The Praetorians

by Jean Larteguy

  “That’s why he linked up with Jacquier. He despises him, turns on him if necessary, but it’s nevertheless Jacquier who holds him on the lead.

  “Only I’m pretty well certain,” Boisfeuras concluded, “that long before the 13th of May Restignes was already anxious to get rid of Jacquier. In this business he’s acting alone and on his own authority.”

  * * * *

  Restignes lived on the heights above Algiers, in a modern villa which was all french windows, so that the garden with its red and purple flowers, its pine- and eucalyptus-trees, seemed to spread right into the house.

  He greeted the two officers like old friends who had come to pay him a courtesy visit. Restignes wore a tobacco-coloured flannel suit, suède moccasins, a shirt open at the neck. Still slender and agile at the age of fifty, he looked like a tennis or polo champion. One could tell at once that he was one of those men who had been spoilt by life, had been born rich and had always remained so. His easy manner, his charm, his irony, had made him a popular figure at school and at the university and later on in the salons and ante-chambers where political reputations are made. His features were sharp and clear-cut, with the exception of his slightly fleshy chin. His eyes, which were pale and cold, were not only winning: they were also commanding.

  An Arab servant in a red fez and flowing trousers brought in coffee. They lit cigarettes and discussed horses. Restignes scrutinized the two officers closely for any sign of impatience.

  He liked the look of them, for he felt they were his sort, but he could not resist the temptation of provoking them.

  “I hear you had a big audience at your circus show in the Forum.”

  “Two hundred thousand yesterday,” Glatigny replied in the same tone. “But we could improve on that figure and pad out our programme if you agreed to do your act.”

  “What do you suggest, the flying trapeze, or a clown in the arena? I’d be too sarcastic as a clown.”

  He stood up suddenly and threw his lighted cigarette out of a bay-window overlooking the garden.

  “Gentlemen, I didn’t like some of the methods you had to use during the battle of Algiers; I even hid some Moslems, who were my friends and whom you were chasing, here in this house. . . . But last night Captain Mahmoudi came to see me. I know under what conditions you had him released and I’ve followed your experiment with the greatest interest. I realize that you wanted to go further than the plot—or putsch, shall we say—in order to solve, in a revolutionary climate, an inextricable problem. Contrary to all the acknowledged politicians, you are trying to lean on certain aspects of mass mentality—warm-heartedness, enthusiasm, fraternity—and not on hatred or folly.

  “I can feel when the wind of chance blows certain men forward and carries them away; at such times I like to be on their side. Rationally speaking, you can’t win, but there’s this wind blowing you forward and all these Moslems coming over to you. . . .

  “Last night Mahmoudi and I had a dream. We happen to be, for a few days longer, in one of those periods of grace in which any dream is possible. I have therefore decided to make you a party to this one and even to suggest that we realize it together. What I am offering you is peace in Algeria.”

  He clapped his hands.

  “Ahmed, bring us some champagne. My wild dream of last night has survived the light of dawn, but it has to be nourished all the same. We’re going to drink, which I hardly ever do, especially in the morning.”

  The champagne was served and Restignes raised his glass.

  “I drink to our project. As I told you, it’s utterly wild . . . and it has taken an untold number of hazards to create this situation for it to become possible.”

  Restignes’s voice was warm, friendly, rich in inflexions, but Esclavier noticed that his eyes remained blank and cold, as though they were the uncommitted onlookers of the rest of his personality.

  He went on, with his hands in his pockets, bending slightly back from the waist:

  “You had General Salan cheered in the Forum by people who would not have shed a tear if his assailants’ aim had been better. You had the name of Charles de Gaulle acclaimed by the French Algerians, who have never been able to stand that cold-blooded, haughty northerner. I too want to stand for election in the Forum; I want the homage of that crowd which you have got so well in hand. Some of them hate me, others like me, but they all know me. It will be much easier than for our Commander-in-Chief.”

  “And afterwards?” asked Glatigny.

  “I love Algeria, even though I wasn’t born here. Between the urge I feel to leave a great project stamped with my name and the attachment I have towards this country, the attachment is what counts more. For my project to succeed I shall even be prepared to take a back seat.

  “I live every moment of the tragedy of Algeria in both camps. Through my family, I belong to the big settlers . . .”

  “You belong most of all to Jacquier,” Esclavier thought to himself. He felt an insolent remark rising to his lips, but he bit it back.

  “. . . through my friends and acquaintances, I’m attached to the Moslem intelligentzia, the French liberals and also the big-business circles which generally view a situation objectively.

  “Ferhat Abbas is one of my friends, today as yesterday.”

  Suddenly he assumed a ruthless tone:

  “The movement born on May 13th cannot be left in the hands of simple-minded adventurers, obtuse politicians and disgracefully ambitious generals. It must not be stopped but drawn out to its full extent. What differentiates a revolution from a coup d’état is its extent. A revolution affects a whole people, a coup d’état concerns a single individual or a team.

  “You begin by putting me in the saddle at the Forum, which will win you over a certain number of nationalist Moslems and, with them, some Frenchmen who know that privileges can’t be maintained indefinitely.

  “We have all these people enrolled in the Public Safety Committees. You, the military, stand behind them. Being more intelligent than the narrow-minded extremists or men of straw who now constitute these committees, they will become masters of them.

  “Second stage of the operation: we create a revolutionary atmosphere, we bring the kettle to the boil. Then, with one of you, I go off to Switzerland and bring back Ferhat Abbas.”

  “He’ll slam the door in our faces!”

  “No. I can promise you he’ll follow us. We take him to the Forum and with him we once again proclaim integration: then no one will doubt it any longer, either in Algeria or anywhere else in the world. We shall see the external revolution collapse, the willaya chiefs abandoned by their men and reduced, if they don’t rally to us, to being mere gang leaders without popular support.”

  “I’m against integration,” Glatigny quietly declared. “It’s quite impossible.”

  “It must lead to something further. We must first of all piece together all those separate elements which make up Algeria, and integration is the only cement possible. Afterwards Algeria will proceed quite naturally to a form of independence within the framework of the community.

  “By stirring up this country, by exploiting all its revolutionary power, by making financial sacrifices, of course, we shall recover our influence in the Maghreb and throughout Africa. . . .”

  “Heavens, what a glorious prospect!” Esclavier exclaimed. “But to put your plan into operation, we’ll need some time. . . .”

  “A week, or else it will be too late.”

  “I agree,” said Glatigny, “even though it means alienating certain elements of the military establishment. At eleven o’clock tomorrow, Monsieur Restignes, you’ll speak at the Forum.”

  “What about Soustelle?” asked Esclavier.

  Restignes made a gesture with his hand:

  “He’s no friend of mine, but why shouldn’t he be? Explain this plan to him. Because he’s intelligent, because all his
revolutionary youth will rise to the fore again, he may well accept it.”

  The three men went out into the garden. Restignes stooped down to straighten the stem of a flower which had bent in the wind.

  “Till tomorrow, gentlemen,” he said to them.

  As he and Glatigny retraced their steps down the gravelled path in the garden, Esclavier made a gesture of triumph at the big trees through which the early sun filtered in gentle rays.

  “I’ve never felt such a thrill at being young! No doubt it’s not my own youth, but the youth of this morning when anything seems possible.”

  PART TWO

  NIGHT IN THE ADRAR

  The geographer El Yakoubi (last half of the ninth

  century) uses the word Sahara as a synonym of cemetery.

  ROBERT CAPOT-REY, Le Sahara français

  9

  THE FARAWAY PRINCESS

  “And what was the result?” asked Irène.

  “The result is that I’m at Saint-Gilles, describing my campaigns like an old dotard. Boisfeuras is dead. Glatigny has resigned himself to serving loyally the master he has chosen for himself. The rest of us refer to him contemptuously as the ‘Unconditional One.’ Mahmoudi has fled to Tunis and gone over to the F.L.N. No doubt we’re going to lose Algeria, but in dishonourable conditions and with further bloodshed.

  “The Restignes project fell flat. Yet I lived through that morning when anything was possible. . . . I have never felt such a thrill in the whole of my life—something which gets you by the guts and the heart and sets your head on fire.

  “We were no more than a handful of officers and soldiers, but we were the ones that fate had chosen, on the morning of May 20th, to change the course of our country, lift her out of her dead-end and launch her on a fresh destiny. Boisfeuras understood this at once; this sort of enterprise was in keeping with his past and his character. For a long time he had been waiting for this tide which would carry him out to some great adventure. He knew at once that we would have to act quickly, to see it through to the end and not hesitate to kill if necessary.

  “But Glatigny and I were afraid. The West found in us the defenders it deserved: two worthy little bourgeois!”

  “What happened to Restignes?” asked Urbain Donadieu.

  “Restignes went back to France and was never seen again in Algeria. He came to see me at the Val-de-Grâce and this is more or less what he said: ‘My dear Captain, I’m like certain gamblers: when I’ve lost a packet in the casino I don’t set foot in there again.’

  “As provoking as ever. But it hurt him to have to leave Algeria. As he left, after offering me a directorship in one of his businesses—a post deliberately created for my benefit—he said again: ‘You see what a bad gambler I am!’”

  “For a long time everyone thought that de Gaulle would make him a Minister.”

  “It was difficult, Monsieur Donadieu. Restignes isn’t easy to get on with; he is insolent and a bad mixer. However that may be, Restignes worked hard, if only for a few days, for integration.”

  “This time I must take some notes,” Irène said to herself. “I’ve never heard about this intervention of Restignes’s on the 13th of May. At the time it was vaguely hinted that there had been contacts with Ferhat Abbas, but no one has ever been able to give an exact date or name the intermediary through whom the contacts were made. If I’m to believe Philippe the whole world was topsy-turvy—the paratroops plotting to bring peace to Algeria, the torturers of the battle of Algiers shoving Ferhat Abbas forward on the balcony of the Forum!”

  “Your project involved a great many risks,” observed Urbain Donadieu. “There was not much chance of its succeeding.”

  “You forget the atmosphere of the Forum, that sort of basin where every day two thousand people produced, like generators, those waves which electrify a whole country, turn cowards into heroes, misers into prodigals. . . . The whole town was transformed. All social barriers had melted away. Algiers wallowed in eroticism, although puritan by nature, and in generosity, although it’s one of the most selfish towns in the world.

  “Bristling with flags and pennants, throbbing and screaming, the frigid woman had just woken to love. . . .”

  “What happened afterwards?” said Irène, who was getting impatient.

  Esclavier hung his head:

  “It was not quite ten o’clock in the morning when we met Boisfeuras in the Government General. He was coming out of a meeting of the Public Safety Committee which had been somewhat stormy. Bonvillain had left in a rage and the Tojun was continuing to oppose Soustelle, de Gaulle’s emissary, whom he didn’t want.

  “In an empty office we explained Restignes’s project to Boisfeuras. He listened with eyes closed, and his beaky nose twitched in his flat Chinaman’s face. We felt that our words were falling into him as though into a cave, where all sorts of echoes repeated and amplified them.

  “‘At one moment I envied Marindelle,’ he said, ‘because he was being parachuted into France, but that’s a mere adventure. It’s only in Algiers that the great game will be played and we’re the ones that hold the cards!’

  “Like us, Boisfeuras was suffering under a delusion. We didn’t hold the cards very long. We had decided to assemble the officers and N.C.O.s of the 10th Regiment at three o’clock to tell them what we were planning to do. Afterwards we would have to persuade Bonvillain to take us to Soustelle, and Soustelle to agree to a meeting with Restignes.

  “Having a substantial crowd of Moslems in the Forum at our disposal, we would have no difficulty in having Restignes acclaimed, which would enable us to face the Tojun with a fait accompli.

  “We eventually found ourselves in the villa at Birmandreis with Mahmoudi, Glatigny, Dia, Pinières and a dozen officers belonging to other parachute regiments whom we had picked up in the Forum.

  “While helping ourselves to Boisfeuras’s whisky—he must have stayed behind at the Government General—we heatedly discussed Restignes’s presence in our movement——”

  Irène corrected him:

  “It wasn’t a movement, it was merely a plot, a putsch. . . .”

  “Don’t forget that by then this putsch had succeeded and assumed such dimensions in the Forum that it had gone beyond its initial scope. The appearance of Restignes and the unexpected extension this gave to our action tended to disturb a certain number of our comrades.

  “In the army we do our best to become rough diamonds, and on the people with whom we have to deal we pass judgements which are more often than not unsubtle. In the case of such a complicated and controversial creature as Restignes could be it was more difficult.

  “The same old objection kept cropping up: ‘The chap’s been mixed up with the F.L.N.’ But he brought with him a promise of peace and I can assure you that by then we had all had enough of the war in Algeria and the twinges of conscience it entailed.

  “The military profession is traditionally the profession of the sluggard. We get up early to do nothing and regulations enable one, if one knows them well, to confront any situation. In Algeria that type of officer died out. When we came in from operations we had to deal with the police, build sports grounds, attend classes. Regulations? They hadn’t provided for anything, even if one tried to make an exegesis of them with the subtlety of a rabbi. Our regulations had to be created on the basis of the half-digested leavings of Mao Tse-Tung and Chakhotine.”

  “Chakhotine?” Irène enquired.

  “The Rape of the Masses, six hundred pages. What captain on active service could find the time to read it from cover to cover? So one, who has dipped into it, mentions it to another, who discusses it with a third, and everyone has the impression he knows the book by heart. The same applies to Mao’s instructions on guerrilla warfare.

  “Our discussion went round in circles, because everyone had ‘heard’ that Restignes was this or that. But at the time I felt sure t
hat our comrades were going to follow us, simply because we were fond of one another and belonged to the same outfit. But at two o’clock in the afternoon, when the orderlies began opening a few tins to cook up some sort of a stew, the telephone rang. On the other end of the line was Colonel Puysanges asking in a smooth voice to be put on to Glatigny. Jacques handed me the other receiver:

  “‘Major de Glatigny, you have been appointed as from now to command the Saharan troops at Ouargla. You will leave in an aircraft which takes off at sixteen hundred hours, which I imagine gives you sufficient time to pack. Captain Esclavier has been posted on a course at the Arzeu base, where he will be instructed in landing techniques and amphibious operations. The captain must report there this evening, as the course starts tomorrow morning. Captain Mahmoudi will join the 8th R.T.A. at Koblenz, to which he has just been transferred.’

  “As a result of this posting, Glatigny left the paratroops and found himself back in the cavalry, in a junior command. I had repeatedly been offered the post of chief instructor on this course on which I was now being sent as a pupil. And to send Mahmoudi to Germany was the most unfortunate move of all!”

  “Well, did you just snap to attention and salute?” asked Irène.

  “We asked Puysanges the reasons for this ruthless decision.

  “‘A personal order from the Commander-in-Chief,’ he replied. ‘I once invited you to take pot luck with me at luncheon; I also told you that I could be of help to you on certain occasions. . . . Now it’s too late, the Commander-in-Chief knows all about it.’

  “Glatigny had gone as white as a sheet. He asked in a low, almost inaudible, voice:

  “‘What if we refuse?’

  “‘You’ll be considered rebels, mutineers, because you’ll be rising against a commander-in-chief who is still legally recognized by the Paris Government and who at the same time, with Massu as his spokesman, is head of the Public Safety Committee. But you, Glatigny, are loyal to the traditions of the army, I know that you won’t turn mutinous. Only your friends might not follow you; I have therefore taken certain precautions: the paratroops of the 10th Regiment are no longer guarding the Government General, they’ve just been relieved by the legionaries.