The Centurions

by Jean Larteguy

  “‘What about you, Captain?’

  “‘I don’t believe in God, but I feel I am bound up with Christian civilization.’

  “The captain addresses me as ‘vous’ when we’re alone together, but uses the familiar ‘tu’ in front of my comrades.

  ‘Esclavier gave another laugh:

  “If you were to ask me what I have come out here to fight against, I would say: in the first place, excess. Sophocles says: ‘Excess is the greatest crime against the gods.’ I’m fighting against the savage, lawless nationalism of the Arabs because it is excessive, just as I fought against Communism, because that too was excessive.’

  “I felt like asking him: ‘What are you practising here if it isn’t military Communism? But the Communists can at least justify their methods, their pragmatism, their contempt for individual man by an immense objective: to strip humanity of its old skin; whereas your ultimate aim is simply to win this war, nothing but this war, and, whatever you might say to the contrary, to save the privileged classes and maintain an economic, political and racial inequality. In fact, Captain, you don’t really know why you’re fighting—from habit, perhaps, and out of barbaric loyalty to the head of your clan who is Raspéguy.’

  “But the captain had turned over and was fast asleep.

  “Next morning we crossed a sort of prairie covered in wild flowers, and the captain pointed out that there were very few bees and scarcely a hive to be seen.

  “‘To me,’ he said, ‘as to the people of the ancient world, bees are the symbol of peace, prosperity and organization. This land of Algeria has never known anything but war and anarchy, and so the bees don’t come here.’

  “‘The men have a strange attitude towards Captain Esclavier. They manifest a sort of jealous, fierce attachment to him. They are proud of his strength, his good looks, his courage, his medals (he’s an officer of the Légion d’Honneur and a companion of the Libération—and even I am not insensible to the display of so much glory), they like to see him impeccably turned out and always on the go, but they are frightened of his sudden moods and his contempt for any form of weakness. He’s the absolute prototype of the paratrooper and Raspéguy’s favourite officer.

  “By way of contrast, all the reservists of the first company feel like personal friends of Lieutenant Merle’s. They are always happy to see him, are scared when he jumps into his Jeep, which he drives like a maniac, and would give him a word of warning if they dared.

  “This lieutenant is the brother all of us have secretly dreamt about. He’s as cheeky and comic as the bird that bears his name and declares at every opportunity that he doesn’t like the army. He has absolutely no sense of ownership; he loses all his kit and never has any cigarettes or matches or any water in his bottle. So he borrows from everyone, with a falsely contrite air. He seems to have no sense of hierarchy. He is possibly the only one who doesn’t take Raspéguy seriously, much to the colonel’s secret pleasure.

  “Merle is very close to Lieutenant Pinières, a sort of red-haired colossus who is convinced that there is nothing better in the world than being a paratroop officer in the best parachute regiment which is naturally the one in which he happens to be serving. To Merle, tough Esclavier is like an elder brother.

  “Merle has one vice: gambling, and he ‘blows’ his pay at the Aletti Casino as soon as he draws it. For the rest of the time he lives on loans from Esclavier.

  “Major Beudin, commonly called Boudin, who comes from Auvergne and doesn’t like to see money wasted, decided this month to dole Merle out his pay in driblets of 10,000 francs. In Captain Esclavier’s office I was able to witness a scene of high comedy between Merle and the major. It was like a bargain being transacted on a fairground.

  “In the midst of this circus Boudin is the only one who keeps a cool head and a sense of reality; he suffers agony from all the irregularities that are committed, but he is secretly enchanted at being the only one capable of dealing with them. For Raspéguy he has the attachment of a faithful dog, and receives every kick he gets from him with something akin to pleasure. Boudin is said to be extremely courageous in battle but incapable of commanding a company.

  “Major de Glatigny still preserves some of the haughtiness of a cavalry officer; in one respect he is less easy to get on with than the others, he still believes he’s an officer by divine right. He goes to Mass, performs all his religious duties, but is beginning to be caught up in this crazy atmosphere.

  “Raspéguy is flattered to be in command of this descendant of a great military dynasty and addresses him with false irony as ‘Count’ or ‘Constable.’

  “Major de Glatigny is the only real ‘traditional’ officer in the whole regiment. In spite of everything, he has preserved the sense of what a soldier may do and may not do, whereas all his colleagues are living in a dream world. He is extremely civilized and uses his influence to temper the colonel’s outrageousness.

  “I can never face Captain Boisfeuras without feeling slightly ill at ease.

  “He is ugly, with phenomenal stamina and a rasping voice. He walks without making a sound and, like certain old college ushers, he’s on to you before you can hear him coming. He’s the only officer who’s badly dressed, he’s the jackal among the wolves. I asked Lieutenant Merle about him.

  “‘You know, old man,’ he replied (he calls everyone ‘old man’) ‘I owe my life to Captain Boisfeuras, and at a time when there was no love lost between us.’

  “Captain Boisfeuras often goes to Algiers and is sometimes away for several days. He’s the ‘political’ officer of our odd regiment, and his power is obviously more than that of a mere captain.

  “As his chauffeur, butler, batman and bodyguard, he has a sort of Chinaman who is always behind him with a revolver on his hip. The Boisfeuras enigma stirs everyone’s imagination. Some say he’s a secret agent, others a politician who is lying low, others still a special envoy from the Government, and his reputation increases in proportion to the mystery surrounding him.

  “Our medical officer is a magnificent Negro, Captain Dia. He addresses everyone as ‘tu,’ from the colonel down. His voice resounds like a copper drum; he eats like an ogre, drinks like a wineskin; his hands are sensitive and bring relief to his patients. He overflows with humanity and love of life.

  “He goes bathing at night. I noticed him one evening by the edge of the sea; he was playing on a strange little flute. Esclavier, Boisfeuras and Marindelle were with him and I fancied—for his face was visible in the moonlight—that Captain Esclavier had tears in his eyes. But a man of that stamp can’t weep very often, and the moonlight may have been deceiving.

  “I felt I was witnessing the celebration of a cult of some strange African or Asian divinity. The note of the flute was plaintive and was drowned by the dull roar of the sea. I had no place there, I, who am soon to be a priest of the Catholic and Roman Church.

  “What curious and disturbing people these ‘wolves’ are! They are familiar with Sophocles, Marx and Mao-Tse-Tung, but I fancy they are burdened with painful secrets; I know that they are sometimes possessed by certain obscure forces.

  “I looked at myself in the mirror just now and I was pleased and horrified at once to see that I too am beginning to look like a wolf.

  “Tomorrow we are leaving the Camp des Pins, tomorrow we are embarking on this beastly war in Algeria and I’m almost relieved at the prospect.

  “Dear God, help me against myself, against the others, against the temptations of the wolves!”

  2

  THE BLACK PANTHER

  P —— was like any other little Algerian town situated in the cultivated zones: a long street with three cafés, a Moslem veterans’ association, a few French shops and a larger number of Mozabite stores. The French inhabitants were called Perez or Hernandez: and the Mozabites, who never ventured outside their own front doors, were as fat and limp as slugs.

&nbs
p; At the end of this street with its scarred and pitted surface, stood the police-station, a brand-new building with fine yellow railings and white bars across the windows.

  The gateway was reinforced with sandbags, the café terraces protected against hand-grenades by iron grilles, and the entrance and exit of the town sealed off by makeshift roadblocks of spiked fences and barbed wire.

  Barbed wire everywhere: round the public gardens and its bandstand where no band had played for years, along the church, the town hall and empty school, in front of the little concrete blockhouses guarded by steel-helmeted, trigger-happy sentries.

  The Moslems hugged the walls and avoided running into the Christians; hatred had become a living, palpable thing, it had its own smell and habits; at night it howled in the empty streets like a famished dog.

  In two months the whole area round P —— had gone over to the rebels. Settlers’ farms had gone up in flames, turning darkness into daylight right up to the gates of the town; flocks had been slaughtered; men, women and children had been massacred in particularly atrocious circumstances.

  Cars were machine-gunned on the roads, and buses set on fire, and one convoy every other day was the only means of communication between P —— and the rest of the world. Troops only moved about in full strength, and even then were shot at every time they emerged.

  Colonel Quarterolles, the garrison commander, had been taken prisoner in 1940. He had not taken part in the war in Indo-China and he claimed to know Algeria like the back of his hand by virtue of having commanded Tunisian and Moroccan levies over a period of fifteen years. First of all, he was unwilling to admit that with a garrison two thousand strong he was held in check by a “band of thugs and murderers armed with boukalas.” It was only after one of his platoons that had gone out on patrol to a farm five miles outside the town had got itself wiped out that he requested the support of an operational unit.

  And that was how one fine day the Raspéguy circus turned up in P —— with its trucks, its loud-speakers and its paratroops in their outlandish headgear. Colonel Quarterolles thought that these lads of twenty, with their over-tailored tunics and easy gestures, powdered like little marquises by the dust of the road, did not strike a serious note at all. He liked hefty warriors in steel helmets, clanking with heavy equipment—the old-fashioned, wine-swilling type of soldier.

  Quarterolles had managed to extract the commitment from the headquarters of Area Ten in Algiers that the paratroops sent to him would be placed under his orders and that he himself would command all the operations “in person.” In order to get rid of him, the Chief of Staff had promised him anything he asked.

  The commander-in-chief had thought of relieving Quarterolles of his command and sending him back to France, but he feared there might be a scandal. It was only by a miracle that a scandal had so far been avoided.

  At Lille the S.F.I.O. Party had just adopted a motion on Algeria requesting the Government to concentrate all their efforts on achieving a cease fire. If the newspapers had come out with a report in heavy type: “A platoon of twenty-eight reservists has been massacred outside P —— by a rebel band; three machine-guns, one 60-calibre mortar with its shells and twenty-three rifles or submachine-guns have been lost,” the congress might have not only requested but demanded a cease fire as well as disciplinary measures against the army leaders who allowed the soldiers under their command to be massacred.

  The only unit in reserve was the 10th Colonial Parachute Regiment which was said to be insufficiently trained and lacking in team spirit. The general had sent for Raspéguy who had reported with Esclavier by his side. They had been made to wait in a little room through which busy young officers kept passing to and fro, clacking like old hens.

  A captain came to fetch them; he wore a scarlet waistcoat with brass buttons under his tunic—like a damned lackey, as Raspéguy observed.

  The general was sitting at his desk, bent over a large sheet of glass with a map of Algeria spread out underneath it. His face was lifeless, his voice toneless:

  “Raspéguy, I allowed you the two months you requested in order to train your regiment. Those two months are now up; are you ready?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’ve got a tough job for you. Do you want to hang on to your reservists?”

  “Very much so.”

  “That’s up to you. You’ve heard about what happened at P ——. I want those arms we lost there to be recovered. I want Si Lahcen dead or alive . . .

  “Good hunting, Raspéguy! For this job you’ll have an absolutely free hand. I want results and I don’t give a damn what methods you use.”

  Raspéguy had asked:

  “What’s my position in relation to the colonel commanding the sector?”

  “It can be whatever you like. If he gets in your way . . .”

  He made a gesture with his hand as though to sweep away a troublesome fly. His handsome face with its regular Roman features remained inscrutable but Esclavier noticed that his eyes betrayed the cruel glint of a mandarin of old China, whose peace and meditation has been disturbed by an importunate intruder.

  The intruder was the garrison commander.

  Raspéguy had reported to Colonel Quarterolles in the prescribed military manner, snapping splendidly to attention, giving a smart salute, keeping his eyes fixed on some point in the middle distance. But he had no badges of rank, no decoration, no weapon, and his battledress was unbuttoned to reveal his sunburnt torso.

  “I’ll have to take him in hand immediately.” Quarterolles had said to himself, “these former N.C.O.s always try to take the bit between their teeth.”

  “Look here, Colonel, I’ve noticed your men don’t wear steel helmets. The regulations . . .”

  “The regulations are all very well, Colonel, but they overlook one important point.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That we’ve first of all got to win. Now no one can fight properly and win while lumbering about the mountains in the month of July with a heavy helmet on his head. I’ve given my men orders to leave their helmets behind at the Camp des Pins, but to take two water-bottles each.”

  “That’s your business. Tomorrow we’ll mount an operation to occupy a few farms which I had to abandon for lack of personnel. Today I’ve arranged quarters for your unit in the town. You can take over the school as your headquarters.”

  “No.”

  “Eh?”

  “No. The whole regiment will camp out in the mountains tonight and we’ll light some big fires so that the fellaghas will know that we’re there. I don’t like the idea of barbed wire, Colonel; I saw too much of it out in Indo-China.”

  “I forbid you . . .”

  Raspéguy shrugged his broad shoulders and smiled.

  “Come now, Colonel, we’d better see eye to eye. Besides, it would be tiresome for you if we did not recover the weapons which you let them steal from you . . . and I feel it’s not going to be very easy.”

  “That incident has been grossly exaggerated.”

  “That’s to say it has been hushed up.”

  “But, for you and your staff, if the school won’t do . . .”

  “I live with my men, I march with them, I eat the same rations, I put up with the same heat and thirst. So do my staff. My compliments, Colonel.”

  Raspéguy saluted. The trucks disappeared in a great cloud of dust, heading for the bare mountains which were tinged mauve and blue by the clear light of the late afternoon.

  In the last truck three paratroopers were singing a slow, melancholy cowboy song.

  “Yet another of those tricks they brought back from Indo-China,” Colonel Quarterolles said to himself, “with their don’t-give-a-damn attitude, their lack of discipline, their contempt for regulations and proper channels, their line-shooting and shoulder-swinging . . . We’ll see what they’re like when they’re on t
he job, those puppets.”

  Vesselier, the mayor, came and called on the colonel. He gesticulated with his hands while he spoke and had a pronounced colonial accent:

  “Ah, Colonel. Where do they think they are off to, those fools, into the blue like that without knowing what’s going on? They ought to be stationed on the farms so that the crops which haven’t been burnt might at least be harvested . . .”

  “And he did not even introduce me to his officers,” the colonel complained. “We’ll see about that tomorrow . . . Have you got any new information on the band, Mayor?”

  “The band, the band . . . If it had been left to us, Colonel, the whole business would have been settled long ago. As you and I know, there’s only one thing they understand, these fellows—a firm hand on the cudgel.”

  By nine o’clock in the evening the main street of P —— was deserted, all the shops shut, but outside on the balconies the householders sat taking the air and looking towards the mountains where the lights of the paratroops’ camp blazed brightly.

  • • •

  On the following day Major de Glatigny and Captain Boisfeuras came and reported to Colonel Quarterolles. The colonel knew Glatigny by name. He was extremely affable.

  “We should like to get in touch with your Intelligence officer,” said the major.

  “I’ll send for him.”

  Presently a tubby little captain appeared; he had little boot-button eyes immersed in fat and minced as he walked. He looked stupid, narrow-minded and as obstinate as a mule.

  He sank back into an arm-chair and mopped his brow.

  “Moine, tell these gentlemen what you know about the Si Lahcen band.”

  “We estimate it’s about a hundred and thirty strong, scattered across the whole range. By day they lie low in the mechtas, by night they’re on the prowl. They have no automatic weapons . . .”

  “What about the submachine-guns they captured from you?” asked Boisfeuras.