The Praetorians

by Jean Larteguy

  * * * *

  Mohadi’s guests, Boisfeuras, Esclavier and Pellegrin, sat in deep leather armchairs, in their host’s library, drinking champagne out of crystal glasses. His wife, with an imperceptible gesture, motioned to the servant when a glass was in need of refilling. She must have been a good housewife.

  She was fair and buxom; her skin had that particular clarity of really pampered women. Esclavier, who was sitting next to her, felt she was on edge, nervous to the point of making him feel uncomfortable.

  Pellegrin alone seemed perfectly at ease, pecking at the almonds in the dishes. He picked a book up from one of the tables.

  “So you read Sade, do you?”

  “Do you like him?” asked Mohadi.

  “No. He was a queer and an idler. When he tried to discuss any other subject but buttocks he argued like an old boot. It takes all the stupidity, all the boredom, of our age to have brought him back into fashion. And he couldn’t even write! But you and I, Mohadi, have got something else besides these dirty-minded schoolboys’ amusements, haven’t we? This war offers us distractions that are more stimulating, but also more dangerous.”

  Pellegrin put the book down and faced his host. Mohadi saw nothing reassuring in the placid face of the sub-prefect. He turned to Boisfeuras, who was dipping a biscuit in his champagne and saying nothing. But Boisfeuras looked up. His eyes, which changed in colour, had gone yellow behind his half-closed lids.

  Mohadi realized that with Boisfeuras and Pellegrin he was up against men of his own calibre, dangerous, pitiless and well aware of all his activities. But he insisted on going through with this mad poker game, in which each player looked in silence at his cards, knowing full well what his opponents held.

  Esclavier stood up:

  “We must get back before the curfew.”

  “Why?” Pellegrin asked. “We’re enjoying ourselves. Tomorrow we’ve got to bury poor old Leroy. Raspéguy will make a funeral oration at the graveside, and as that old bastard knows how to twist your guts I’m bound to shed a tear or two. Besides, Leroy was a friend of mine. May I have another glass of wine, Mohadi?”

  All of a sudden he addressed him by the familiar tu:

  “It’s first-class, your bubbly! Fundamentally, there’s quite a resemblance between us, because we don’t believe in anything, except you in your interests, and me in my friends. What intoxicates us is the big gamble, at the end of which lies life or death; it’s the last stake.”

  “Listen, Pellegrin—since we’re talking of gambling and calling each other ‘tu’—there are some people who always back a number which is bound to lose. Something has gone wrong with the roulette wheel, and it can’t come up. They do it with a sort of perverse obstinacy and then they’re angry with the others because they’ve lost. . . . You French——”

  “I thought you were French as well.”

  Mohadi made a gesture with his hand and went on:

  “You’re backing numbers that will never come up. After Indo-China it was Morocco and Tunisia, now it’s Algeria.”

  Boisfeuras rose to his feet and rasped out:

  “You know what a martingale is, Mohadi: you keep losing for a long time before winning anything, and then suddenly a run of numbers comes up and you make a big pile. But what interests you, and in this perhaps you’re like us, is first and foremost the gamble, and only secondarily winning. If you were nothing but a politician you would be sitting pretty at Tunis without running any risk. But gambling is in your blood, as it is in Pellegrin’s, and in mine. With Esclavier it’s a little different; our friend is more complicated and needs to mingle regrets and subtleties with the brutal pleasure of gambling.

  “So here are all four of us sitting round this poker table. The cards are dealt, everyone is bluffing, of course, but you, Mohadi, you’re cheating. You’ve got another card up your sleeve.

  “Esclavier is right; we must be off. We’re the ones who imposed the curfew. It’s only natural we should set a good example by abiding by it.

  “Did you know Captain Leroy was blind drunk when he was walking back to his barracks?”

  Mohadi did not frown; he did know.

  Mohadi’s wife, a Frenchwoman from Tours, showed the guests out, while her husband stayed behind dreaming among his pornographic books.

  She seized Pellegrin by the arm and said to him in a curious flat voice, without the slightest expression on her face:

  “It’s Lucien who had Captain Leroy killed. He wanted to make an example of him.”

  Pellegrin gave an odd sort of laugh, deep down in his throat:

  “Do you think we didn’t know, my beauty?”

  Then, in a cynical tone of voice:

  “Don’t worry, we’re very grateful to you for the information.”

  And all of a sudden, almost tenderly:

  “We can’t help it, can we, we always remain attached to our country even when we know it’s no longer any use!”

  He kissed her on the cheek and went off.

  Two days later, towards the end of the afternoon, Boisfeuras, accompanied by his batman, and Pellegrin by four policemen, turned up at Mohadi’s house. He was alone and had sent his wife off to Algiers.

  With a smile he asked them:

  “Do you now need an escort to come and have a drink with me?”

  “I apologize,” said Boisfeuras, “but we’ve got to make a search—a pure formality, of course.”

  He took a letter out of his pocket and handed it to him. It was crumpled, written on squared paper, in a clumsy hand. Boisfeuras himself had dictated it to a Moslem orderly:

  “Ben Mohadi has got some arms hidden in his house. Mohadi is the fellagha political head. Everyone knows it.”

  “How silly,” said Mohadi, handing the letter back. “Do come in, but allow me to ring up the Government General.”

  “That will be difficult, I think. The line was cut by the rebels last night. The only way of getting through is by army wireless. Later on, if you like . . .”

  It was Boisfeuras again who had disconnected the line.

  Pellegrin came forward:

  “As sub-prefect of Z, I, of course, demanded to be present at this search. I consider it inopportune, to say the least, especially after the advice I was given in Algiers. But you know what the military are like, obstinate as Aragonese mules.

  “And this unfortunate break in the telephone line!

  “Thanks to my presence, you will at least have every guarantee. Besides, as you can see, it’s the police who will carry out the search.”

  Mohadi looked Pellegrin straight in the eye:

  “I’ve long been aware, sir, of your . . . impartiality . . .”

  “All the same, you might stand us a drink, Mohadi. We’ll just come in for a moment, and that will be all.”

  The four policemen, with their sub-machine-guns slung over their shoulders, tramped in behind them in their hob-nailed boots. Min stayed outside, leaning against the door, with his carbine in his hand.

  “A pure formality,” Boisfeuras repeated. “But we make it a rule to check every piece of information that comes in, even when it appears to have no foundation. We’ve occasionally had some odd surprises.”

  Mohadi sat with his legs crossed in one of the big leather armchairs in the library, listening to the policemen stamping about upstairs. They were in his bedroom and he visualized them turning back his mattress, opening the cupboards and turning out the drawers. He was a tidy man and the thought of all that mess made him feel extremely annoyed.

  Leaning on the window-sill and shivering slightly, like a child that feels the cold, Pellegrin gazed out on to the grey ridges of the jebel. The rain had washed the mountains clean and the sky was very bright.

  Captain Boisfeuras was examining the titles of the pornographic books:

  “Here, I say, you haven’t got
the Kin-ping-mei, I mean the complete edition. It only exists in English; the French translation has been abridged.”

  Mohadi now felt very calm, as though this business did not concern him at all. He only wondered, with a certain curiosity, how Boisfeuras would manage to find the opening to the hiding-place. But the stage effects were beginning to drag out too long. Boisfeuras was carefully taking each volume out of its shelf and putting it back again.

  Mohadi longed to know who had denounced him: Andrée, his wife, or Jacquier, his friend, his accomplice? They had not been driven to it for any great reason, both the one and the other being without any political belief; they had done it because Alexandra, that vicious little slut, had been pinned to the sand with the bayonet of an over-zealous moujahedine.

  Jacquier harboured an almost monstrous love for his daughter. Whereas he treated other women like dogs, he would grovel at her feet for a smile.

  Andrée called Alexandra her best friend, but there seemed to be an even stronger bond between the two women. It gave him a certain satisfaction to imagine their two bodies intertwined on a bed, and himself hiding behind the curtain watching their fun and games.

  That imbecile Ziad had sent in the killers to show Tunis his independence and to make things unpleasant for the leaders of Willaya 3, Si Lharba and himself, who were guilty of not having flattered his vanity sufficiently.

  Up to then the zone of Z had been under the complete control of the F.L.N. After the massacre on the beach they had not had to wait very long for the inevitable result: Raspéguy and his paratroops.

  The Moslem population, which had an almost religious fear of the “lizards,” had remained undecided and wavering, waiting to be quite sure of the victor’s name so as to rally to his side.

  Mohadi had felt that he had to make an example and, in order to impress the mob all the more deeply, it had to be a frightening one. It was then he had given orders for an officer, selected at random from among the paratroops, to be killed, tortured and mutilated, so as to exorcize the fear inspired among the inhabitants of Z by the lean soldiers in the peaked caps.

  Mohadi was sweating and drew a fine lawn handkerchief out of his pocket to mop his brow. He inhaled the scent of it, Alexandra’s scent, heady and at the same time refreshing.

  “No,” he thought to himself, “it won’t be easy to build an Algerian nation out of this mixture and decomposition of every race in the Maghreb, to force these anarchists, who are undisciplined and quarrelsome by nature, to respect law and order.”

  He remembered the cruel rejoinder of Clemenceau when he was asked what would have to be done with the war veterans:

  “Kill them all off.”

  “After independence we’ll have to liquidate all those desert rats, those willaya, mintaka and kattiba leaders, those men who are born rebels and will remain so till their dying day.”

  But around Mohadi the action was speeding up, the film was developing a breathless pace. Boisfeuras was flinging whole rows of books down on the floor. Pellegrin had left his corner by the window. The policemen were coming downstairs and their sub-machine-guns made a noise like chains as they clanked against their equipment. They filed into the room like actors in a bad play, all carrying their weapons in the same way. Boisfeuras issued an order. One of them went outside, then came back with a pick and axe.

  “Pointless,” said Mohadi. “To open it, press on the moulding, now pull it towards you.”

  The side of the bookcase swung forward, revealing the entrance to the hiding-place.

  It was a small room, nine feet by twelve, with an iron bed-stead, a deal table, an old safe with its key lying on top of it and eight big wire-bound cases piled one on top of another. The cases revealed some hand-grenades, plastic H.E., bomb cases and fuses, and machine-gun parts with their ammunition.

  In the safe were the willaya fighting funds—sixty million francs—and the list of collecting agents, with the sum each one had collected marked against his name. In a black notebook there were other names, those of French settlers and shopkeepers who paid up to be left in peace.

  Some letters, some instructions from Tunis, typewritten in French.

  “Gentlemen,” Mohadi quietly remarked, “this is a put-up job. These arms, this money, these documents, have been planted here without my knowing it.”

  “And the hiding-place,” asked Boisfeuras, “was that also made without your knowing it?”

  “That hiding-place has always been there, it was built during the war by my father, at the time we were expecting the German invasion. I sometimes used that room to entertain a girl-friend without my wife knowing about it.”

  Pellegrin gave him a slap on the back:

  “Good old Mohadi! You first made them read your dirty books, you gave them some champagne, then the bookcase swung forward; from the theoretical you went on to the practical. . . . But, by the way, we haven’t had that champagne! It can wait for another time. You see, I also believe it’s a put-up job. A trick of the F.L.N.’s, isn’t it, to win you over to their side?”

  “It may well be, my dear Monsieur Pellegrin.”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” said Boisfeuras, “but until this business is cleared up it’s my duty to keep an eye on you. I think everything will be settled by this evening and you’ll be released. In the meantime would you mind coming along with me?

  “Corporal, detail two of your men to take Monsieur Mohadi to the room next to my office. He can lie down there and have a rest. Don’t let him out of your sight. I’ve got to carry on with the search.”

  * * * *

  “What happened then?” asked Irène.

  “The room where Mohadi was locked up had a window over-looking the garden; beyond that it was open country. That window was not closed properly and it was impossible to see the policeman on guard duty standing behind a little wall. Mohadi chanced his luck; he jumped out of the window and the policeman fired—at his legs, as the regulations laid down—and he missed the prisoner. Min, Boisfeuras’s batman, heard the policeman’s shot, brought his carbine up to his shoulder and hit Mohadi right in the head.

  “A report was duly drafted, signed by the police and counter-signed by Boisfeuras.”

  “It was just a well-organized murder,” said Irène.

  “In peace-time or in any other war, yes, but not in the sort of war we had to wage in Algeria. If he had been put up for trial Mohadi might have got away with three months in prison, he might even have been acquitted. We should have lost face; the F.L.N. would have been in a stronger position in the zone of Z, which would have served them as a jumping-off point for a reconquest of Algiers, for the creation of a new network of bombs; still more people would have had their throats cut. We had been ordered to win this war. Each successive government gave us this order one after another, from Mendès to Gaillard. To win the war we had to kill Mohadi. This fellow was waging the same war as we were, he accepted the risks and must therefore have found the way in which we dealt with him perfectly normal. Like everyone else, of course, he would have preferred to live, but that wasn’t possible. His death made quite a stir. At the Hôtel Saint-Georges, at the Aletti and in various society drawing-rooms—the three places where Mohadi was always to be seen when he came to Algiers—he was given the right to this funeral oration: ‘Well, well, they got that bastard in the end.’

  “But, back in France, the ‘bastard’ became a hero. Petitions were drawn up in the schools and universities. A Mohadi committee was created, not a single member of which, of course, had ever set foot in Algeria. If Mohadi had seen their faces he would have had a good laugh, for he was our sort of a man. The Mohadi incident was a private business between people of the same world, a bloody settling of accounts. The lukewarm, the faint-hearted, the bureaucrats and do-gooders couldn’t understand it at all.

  “Meanwhile we were fighting. A series of extremely tough engagements brought us up a
gainst the kattibas of Willaya 3, who did not want to be dislodged from this zone, which contained the hide-outs, the ammunition and food stores, the infirmaries and hospitals.

  “It was the end of winter and the beginning of spring. The almond-trees were in blossom in the plains, but the peaks were still covered in snow; between them lay a sea of mud, thick, clinging mud, which you never managed to get out of. In the morning we often found ourselves lost in a mist. The fires we lit tinged it red, but were not enough to keep us warm.

  “We were never dry; the constant drizzle came through our raincoats and tents; our feet rotted in their boots and the bread we were given was always mouldy.

  “It was then, almost by accident, that I killed the leader of Willaya 3, Si Lharba.

  “Hounded down and harassed, Si Lharba had at last decided to abandon the zone of Z. I ran into him just as he was pulling out with his command post, escorted by his bodyguard, a dozen men at the most. I was moving along a ridge, he was coming up from a valley. The mist, as thick and yellow as pus, had only just cleared, which had prevented the rebels from seeing us and thus avoiding us.

  “The fight lasted perhaps five minutes. The rebels had landed up right in the middle of my company. Not one of them surrendered, and I got down to work.

  “Among the bodies I noticed two which, instead of a jellaba or denims, wore the camouflage uniform of the paratroops and our cap. At first I thought it was a couple of my men who’d been caught in their comrades’ fire; but no, it was Si Lharba and his second-in-command, Ahmoud. In Si Lharba’s wallet I found a photograph of Raspéguy, cut out of an illustrated weekly.

  “The colonel turned up immediately afterwards. Whenever the bullets began to fly he was always there. Stroking his chin with his hand, he looked at the two bodies for a long time; he even squatted down on his heels to get a closer view.

  “‘They wanted to be like us,’ he said, ‘to dress like us, maybe because they were not so very different from us. We ought to understand each other. But then, if we did, why go on fighting?