The Praetorians (44 page)

8
September
1959

The company that got so badly mauled shortly after the colonel's arrival, the
3
/
2
of
108
, in other words the third company of the second battalion of the
108
th regiment, has just been in action again.

But there has been a great change.

The reservists showed their teeth and it was the enemy who took to their heels. They can't get over their courage. Raspéguy came and congratulated them and has decided to turn them into shock troops, which flattered them.

The Moslem commando came back with a dozen prisoners, fifteen weapons recovered, and valuable Intelligence on the rebel organization in the zone.

I must say I can't quite understand why these former
fellaghas
haven't rejoined their old friends. Lamazière has tried to explain this to me:

“It's not so much the F.L.N. that attracts them as war itself, adventure—‘knocking about,' as Colonel Raspéguy would say. But they also need a cause to fight for—their own cause, of course; they're like us and can't be content only with adventure.”

10
September
1959

Colonel Raspéguy has just decreed that the Moslem commando will wear the cap and camouflage uniform of the paratroops. The chaps in the
3
/
2
are furious and want the same.

16
September
1959

De Gaulle spoke on the radio. His voice reached us as though from a great distance. Although he was brought back to power by the integrationists, he is now proclaiming self-determination. The regular officers are in two minds about this, but Raspéguy put it to them:

“Why should self-determination bother us? It's up to us to
prove that the Moslems want to remain French. Of course, if it was put to the vote in N just now, it would be a hundred per cent
fellagha
. But we're going to change all that, aren't we, gentlemen?”

A new major arrived this evening, another paratrooper. It's that man Esclavier, who has been in the papers quite a lot recently. He is going to be operational second-in-command to the colonel.

The lads of the
3
/
2
already know all about him, his war record and exploits. They discuss him with the other reservists as though he was already their property. The cavalrymen still keep to themselves, the legionaries are the same as they've always been, but the
108
th is divided: half in favour of Raspéguy, whom they call Pierrot, and the other half sullen or openly hostile.

28
October
1959

We're preparing a big operation. Its code-name will be Aldudes, the village from which the colonel comes.

Raspéguy, who was offered some paratroops as reinforcements, rejected them and instead asked for Algerian levies, quoting that proverb which, ever since Kipling's day, has been brought in to clinch an argument:

“The Afghan wolf is hunted with an Afghan hound . . .”

I'm extremely busy and am horrified to note that I'm no longer bored, that I don't think so much about my “goat-girls” and that I find myself waiting for several days before answering the letters which the less unfaithful of them go on sending me.

The colonel has explained his field signals system to me. It's remarkable but requires extremely well-trained troops: everyone is on the same wave-length, so that each unit, company or even platoon knows what is going on in the higher formation and can follow the battle.

We're going to start out from the coast and make our way up to the crests overlooking it, then climb down the other side, passing through zones in which no French soldier has set foot for three years.

Yesterday we received the mimeographed instructions which have been distributed to the officers and the troops.

“By order of Colonel Raspéguy, Grand Officer of the Légion d'Honneur, commanding N sector. In the course of operation Aldudes, which will take place from
1
November to
15
December:

“All officers, no matter what their rank, will march with their men, carry their own equipment and draw the same rations.

“At any moment, and without prior notification, the conduct of the operation may be modified, platoons and companies detached from their unit and employed on special missions.

“Each man will carry three days' rations, three units of ammo, one blanket, a bivouac tent, two bottles filled with water or coffee. Alcoholic drinks are strictly forbidden.”

 * * * * 

A soldier at the Wadi R'hia post has just committed suicide. The garrisons are relieved only every three months, receive only one monthly visit from the convoy, and live right next to a resettlement camp which is completely controlled by the F.L.N.

When they go anywhere near it they are met with a volley of stones and sometimes rifle-bullets. They live in the midst of their cork-trees, surrounded by hate. They are bored, make mountains out of the smallest molehills, and then one fine day they put the barrels of their rifles in their mouths and press the triggers with their big toes.

In the mess Raspéguy commented briefly on the incident:

“In the units I've commanded I've never had a man commit suicide, because the men always had something to do.”

Unlike the colonel, who goes from one resettlement camp to another, makes speeches, launches appeals, Major Esclavier keeps apart from everything that is not strictly a military matter.

Esclavier takes the companies over one after another and goes off into the forest with them for three days on end. He eats, sleeps, lives with his men and teaches them “the little tricks that prevent you from getting yourself killed like a donkey”: how to jump out of a truck while still on the move; to shoot without aiming, to post
choufs
—look-out men—at every halt and encampment, to reconnoitre a stretch of country, to muffle one's equipment, to set an ambush . . . and, from the hunted, to turn into the hunter.

Captain Naugier deals with the town of N. His work is exceedingly mysterious.

16
November
1959

It's cold and it's raining. For the last week I've been shivering in my sodden clothes. We march and march through these cork-trees, we cross ravines full of brushwood, nothing happens; then all of a sudden we're in the middle of a swift, sharp fight. The men no longer grumble, no longer drag their feet or report sick since witnessing the stroke of madness, the piece of bluffing, the demonstration of wild courage that Colonel Raspéguy and Major Esclavier have just given the troop.

A battalion of the
108
th, a battalion of levies and the Legion had managed to surround about a hundred
fellaghas
. To complete the encirclement, we had to hold a little rocky crest which controlled a sort of ravine, and therefore occupy it with one or two groups armed with automatic weapons. But time was short, the
fellaghas
had discovered the gap in the net and were rushing in that direction. The colonel's helicopter, an old Bell—known as “the Mule” because it often refuses to start up in the mornings—appeared and hovered right over the crest, a yard above the rocks. Raspéguy and Esclavier jumped down, each with a carbine in his hand, and the helicopter flew off again.

We were all down below, in a sort of basin covered in brushwood and hemmed in on all sides by the rocks. We could clearly see the two officers outlined against a sky across which black clouds were drifting in the wind.

I watched them through binoculars. The colonel broke up some cigarettes and filled his pipe. The
fellaghas
opened fire on them; taking their time, Raspéguy and Esclavier settled down behind an outcrop of rock, not lying flat but in a kneeling position, and started firing back.

Figures kept falling all round them; at one moment the rebels, who had scaled the rock, were almost on top of them and had to be driven off with grenades.

Not a single
fellagha
succeeded in passing through that side and breaking out of the cordon.

When it was all over, the helicopter came to pick Raspéguy and Esclavier up again and flew straight over us.

In a single movement, every man in all three battalions rose to his feet, brandishing his weapon, and cheered at the top of his voice—myself included. Next to me, the commander of the Legion kept muttering:

“My God, those two! Those two!”

In camp that evening I came across Captain Naugier who had come up from N. I discovered he was a shrewd fellow, nonconformist in his speech as in his behaviour.

I asked him what he thought of this exploit.

“I don't know Major Esclavier very well,” he said, “but I can assure you that Colonel Raspéguy is not the sort of man to get himself killed for the pleasure of accomplishing a fine gesture or through ‘sticking his neck out,' as he puts it.

“It was in full awareness of the risks he was taking that our colonel staked his life today. In order to fight, he needs men whose feelings for him are far stronger than those of a troop for its leader. Raspéguy wins because he can demand the impossible from the men under his command, because between them there is not merely discipline and respect but a sort of passionate affection. Don't you think, my dear Mussy, that his gamble has paid off yet again?”

But later on, while I lay bundled up in my damp blanket trying to fall asleep, I said to myself that there was something more besides: just like Esclavier, Raspéguy is one of those men who from time to time feel the urge to put their lucky star to the test.

18
December
1959

Operation Aldudes is over. The score:
300
fellaghas
wiped out,
200
prisoners (of whom a hundred have joined the
harkis
or the Moslem commando),
250
army rifles and
100
shot-guns recovered, as well as several tons of food supplies, a field hospital and
22
,
000
,
000
francs.

The climate is completely changed. The reservists talk of nothing but fighting it out to a finish. Raspéguy has sent them
off to the outlying posts to relieve their comrades who've been rotting there for months, and promised them he would celebrate Christmas with them.

Throughout this operation the colonel made full use of his signals system. He never stopped taking the enemy and their look-outs by surprise, launching his troops in one direction, halting them, withdrawing them to the rear. Out of our “reservist malcontents” he has obtained more than an old seasoned troop would have provided. Now, when the Mule flies over N, they all shout out: “There goes Pierrot!”

The Moslem commando is likewise making progress. Lieutenant Lamazière has invited me to follow an operation which they are going to carry out next month in the mountains where the command post of the rebel zone is installed.

Since this morning the commando has been equipped with an embryo political organization directed by a former rebel leader whom the colonel captured in the Sahara. He is a certain Abdallah, a former Kabyle school-teacher, one-eyed and efficient . . . a little too efficient perhaps, because his methods of indoctrination are most energetic. This party or semblance of a party is called the “Movement for the Emancipation of the Algerian Element”; its undeclared aim: independence within the framework of the community. Its slogan: “War on Want.” Its premise: “General de Gaulle will keep his promise and will never come to terms with the F.L.N. but will always be prepared to grant an honourable peace.”

Big photographs are being displayed everywhere of the paratroop hero Captain Boisfeuras who, propped up on one elbow, said with his dying breath: “Victory is his who dares the most.” That captain must have been a perfect model of the good, somewhat circumscribed, soldier.

22
December
1959

Lieutenant Piétang is back from Algiers where he spent four days and met some journalists.

According to him, there's something being cooked up, not only on the military staffs but by the activists as well.

He heard one colonel, and not one of the least important,
declare: “With or without de Gaulle, the army will never abandon Algeria.”

This mania the Algiers colonels have of insisting on speaking in the name of the army!

They're perfectly entitled to say: “I, Colonel So-and-So, undertake not to abandon Algeria.” But the army! What do they know about it? Most of them have not even got a command. They'd do better to consult us! Admittedly, they'd be in for a few surprises.

“A troop can always be conditioned,” they explain. So they take us for under-developed half-wits, do they!

On the other hand, Operation Jumelles, which was mounted by General Challe in Kabylia, has given us some breathing-space and his raiding forces have done a fine job.

For the first time the army in Algeria has a leader who does not dabble in politics but makes war, and who, “even though an airman” (as Raspéguy says), has not got his head in the clouds.

Major Marindelle, who is on his staff, came to spend a few days at N. A strange mixture of child and soldier-monk. He gave us a lecture on revolutionary warfare. . . . I fell asleep in the middle of it. Yet I remember one interesting point (assuming it to be true—with all this intoxication, it's difficult to tell!). The rebels in the hinterland, who are very disturbed, knowing that de Gaulle will never recognize the F.L.N. as representing the Moslem Algerians, and fearful of finding themselves evicted from the future Algerian nation, are reported to be ready to come to terms with us behind the backs of the people at Tunis.

But on what conditions? Meanwhile the French of Algeria seem to be more and more pig-headed. Those chaps are sometimes to be pitied, at other times one feels like giving them a kick in the arse, but no one ever dreams of abandoning them.