Presidential Mission

by Upton Sinclair

  “I have heard such a rumor,” responded the P.A. “Tell me what you think of him.”

  “He is a soldier and a man of honor. He will fight for la patrie to the best of his ability. But I do not see how he can have any success as a leader of the movement. What claim to legitimacy could he have?”

  “I am trying to understand your point of view, Denis. What claim of that sort can General de Gaulle have? When I mention him to Frenchmen here, the response is: ‘A mere brigadier-general, self-proclaimed as head of our government.’”

  “I know that it is difficult to explain, Lanny. De Gaulle was first in the field and he has managed to get the ear of the people. He seems to us an inspired leader, one of the deliverers whom God has always sent to our nation when the need became extreme.”

  Lanny would have liked to say that legitimacy and inspiration were different things, and frequently opposite; but he didn’t want to hurt his friend’s feelings, he merely wanted the “lowdown” on the followers of De Gaulle so as to know how to deal with them, and to report them to the Boss—one who seemed to Lanny to possess both legitimacy and inspiration. The secret agent wanted also to understand Mr. Robert Murphy, and what he was telling members of the “two hundred French families” about the intentions of the American government toward them. Lanny could understand why a kindly and trusting career man of the State Department seemed such an excellent choice to Denis de Bruyne; he was a gentleman, and knew how to talk to other gentlemen; he was Catholic, and knew how to deal with Frenchmen of that conservative sort.

  Lanny learned from Denis that the Counselor had made M. Lemaigre-Dubreuil his confidential adviser and practically his righthand Frenchman. It had been Lemaigre who had suggested Herriot and had sent agents to that statesman, who called himself a “Radical Socialist”—in much the same way that Southern defenders of property rights in the United States call themselves “Democrats.” It had been Lemaigre who had suggested General Giraud, and even, so it was whispered, had persuaded the Germans to let him escape. When Lanny expressed incredulity at this idea, the scion of the De Bruynes explained: “You know how it was before the war, Lanny. Many of our leading men of affairs were intimate with the Germans; they did not wait for Le Couple France-Allemagne to be realized officially, but went ahead and introduced it on their own. Now, of course, they have influence among Germans, and if they ask a favor, and pay for it, they may get it. Who can tell what secret pledges General Giraud may have given before he slid down that rope from the fortress window?”

  “Now, now, Denis! That is a Gaullist voicing his prejudice!” is what Lanny wanted to say, but he bit off his tongue. His purpose wasn’t to educate his near-godson, but only to use him, as he would use everybody he met, at home and abroad, for the safety of the American Army. Every time Lanny walked or drove along the esplanade of Algiers he saw with his mind’s eye that Army coming in under the fire of machine guns and cannon. How many guns there were, and how straight they were shooting, might depend upon what Lanny was doing now, and what Mr. Robert Murphy was doing, and all his twelve young vice-consuls, whose trail Lanny kept crossing now and then.

  IX

  What more could a P.A. do? What questions should he ask, what people should he meet? He racked his brains and those of his old friend. Denis said there was a small group living like the early Christians, not literally in catacombs, but meeting in secret places and arranging to print and distribute leaflets and otherwise wage ideological war upon the Vichyites. There were several of these people with whom President Roosevelt’s friend ought to consult, so the capitaine insisted. When Lanny objected that he couldn’t afford to identify himself with the Gaullists, Denis replied: “They are not Gaullists; that is just a bad name used by the enemies of la France libérée. These friends are patriots. There is a Communist among them, and a Catholic priest; there are several small business people, there are students and teachers and some workingmen.”

  Lanny asked: “What are the chances of there being a spy among them?”

  “Who can ever be sure about that? All I can say is that I cannot imagine which of our twelve would be the Judas. If you cannot risk meeting a large group, let me choose three or four of whom I can be absolutely certain.”

  “That sounds better, Denis. I cannot be sure of coming back to Algiers, and what I must do is to put trusted friends in touch with our Intelligence service. If you give your consent, a specially trained man will be sent here to contact you and arrange to furnish you with money and supplies.”

  “That would be a serious proposal for an officer of the French Army to accept, even a demobilized officer. I would prefer that you put it before the group I will bring together. You know how it is when you have pledged yourself and accepted a leader.”

  The other replied: “It will be much better for me to be dealing with a group, and with someone of whom I am not personally quite so fond. Let me meet not more than four other persons and tell them my story—but not all of it. Let me be the judge of that. You say nothing, except to vouch for me personally.”

  “It’s a deal,” said the young officer, speaking American. “I will send you a note to this hotel. It will be signed, let us say ‘Annette,’ for code.” That was the name of Denis’s devoted young wife, whom he had not seen for a year and a half. “It will be better to use a woman’s name,” he explained; “for then, if a spy should read it, he will assume that it is an assignation.”

  “O.K.,” said Lanny, and went back to his hotel room. He spent half an hour typing a report. He double-sealed it and addressed it to Mr. Robert Murphy, Counselor of the United States Embassy. Next morning he went walking. On the street he picked up an intelligent-looking Arab lad and offered him twenty francs to deliver the letter to the Consulate, just across the street from the Admiralty. Ten francs when he started, and the other ten afterward, Lanny said. He went up in the ascenseur of an office building and saw the letter handed in at the door. He smiled to himself, considering it something of a joke on the genial career man mentioned in the report. Lanny could be quite sure that as an honorable official he wouldn’t open the inside letter; but suppose he happened to be psychic!

  X

  A note from “Annette” made an appointment for the following evening. The spot agreed upon was in the Place Bugeau, near the harbor, and there happened to be a military band concert. After one of those dreadful moist and sticky hot days for which the climate of Algiers is notorious, the night was cool, and a great crowd had come out for fresh air and free entertainment. Lanny had to do some searching before he found his friend. They did not give any sign, but Denis started to walk and Lanny followed at a discreet distance.

  He was prepared to be taken into some dark alley and to dive into a cellar of underground conspirators. He didn’t relish the prospect; the alleys swarmed with Arab refugees who had no other place to sleep, and the filth was such that you hated to set foot in it. But Denis led the way along the main street, the Rue Michelet, past throngs of people on their way to the movies. He entered number 26, a modern apartment house, and waited in the entrance for his friend. Their goal was the home of Professor Henri Aboulker, a Jewish physician.

  In a drawing-room furnished in the demoded French bourgeois style, with heavy fumed oak furniture, the thickest carpets, draperies, and tapestries possible, and gilt on everything that could carry it, the P.A. was introduced to four men: first, the professor himself, nearly seventy, and crippled from World War I; he was a professor at the university medical school. Second, to the professor’s son, José by name, a medical student of twenty-two, eager, intelligent, and determined. Third, to M. d’Astier de la Vigerie, middle-aged, very French, slender and dapper, good-looking and aware of the fact, Lanny decided. The fourth man was younger and wore the garb of the Jesuit order; he was the Abbé Cordier, and it soon became evident that he regarded D’Astier as his leader.

  The capitaine had complied with Lanny’s request to say nothing except that here was an old friend and the bearer of impor
tant news. Lanny revealed to them that he was an agent of the American government, sent to gather data and report on the prospects in the event of an American landing in French North Africa; he desired to be informed concerning every aspect of the situation, and would arrange for Intelligence agents to get in touch with the most dependable persons. He requested that these friends of his old and very dear friend tell him as much as they were willing about themselves, their organizations, their plans, and their hopes.

  They did this freely. The doctor was president of the Algerian Jewish Federation. He reported that the large population of his people were chafing under the shameful restrictions which the local government had imposed upon them—compelled, of course, by the Vichyites, compelled, in turn, by the Nazis. José declared that the Jewish youth were ready, to rise to the last one; but they could do nothing until they had arms. If they acted prematurely they would bring on only a frightful pogrom. Lanny replied that all American and British broadcasts to France were warning the population to do nothing until they received orders; and this applied to Jews more than to any others of the population.

  D’Astier de la Vigerie was one of the organizers of the “Chantiers de la Jeunesse,” an Algerian youth organization with all the Fascist trimmings. He now assured Lanny that this was mostly camouflage, that secret propaganda had been carried on, and that his four thousand young people—their ages up to twenty—despised the collaboraters and would put themselves at the service of the Americans to do whatever was desired. Denis de Bruyne put in the remark that the youngsters adored M. d’Astier and called him “Chief.” The Abbé Cordier added that these facts were well known to Mr. Robert Murphy, who was counting upon them in his plans.

  All this, of course, was good news and a source of satisfaction to an itinerant investigator. He spent several hours questioning these gentlemen and storing their replies in his mind. The intricacies of French politics presented few mysteries to the son of Budd-Erling, for he had watched them for a long time, and on this African shore he found everything reproduced in miniature. He was somewhat startled to learn that the youth leader and the abbé were royalists, that is to say, followers of the Comte de Paris, the pretender to the throne of a monarchy which had been dead for more than a century. This meant that they were the most fanatical of all French reactionaries, devotees of Roman Catholicism in its unreconstructed medieval form. The group in Paris had been headed by Charles Maurras and Léon Daudet, publishers of ferociously abusive newspapers and tireless conspirators against the Third Republic.

  Lanny wondered, had Denis come out of the war a “subject” of this Comte, who was at present a refugee in Spanish Morocco, under the protection of a Catholic-Fascist Caudillo? The American reminded himself that all three of the De Bruynes, father and two sons, had been supporters of the Cagoule, a sort of Ku Klux Klan of France, but far more violent and deadly. Lanny listened to these two conspirators and saw the light of fanaticism in their eyes. He realized that he was keeping dangerous company; but that was a part of the game he was playing, and if the readers of L’Action Française were willing to help save the lives of American soldiers, they must surely be allowed to do it. Five years ago F.D.R. had explained to his new agent that there were millions of Catholics who were not French royalists but loyal American citizens, and who controlled a mass of votes without which there could be no Democratic Party. So he had sent his friend Admiral Leahy to pray with the old Maréchal in Vichy, and the Catholic Mr. Murphy to Algiers to line up a Jesuit abbé and the leader of an imitation Fascist youth group against the old Maréchal’s supporters in the colony which was the richest jewel in his crown.

  Lanny went away from that secret meeting whispering to himself: “Good Lord, we are going to take Algiers with the boy scouts!”

  XI

  While Lanny was engaged with these activities, he read the miserable newspapers which the censors plus the paper shortage permitted to the people of Algiers. Everything was treated from the propaganda point of view, the German successes played up and the Allied played down. General Rommel had begun a fierce attack against the British line, which had seesawed back and forth over a distance of some five hundred miles and had been established west of Tobruk. After a week or two of fierce fighting, the British were beginning to show signs of weakening, and this made a deep impression upon the rest of North Africa, both the Europeans and the natives. Lanny could see doubt and fear in the eyes of his friends, and exultation in the eyes of the near-Fascists whom he had to pretend to hold as friends.

  At the same time the Germans on the eastern front launched the tremendous attack in the Ukraine which they had been preparing for many months. They, too, made gains, and the pro-Vichy newspapers hailed these as the beginning of the end. When the British chose this time to make a twenty-year military alliance with the Soviet Union, this seemed to complete the Vichy case. “You see,” said their newspapers and radios, “just as we told you, the British Empire is the devil’s ally, and this is a war for the salvation of the Christian world.” When the elegant ladies of the colonial plutocracy echoed this in Lanny’s presence, he expressed regret that his recently shattered legs made it impossible for him to play a soldier’s role in this conflict. These ladies, as a rule, distrusted Americans as socially dubious, but they had learned that the son of Budd-Erling had been honored with the friendship of Admiral Darlan and had even been received by le vieux lui-même.

  There were successes to counterbalance the Allied defeats, but these the Algiers newspapers did not mention, or if they did, it was only to cast doubt upon them. London issued the claim that eleven hundred bombers had attacked Cologne, and in the short time of an hour and a half had destroyed a great part of the city’s industries. Vichy said that claim was absurd on the face of it; there weren’t enough airfields in Britain to launch such a number of big planes at one time, and they would have bumped into one another in the sky. It was the same when the American Navy claimed to have destroyed a great part of a Japanese Fleet by air attack near Midway. Nobody from Vichy had been there to see it; nobody but Americans had been there, and it was obvious that they were making up stories to keep their public satisfied.

  There was an “Armistice Commission” of the Germans and Italians in Algiers, for the purpose of seeing that the French obeyed the orders of their conquerors. That meant hundreds of Nazis, both military and civilian, and Lanny might have met some of them and sought to trade on his old-time friendship. But he didn’t think he could get anything out of any Nazi now, and it seemed to him the part of wisdom to meet as few as he could and to be the ivory-tower art lover, wholly aloof from a cruel war into which his country had been dragged by forces beyond any art lover’s control. The Germans would have their doubts about such an attitude, but their spies would be unable to disprove it.

  XII

  Lanny’s various art purchases had been properly packed, and arrangements had been made for shipment, no easy matter, requiring influence and many pourboires. In these days of food shortages and black markets, everybody’s palm was held out, and you couldn’t blame him, poor devil. Robbie Budd’s son had been taught from childhood that the way to get along in the world was to have plenty of money and to distribute it freely; this attitude had been confirmed, as a war measure, by no less an authority than the Commander-in-Chief of his country’s Armed Forces. Lanny spent; and while he dared not keep any written records, he kept in mind a rough estimate of what he had expended as a P.A., and when he got back to New York he would withdraw that amount from the account which F.D.R. had established for him.

  He was going to French Morocco, partly because Casablanca was a convenient place from which to jump off, and partly because he had been told that Moroccan mosaics were even finer than those in Algiers. Also, he reflected that if any of the collaborators had become suspicious of his activities, it would be better that he should manifest interest in more than one part of the African coast. From the Mediterranean port to the Atlantic port was some twelve hundred miles a
s the planes flew, and he would keep the enemy’s mind jumping from one to the other.

  The evening before his departure Lanny spent in the home of the Jewish doctor, along with Denis and the other three conspirators. They had gone to work with renewed ardor as a result of his assurances and they had much to report. Later they turned on the long-distance radio set and heard the voice of an announcer: “Ici Londres.” He introduced the hero of the Free French, General de Gaulle, and the five conspirators listened to that fervid oratory which had so thrilled French refugees all over the world. It wasn’t so good this time, because the orator devoted most of his talk to scolding the American government for continuing in its refusal to recognize his government as the one and only representative of France. It was made quite evident that this Jeanne d’Arc in striped military trousers had little love in his heart for Americans; and this was embarrassing to the four Frenchmen who had agreed that America was the only power in the world that might be able to help the French to freedom.

  They talked about the problem, and Lanny explained the position of his government, that to recognize De Gaulle as the sole French authority would mean a formal break with Vichy and would have the effect of closing a window into the Axis world. Lisbon and Stockholm were other such windows, but not to be compared with Vichy. “There are millions of Frenchmen who are loyal to the old Marshal, but who hate the Germans, and these people help us and we can help them,” Lanny argued. “But if we should break with Vichy, or force Vichy to break with us, all that would come to an end. I personally am here because of that contact, and the same thing applies to Murphy and his vice-consuls. We don’t want to fight you, and surely it’s important that we have a chance to come here and tell you so!”