The Praetorians

by Jean Larteguy

  The chibani said:

  “My son was a strong, handsome lad. One day, because he was smoking a cigarette, they cut off his nose and his lips. So he hung himself. The man who did that was living on women and took a rake-off from every basga-player. He, too, smoked. What man has the right to condemn another for what he does himself? Never have the French cut off anyone’s nose, tongue or lips.”

  As they went by, men crouching against the walls whistled softly through their teeth to warn the others of their arrival. They said of them: “They’re Arabs, but at the same time they’re with the French,” and that did not appear irreconcilable.

  But when Mahmoudi, Aicha or the old sergeant-major asked a specific question like “Will you come tomorrow?” the inhabitants of the Kasbah grew suddenly suspicious and merely repeated:

  “Manarf, if it is God’s will.”

  In the darkness old gramophones blared out love songs that were fashionable five years before in Cairo or Beirut. The moonlight played on the washing hanging from the windows.

  “They won’t come,” said Mahmoudi.

  But more than twenty thousand of them had come and the captain felt himself being swept forward by them towards the Forum, where, for the last three days, the Europeans had been celebrating a new cult alone.

  Glatigny appeared on the terrace of the Government General, slim and elegant, wearing no decorations on his light-coloured summer uniform. Esclavier arrived behind him, his battledress blouse wide open, his cap in his pocket, his waist confined in a webbing belt. He was accompanied by a gigantic Negro officer, who wore his badges of rank on the red background of the Army Medical Corps. Captain Pinières, with his arm in a sling, jumped over the window-sill without supporting himself and almost fell into the sand. His red hair gleamed like flames in the sunshine.

  “The whole of the 10th Regiment is here,” said Françoise. “Only Raspéguy is missing. I have a feeling they’re up to one of their tricks again. They say that last night a company commanded by Boisfeuras surrounded the Commander-in-Chief’s residence. The captain is reported to have said to the Tojun: ‘A bazooka at fifty yards may miss its target, but a sub-machine-gun at one yard, never!’”

  “That surprises me,” said Pasfeuro, “for Boisfeuras has a certain fellow-feeling for Salan. He’s a Chinaman, like himself!”

  Generals Salan and Massu appeared on the balcony, greeted by a great cry of delight from the crowd below. The cry reverberated and was amplified in this huge ancient theatre, hemmed in on one side by the tall buildings overlooking the Government General and offering on the other an unbroken view of the sea, now empty of shipping, where the sun sparkled like toy mirrors on the deep-blue, almost black, water.

  “From Dunkirk to Tamanrasset fifty-five million Frenchmen and ten million Algerians forming a single entity.”

  Françoise started weeping.

  “What’s wrong?” Malistair asked her.

  “You can’t understand. It’s extraordinary what’s happening to us. Here we are at last rid of that solitude complex which made us so unbearable. Fifty-five million Frenchmen from Dunkirk to Tamanrasset—and no longer one million Europeans against nine million Arabs and forty-five million from Metropolitan France.”

  “Am I hearing right?” asked Pasfeuro. “It’s integration that has just been proclaimed? And by Frenchmen who only a week ago rejected the idea of mixed schools!”

  “Just listen to them shouting and clapping! In Algeria we’re not reasonable creatures like you; sentiment always gets the better of reason.”

  “Think what this means, Françoise,” Pasfeuro went on. “It means raising eight million Arabs to the same standard of life as the French and giving them full citizenship, though most of them can’t read or write and are polygamous.”

  “The French are also polygamous,” Malistair chipped in.

  “No, I can’t believe it. It’s just another trick of our little pals behind us. They’re trying to impress Metropolitan France; France could not in all decency fight against an Algeria in which French and Moslems have come to an agreement. If the military succeed in giving this impression Paris will capitulate. Integration’s just a word, a psychological-warfare tactic, or else plain madness. . . .”

  “In any case, the word is launched,” Glatigny observed. “Look what’s become of your word, Boisfeuras. It’s been taken up by a thousand voices. We shall never be masters of it again.”

  “Si Mellial told me: ‘In the face of a word like Istiqlal, Independence, you’ll need one that is just as strong.’ Can you tell me what other word than ‘Integration’ we had to bite on?”

  “I sleep with a Moslem girl, yet I can’t accept it.”

  “Maybe because sleeping with a Moslem leads to too many problems?”

  “I recognize the same rights for the Moslems as for us. They are our equals, but they’re still different, and to try to assimilate them would be to force them to betray their own civilization and ours as well.”

  “What have Ferhat Abbas and the nationalists who gave birth to the F.L.N. been demanding for the last thirty years? Integration. That’s what we’re proclaiming today.”

  “They wanted it yesterday, today they’re demanding something else.”

  Esclavier came over to them:

  “What a face Uncle de Gaulle’s going to pull! To him an Arab will always be an Arab, and a Frenchman a Frenchman. The Frenchman’s a Christian, the Arab’s a Moslem. One is clear-minded, he’s the son of Descartes, the other has a jumble of baroque ideas and dreams in his head. And de Gaulle’s the one who is going to be asked to make this bewildering synthesis!”

  Boisfeuras buried his fingers in Dia’s shoulder:

  “Mahmoudi has won; the Moslems are arriving with their banners and flags. They’re coming up the Boulevard Lafarrière.”

  On the balcony a man suddenly announced in a ringing voice:

  “I have great news for you. Our Moslem brothers are coming to join us.”

  Pasfeuro was kicking the wall in fury:

  “They’re first-rate stage-managers, our little pals. With the help of the S.A.U.* officers, who have found their customers from among the people they administer, they have put on a gigantic show.”

  Now the flood of Moslems began to stream in. There were five thousand at first, then ten thousand, then thirty thousand; men, women, boys and girls, singing the “Marseillaise” and waving flags. After a moment’s hesitation the two crowds mingled and fused together.

  “This is more than stage-management,” the journalist said to himself. “This time there’s really something afoot. . . .”

  “Well, do you still think all these people are just dummies?” Françoise shouted to him.

  The man standing behind the microphone demanded in the same ringing voice:

  “Stand back there to make room for our Moslem brothers!”

  Here was the fusion of the iron and the bronze, in the heat of this oven in which two hundred thousand people were kissing and embracing one another and laughing.

  The Moslems at first made as though to withdraw; then they looked, smiled, and with a great sigh of relief they in their turn shook hands and kissed.

  “Join hands,” shouted the loudspeaker. “Make a chain of friendship.”

  All hands stretched out, clasped their neighbours’. They were stiff and tense at first, then slackened in one another’s grasp.

  “Tear off your veils,” Aicha ordered a small group of young Moslem girls, “you’re free now.”

  A few haiks were doffed. A young girl next to Aicha, with dark, damp eyes, looked at her uncertainly, so Aicha tore her veil off with her own hands. The young girl made as though to draw away, then her face beamed and, with an automatic reaction, she patted her hair into place.

  An old French labourer had seized Mahmoudi’s hand in his. He grasped it violently, almost until it
hurt, and two tears coursed down his weatherbeaten cheeks.

  “Why have we waited so long?” he asked. “It was so simple.”

  “Yes, why indeed?”

  In the group of journalists Françoise Baguèras was weeping and laughing:

  “We’ve come out of the nightmare: the war, the outrages, the torture, the farms burnt down and the women raped! And you wanted me to follow you to America, Malistair, to leave a country like this! There are no more miracles in the world except in Algiers. That’s why I shall stay here for the rest of my life. Give me your handkerchief . . . and a cigarette.”

  Malistair hung his head, for he did not believe in this miracle.

  Among the officers Dia had started dancing on the spot. His body swayed imperceptibly, his eyes were closed, his nostrils distended; he was inhaling this crowd, its enthusiasm and its joy.

  “It’s wonderful, men and women embracing in their thousands after hating each other’s guts and throwing in each other’s face their religion, their past, their country.

  “They have been released from the fear they had of each other and are surprised to see how easy it was.

  “Glatigny, Esclavier, Pinières and even you, Boisfeuras, do you realize we’ve been forgiven, that all these people kissing one another have come to give us their absolution?

  “We’ve been forgiven for the mechtas of Rahlem and the battle of Algiers, forgiven for Si Mellial and Ben Mohadi, for the fells smoked to death in their caves and those shot at first light on wood-gathering duty.

  “We’re as new as children who have just been baptized. Here He is, back again, that great warm-hearted merry God who seemed to have abandoned us. When we felt we had suffered sufficiently He laughed that great full-bellied laugh of His, and suddenly there’s this crowd in one another’s arms.

  “You’ve got tears in your eyes, Esclavier, because you have just found Souen again; and you, Pinières, because My Oi, whom the Viets strangled to death at Dalat, is once again by your side, with our little pal Merle. You, Glatigny, you’re forgiven for the bombs on the Meo Pass, which you have never forgotten, and you know you now have the right to love your little Aicha.

  “There’s nothing to be seen in your expression, Boisfeuras, but of all of us you’re the most deeply moved; your laugh won’t grate on our ears any more.

  “I, Dia, am happy, I have found you all again, and also Lescure and his flute and the sacred rhythms of the great forest of the Guerzés. I’ve lost my Negro colour. After Indo-China I was a Negro among you white men, and I suffered from that. Today I haven’t any colour, race and colour no longer exist, but only a love which is going to clean up everything in the world!”

  “Have you seen the darkie?” Plumet of Radio Europe asked a reporter on Match. “He’s gone barmy. I don’t know what he’s talking about, but he’s stamping and pawing the ground. His little pals ought to take him home. He’s got a touch of the sun.”

  “What a life!” said Sergeant Molintard to Péladon and Videban, who were with him on guard in front of the railings. “This is the eighth bit of skirt I’ve had to tumble. All of them old and fat, not a single attractive one. And now all the young bints are joining in the fun!”

  “I saw a little bint who’d just taken off her veil,” said Péladon. “She wasn’t half bad. Why is it we can’t get married to these bints? They tell me they’re pretty hot stuff in bed.”

  “Not bad,” Molintard confirmed condescendingly. “It must be something to do with religion that stops us marrying them. But now, with this integration lark, it ought to be all right.”

  “I’m going to try and find that little one I saw just now,” Péladon concluded.

  Colonel Puysanges caught hold of Arcinade’s arm.

  “The colonel’s gone mad,” the tubby little man thought to himself. “He’s going to tear my sleeve.”

  “Arcinade, I want the men who organized this show in the Forum.”

  “But will they want you, Colonel?”

  “Have they been in touch with Restignes again?”

  “No, but it won’t be long before they are. You realize, don’t you, Colonel, that all this show of fraternization is faked?”

  “Everything’s faked: love, war, politics.

  “If you have any news of Restignes let me know at once. It’s astounding what they’ve done here, these prætorians of ours. Now they can choose the Caesars they want.”

  * * * *

  Comrade Lamentin was also at the Forum. He had found a place on the balcony of a building and was watching the spectacle through the binoculars of his host, a school-teacher like himself. His reflections were those of a conscientious and efficient crowd-technician:

  “The guiding element behind the crowd has not held firm. It was too fluid and those who were responsible for it must have lacked specific instructions. And now this crowd has been left to its own devices, swollen into a vast, dangerous mob which no one is controlling any longer.

  “Sheer chance, the impulse given at the outset, has led to this explosion becoming an enormous fraternization movement. But what a risk they have run!

  “The delegations should have succeeded one another without a break, submitting motions carefully drafted in advance, the leaders of the movement remaining permanently out on the balcony.

  “There’s a lack of professional technique about it all . . . and with such splendid material too!”

  A smile came over Lamentin’s face. His colleague looked at him in astonishment.

  “What’s wrong with you, my dear fellow?”

  “I was just thinking that today, for the first time, it would have amused me to be a paratroop colonel.”

  * * * *

  On the 17th, 18th and 19th of May more and more Moslems turned up at the Forum. They came from Algiers, but also from all parts of the Sahel and the Mitidja; the army’s and settlers’ trucks were no longer sufficient to transport them. For the first time since the start of the revolt, in the towns, in the villages, and even in the tumbledown mechtas at the foot of the mountains, the Moslems felt that what was going on in Algiers, in that tiled square, concerned them as much as the Europeans.

  A great relief mingled with astonishment spread through the whole of Algeria. In the willayas the kattiba leaders no longer dared to give orders to their men for fear of seeing them desert.

  In three days the movement of May 13th had swept away all the old administration of free communes, as well as the new one with its prefects and sub-prefects.

  Even so, Glatigny had had to dispatch Captain Orsini to Constantine with orders to persuade the super-prefect and two generals, who were being difficult, to understand the situation more clearly.

  Orsini set off in the middle of the night with a dozen paratroopers and carried out his comrade’s mild instructions with his customary ruthlessness.

  Glatigny had to recall Orsini to Algiers; then, since there were still some difficulties in Corsica, which Lieutenant Mattei, who was entrusted with the task of rallying the island, had not been able to solve, he sent him out the little captain, who suddenly felt far less sure of himself and embarrassed at being among his own folk again.

  On May 17th, at half past one in the afternoon, Soustelle landed at Maison-Blanche airport after escaping from Paris in melodramatic circumstances. Salan hastened to block his way. He did not want anyone else to rob him of the revolution and the popularity he had just found for himself in the Forum. But he arrived too late; Algiers learnt in a few minutes that the former Governor General was there and the soldiers on guard at the airport cheered him.

  The Gaullists acted quickly and once again Colonel Puysanges admired the technique and speed of the little group of officers round Glatigny and Bonvillain. But he was beginning to take fright, and was already preparing to spring his trap for them, for none of them had replied to his approaches. To his chief he suggested mod
eration and “coming to some arrangement” with this setback, for, he said, “certain elements of the army, in a state of over-excitement, might go to any lengths of disobedience.”

  The “setback” thus found himself offered all the attributes of the Minister of Algeria, Lacoste’s official car and office, and the Villa des Oliviers as his residence.

  Soustelle refused all this and accepted only the extremely vague post of adviser, which made it possible for him to put the Tojun in a compromising position and at the same time not commit himself too deeply with this man whose aims were still as obscure as ever, who belonged to too many people, too many parties, too many sects. And, besides, did not Salan derive his powers from the régime?

  Soustelle decided to act as the prophet of integration during an extensive tour of the towns of Algeria.

  On May 19th Jean Restignes dispatched one of his servants with a brief note for Major de Glatigny:

  “Dear friend,

  “I should be delighted to meet you and your brother-officer Esclavier. The best thing would be for you to come to my house at eight tomorrow morning. We shall be able to discuss matters in peace and quiet.”

  The writing was spindly, elegant, slightly feminine, and the hastily scrawled signature betrayed irritation.

  That evening Esclavier, who was dining with Boisfeuras, asked his comrade what he knew about Restignes.

  “More or less nothing. But he worked for my father in the Far East for a couple of years. It was long before the war, and Restignes was still on the threshold of his career.

  “My father remembers him as an extremely intelligent, enterprising, self-sufficient person with a remarkable gift for analysing political situations. He recognized in him a sound business sense and even a feeling for schemes on a grand scale, could well have imagined him as leader of a political party or becoming an excellent Minister, but not Prime Minister: too unstable, over-sensitive, always in need of a protector. Restignes generally selects his protectors from people of inferior capacity to his own, but who are more eager for advancement and have none of those twinges of conscience which plague him.