A Tree on Fire (46 page)

‘I won't let that worry me,' said John, standing up to go back on deck. His ineffable middle-aged gentleness worried the Spaniard, who stood by him later at the rail. John would have preferred an overnight journey, for there was nothing to see except the occasional steamer passing from east to west. The bar was closed after coffee, and people wandered up and down, or dozed on deckchairs as the boat rattled its way across the sea he had last sailed on coming from Singapore in 1945.

‘You mustn't go beyond Algiers,' the Spaniard repeated.

‘I thought a million French troops had made the country safe at last?' John said, wanting to get rid of him and study his maps in peace. Richard had procured a thick packet of large-scale survey maps for him, of areas where fighting was heaviest, and of zones said to be already liberated by the FLN.

‘It will never be safe for
us
, not with ten million troops.'

John pitied him, yet wished he did not exist. The man was frightened, and because John was not, saw a danger of losing the protection that his fear gave him. If everyone were afraid they could at least learn how to feel safe. Those who were not tainted with fear were traitors, saboteurs, or innocent foreigners who did not realise what was at stake. They weren't pulling their weight, and detracted from the collective fear needed to give vital energy for the defence. And because John was an outsider the Spanish–Algerine felt as if the finger of the world were pointing at his insecurity and guilt. John asked what business he had in Algeria, and he replied that he owned a farm near Algiers, and a block of flats in the town. He was sixty-five, and if he lost both, he would starve. ‘So you see, we can't leave.'

‘To lose all,' John said, turning from water racing by to set his grey eyes fully on the man, ‘is to become free. When you own nothing then you can live. Your eyes only open when you have nothing. Your spirit will flower. Ever after, you can share the fulness of your heart with others. If ever you lose everything' – he took a small card from his wallet, his name and the address of Albert's non-existent Lincolnshire house written on it – ‘come to me here, so that I can willingly share all I have with you' – he grasped the shocked man's lapel with a gaze that burned into his eyes and in some way frightened him. ‘There'll be a camp-bed in my room, and food on my tray.' The Spaniard sweated, thanked him, and went quickly to his deckchair where he tried to sleep for the rest of the journey and keep out of this madman's way.

John stood alone and during his musing remembered the fire he had started in the kitchen on the night of his departure, and smiled in the hope that it had succeeded in consuming the destructive pride of the family. If not, he would try again when he got back. If so, they would live in tents and caravans, and prosper under the hardship, pride gone, comrades once more.

Approaching Algiers the air was sultry, yet on top deck, exposed to the wind, it became damp and penetrating. Sailors were hoisting signal-flags, which shot out on the lap of the wind when the string was pulled. The coast to the east merged with heavy air and cloud that no stiff breeze could shift. An oil-tanker was waiting to enter the roads. Trying to penetrate the bad visibility with field glasses he half discerned distant peaks of the Kabylie Mountains.

After a fortnight in the sombre humidity of downtown Algiers John gave a taxi-driver twenty-five English pounds and was driven to the nearest FLN roadblock in the Kabylie Mountains. After many detours he arrived there at five in the afternoon, having taken all day to do the hundred miles, and been shot at several times by Algerian militiamen. His papers were checked at the roadblock, and the major said they had organised a tour for him, to see a hospital, schools and training camps, and that it might also be possible for him to interview prisoners.

John nodded, wise and of few words. ‘Are there any Englishmen fighting for your cause?'

The major did not know. ‘Some English deserters came over to us from the Foreign Legion, but I believe they were repatriated through Tunisia. All deserters can choose repatriation, and most of them do.'

Two orderlies struggled up the hillside with his suitcase, camera, field-glasses and haversack. For a fortnight he was guided about the hills, seeing the black and blighted circle of one doomed village after another, the marks of massacre, endless graves. He was shown an improvised arms factory, and caves in which grenades were made out of milk-tins. He watched a napalm attack by French planes on Algerian Nationalist positions, a distant upsurge of boiling nightmarish colour that brought the spread of childhood horrors bursting out of his mind. He lost balance, held a tree branch to stop the sight of collapsing trees spinning him to the ground. Even when the earth had settled down to the steady work of burning itself to death, he heard from within it the thump and scatternoise of fighting, and remembered his own short-lived term as a soldier. He calmly scanned the hills and boulders while the major pointed to landmarks of the trap now drawing in more French forces. He took John's hand. The vantage-point was no longer safe, and they had to run.

He saw the prisoners next day, young men of twenty in their camouflaged commando suits. They were ragged, weary, hungry, though not particularly disgruntled, and stood in line between the trees. John chose the man who looked most dispirited and asked why he had been taking part in this war. ‘I don't know,' he said. ‘I'm a conscript.'

‘Did you like fighting?'

‘No,' He was tall, sandy-haired, and had a raw unhealed scar down his left cheek.

‘Where do you come from?'

‘Auxerre.'

‘What do you want to do now?'

‘Nothing. Go home.'

‘If you get home,' John said, ‘will you tell others about what's happening here?'

‘Perhaps. It's terrible. I don't know.' John reflected that it was beyond the resources of the Algerian Nationalists to indoctrinate each of the million Frenchmen set against them in this way, should they be sent in the tracks of those already captured.

He saw children gathered outside a hut and being taught to read by a young man from the city. The remnants of a European suit showed how recently a change of heart had sent him to this bleak wilderness. John had often come across groups of such dispossessed infants, grazing between trees like flocks of half-starved goats yet guarded by an adult who negotiated food for them and tried to see that none actually died. They were fed on a priority scale, which sometimes meant as much nutriment as in normal conditions. As far as possible they were kept under the green umbrella of wooded areas, for in the open any flicker of movement would be blasted from the air. Cut off from house, parents or village they ran and fought in the sunlight, rolled in autumn leaves, slept in outside
djellabas.
‘The children are cared for as much as our soldiers,' his guide told him. ‘They are the future citizens of Algeria.' He had learned good English at the Lycée in Constantine, had not in fact wanted to take to the hills, because he had enough pro-French middle-class ambition to get control one day of his father's transport agency. But his brother was arrested – by mistake as far as he knew – and died while in the hands of the paras. There was no decision to make. Life became simple. At the first attack he was wounded in the leg and permanently lamed, and so he became a teacher and shepherd of orphan children, spent his night whenever there was a lamp or candle reading the French text of
Kapital.
He was well read in all matter concerning revolution, including the phase of government when the war was over. John made him a present of his fountain-pen, and a street-map of London.

‘Here,' said the major, ‘is our hospital.' Nets and camouflage-cloths were spread high and flapping between the trees. Huge poles had been rigged where trunks were sparse. John looked for huts or tents, motor-cars perhaps. ‘It was,' said the major, ‘one of the best hospitals in the
wilayet.
Before moving it here we used to put out red cross signs but they were machine-gunned. Now our wounded can be looked after in secret. We occasionally spread red crosses where nothing exists just to test their panache, and we are never disappointed to see bombs and napalm raining down.'

They entered between two bushes. John thought the path would lead to an encampment, but steps descended under his feet and feeble lamps flickered along the narrow tunnel. Fumes mixed with damp earth, caused him to cough and wonder what it was like being carried down with shrapnel or a bullet in the lungs, and the thought brought tears to his eyes. The mutual cruelties of the world mauled his senses, and at such times the justness of the cause being fought for did not help his manhood to face these realities. It was easy and comforting and necessary to believe certain things and fight for them, but to see what suffering took place during the transformation of the social order (or one part of it) was enough to break the heart.

The tunnel turned at right-angles, and then again sharply, for soldiers had been known to advance into such places preceded by flamethrowers, and such an intricate entrance was better for picking off the machinist before he came into the central ward, gave time for the lightly wounded to escape by an emergency exit.

He stood ten minutes in the dark. Wounded men were lying on the floor wrapped in greatcoats and ragged blankets. Damp petrol fumes made even John join in the coughing, and as he walked between them the disinfectant stench brought him close to retching. He could see clearly, and those sitting up showed gaunt faces, olive-wax features wondering who this man was from another world, who found it so warm that he paused to force out the peg-buttons of his sheepskin coat. The major explained that a doctor and three nurses looked after the hospital. Once the wounded reached it there were few deaths, but fatalities were common between battleground and casualty station. They had still not solved this kind of problem. The rules of Red Cross protection were hardly refined enough to help in such a struggle, but perhaps they would be so when this type of war became more general. John wanted him to finish before asking the question he made at each stop, but at the end of the row, following his own intense scrutiny of every face and revealed feature, he saw Frank Dawley resting with his back against the rocky wall. His eyes opened, and were set in a dull stare.

The black earth stank, the reek of months or years, of petrol and wound odours, palliasses soaking in urine and excrement. His hopes, when he'd imagined it would end like this, had been nightmares, sweat-rivers and black seas desolate under the light of a slaughter-moon, a sickle-back sweeping along the rim of the earth. Any man who came down to this must count it as a certain end in his life, the point at which only death or resurrection could occur. The major talked on, and it seemed to John that the top of the ladder in guerrilla warfare was the gift of an easy and authoritative tongue, with little way to go before it led to a government post.

His eyes closed for a moment. They were hemmed in by grey bristles that spread over the pallow-eyed face. John took out his wallet, and gave him the letter from Myra which contained a photo of her and the child. ‘This is the man you were looking for?' the major said.

‘Who are you?' Frank asked, taking the envelope.

The doctor was a young man of twenty-five who had not finished medical school. ‘He was brought in a fortnight ago, and is ready to be discharged. His papers are in order for repatriation – out by the coast.'

‘When?'

He laughed. ‘We don't know.'

‘My name is John Handley,' he said. ‘I'm Albert's brother. I've been sent here to look for you.'

Those who could walk were allowed into the fresh air, stood at the entrance waiting for eyes to focus on humps of rock and twisted tree-pillars. ‘I made up my mind to come and find you,' he said, hand on his arm. ‘It was so easy that I still can't believe I've done it. A month ago I was in Lincolnshire with Albert and Myra, and all the brood.'

Frank smoked one of his smooth well-packed steel-tasting cigarettes. ‘You may not find it so easy to get back.'

‘Has this life made you pessimistic?'

‘Not at all. But I know what is involved. The Yugoslav ships don't have a regular schedule, and often they can't get in at all. French warships go up and down playing guns and searchlights on the coast. We may wait months.' He wondered whether anyone but John could have discovered him in this way, and at the same time talk so blithely about getting out. He'd only seen him for thirty seconds two years ago, at Albert's house in Lincolnshire when he'd inadvertently strayed into his room while looking for the lavatory. John, sending morse at his radio-set, had picked up a huge revolver and threatened to blow his brains into the wall if he didn't clear out. ‘I left my passport at the last place in Morocco,' Frank said, ‘but it followed me by FLN courier. There's more organisation here than you imagine. I suppose it looks like one big slice of chaos with everything so worn-down and shabby, but it works better than any so-called civilised town.'

John was amused by his defensiveness. They walked some way from the hospital, sat on a spur of land looking into a valley. ‘Did you bring any books with you?' Frank was eager to set his eyes again on print that could be immediately understood, wanted for a while to restrict his world to clear shapes and lines of letters that would liberate his mind into the sort of pictures he chose to make from them. ‘My luggage should catch me up tomorrow,' John said. ‘There are one or two things you might like.'

‘The fact is,' Dawley said, ‘I feel at home here. I'm a part of this country. I've learned to exist in it. I don't know that I want to leave just yet.'

‘You don't have much choice. They're sending you away.'

‘That's true. I'll have to go. I wouldn't want to hinder them. They're all right, in spite of what they've had to do at times.'