The Praetorians (5 page)

The mayor sorrowfully thought to himself:

“There was a time when soldiers and priests enjoyed good living. The young priests today nibble at their cassocks and dabble in social services—when they're not working as manual labourers! The officers play at revolutionary warfare and drink water, which leads them to overthrow governments because they annoy them.

“Wisdom, the great traditions of good living, tolerance and common sense, have happily found refuge among a few old Socialists, whom no one, alas, takes seriously.”

They had their coffee in the arbour.

“My dear Philippe,” Donadieu began, “let me call you by your Christian name, for by making me his executor your uncle made me responsible for you in a way. . . . Marguerite, bring us the brandy—no, not the electors' bottle, the other one, on the corner of the sideboard. You don't drink brandy, you don't smoke? But you're going to be even more bored than I thought!

“Do you know, at least, why Paul made you his only heir?”

Philippe shrugged his shoulders. By leaning back a little he could see the sky and the first stars. He would have liked to be alone, and at the same time the idea of solitude made him frightened.

“Paul thought that you'd get tired of the army one day, that you would then like to have some quiet spot in which to get it out of your system, to become once more a normal man who has had enough of great heroic conflicts which end up as charnel-houses, towns of which you can remember nothing because you creep through them in the dark, and villages being burnt at dawn. . . .

“I'm quoting him, my dear Philippe—my own sentences are shorter and I don't go in for sermons. But it looks as if Paul was right, because here you are. I must also tell you that he was not very fond of your sister or her husband, that he had quarrelled with your father and that he was proud of the little exploits you performed during the war.”

Esclavier looked the older man straight in the eye.

“My uncle was mistaken, Monsieur Donadieu. It was not because I was fed up that I left the army, but because that particular army could not become the one we had dreamt about, a few of us, in a prisoner-of-war camp in Indo-China.

“We went as far as we could, we even crossed the Rubicon, as Uncle Paul would have said. Only, the man we brought to power is not one of us. He belongs to another army, another history. One of my friends, Boisfeuras, got himself killed, others resigned or even came to terms with the powers that be, the wildest of us dabbled in plots without a future. I preferred to hand in my papers.”

“Your French Algeria was a cause that was lost in advance; you can't go against the course of history.”

“The Israelis managed to, and it was a history two thousand years old.”

“My daughter's coming down here, Philippe. She's called Irène, she's extremely pretty.”

Esclavier gave a short, rather strident laugh.

“You want to marry her off? I'm sorry, but——”

“Not at all. I like her as she is, free, cynical, at least in her manner of speaking, with a taste for anything that glitters but well aware that it isn't gold. I don't see her under any man's thumb, with a brat on her knees, and it's not my line to play the heavy grandfather.

“A shame you don't enjoy good food. Don't try and pretend. I saw how you behaved at dinner. Frugal men make me feel uneasy, and also those who don't sleep well. Caesar, who knew something about men of your sort, said: ‘Let me have men about me that are fat . . . and such as sleep o'nights.' You chaps, the officers of this new army born in Indo-China and Algeria, are thin, restless, and you sleep badly. Does de Gaulle know that?

“My daughter's exactly like you.”

 * * * * 

When Donadieu was alone again he took out his tobacco jar and the old long-stemmed German pipe that Paul Esclavier had brought back for him from one of his countless journeys across the Rhine. He filled it carefully and lit it. The sky had grown dark, the stars twinkled brightly.

Urbain had at last reached a state of indifference, of curiosity without passion. The little daily certainties he had chosen had taken the place of the dreams of adolescence and the desires of maturity. He lived under a glass dome, in a rarefied but pure air, and only certain sounds, certain images, smells and tastes, freed from all context, reached him.

A toad croaked on three notes—the first three notes of Bach's “Toccata and Fugue.” For a moment this sound appeared to sum up the whole world, to be the most perfect expression of it. Nothing else counted but the acrid taste of the tobacco, the gentle breeze redolent of resin that swept the darkened landscape, and those three notes hanging in the silence.

 * * * * 

On the following morning Esclavier found two letters slipped under his front door. The first one he opened was from Squadron Leader Jacques Glatigny and was ten days old; it had followed him from the Val-de-Grâce to the apartment in the Rue de l'Université before being forwarded to Saint-Gilles.

“My dear Philippe,

“It is with great sorrow and real dismay that I have just heard about your resignation from the army. After Boisfeuras, who chose to die, here you are leaving as well. I'm staying on and I feel guilty. But I've got five children, I've no private income and I can't think of any other profession but the army. General de Gaulle's régime, in spite of all its shortcomings and defects (including the defect of depending solely on the life of one man), suits me for the time being. I look upon it as a temporary but necessary stage in our history. This adventurer has perhaps given evidence of wisdom in not following us. He had acquired a sense of the possible in his retirement, and what we suggested was not possible if one considers the real state of France and that of the world. It was a great dream which only suited a young nation. It was you who summed him up so succinctly, after one of those visits to officers' messes which we organized for him so that he should get to know us better: ‘You can see he was never out in Indo-China.' And Boisfeuras had then chuckled in that grating voice of his.

“Oh that voice! I can still hear it. I close my eyes, and there he is in front of me with his swinging Vietnamese coolie gait.

“De Gaulle, it's true, was not out in Indo-China, nor did he undergo our temptation. So he is bound to condemn us, because he can't understand us. He wants to create a France, and perhaps a Europe, set aside from the great currents of violence that are sweeping the world, to make it a sort of refuge for a certain civilization, which is ours and to which we cling. He hopes that when the great delirium of the newly liberated countries has died down it is to the West that they will turn.

“But for that to happen our old fortress will have to hold out another twenty years, the time needed for the Communists, who are a prey to their internal contradictions, to start killing one another and become humanized; the time needed, too, for the bitterness born of colonization to come to an end. And if we want to defend our old crumbling citadels we need warriors. Your resignation is not well timed.

“They tell me you mean to retire somewhere near Grasse for a few months, to ‘get your bearings,' as they say.

“You'll be quite near the estate where Boisfeuras's father lives. He's an old
taipan
from Shanghai, a very rich old man who played an important political rôle in the Far East, a sort of disillusioned sharp-witted opium-addict, who was very upset by Julien's death.

“He'll be glad to see you. I know he'd like to have an eyewitness account of his son's last hours. You yourself were too influenced by Boisfeuras not to want to know him better through the medium of his family and background.

“It's because of his death that you're resigning, isn't it?

“The children are well. Claude leads a very social life and, as you know, I've been put up for promotion to lieutenant-colonel by my branch of the service. I don't belong to the paratroops any more, I've come back to the cavalry.

“It's a shame Raspéguy hasn't got you with him any longer. You can't imagine what hatred he has roused against himself at H.Q. I'm doing what I can to save his bacon by keeping him on in his command.

“At the Ministry of the Armed Forces, Rue Saint-Dominique, no one, or hardly anyone, has tramped across Indo-China as we did. How can they understand Raspéguy!

“If I lost your friendship I shouldn't have much left in life.

Jacques.

“P.S. Here is the address of Boisfeuras's old man: La Serbalière, Cabris Road, Grasse. The property is enclosed in a high wall about two kilometres long.”

The second letter, a very short one, was from Isabelle Pélissier, whom Philippe had loved and then left during the battle of Algiers and whom he had met again at the time of the May
13
th revolution. It was addressed direct to Saint-Gilles-de-Valreyne, which intrigued Esclavier, for he had not given his address to anyone.

Algiers,
13
March
1959

“Philippe,

“I was not surprised to hear about your resignation from the army. The news was given me by one of your friends in the
10
th Regiment, who seemed astonished. But it was bound to happen.

“It is rarely one fights for ideals, but more often for a piece of land, also for a woman.

“You never liked Algeria, and still less us, the French Algerians, who live here. Our faults were easy to see; they're the faults of any young nation; our qualities take longer to discover.

“All you remember is our vulgarity, our love of money and our bravado. You tried, through me, to love Algeria and you didn't succeed.

“I am terribly sad. I sometimes feel that our failure, yours and mine, is rather like the failure of the relations between Metropolitan France and Algeria. And yet if you only knew how passionately we people here loved France when she was at her lowest, and how much I loved you, Philippe, how much I still love you.

“Good-bye,

Isabelle.

“P.S. Do you remember? One evening you told me about that little cottage in Provence which an uncle of yours had left you. You wanted us to spend a month there together, on our own, so as to enable me to get to know France, you said. I've remembered the name of the village and I thought you might have taken refuge there. But I no longer want to get to know France.”

Philippe put the two letters away in his desk, decided he would answer neither of them, but that he would go, as soon as he was properly settled in, and call on Captain Boisfeuras's father.

He fell asleep bathed in the moonlight which came in through the open window. He would have liked a woman beside him; any woman, provided she was beautiful and silent. He would have talked to her as one talks to oneself, but taking greater pains to be clear and precise, in the same way as one takes pains to compose one's features in front of a mirror or perfect one's style in a personal diary.

According to the official bulletin published in Algiers, the band that had crossed the barrier consisted of no more than a hundred or so
fellaghas
equipped with a motley collection of arms. The same bulletin claimed that this band was in the process of being annihilated—whereas it had not even been tracked down—and hinted that the barrier, instead of playing its usual rôle, which was to contain the enemy, had this time been employed as a sort of trap.

The Algiers paper had made the most of this explanation, but those at home had confined themselves to a strongly worded criticism of the measures being taken on the Algerian-Tunisian border.

This band, the biggest that had ever crossed the barrier since it had been set up, numbered some two hundred and fifty men and was armed with ten light machine-guns, two heavy machine-guns, three light mortars and two bazookas. This material was of Czech origin and recent manufacture. Every
fellagha
was equipped with a ground-sheet, a pair of jungle-boots, a cap, and carried a rifle, or, if issued with an automatic weapon, a pistol.

It therefore consisted of two
kattibas
who were on their way to the Aurès and the Némentchas to take up a position there.

As Raspéguy had foreseen, the
fellaghas
had avoided the ridges and had crept through under cover of the valleys. They were thus able to hide up during the day and rest without being spotted by the air force. They marched only by night. After forty-eight hours' pursuit the
10
th Regiment had found no trace of them. The district was more or less uninhabited, the population having
moved elsewhere, and, as usual, the few shepherds wandering about the mountains with their wretched flocks of sheep knew nothing, had seen nothing.

At six o'clock in the morning H.Q. Tebessa informed the paratroops that a company of the
7
th Infantry Regiment composed of reservists and engaged on a routine operation—combing through a little valley at the foot of Jebel Doukane—had just come up against the band.

Raspéguy was sitting on a flat rock, dipping a crust of bread into a tin of sardines. The wireless message made him leap to his feet. He tore the microphone out of the operator's hands.

“Raspéguy here, who are you?”

“Captain Bigelot, the Sector Intelligence Officer.”

“Please repeat your information.”

“At the foot of Jebel Doukane, at the entrance to a little valley, a company from the sector has run into the
fellaghas.
”

“Its position?”

“
27
°
5
' south,
12
°
8
' north.”

With a gesture of impatience Raspéguy called for his map.

“I can already see what's happened. A few shots, the
fells
have done a bunk and your chaps can't get over it.”

“Not at all, sir. The company has been completely surrounded, and the
fells
are killing off our chaps; it was their first engagement. They're bringing up all the general reserves, the
4
th C.P.R. and the
1
st Foreign Parachute Regiment. It isn't just a hundred rebels this time, but three or four hundred, maybe more.”

“Leave the band to me. I'm twenty kilometres from the valley. I want all the available helicopters at once. Get in touch with Ain Arnat. There's something fishy about this business.”

“What do you mean, sir?”

“Instead of making for their bases, a band as strong as this halts right out in the open to come to grips with a company? It's either a trap or else the chap in command of the
fellaghas
is a bloody fool.”

With his large racket-shaped paw, Raspéguy crushed a mosquito that was biting his neck. He felt that this fight would not be like the others, that the losses would be heavy. Like a miser,
he was frightened of spending his capital, these agile supple soldiers whom he had knocked into shape with jealous eagerness.

He stuffed his pipe with a few cigarettes, did not light it and began issuing his orders. Already a plan was taking shape in his head. He wanted to engage the band in open country. In the undergrowth and wadis it would cost too many lives.

A message came in from Ain Arnat.

“You'll have a D.I.H.
*
in half an hour's time. Clear a landing-strip for it.”

The three companies closest to Jebel Doukane—ten kilometres as the crow flies—had left their haversacks behind and without taking time to fill their water-bottles were trying by means of a forced march to reach the valley where the fight was on. Pinières was in the lead, Orsini behind him and, bringing up the rear, Boisfeuras's company—it continued to be known by the name of its former captain. Raspéguy had worked out their route on the map, then called up the three company commanders by W.T. one after the other.

“I'd give a normal unit three hours to cover these ten kilometres. You've got to do it in two. Good hunting.”

 * * * * 

The
fellaghas
, under cover of the rock-slides that blocked the valley, had opened fire at point-blank range on the slumbering columns of the
7
th I.R.: twenty dead, forty or so wounded, and the survivors had scattered and gone to ground in the undergrowth.

A young reservist second lieutenant whose platoon was intact wanted to make an attack on a machine-gun which, with its raking fire, was keeping the company pinned down and preventing it from pulling out. But his men did not follow him and he went forward alone until a bullet doubled him up. He dragged himself behind a rock without a single one of his men, who were nevertheless fond of him, venturing out of cover to help him. He died alone cursing them. On passing out from
Cherchell, this second lieutenant had wanted to join the paratroops, but his family's entreaties dissuaded him from applying.

Unable to advance or retire, or to risk the slightest move, the company, commanded by an elderly lieutenant who was frightened out of his wits, continued to suffer heavy losses without inflicting any on the enemy.

“It's like shooting down rabbits,” exclaimed Mahmoudi in disgust. He had taken cover behind a rock next to one of the big
kattiba
leaders, bristling with hand-grenades and daggers, who was directing the fire of the machine-gun.

“That's all the French are,” said the big-wig, “a lot of rabbits.”

He made an obscene gesture with his arm, took a pair of brand-new binoculars from their case and stepped out of cover to inspect the terrain.

“They're not all rabbits,” said Mahmoudi under his breath.

He remembered some of his companions in Camp One: Esclavier's big cruel mug, Boisfeuras, Glatigny, as smart as ever even in his rags, and Merle with whom he had stolen some molasses.

Mahmoudi was not in command of the band; if he had been he would never have allowed this company to be attacked, for it meant revealing their position unnecessarily just for the brutal pleasure of killing a few boys who did not know how to hold a rifle and slitting the throats of a few wounded crying out for pity, with the result that already a whole divison under arms was on their tracks.

The band was simply responsible for escorting him to Jebel M'Zouia, where another group would take him in charge. From there, in ten days' time, he would be able to reach Kabylia. After a few months spent with Krim Belkacem and in the camps of the Kef he had been appointed military leader of Willaya
4
*
where things were not going as well as they should.

Willaya
4
was the bastion of the rebellion and for the past four months its leader, Ahmed Ziad, had been doing exactly as he liked. He always had a perfect excuse for not reporting when
summoned by the G.P.R.A.,
*
and was said to have destroyed his wireless transmitter so as to be left in peace.

Mahmoudi, who had secret orders to liquidate him and take his place, was bringing him another transmitter. Ziad, a highlander about fifty years of age, a cunning, cruel man, whose powerful clan had roots throughout Greater Kabylia, was not going to be easy to deal with.

All of a sudden Mahmoudi had a feeling of alarm; he pricked up his ears, inhaled the damp morning air and peered up into the sky.

The big
kattiba
leader, who was strutting about like an admiral on his rocky platform, spun round like a top and collapsed with a bullet in his head. Mahmoudi had thrown himself flat on his stomach behind his rock and the binoculars landed by his feet. After wiping them he focused them carefully. At the other end of the narrow valley he saw some men in caps and camouflage uniform advancing by short bounds without ever breaking cover for more than a few seconds.

Someone touched his shoulder. It was Atarf, chief of the band, who had crept uphill to reach him. A former law student in Paris, he had just come from a military training college at Prague and this was his baptism of fire. It was in French that he addressed Mahmoudi:

“You see, the dogs are bringing reinforcements up. But it's not serious. The valley's too narrow for their aircraft to be used. I'm leaving a platoon behind me, which should be enough to contain the troops coming up for some time. We shall break through the company that is facing us. It's already sufficiently damaged, it won't put up much resistance.”

Two bullets whistled over their heads. Mahmoudi lowered the binoculars.

“Do you know what they're called, brother, those troops who have just arrived? Raspéguy's Wolves. You can recognize them by their peaked caps. They have killed off over a thousand of our men. If they've shown up at the north of the valley
it means they also hold the other end. Maybe they forgot to teach you that sort of thing in Prague. Listen!”

In the distance a roar of engines was accompanied by a whirr of blades.

“Helicopters. They're dropping a company on each of our flanks. The trap is closing in.”

Mahmoudi's mobile face contracted:

“I told you to leave this company of wash-outs alone and first get to your bases, as you'd been ordered to do. You couldn't resist playing the hero. Do you know what the Viets used to do when one of their officers made such a big mistake? They sent him forward with a bamboo pole with a charge of dynamite on the end of it, to blow up the barbed-wire entanglements of a post. If he didn't go the political commissar bumped him off. Didn't they ever tell you that on the other side of the Iron Curtain?”

 * * * * 

The man from Prague, lying flat on his face, his cheeks scratched by the thorny brushwood, had lost all his arrogance. An hour earlier he had curtly reminded Mahmoudi that he alone was in command.

Tall and athletic as a rugger player, he had close-cropped hair, blue eyes and fair skin. He was a Berber from the Aurès, a
Chaouia
, insolent, crafty and vain, proud of his freshly acquired knowledge and the few military and political Czech techniques that had been drummed into him during the hours he was not chasing after women. In Czechoslovakia the women were plump and as fair as beer, merry girls with a weakness for the officers of the Algerian Liberation Army. But their language was incomprehensible. Fortunately, some of them spoke French, as Macha did.

The memory of her body made him tremble against the rock, and at the same time he felt completely bereft and wanted to be sick.

“Well,” said Mahmoudi, “better make up your mind. What do you intend to do?”

“We could still try and break through!”

“And be a sitting target? Not on your life. You'll go and see all the leaders in your group, and these are the orders you'll give
them: everyone is to split up into little sections of five or six and make for cover, the wadis and undergrowth. Strict orders not to fire until the last resort. After going to ground we'll wait for nightfall and between sunset and moonrise we'll try to break through at various points simultaneously. The signal: two rifle-shots, a pause, then another shot. Rallying-point: the Mahlef
mechtas
at the foot of Jebel M'Zouia.”

“Do you think we'll get away with it?”

“At best we'll save a hundred or so men of the two hundred and fifty for whom you were made responsible.”

“And the rest?”

“For the dead the French have a large grave dug by the prisoners, that's to say our chaps who agree to work with them. A few sacks of quick-lime are poured in and that's the end of it. The French are keen on hygiene and have a delicate sense of smell. Krim Belkacem and Boussouf will publish a bulletin claiming a victory.”

“But it's true, it has been a victory: a French company wiped out and the barrier crossed without one of our men being lost!”

“You had nothing to do with the crossing of the barrier, nor had your men. . . . You were simply told: ‘You'll cross it on such and such a day at such and such an hour, the alarm system will not be working, the mines will have been removed and the high-tension wires cut.' A twinge of conscience cunningly exploited, some promises that we have no intention of keeping, a renegade to his race and an imbecile general—that is what enabled us to bring it off. The company of reservists, that's another story: they didn't even know how to hold a rifle, and they had no inclination to fight.”

“You're always ready to find excuses for the French and to belittle us. Why are you with us, anyway?”

“Because I want the independence of my country, and because I know we shall obtain it. And, besides, I've got a score to settle. Is that sufficient reason for you?”

Mahmoudi suddenly broke into Arabic, and his voice was harsh and insulting:

“Go and issue my orders, be quick about it, then come back here. Bring me back my team, the W.T. and three men.”

“Do you realize to whom you're talking in that tone of voice?”

“You're relieved of your command for incapacity. You can still serve as a liaison agent, but, even so, remember what I told you about the Vietminh.”