The Praetorians (3 page)

 * * * * 

On returning to his unit, the colonel was overcome with anger. He thumped his table with his fists until his chief of staff, Major Beudin, known as Boudin, a tubby little man with kindly eyes, came running in.

Raspéguy began yelling:

“Listen to me, Boudin. I'm giving you a week's leave, but not for you to go out on a drunken binge. I want you to get hold of Esclavier, and, even if he's not completely recovered, you're to bring him back here to me. I want to know why he did it.”

“A girl, Colonel; you said so yourself.”

“I said so to the others, and the Old Woman is spreading it about, but I simply don't believe it. He's not the sort to devote his life to a hundred pounds of female flesh, even if she's only twenty. What if it's some bee in his bonnet that he's got against me personally?”

He had calmed down by this time and was filling his pipe with cigarettes which he broke in two. He had his back turned to fat little Boudin, who cast a glance of envy in his direction.

The colonel was as slim as an adolescent. From the back he could be taken for a twenty-year-old if it were not for those folds round his neck. They were all slim, all adolescent, the Esclaviers, the Glatignys, the Marindelles: dangerous, pitiless and at the same time pitiful. Even Boisfeuras, who was not like them, had found this strange youthfulness in death. But he, Boudin, with his common sense, his feet planted firmly on the ground, his Auvergnat craftiness, was there to protect these fragile soldiers.

He would make quite sure not to find Esclavier.

In Italy an old glass-maker had told him that crystal
sometimes catches a disease which makes it break without any reason. That sort of leprosy is contagious. Esclavier had it and he must not be allowed to infect his comrades, the crystal warriors.

Boudin would go and see his mother in the Cantal; he was very fond of his mother and they were proud of him in the village.

 * * * * 

Esclavier travelled down to the south in short stages, in an old open car which he had bought second-hand. He took with him a few books, two jade statuettes that Glatigny had made him buy in Hong Kong, a Moorish hanging and his revolver, a Lüger he had taken off a
kattiba
*
commander in the Saharan Atlas. That was all that remained of fifteen years of military life, apart from a few memories, a few medals and an immense lassitude.

He took the Auvergne road, passed within twenty kilometres of the village where Boudin was born and thought of turning off to call on the major's mother. She was an old peasant woman with a fierce face and her hair drawn back under her cap, as he knew from a photograph which his friend had once shown him with that mixture of pride, shame and apprehension that Latins usually assume when showing the pictures of their fiancées. But Esclavier continued on his way. He would have had nothing to say to the swarthy old woman and he would have had to confirm some of the lies which the son had told to make himself out better than he was. Boudin had as much right as anyone else to “give himself airs”; his at least had a certain charm.

Fat little Boudin was at the farm. That very morning he had telephoned Colonel Raspéguy to inform him that, despite all his efforts, he had not managed to get hold of Esclavier.

“Have you looked everywhere?” Raspéguy wanted to know.

“Come, you know me, Colonel!”

“Very well, you can come back now. Did you see his promotion to major has just been published in the
Journal Officiel
? What a fool he is!”

With a clear conscience Major Boudin had gone off barbel-fishing. He used dried bull's blood as a bait, which was forbidden by law. But the police had far too much respect for him even to think of suspecting him.

 * * * * 

More than a thousand kilometres away, in his operational command post at Tebessa, Colonel Raspéguy sat deep in thought. He was amazed to discover that he was actually relieved that Boudin had not been able to find Esclavier, that Glatigny had left him, that Marindelle was still at Divisional H.Q. and that Boisfeuras had been killed.

Soon he would have his general's stars, he, the little shepherd-boy of Les Aldudes. His ambition was no longer that restless, hungry beast gnawing away inside him. It had been tamed, had grown gentle and had a silky coat.

That gang of hotheads would not have allowed it to rest; and he would have followed them, for he felt they were right however disagreeable it might seem to the other colonels and generals. And even to himself.

He was called to the telephone. A fresh band had just crossed the barrier on the Algerian-Tunisian frontier, in spite of the barbed-wire entanglement and high-tension wires. The alarm had been given, but most of the band had got through. It was now his move.

His move: to race for days and nights on end over the mountains in pursuit of phantoms that vanished just when you thought you held them fast, to put a further strain on his men, who were at the end of their tether. By means of terror or persuasion, though the result was the same, the
fellaghas
had won the population over to their side. They were afforded hide-outs, provisions, information. They were waging this revolutionary war which was now being discussed in the headquarters summaries but of which no one on the French side dared to apply the rules.

“The army depends on the people just as a fish depends upon water.” Mao Tse-Tung had written that and Boisfeuras used to repeat it incessantly. The rebels alone depended on the people; they swam in their midst.

Raspéguy began to feel angry with himself.

“Here I am starting to think like Boisfeuras. In the first place why did he go and get himself killed, that fellow? And quite deliberately, I know. There must have been something that didn't click in his schemes.”

Glatigny, quite naturally, had got a staff appointment. All the generals who watched over this cherub and his boring little wife had persuaded him to come back to his own set. At least Glatigny was still loyal to him and warned him from Paris of all the traps that were being set for him.

As for Esclavier, there was something lacking for him to be a real officer. Too eclectic, indifferent to promotion, not believing in the army but adjusting himself to it because he had not found another way of life which suited him so well. A military adventurer from a good family and with a gift for warfare—that could not be denied—but who had been able to leave the army without feeling the slightest wrench. Therefore, he was no soldier.

Marindelle was happy with his Cinquiéme Bureau and psychological-warfare business, a sign that with him, too, things were not going so well. Dia, who was the benign magician of the whole team, had been posted to Divisional H.Q. on being promoted to major. He was packing his traps: they were sending him to Ghana to represent France at some congress or other. There remained Orsini and Pinières, with the solid nucleus of N.C.O.s and a handful of seasoned newcomers.

Raspéguy went and stood, with his fists on his hips, in front of the huge map marked with red and blue lines which stretched across the end of his office.

The colonel had the gift of being able at a glance to transpose these contour lines, which he followed with the stem of his pipe, into human exhaustion, expended energy, stumblings and oaths.

One kilometre on this chaotic, jagged terrain was equivalent to four anywhere else. In the valleys there were mosquitoes, and, at two in the morning, mist. Up on the ridges it was icy cold and fires were lit, which gave away their position. And there was no water.

The colonel paced up and down his office. He was thinking:

“The rebels will keep to the valleys; that's where they're to be found. But my boys are worn out, and they don't like savage hand-to-hand fighting in the brushwood, where training and courage count for nothing, where luck alone prevails.

“I shall nevertheless take to the wadi-beds and valleys. We'll have to sweat it out, and perhaps for nothing. If only the population would keep me informed I'd be able to put paid to this band of
fells
without too many casualties.

“The army must depend on the people as a fish depends upon water. Heavens above, that's all I ask! I'm a man of the people myself. I love honours, medals, parades, but, above all, victory. A victor smells good even if he stinks of blood and sweat; the vanquished can drench himself in eau-de-Cologne from Dior, he'll still leave a smell of shit behind him.

“And Boudin, of course, isn't here!” (In his usual unfair way Raspéguy was holding him responsible for his absence, although it was he himself who had sent him to Auvergne.)

“Esclavier would already have set out in pursuit with his company and with Pinières's. He enjoyed the chase, like those wild huntsmen of old, and yet it was not so much the men he wanted to capture . . . Once a band was surrounded he was no longer interested. But then what did he want?”

The colonel, still striding up and down the room, found himself in front of the big photograph which was hung behind his desk: Boisfeuras dying in the sands of the desert, his lips twisted with pain and in his eyes that ironical gleam.

“Boisfeuras is still making fun of someone, but of whom?”

All these questions he asked himself exhausted him, driving him to distraction. Raspéguy picked up the telephone and gave his orders:

“Fall in the whole regiment. We move off in an hour. Four units of ammo, but only two days' rations, two water-bottles per man. No tents or bedding, they're too heavy, we're not going out camping.”

 * * * * 

The house that Philippe Esclavier had inherited from his Uncle Paul stood apart from the rest of the village and overlooked the
valley of the Siagne. In the terraced garden there was an old stone gateway, a stretch of ruined wall which dated, it was said, from the Romans, a few cypresses, some olive-trees; their silver-lined leaves, at midday, reflected the rays of the sun in scattered patches over the thin grass and grey and red rocks.

The rooms were spacious and whitewashed, furnished with long waxed tables, rush-covered chairs, wooden benches; the floor was of dark-red tiles. A few engravings on the wall; some pieces of old chinaware on a sideboard.

In a lofty vaulted room, the remains of an old chapel, Paul Esclavier had had the idea of installing a library. He had had the shelves built, but the books had been left in packages, stacked one on top of another.

Since the end of the war, every year, when the fine weather began, Uncle Paul had made a resolution to abandon all public life, both his post as Secretary General of the Teachers' Trade Union and his seat on the Central Committee of the Socialist Party, to retire to his “Thebaid.” But it was only a few weeks before his death, and on definite orders from his doctors, that Paul Esclavier had begun to implement his decision by sending his books to Provence. He had not had time to follow them.

Seated on a packing-case which he had dusted with a cloth, Philippe thought about his uncle and of the last holidays he had spent with him in Avignon in
1939
.

Paul Esclavier was then living in a little cottage just outside the town. The warm night was full of the sound of crickets; it was the evening that war was declared.

Paul was wearing espadrilles and old linen trousers topped with a none-too-clean singlet. His ruffled hair was already white. A lock kept falling over his eyes and he swept it aside with the back of his hand; it had become a characteristic gesture. Absent-minded and impulsive, he had not been able to pass his certificate in German, which condemned him for the rest of his days to being a third-form teacher in provincial lycées.

He played bowls, drank pastis, and, because he was unambitious but a man of fanatical integrity, the Socialist professors and teachers had made him their departmental delegate.

Étienne Esclavier, on the other hand, had just been nominated
to the chair of Contemporary History at the Sorbonne. That evening he was wearing pin-stripe grey flannel trousers and an alpaca coat somewhat tight across the shoulders, which made him look like a
1925
fashion-plate.

The world lay open before him. Who could say that he might not one day become Grand Master of the University? But already he was dreaming of another rôle: of becoming for the country a sort of conscience, soaring above the base contingencies of daily life, and who would be consulted rather in the manner of the Delphic Oracle.

As for Philippe, who was seventeen, he had passed the second part of his baccalaureate and was to start training as a teacher in October. A place was earmarked for him at Louis-le-Grand.

All three of them sat leaning over the old wireless which was crackling. Suddenly there was the sound of Hitler's voice, raucous and frenzied, fuming, screeching, rising to a hysterical pitch, falling and rumbling again, like distant thunder.

Uncle Paul pointed a threatening finger at the wireless set:

“Hitler's a madman; he should have been locked up long ago!”

“Don't say that,” said Étienne, as though he were frightened.

He got up and went out on to the terrace.

“Our great man is on edge,” Uncle Paul quietly observed, turning up the volume. “You see, Philippe, I like the German way of life, German high spirits and what the best of them have written. But what you're hearing now isn't Germany.”

Professor Esclavier came back, his voice trembling:

“Germany—and you're one of the few people, Paul, who don't realize this—is, on the contrary, the unleashing of all the obscure forces of evil. Hitler and Nietzsche, and not Goethe and Heine.”

“I don't believe in obscure forces, Étienne.”

“Once again Germany is threatening intelligence; the sound of her jackboots is drowning the voice of reason.”

“And it's we, France, who represent that intelligence and have a monopoly of it? Do you really think that? For me intelligence doesn't exist without courage. Athene, the goddess of intelligence, relied on her spear. We are going to have to prove our courage.”