by Norman Lewis
The week of almost nightly attacks by dive bombers provided a classic, oversimplified vision of war, not devoid of its savage poetry. We had ring seats for these regular performances, for the Villa Portelli was close to the centre of the raiders’ target. The planes came in, five or six in succession, flying at low altitudes, circling with premeditation, and clearly visible in the dusk. One after another, at intervals of a minute or two, they would carry out their bombing runs, going into their dive — as it seemed to us — when immediately above us. We would listen to the howl of the accelerating engines, interrupted by that of the high-pitched and penetrating scream of the approaching bomb. At this point the gunners operating the two anti-aircraft guns at the bottom of our garden would give up and jump for their slit trenches, although the pageant of fire and flame was kept going by many other guns placed round the harbour.
The glass fell away in an icicle shower from our windows and all that we saw through it had been balefully transfigured. Hundreds of guns were pumping thousands of shells into the sky, which opened up to spew fiery lava over ten ships sitting in a carmine lake. Our white arums in the garden had turned pink, and so had the naked, scaly branches of the plane trees. Tracers from the multi-barrelled ‘Chicago Piano’ came up out of a pink mist, only miraculously deflected in the last hair’s breadth of time from our balcony. A near miss drove the gunners out of another emplacement, and they ran hunched like men caught in a driving hail-storm. We too were transformed, at one moment ruddy and grinning horribly in the light of a great vermilion explosion, and the next aghast in the white sheet-lightning of a magnesium flare. We heard the walls crack, and the villa shift and settle, breathed layered smoke and felt the concussion of the bombs in our eardrums and the soles of our feet. Our two worst cases of uncontrollable apprehension were clasped together under the table in the foetal position of twins in the womb, but even Sergeant-Major Leopold, our man of steel, seemed influenced by these happenings, revealing suddenly his Sephardic origins in an urgent outburst of cante flamenco. The FSO, after declaiming a passage from Ovid, bounded up to the roof, where he stood — as he admitted later, in a state of disbelief — while the shrapnel from anti-aircraft bursts tinkled around him.
The bombing was accurate and could be expected regularly to take place after the arrival of a convoy. Backed by the opinion of Signals radio technicians who detected the existence of clandestine transmitters, GHQ ascribed this to the presence of spies. We were ordered to drop everything and track these down, and to enable us to do so we were supplied with a van fitted out with the latest equipment, including a direction-finding aerial. It was quite a new toy for us, and at last after the wasted weeks we were to be put to effective use. Unfortunately, spy-hunting too soon turned into farce. Once again we were defeated by the system which surrendered all responsibility to our old soldiers. Only these were allowed to twiddle dials and perform the simple calculations necessary to locate the illicit transmitter. These, through educational limitations, were unable to cope with magnetic variations, and simple mathematics, so although we broke into a number of houses at the dead of night, and aroused their blameless occupants from their sleep — to confront them with wild accusations of espionage — no arrests were ever made, and the transmissions continued undisturbed.
Chapter Seventeen
7TH JANUARY 1943
TODAY I AM APPROACHED again by the Arab Sûreté agent Bou Alem, a man for whom I took one of my instant dislikes at our first meeting — these being so often discovered later to be without foundation. The aversion may have been based — regrettably enough — to some extent on the man’s appearance, for he is rather ugly with some slight deformity of the arms and shoulders, giving him a somewhat cringing aspect. I was also repelled by the way he seemed ready to cultivate the good graces of French officials, in particular Captain Bouchard who evidently approves of his gendarmes’ habit of crushing Arab children’s feet.
Nobody particularly wanted to see him when he first called at our office, but in the end I was found and reminded that contacts with such as Bou Alem were part of my job. He asked me if I would go to prison with him, as he had something to show me. It was at least a way of using up too much spare time and I went along. He took me to a paved yard, raised a plate of metal like a manhole and shone down a torch. An iron ladder led into absolute darkness. At first I assumed this to be some sort of subterranean latrine, for there was a tremendous stench of faeces and urine. I then made out several half-naked Arabs stretched out on sacking spread over flagstones among piles of excrement. One began to crawl towards the light. Others stirred, as if in their sleep. We went down the ladder into the terrible effluvia and intense cold. ‘This,’ said Bou Alem, ‘is a punishment cell. They call it “the grave”. These men are dying.’
I told him I was horrified and disgusted, as I was. I added that we had received the most express orders not to meddle in French affairs, and that I personally could only be concerned with the security of our troops. ‘There’s nothing I can do about this,’ I said.
‘The first thing you did when you got into this town was to rescue the gangster Fortuna, who was sentenced to death for murder. These men haven’t been charged with any crime. They’re Arab village leaders, that’s all. By this time next week they’ll be dead of cold or starvation. You let Fortuna and his gangsters go. Why can’t you free them?’
‘We’ve reached agreements with the French. I haven’t the power to.’
Shame has made me do my best to avoid Bou Alem all the more after this. Whenever I see him in the street I dodge down the nearest side turning, but once more he has turned up at the office and caught me before I could get away.
He says he has important and confidential news for me. It is not a good thing for him to be seen to frequent the Villa Portelli, he says, and he arranges that we should meet in a gargoulette, a cheap Arab eating-place in an alleyway which no European would ever dream of entering, and where he is among his own people.
Bou Alem’s message is that the French are planning to massacre the Arabs, but that the killing is to be done by British troops, who will be used as their tools. In the first few weeks of our occupation the British had nothing but praise for the enthusiasm and diligence of their Arab labour force, and there is now talk that when the Allies withdraw from such base areas as Philippeville and advance into Tunisia, the best of their workers will go with them. It is a relationship the French are determined to break at all costs. The continuing British cause for complaint with the Arabs is the looting of their supply depots, the largest being at Philippeville, and the French plan is to induce the British to take bloody reprisals on the nearest village. In this way, Bou Alem says, the Arabs are to be taught a lesson they will never forget, and at the same time be detached from the Allies and therefore freely available once more on the labour market at 7 francs per day.
I listen to these revelations full of sympathy, but can only reply that whatever secret understanding has been reached — clearly at a high level — between the British and the French, it cannot be any concern of mine, and I can expect nothing better than a severe reprimand if I even put in a report based on his information.
12 JANUARY
The FSO called a section meeting today, appearing to be in a high state of excitement. He has just returned from a meeting at GHQ with the G2, and a commanding officer of the Royal Naval Marine Commando that has arrived in the area, and all he says confirms in substance Bou Alem’s report. According to information provided by the French Sûreté, the Arabs responsible for the raids on the base depot are from the nearby village of Filfila, always a notorious den of thieves. The commandos have come straight from living rough in a Highland glen, chasing knife in hand after sheep before butchering and devouring them among the heather and snow. Now they are to be ‘blooded’, the FSO says, his blue eyes atwinkle — given a taste of the real thing. An invaluable experience, their CO agrees. Suddenly for Captain Merrylees, his lacklustre war of shadows has come to life, and the
re are fighting men among us, saga-warriors of the kind that skinned their captives alive after a Viking raid. He chuckles. ‘To toughen themselves up,’ he said, ‘they mix piss with their beer.’ Not a bad thing either, he seems to suggest. Something the Norsemen of old, too, were accustomed to do.
But there is a small intelligence involvement here too, for the G2, as willing as anybody else to unleash the dogs of war, has asked, before issuing the final order for blood to flow, for a routine account of the village, accompanied by a sketch map providing some physical identification to prevent any regrettable error, and a run-down of its population by age and sex. This I am ordered to do.
I go straight from this meeting to the lugubrious alleyway gargoulette, leaving a message to be passed on to Bou Alem to meet me there later in the day.
It is no more than he has expected, he tells me on his arrival. Now, he says, the time has come when something will have to be done to get it across to my superiors that the French are proposing to use them, that it is the colons and not the Arabs who are their enemies, and if the Arabs are to be punished it is only because of the energy with which they have supported the Allies’ cause.
‘We can forget it,’ I say. ‘Nobody will listen to me. I’d only be sticking my neck out for nothing. If we can stop the looting, they’ll call off the attack.’
‘Are you sure of that?’
‘I’m sure.’
‘The looting can be stopped,’ Bou Alem says.
‘How?’
‘The saint will tell them to stop. All Algerians obey his word. Sidi Omar Abbas.’
‘I’ve never heard of him,’ I say. ‘This is the first time I’ve ever heard you had a local saint.’
‘He is a very great one. Most men become saints when they are old. Sidi Omar was recognized as a saint when he was able to read his parents’ minds.’
‘Ah.’
‘Have you heard of the great influenza epidemic of 1918?’
‘I have indeed.’
‘Half of the Arabs of Philippeville died,’ Bou Alem says. ‘Sidi Omar was lying, about to die of weakness and starvation on a mountain top, when two crows fed him. They killed a newly born lamb and dragged it within reach of him.’
‘Do you believe that?’
‘Yes, I believe it. Certainly I believe it.’
‘Is this miracle accepted by Mohammed Kobtan and Dr Kessous?’ (Philippeville’s two Arab intellectuals).
‘I assure you it is. Not only that but we once suffered from a plague of poisonous reptiles, and Sidi Omar told all the people to go into their houses. He breathed upon the reptiles and they died. This was before my time. It is within his power to put a spell on the French and cause them all to fall asleep.’
‘Why doesn’t he, then?’
‘Because God has a plan for us. He refuses to interfere.’
‘Perhaps he’d refuse in this case.’
‘We could ask him. There is nothing he cannot do if he agrees.’
Sidi Omar lives on a local mountain top, in a shrine already built for him, in which his mortal remains will be buried, after — as Bou Alem explains — in the manner of Simeon, he has called upon God to draw his soul up to heaven. The upshot of this discussion is that Bou Alem will try to see him and implore his intervention, while I report on the possibility of a peaceful solution to the FSO.
13TH JANUARY
The meeting with Captain Merrylees comes as a surprise. Sergeant-Major Leopold has always preferred to arrange such interviews to take place under formal conditions, and to be present in person, having positioned himself in regimental fashion to the side and rear of the FSO’s desk. This time he has been called away and, relieved of his faintly sardonic presence, the FSO is clearly another man. None of the usual flare-ups and barrack room explosions; on the contrary, he is positively mild, and seems quite to have lost his thirst for blood. Not only that, but apparently eager to find some way of holding the commandos at bay. ‘Do what your Arab friend suggests,’ he says. ‘Why not? There’s nothing to be lost.’ It is the friendliest and most reasonable encounter that has taken place between us to date.
Pondering over this abrupt change of mood, I have hit upon a possible explanation for the two faces of Captain Merrylees. I have decided that he is obsessed with his own imaginary or real inadequacies as a soldier. The conditioning process we have all gone through appears to have done nothing to strengthen his self-confidence. He probably despises the foolishness with which, like us all, he is beset. So, over and over again he has to assure himself and us that it is nothing but play-acting, a kind of dream, something that will pass. Yet, as an ineffective and incomplete soldier, he feels threatened by the sergeant-major’s martial presence, and above all by Leopold’s total belief in himself. Leopold treats the FSO with an almost exaggerated deference, yet behind this a wordless domination seems to exist. It is a hypothesis providing a key to otherwise inexplicable behaviour, to Merrylees’ increasing concern for his appearance which keeps his batman endlessly polishing his buttons and his buckles, and in particular the episode of the bombing when Leopold burst into song, while the FSO — perhaps determined to go one better — endangered his life by going up on to the roof.
In the evening I go to the gargoulette and see Bou Alem again. ‘Sidi Omar agrees to see you and discuss your problem,’ he says. ‘He’ll only see you if you’re by yourself, and you have to remember he speaks nothing but Arabic. You speak a little, didn’t you tell me?’
‘But not the local variety,’ I tell him.
‘Say a few words,’ Bou Alem says.
I trot out one of my sentences kept ready for such occasions, containing a few basic words common to all the dialects. ‘Ana q’rait fil jerida al yom inna …’ (‘I read in the paper today that …’) He holds up his hand. ‘I can understand you, but only just.’
‘Couldn’t something be worked out in advance which I could read to him? Perhaps you could help?’
‘He wouldn’t listen to a set speech. He wants to talk to you to test your sincerity.’
‘This is a different language from the one I learned,’ I say. ‘Half the words are different, and even the ones I know carry a different accent which makes them unrecognizable. Everywhere else they say bálad, for country. You say bled.’
‘And not only that,’ he says. ‘We have half a dozen different dialects in this department alone. If I go to Batna or Tebessa I have to take an interpreter. When you listen to some of these tribesmen they sound like sheep bleating.’
‘What’s to be done, then?’
‘I brought this book along,’ he says, ‘It might give you some ideas.’
The book is Soualah’s L’Arabe Pratique et Commercial, the only one to be found on Algerian Arabic, and it starts off with a casual mention of an extra letter in the alphabet, an extra tense and the fact that pronunciation has been much affected by the Berber language predominant in many areas. I have already studied it, lost heart and pushed it aside. On the other hand it is a school book produced in a stern direct fashion for the instruction of the children of another race, containing many cautionary sentences in French with their equivalent in Arabic which might have some application to these circumstances. There is even a chapter on ‘Les Armes’, with an illustration showing fiercely moustached Zouaves firing an antique cannon.
‘How much time have we got?’ Bou Alem asks.
‘Two days. Possibly three.’
‘It’s short. Read it through, and get what you can out of it. Sidi Omar knows the language problem as well as anyone else. Let him see you’ve done your best, and he’ll make allowances.’
15TH JANUARY
Aïn Zouit is about five miles out of town, at the back of Stora, with the mountain looking rather like an enormous mine-tip rising among the oak woods, with the white unfinished shrine on its top. A number of Arabs live in the usual misery at the foot of the mountain, in the hope — Bou Alem mentioned — of imbibing the spiritual essences that roll down the slopes from the
shrine. I see young marriageable girls, some of them pretty, who are too poor and demoralized to bother to veil themselves. They look away when I ride up.
I leave the Norton propped against a tree-trunk and start the steep climb up the track leading to the top of the mountain. After a few hundred yards I stop to rest, and a collection of villagers following me wait and watch. I go on again and after a while see a distant white-clad human form moving among the boulders below the shrine, and shortly it becomes clear that this is a man coming down the mountain-side at an amazing speed. He is leaping from rock to rock, scrambling across screes and dried-up gullies. At this point I decide to save my breath and wait, the semi-circle of villagers at my back, and a moment later an old man bursts through the scrub on the slope ahead, dislodging small landslides of loose stones, and comes towards me, hand outstretched. It is the saint in person, tall, lean, and immensely old, blue-eyed, with teeth set at all angles in his smile, a tattered but splendidly laundered jellabia, untidy turban, one of his sandals tied up with string, and a trickle of blood where he has grazed a toe.
He takes my hand in his grip, bursts into laughter, dismisses the following crowd, then gestures invitingly towards the summit, and we set off together. I scramble and haul myself upwards with bursting lungs, but for Sidi Omar this climb is hardly more than an act of levitation. He gets to the top a hundred yards ahead, and waits for me, laughing. Then we go into the shrine built a century before, as Bou Alem has told me, to house the relics of the most celebrated of all North African saints, Sidi Mohammed Ben Farhas, visited in his day by innumerable sterile women from all parts of the country, who infallibly conceived on their return home. Sidi Omar lives in the zuwiya, a partially ruined building that once housed the followers of the cult. He has set two plates on a table in a bare room with half the roof missing. A bowl of black honey encrusted with flies stands between us, and the saint opens up a hole among them with his thumb, gouges out a dollop of honey and drops it on my plate. Many flies that have avoided the temptation of the honey buzz round our heads, and occasionally one lands on the sagging inner surface of Sidi Omar’s lower eyelids, although they do not bother with me. Chickens scuffle round our feet, and at one point a goat tethered in a far corner urinates.
