The Praetorians (45 page)

Come to think of it, what is Raspéguy doing in his own small way? He is creating, out of rebellious and dynamic elements, another F.L.N. with whom it will be possible to come to terms, since it will owe us everything.

Captain Naugier has told me:

“Major Marindelle is extremely intelligent, in the know about quite a number of things, very well informed on what's going on in the rebellion, maybe even in touch with some of its elements. He belongs to a very special organization which has no legal existence. It's not on the French of Algeria but on the rebels themselves that he observes the repercussions of the Government's policy. But he's wrong in his belief that it will be possible to get de Gaulle to renounce his disastrous policy simply by stamping one's foot.”

24
December
1959

Paule has agreed to come and spend the Christmas holidays at N. She only needs a permit—there won't be any difficulty about that—and an air ticket—there the problem is insoluble, for neither she nor I possess forty thousand francs.

I don't know why exactly, but I discussed the matter with Major Esclavier.

“The young lady,” he told me, “need only get in touch with my friend Guitte Goldschmidt, who's also coming out to Algeria for Christmas, she'll get her a ticket. Later on, when you've got the money, you can pay me back. Are you planning to marry her?”

I reassured him on that score. Esclavier is still as withdrawn and melancholy as ever. At certain times one feels like trying to be nice to him, but he senses this and at once keeps his distance.

24
January
1960

It's happened! Another revolution in Algiers! Barricades in the streets, policemen shot down like fair-ground targets. We're in the dark about what's going on and extremely apprehensive.

Massu, after giving an interview to a German journalist, was recalled to Paris on
19
January. Five days later firing broke out in Algiers.

“He's fallen into a trap,” Colonel Raspéguy maintains. “If this is another of Uncle de Gaulle's tricks, it's a pretty low-down one. It was so convenient for Massu to follow a man without having to understand anything.”

It seems that Raspéguy had a “packet of trouble” with Massu at the time of the
13
th of May.

The Christmas holidays were very pleasant. Having been given a good hiding, the
fellaghas
left us in peace. Paule came out with Guitte Goldschmidt. Guitte seems to have fallen in love with Major Esclavier the day she was born and never to have recovered from it.

This daughter of a left-wing university figure is a real fire-brand. From her visit to Israel she came back a Zionist, a nationalist and an activist. At Tel Aviv she went on a parachute course—for her own way, she would have gone out on operations with Lieutenant Lamazière.

Paule, who prides herself on knowing the ins and outs of the human heart, maintains that Guitte is extremely unhappy, that Philippe does not love her or rather loves her very much, which is worse.

For the first few days Guitte had a room next to the major's. On Christmas evening she managed nevertheless to slip into his bed and he raised no objection, the pet!

Yet she's a real beauty; beside her, my “goat-girl” looks like a lifeless doll.

I heard the colonel say to Esclavier:

“Philippe, if you must marry, this is the girl for you. She's the same breed as you.”

It's odd to hear a Basque say that about a Jewess!

Guitte and Paule flew back on
7
January. Paule thanked me for a “charming visit,” but Guitte, so as not to burst into tears, dug her nails into her palms.

Tragic passions have always frightened me; they're liable to get the better of our fragile male egoism.

27
January
1960

Colonel Raspéguy wanted to send Major Esclavier to Algiers to see what's going on. The major refused and so Naugier went instead. Naugier came back a short time ago, rather depressed. The great man of this revolution appears to be a café-owner with a very shady past, a certain Joseph Ortiz, whom Lagaillarde, who's fortunately nicer, pipped at the post with his skeleton staff.
But behind them there's the army, or at least a group of colonels, whom Challe and Delouvrier did not completely disapprove of at the start.

Their aim: to give the Head of State a dressing-down, oblige him to modify his Algerian policy, to recall Massu; but if de Gaulle gives in he'll be a prisoner of the colonels for good. Then there was that shooting, started by no one quite knows whom. The cannon for the dressing-down was loaded not with blank shells but grape-shot.

Naugier brought one or two stories back with him.

Colonel Parsabel du Mostier, commanding a parachute regiment, was questioned by a C.R.S. colonel, his face distorted with fury, who asked him:

“Well, whose side are you on?”

The colonel looked him up and down from his great height:

“I'll have you know, sir, I don't belong to anyone.”

Practically speaking, the army, that's to say the active army, no longer belongs to anyone, and least of all to de Gaulle, for they feel, a little prematurely perhaps, that he has deceived them.

“That's just like him,” said Colonel Raspéguy, referring to Parsabel. “Yet he wasn't in such a bad position in this régime: a Polytechnician, son of a general and nephew of a provincial of Jesuits, who goes to church and bears the right sort of name!”

We had assembled for dinner in the more or less ruined villa which serves as our mess. The grey sea was spread out in front of us. The colonel was sucking his pipe.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “what's going on in Algiers is no business of ours. Back there they've got time to waste. Our job is to wage war and to win it, first of all here, then farther afield. Once this war is won, the Moslems and the French will decide their own fate. It's up to them.”

“But what if de Gaulle comes to terms with the F.L.N.?” Lieutenant Lamazière exclaimed. “It means I shall have lied to my men. Once the G.P.R.A. is installed in Algeria they'll all have their throats cut.”

Raspéguy shrugged his shoulders:

“Come now, Lamazière. Do you think a man like Charles
de Gaulle, with the record he has, will break his word? But do you also expect a man like that to bow his head before a little pub-keeper? Tomorrow, night operations for everyone. Major Esclavier will give you the detailed orders and time of departure.”

The colonel saluted and went off. In the evenings he always eats alone.

29
January
1960

A raving speech from the delegate general who is leaving Algiers. We're right in the middle of a comic opera . . . in spite of the bodies laid out opposite the Main Post Office.

Lieutenant-Colonel Hanne came and asked Raspéguy to send a message of loyalty to de Gaulle. But he was sent off with a flea in his ear.

“I belong,” he replied, “to an army which belongs to the nation and not to a single individual. Furthermore, sending him a message of loyalty would imply that the army is not entirely loyal. It would be most distasteful.”

Raspéguy, I feel sure, has now lost any chance he had of wearing a general's stars.

Major Marindelle arrived in a liaison plane. This time he's seriously perturbed, he's got the red-rimmed eyes of a man who hasn't slept for several days. In front of us all he asked Raspéguy to go to Algiers. He alone could get past the barriers, obtain the capitulation of Lagaillarde and bring him to Challe who has settled in, surrounded by his air-force commandoes, at Cheragua base.

More raving!

“What do you think?” the colonel asked Esclavier.

“Nothing,” the major drily replied. “Since rejoining the army I've stopped thinking.”

The colonel turned to Marindelle.

“Have you a written order from General Challe?”

“No, but I'm certain he'd agree.”

Raspéguy turned back to us.

“No change in the orders. The time of departure for tonight's operation is three o'clock in the morning.”

We shan't hear General de Gaulle's speech, for, unlike the rebels, we don't have transistors.

8
March
1960

I was informed this morning of my promotion to the rank of second lieutenant, on my return from a week's raid into the rebel zone with Lamazière and his Moslem commando.

I was frightened, cold and hungry, but I don't regret the experience.

Muffled up in a
kachabia
, a windcheater, a pair of old trousers and canvas boots, I spent eight days living as a rebel with the thirty men of the commando.

A part of the population, who had fled from the resettlement camps with their wives, children and cattle, have built new villages right in the mountains. That's where we went.

Built of branches, concealed under trees, these villages are invisible from the air. Lamazière and Belhanis know their position more or less exactly. On their map some of them are marked with a red cross; these are the ones that have a regular A.L.N. garrison. Others, marked in blue, are only encampments or staging points.

Belhanis was a
fellagha
for three years. He knows the passwords, the signs made with bits of chalk or broken branches, he can interpret the way in which certain stones are arranged on the side of a path.

We marched for six hours in the rain after the trucks had dropped us. All of a sudden Belhanis motioned us to stop. The men took cover. Three of them then went off, their sub-machine-guns hidden under their
kachabias
.

“That's the village over there,” said Lamazière. “Look at that smoke rising above the big tree.”

“It's odd, the dogs aren't barking.”

“They've all been killed. Orders from the chief of the zone: where there are dogs there are men, and the French might hear them barking.”

It was a long wait. One of the two false
fells
appeared on the path and motioned to us with his hand. We got up.

In a sort of woodman's hut we found three old men and some women and children crowded together. The women were ugly, prematurely aged; the children, under-nourished, had crusts of bread in their hands, and runny eyes. They made room for us and offered us some tea and a few bits of biscuit.

A cry rose in the gathering darkness. With his own hand Belhanis had just slit the throat of the village headman whom the
fellaghas
had appointed. The cracked bowl I was holding trembled in my hand.

By then the old men had realized that we weren't
moujahedines
, but they didn't move.

“We're waging their sort of war,” Lamazière said to me, “and unfortunately there's only one way of going about it. To begin with it turns your stomach, but you get used to it in the end. When we started I wanted my men to behave more humanely. Belhanis asked me: ‘Have you ever seen a wild boar attacked by hounds which had been muzzled?'

“I insisted and I lost a stick of ten partisans. The next time, instead of getting rid of a single individual, we had to burn down a whole village.”

Lamazière has a clean-cut, square face. He has grown a neat little beard. Like me, he's a reservist, but how will he ever readapt himself to civilian life with all this blood on his hands? And what if it were all pointless? What if all this effort were to come to nothing?

I asked him:

“What would you do if one day the Government decided to come to terms with the F.L.N.?”

“I'd be doomed, for I should have killed for nothing and broken my word. Belhanis would then be perfectly entitled to bump me off.”

One of the old men uttered a few words, which Lamazière translated for me:

“The old boy says that the F.L.N. will win because one day we shall pull out.”

And Lamazière turned back to him: “
Insh' Allah
.”

We set off again in the middle of the night, before the alarm
could be given, for another of these villages, this one marked with a red cross. We reached it at daybreak, as the cocks were beginning to crow.

A dozen
fellaghas
were quartered in the seven or eight branch huts. They were taken by surprise, but their reactions were quick and they put up some resistance. Seven of them were killed, three taken prisoner, the commando's casualties being one killed and two wounded. Two of the prisoners agreed to follow us, the third spat in Belhanis's face. Belhanis shot him dead and left the body in the middle of the path, its pockets turned inside out.

Behind us the women rushed up. They began screaming round the corpse and tearing their hair. All this in the rain, in the shadowy depths of the forest.

During a halt I observed Belhanis closely, his agile mountain-slogger's body, the proud carriage of his head. When he was with the
fells
, he was doing the same job. But why is he with us now?

I put the question to Lamazière.

“In the A.L.N. he was only a staff-sergeant, and then he had fallen foul of the leader of the zone over some woman or money trouble. He's ambitious.

“Now, the longer he fights on our side, the more reasons he has for being on it, and those reasons aren't at all bad. In another army, our army, he has remained a
fell
and he knows quite well that at the end of it all lies the independence of Algeria. The problem is quite simple: either the F.L.N. snatches this independence out of our hands, or we oblige men trained by us to deserve it by fighting on our side.”

“So many people killed for such a minute distinction!”

“An essential distinction! We began this war and we're caught up in the works. But if you find this raid too sickening and want to go back . . .”

I saw by his eyes that he wanted me to remain. For days and nights, for mile after mile, I went on slogging up and down the slopes, slipping, stumbling, tearing my hands on the thorny undergrowth. How much easier it is, sitting in a chair with a billycan of coffee within hand's reach, to listen to the report of an engagement on the W.T.