from us? Certainly not by treating them to feminist lectures . . . At this point an idea occurred to the captain which most of his comrades found extremely odd, not to say unpleasant. On the following morning he had a number of women and young girls rounded up in the Kasbah; he filled three trucks with them and drove them off to a wash-house. There he made them scrub away at the paratroopers' sweat-stained vests and pants. These women had been hauled off without any of their menfolk raising a finger to protect them. They thereby lost their prestige as warriors, which suddenly reduced the ancestral submission of their wives and daughters to nothing. Bent all morning over their washing, these women felt as though they were submitting to being raped over and over again by the soldiers whose garments they were purifying.

When they came back to the Kasbah without having been molested, when these strong young men had helped them out of the trucks with a courtesy which they were rather inclined to exaggerate (more often than not their fiancés or husbands were old, decrepit and ill-mannered), some of them thought of abandoning the veil, and others that they might take on a lover who was not a Moslem.

 • • • 

Algiers became a paratroop city. It got used to living to the silent, stealthy tread of patrols in camouflage uniform who, with a blank expression on their faces and a finger on the trigger of their guns, paced up and down the narrow lanes and stairways.

The paratroops did not mingle with the local population; they lived on their own, outside the town and its customs, like occupants from another planet. They answered no questions, refused the wine and sandwiches that people offered them. They broke the strike, they destroyed the bomb network, but even the best-informed journalists could not tell “what was going on.”

Si Millial was the brains behind the strike. Once he had vanished, the entire organization he had built up fell to the ground. The paratroops were able to penetrate the rebellion at various levels. Some of the former F.L.N. followed them through fear, because they had given away their comrades and could find no justification for this except in the victory of the paratroops; others, the greater number, because they always veered towards the stronger side, those who were able to protect them.

Within the framework of the
10
th Parachute Regiment each company began to assume an autonomous existence, thereby escaping to a certain extent from the colonel's control.

Esclavier became the specialist in bomb networks and Lieutenant Pinières dealt with the Communist groups who were assisting the rebels by providing them with explosives.

One morning in February Pinières laid hands on the schneiderite factory, which was installed in an isolated villa on the seashore. There were four Europeans there, including a chemical engineer called Percevielle, and a single Arab, Khadder the Vertebra.

So as to avoid all complications, Pinières used the schneiderite to blow up the villa with all its occupants.

On
28
March Raspéguy applied for an interview with the general, which was forthwith granted. The
10
th Parachute Regiment had covered itself with glory in the battle of Algiers and its colonel had become the most popular figure in the paratroop units.

The general began by congratulating Raspéguy on his promotion to full colonel.

Raspéguy puffed pensively at his pipe.

“This is certainly the first time I've felt no pleasure at being promoted, sir, maybe because this isn't the proper way to earn promotion.”

“You've saved Algeria.”

“And I've lost my regiment. We need a little fresh air. We've fallen into bad habits. The lads are drinking too much in order to forget what they've been forced to do. We've achieved better results than the others because we've wallowed in the shit more than they have. So we ought to be dragged out of it before the others: the process of disintoxication will be longer. Come on, sir, we've done our job, we've got our hands good and dirty, please let us go.”

“I still need you here.”

“Boisfeuras isn't the only one I'm worried about, sir. Marindelle blows all his pay in the Aletti casino in a single night and you know all about Glatigny and that Moslem girl of his. I don't know what's happened to Esclavier, but there's something wrong with him as well.”

“Reinforcements are needed for the Némentchas.”

“We're all set to go.”

“Perhaps it would be better after all if you left Algiers, while there's still this little matter to be settled . . .”

“There's still some little matter to be settled?”

“It's nothing, don't worry.”

While the
10
th Regiment was taking to the mountains again, fifty-two Algerian officers signed a letter addressed to the President of the Republic, which they submitted to him direct, without going through the usual channels.

Sir,

In the face of the events which have disturbed our country for several years, we are anxious to remain true to our word, as officers, and to the ideal of Franco-Algerian friendship to which we pledge our lives.

If we have hitherto concealed the resentment and anxiety we feel, it is because, on the one hand, we were bound by our very education to the country we were serving and, on the other, because we had hoped that our sacrifices would sooner or later serve the cause of Franco-Algerian friendship.

Today this hope is replaced by the deep conviction that the present turn of events is actually opposed to that ideal. Our position as Algerian officers is rendered untenable by the ruthless struggle which divides our French comrades and our blood-brothers.

If we appeal to you, who represent the French nation, it is certainly not to break with our past as soldiers in the service of France, nor is it to sever the bonds of friendship, comradeship and fraternity by which we are attached to her and also to her military traditions, but out of hostility towards a policy which, if we were to condone it, would transform this attachment into a betrayal of the Algerian people who turn to us for support and of France who needs and will continue to need us.
*

Captain Mahmoudi, having been charged as one of the instigators of this manœuvre, was first put under close arrest in Germany and then transferred to the Cherche-Midi prison in Paris.

It was from this prison that he wrote a long letter to Olivier Merle to try and justify the attitude he had been driven to adopt.

The letter was returned to him, with the following observation in red ink:

Lieutenant Merle has been killed in action.

While they were marching over the grey crags of the Némentchas in bitter wind and driving snow, the officers of the
10
th Parachute Regiment heard that legal proceedings were being instituted against a certain number of them. The charges were brought against an anonymous X—on the grounds of excessive cruelty, and the officers in question were only to be cross-examined as “witnesses”—a pure formality which was part of the usual legal procedure.

At the evening halt, Glatigny, Boisfeuras, Esclavier, Pinières and Marindelle gathered round a camp-fire. The flame-coloured smoke rose twisting into the dark sky. Every so often the wind would blow it back into the officers' faces; whereupon they all coughed and their eyes began to water.

Raspéguy emerged from the blizzard, with his
maquila
in his hand. His oil-skin ground-sheet and Balaclava helmet made him look like a shepherd from his homeland in winter dress.

He squatted down by the fire and accepted a little coffee in an empty cigarette tin.

“What were you talking about?” he asked. “Those subpoenas you've received? I've also got one in my pocket. But what's a bit of paper worth when we've got guns in our hands? And yet ‘they' told us to use every means at our disposal to win that battle of Algiers. Luckily we went about it fairly gently, but if we had taken them at their word! Now that they're no longer shitting themselves with fear, they send us these little bits of paper. Each time any cabinet ministers or deputies visited our H.Q. I used to say to them: ‘This is on the side . . . We're doing this job because your government has ordered us to, but it repels and disgusts us.' Some of them pretended not to understand or to think that I was making a huge joke. Others would answer with a sanctimonious little gesture: ‘It's for the sake of France.' And now these same bastards, are trying to haul us into court. Hold tight on to your guns, then no one will come and bother us.”

There was a short silence, then Esclavier burst out in a fury which startled them all:

“Let Rome beware of the anger of the legions.”

Lashed by the squalls of rain and melting snow, with their faces all but hidden in their Balaclavas, the centurions of Africa brooded on their bitterness and despair. Under their streaming ground-sheets they clutched their weapons. A more than usually violent squall put the fire out and they found themselves in the dark. Boisfeuras's rasping voice then made itself heard:

“Now we know there's only one thing left for us to do: abandon the whole damned issue.”

Then Glatigny remembered. It was springtime at Sarlat College. The windows of the class-room looked out on to the golden dust rising in the courtyard. Surrendering to the confusion and poetic anguish of his adolescence, he sat there day-dreaming. The voice of Father Mornelier, the professor of Latin and Roman history, rose a note or two higher to indicate that the lesson was over. Glatigny had given a start, abruptly awakened from his gentle torpor; he had retained nothing but a clear recollection of this final sentence:

“A large number of the centurions of the Proconsulate of Africa abandoned the legions and came back to Rome. They became the Praetorian Guards of the Caesars until the day they adopted the custom of nominating them and then electing them from among themselves. That was the beginning of the end of Rome . . .”

There was a burst from a submachine-gun in one of the advance posts. A sentry had fired at a shadow or a noise: a tree bending in the wind, a
fellagha
, or some animal or other.

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*
P.I.M.: literally,
Prisonniers Internés Militaires
; in fact, suspects or even prisoners of war who acted as coolies for the fighting units, to which they soon attached themselves as combatants. One Christmas evening, in the Foreign Legion camp near Hanoi, I actually saw some of these Pims ward off a Vietminh attack with mortar fire. The legionaries were far too drunk that evening to do it themselves. (Author's note.)

*
Code names for calibre
60
and calibre
81
mortar shells, respectively.

*
Evil spirits of Vietnamese legends.