The Praetorians

by Jean Larteguy

  10 light, preferably Alouettes

  5 light observation and liaison aircraft

  New vehicles. Jeeps and 6 × 6s with sand filters, mountings for machine-guns and recoilless cannons, all painted yellow as for Suez.

  New or reconditioned W. T. sets.

  “‘Relations with the sector authorities:

  Complete autonomy, in relation to the air force and helicopters, which will come under my orders, as well as to the sector or zone authorities, who are to provide me with information but are not to issue me with orders.

  “‘Operations are to start immediately. . . .’

  “Underline that last sentence, Marindelle.

  “And send a copy to Glatigny addressed to the military cabinet of the President of the Republic. You’ll be coming with us as well. Tomorrow I’ll ask Puysanges to post you back to the 10th Regiment. While we’re preparing to move out of Z, you’ll go off to Ilghérem and see what’s going on. . . . You’re as crafty as a monkey, but take care where you tread. The approaches are mined.”

  “What about Boisfeuras, sir? That’s more his work.”

  “He’s not quite himself these days, spends the whole time boozing with Pellegrin. He’ll have to get over it. Anyway, all he wants is to command a company. Esclavier will take Glatigny’s place as operational second-in-command. His name has been put forward as a battalion commander. Luckily, it was put forward before the 13th of May! Otherwise he’d have remained a captain for the rest of his days!”

  * * * *

  Esclavier lay on the grey pebbly beach of Arzeu reading Servitude et Grandeur Militaires, which he had found in the mess library. This book gave him moments of real delight and made him chuckle out loud with pleasure.

  “In general the military character is simple, good, patient, and there is something childlike about it . . .

  “. . . the most insignificant aspects of the military life or character, which are both slightly in retard of the general spirit and progress of the nation, are consequently always imbued with a certain puerility.”

  The course was almost over, but Esclavier had not attended a single class or exercise. No one had remonstrated with him about this.

  Although feeling a bit of a cad, but excusing himself on the grounds that he had nothing else to do, he too had gone to bed with the colonel’s Chinese tart.

  The colonel had heard about it and had never called on him again, but the woman came to see him nearly every afternoon.

  She was an expert and passionless, like a great many whores. He discovered this fact with astonishment: she sincerely loved her husband, but she felt that a husband with such an ugly mug made her lose face and she therefore had to make up for this.

  The captain received a couple of letters from Guitte Gold-schmidt, and in his boredom and solitude he found himself thinking about her with great affection.

  The sloppy orderly who acted as his batman came down to the beach with the telegram.

  “By order of the Algerian High Command, Captain Esclavier will rejoin the 10th Colonial Parachute Regiment at Z at the earliest opportunity.”

  Esclavier leapt to his feet and rushed back to pack, leaving the tattered book behind him. The orderly picked it up and looked at the title.

  “Another military regulation!” he said, and pitched it into the sea.

  * * * *

  On October 12th the 10th Regiment, which had left Z for its rear base at Zeralda, where it had been completely re-equipped, started flying out its men and material in transport aircraft.

  Strict orders had come from Paris for Raspéguy to be given all the operational means he demanded.

  The G.H.Q. officers and other paratroop colonels were all saying that this time, at last, that old fox Raspéguy had been “had for a sucker” and was going to come to grief. The news filtering through from the eastern Sahara was worse and worse: crossing of the frontier by “uncontrolled” elements, agitation in the north of Mauretania, attacks on patrols and outposts in the hammada of Tindouf; mines on the tracks, headmen found with their throats slit in the M’Zil Valley.

  “The whole parachute division should have been sent out to the Adrar,” General Hellion himself declared in the course of a luncheon to which he had invited Colonel Parsabel du Mostier, Lieutenant-Colonel Millois and a few other senior officers of the division.

  “But Raspéguy always wants to take on too much and to act on his own,” said Millois with a certain resentment. “He can’t resist shooting a line. If he bogs this business he’ll get it in the neck. His troops have never been out in the desert, whereas my legionaries . . .”

  “I’m told the old bastard has got every chance on his side,” said Parsabel, “at least in so far as equipment and material is concerned.”

  “He should never have accepted this mission,” the general went on. “I did my best to make him understand, but nothing doing. People had stopped talking about him and it was driving him mad.

  “For it’s a put-up job, gentlemen. Algiers H.Q. still sticks to its story: the agitation in the eastern Sahara is only due to this mutineer Camel Corps company. Paris, which wants above all to avoid frightening off those who are interested in the Sahara, has fallen into step. The commander of the Saharan troops, who has failed miserably in this business, is likewise keeping mum. The air force, which has tried to conceal its blunders under cover of bulletins of victory, only wants to be forgotten.

  “When it comes down to brass tacks they all badly needed a scapegoat; and then old Raspéguy turns up, throwing out his chest and drawing in his stomach. Ever since the 13th of May the Tojun and, above all, Puysanges have harboured a fierce hatred for our friend and all his officers, but at the same time they’re rather scared of them. This business gives them an opportunity to get rid of him in one fell swoop.”

  “It’s a pity all the same,” said Parsabel. “Raspéguy’s a good soldier, but he lacks judgement and his regiment is really too steeped in politics.”

  “You must try this pâté de foie gras,” said the general, whose mouth was beginning to water. “My wife’s sister sent it me from the Landes: whole livers. . . .”

  Parsabel, much to the general’s dismay, absent-mindedly took an extra-big helping.

  “I’m worried about the policy adopted by de Gaulle,” he said, gobbling up the foie gras, “I’m extremely worried. He seems to forget that no man is entitled to alienate a portion of French territory. Now, as far as I know, Algeria is a French department. It would be as well to remind him of that again.”

  “I wouldn’t advise you to,” said the general, speaking through his nose. “He’s not an easy man to deal with. They say he hears voices, but I know the only voice he listens to is his own.”

  He was irritated by Colonel Parsabel’s attitude to the foie gras and, to everyone’s surprise, he embarked on a great speech in defence of the President of the Republic.

  This conversation, which was reported more or less everywhere, even came to the ears of the powers that be, and thus it was that General Hellion, who believed he was shortly to be retired, received, to his great astonishment, his fourth star.

  * * * *

  Colonel Raspéguy, with his staff and two support companies, moved into the old red ksar of Ilghérem, half eaten away by the wind, which stood facing the rounded crests of the dunes. It was a first-rate observation post, with good wireless reception, but the well water had a high magnesium content.

  The greater part of the regiment, under Esclavier’s orders, was dispersed in small groups along the M’Zil Valley, a palm-grove stretching for two hundred kilometres towards Tanezrouft, consisting in some places of a single row of trees, spreading out in others to give birth to largish villages like Asamert, Tiradent and Melsa.

  Boisfeuras and his company took up a position at the far end of the valley, in the last township, at Foum el Zoar: a mass of ruins,
a few palm-trees still watered by Negro slaves covered in pustules and sores on which the flies came and settled. Like Tamendit, Foum el Zoar was once one of the great capitals of the Saharan Berber Jews who were massacred in the same year as the fall of Grenada. In the ninth century they had created a vast empire. Of their presence here nothing remained, not even a sign or inscription.

  The three elements of the regiment thus found themselves each at the angle of a rough triangle whose sides measured between two hundred and two hundred and fifty kilometres.

  The main helicopter force was based at the foot of Ilghérem. Covered in tarpaulins lashed to the ground, from the ramparts of the ksar they looked like monstrous mummified grasshoppers which would be torn to shreds in the wind.

  Raspéguy sat up for a whole night with Marindelle, who told him what he had been able to glean here and there by way of information.

  It did not amount to much. The largest palm-groves belonged to a few marabouts who still wielded considerable influence, like Sidi Ahmou at Tiradent, or to Arab merchants who had made a fortune out of trafficking in Sudanese slaves; this was the case at Asamert and Melsa.

  They all practised khammessat—the Saharan method of cultivation on shares—according to which the khammes, or farmer, receives no more than a fifth of his crops, but meanwhile makes up for this by robbing his master. These khammes were mainly Negroes, harralins, former slaves or the remnants of an autochthonous population established in this oasis since before the Arab conquest.

  According to all the intelligence officers, the marabouts were reliable and took a poor view of the implantation of an egalitarian F.L.N. which would do away with their numerous perks. The rich tradesmen were making money hand over fist out of the oil men. It was therefore not at all in their interests that this state of affairs should be changed. As for the Negroes, they were too degenerate to think of anything whatsoever.

  “How, then, do you account for these attacks and killings?” Raspéguy asked the captain. “Everyone is on our side, or else too imbecile to do anything! But the place is rotten through and through, so much so that a hundred and fifty armed men can vanish into thin air and bob up somewhere else to carry out target-practice on the geophysicians.”

  “Another thing, sir. Morocco regards this territory as forming part of her domain and takes a rather poor view of the F.L.N. moving in here, especially as there’s a likelihood of oil: the last drilling operations were extremely promising.”

  Raspéguy and the captain went out on to the terrace. The night was as cool and clear as the water of a mountain-stream. In spite of the blanket he had thrown over his shoulders, the colonel shivered.

  “How would you like to go and have a squint at Morocco, Marindelle?

  “You’re becoming quite an expert in these nefarious schemes. We might perhaps come to some arrangement with the Moroccans. . . . Of course there’s Jewish solidarity, but there’s also . . .” (he made a gesture with his fingers, as though counting out banknotes) “. . . the oil! We’ve got to get this into our heads: either we bring this show off, and it’s going to be extremely difficult, or I’m all set for a town-major’s post in Nevers, Blois or Montargis. I should like to go home to Les Aldudes with my general’s stars. In the days of Napoleon they once produced a general, and they’ve put up a statue to him. If we succeed this time no one can claim any longer that we’re not waging the right kind of war. This situation can’t be solved by traditional means. What’s more, we’ve been flung into a sector which is completely new to us.”

  “What would I have to do in Morocco, sir?”

  “We’ve still got troops there—pretty thin on the ground, admittedly—and therefore, by the same token, Intelligence services. These services are bound to have contacts with those of the Royal Army, which were organized by us. Get in touch with them. See what they think about all this fellagha activity in this part of the Sahara. Tell them we’re pretty fly and can do a job properly. We’ll get rid of the F.L.N. organization for them . . . all we need is one name, the name of the political leader.”

  “I don’t think it’s necessary or advisable for me to go to Morocco, sir. I’ve already made friends with someone in the M’Zil Valley, a certain Ahmad Lahouène, a rich merchant from Fez and a close friend of Allal el Fassi. Allal wants half the Sahara as his country, up to the borders of Senegal.”

  “What are you up to, you two?”

  “At the moment we just drink tea together. But I know that Lahouène is shortly going on a journey to Morocco. Maybe before he leaves he’ll let me have that name, or another just as useful.

  “Then he’ll wait for everything to be cleared up before coming back, or else, which is more likely, he’ll send someone else back in his place. When we’ve finished with the F.L.N. here we may then have to deal with the new fellow. There’s no saying that the F.L.N. would not lend us a hand in the job.”

  “You’re developing quite a taste for this dirty work, aren’t you, my lad? You feel quite at home in these stratagems, this double-agent business? You were already quite a dab at it with the Vietminh. Watch your step, my lad. There comes a time when you think you can’t go wrong and that’s just when you come to grief. . . . But I promise you, if you get me the name of that political leader I’ll see to it that your promotion to major isn’t delayed for long. With one name, just a single name, we hold the thread. I wonder what there’ll be at the end of it?”

  He started thinking out loud:

  “Maybe a lousy old marabout, a former sergeant-major in the levies, a garage mechanic, a pasty-faced Mozabite grocer. . . . We draw the thread in, draw it in slowly so as not to break it, and at the end we find an armed gang with their machine-guns and mortars.”

  * * * *

  General Murcelles, G.O.C. Western Sahara, summoned Raspéguy to Tindouf. He wanted thereby to remind the colonel that he was under his order and at the same time allot him a rôle in the operations he was planning for “cleaning up the zone.” He was curious to meet this phenomenon he had heard so much about.

  To Murcelles, in fact, the 10th Regiment represented the reinforcements he had been urgently demanding for the last month. But in the instructions dispatched to the general, and signed by the Commander-in-Chief, Puysanges had omitted to specify the independence of Raspéguy and his regiment in relation to the local authorities. Knowing Murcelles to be a lively, forceful character, he had visualized the interview between the two officers with a certain amount of pleasure.

  Out of deference, and also because he was anxious not to get on the wrong side of anyone—for he knew the situation was difficult—Raspéguy reported to the G.O.C. at once.

  General Murcelles, a product of the Polytechnic, was only forty-eight years old. He was tall, thin, attractive, rather untidily turned out and often absent-minded. He greeted Raspéguy like an old friend.

  “I can’t tell you how pleased I am to see you here,” he said, shaking the colonel’s hand. “I’ve had this Sahara command for the last two months, and, without knowing exactly how or why, I had the feeling shortly after coming out here that the whole structure was tottering, cracking up and falling apart in places.”

  “There must be something going on,” Raspéguy cautiously remarked.

  “Yes, but what?”

  “Maybe much the same as what’s going on in the rest of Algeria, sir.”

  “Before being made a general I was commanding a sector in the Atlas. We had the O.P.A. to deal with, and also rebel bands. We hunted down the O.P.A. and thereby starved out the rebels.

  “It’s not a bit like that over here. There’s no O.P.A., just desert and a few oases. I haven’t once heard about funds being collected.”

  “Has there been a thorough investigation?”

  The general gave a slight pause:

  “I can do no more than rely on my subordinates.”

  “Have they been out here long?”

>   “They’re old Sahara hands who always come back to their desert. They know the family trees and the habits of the people by heart. Let’s go in for a drink, it’s so hot! Are your men comfortably quartered?”

  “I don’t want them to be comfortably quartered, I want them to sweat their guts out, go thirsty and even hungry. They’ve got one month in which to get used to this climate, find out what’s happening, and a few days in which to fight. That doesn’t leave them enough time to study family trees. . . .”

  In the whitewashed office, with grilles on the windows, the general spread out a map.

  “Look, Raspéguy. The frontier of southern Morocco, the enclave of Ifni, Mauretania. These dots here are the oases, black for the populated areas, blue for the wells. And these here are the drill-works and camps of the oil men, but they’ve been abandoned.

  “All the rest is a vacant space, it’s the Sahara, the name that the Arab geographer El Yakoubi gave it in the ninth century, which means a cemetery. Now here’s my plan. We shall go through all these populated areas and oases with a fine toothcomb. It’s easy to cordon them off, no one can escape except into the desert. You’ll be very useful to me, your men are extremely mobile, especially with the helicopters at their disposal.

  “We’ll soon manage to unearth those hundred or so deserters.”

  Raspéguy broke up a couple of cigarettes and filled his pipe with them:

  “You won’t unearth a thing, sir. This operation is liable to be useless. . . .”

  “Useless?”

  Raspéguy passed his hand across his face. He was thinking:

  “Unless . . . Perhaps it would be a good thing to talk a lot about this operation, to put everyone wise to it . . . and then not carry it out.”

  “Explain yourself more clearly, Raspéguy.”

  “While you roam around with your trucks and camels, and your aircraft cruise above you—without finding anything, needless to say—my regiment, which is used to it, will do the dirty work. For at a given moment there’s always some dirty work to be done in this war. Thanks to which one fine day there will appear in the desert not a hundred but perhaps a thousand armed men, driven from their hide-outs and lairs.