The Centurions

by Jean Larteguy

  “They’ve got no ammunition for them.”

  Captain Moine was lying with complete confidence, certain of being covered and of not running any risk.

  “So when they wiped out your platoon,” Glatigny persisted, “the rebels had no automatic weapons? Thirty men with three machine-guns and several submachine-guns let themselves be surprised by fellaghas who had nothing but antiquated rifles. Is that how it was?”

  “I was on leave in Algiers.”

  “But you held a court of inquiry on your return.”

  “I’ve been out here three years. I have my sources of information. One of these witnessed the battle. The fellaghas only chucked a few hand-grenades at the trucks. Our men lost their heads.”

  “Who were your men?”

  “Reservists of an infantry regiment from the north of France.”

  “Who was in command?”

  “A cadet who had just left school.”

  “And you never tried to put them in the picture or prepare them for this sort of warfare?”

  “They were given two or three lectures when they landed at Algiers, at least that’s what they said.”

  “That’s all over and done with,” said Quarterolles, “we can’t call the poor men back to life. I’m surprised your colonel isn’t here with you; we’ve got to make arrangements for occupying a certain number of farms. I’ve taken it up with the mayor; the engineers are sending up some barbed wire and a few mines.”

  Glatigny replied in that polite, slightly contemptuous tone which he had learnt when serving on the staff.

  “The whole regiment has been out on operations since four o’clock this morning and I don’t think Colonel Raspéguy is thinking for a moment of occupying any farms.”

  “What does he want, then?”

  “The band and, above all, the weapons. For that, we need information, for nothing can be done in this sort of war without information. Who is Si Lahcen?”

  “A highway robber,” said Captain Moine, picking his teeth.

  “Has he got any family, friends or relations who can give us any information about him?”

  “We arrested his brother, but he escaped the same evening.”

  “So Si Lahcen must have accomplices in the town; that’s only to be expected. Who are his accomplices?”

  “That’s a matter for the police, not the army.”

  Boisfeuras then brought a sheet of paper out of his pocket.

  “Since you seem to be in the dark about him, Captain, I’ll tell you who Si Lahcen is: a former sergeant-major in the levies, Military Medal, mentioned four times in dispatches in Indo-China. Noted by his leaders as a remarkable warrant-officer, with the makings of an officer. On his return here he sank all his savings into the transport business and bought a bus. But the civilian administrator was the undercover owner of a whole line of buses. He made things difficult for Si Lahcen, he kept imposing fines on him and one day suggested buying his bus back from him for less than it cost him. Suborned by old friends of his who had risen in revolt, unable to find a soul who could protect him against the administrator, financially ruined, Si Lahcen took to the hills and started burning all his rival’s buses. One night he came down here himself and slit the administrator’s throat. That’s correct, isn’t it?”

  Flies were buzzing about the unshuttered room. The colonel brought a handkerchief out of his pocket and mopped his brow. He had since taken over the administrator’s house and did not like to be reminded of that incident.

  “I want to see Colonel Raspéguy at once. He’s here to carry out operations under my orders. Garrison affairs are my business and no one else’s. I’d rather not know the source of your inaccurate information. I would point out, however, that you’re casting aspersions on a senior official who was deeply respected in this area. I shall expect to see your commanding officer shortly. That’s all, gentlemen.”

  They left the room. Moine followed them outside. Boisfeuras asked the captain to provide him with an interpreter.

  Moine had been closely acquainted with the administrator Bernier, a short, tubby little man with bandy legs, and also knew about his political and financial dealings with the few big caids of the district and the senior public works officials. His villa on the Côte d’Azur had been completed; he was going to retire with his little pile—the sum mentioned was a hundred million, which wasn’t so bad for an administrator—and he had even been awarded the Légion d’Honneur for his good and loyal services. It was about this time that Si Lahcen, clanking with medals, had come back from Indo-China and had decided to put his savings into a bus line.

  “A champion, that administrator,” Moine reflected. “In his day there had been no question of rebels; he had his own way of treating the natives, a way which was at once paternal and determined, but rather more determined than paternal. He was not proud and held open house. He stole as much as he could, but allowed his subordinates to do likewise. With him, there was nothing to risk; he was protected by everyone: the Socialists, the clergy, the freemasons and the settlers.” It was he, Moine, who had discovered his body, his throat slit from ear to ear.

  “How did the paratroops know about all this? He would give them Ahmed as an interpreter, a sly lad whom he had well in hand and who would be able to give them the information they wanted. Some hotheads maintained that Ahmed had connexions among the rebels, but the same thing was said of all the Arabs.”

  Once they were outside, Glatigny turned to Boisfeuras and asked:

  “Where did you get that information on Si Lahcen?”

  “I ran into Mahmoudi at Algiers. Si Lahcen had served under him as his sergeant-major. When he heard we were going to P —— he told me the whole story. Mahmoudi is in a bit of a fix.”

  “Mahmoudi is a French officer.”

  “But he’s serving as a Moslem, under a special statute, and no one ever misses a chance of reminding him of it. I’ve pulled some strings to have him transferred to Germany.”

  “What will he do in Germany?”

  “He’ll wait there till we’ve rid Algeria of its fellaghas, its crooks, its civil administrators and its army of old dotards like Quarterolles and lazy bastards like that Captain Moine.”

  “That’s a pretty tall order, my dear Boisfeuras. It will be a long time before Mahmoudi gets back from Germany.”

  The two officers climbed into their Jeep and left P —— with a sense of relief to rejoin their regimental base in the mountains.

  Lurching over the pot-holes, with his carbine between his knees, Boisfeuras tried to concentrate on this problem: how to capture Si Lahcen’s band without any information apart from a few police reports and local gossip. A band a hundred and thirty strong is bound to be seen when moving across bare, arid territory; it needs food supplies, water and ammunition. It cannot remain indefinitely in the mountains. He nudged Glatigny:

  “Glatigny, what would you do in Si Lahcen’s place? Don’t forget that Si Lahcen has been out in Indo-China.”

  “In Si Lahcen’s place?”

  “Yes. Would you play at boy scouts out in the open in this heat when you could quite simply stay in the mechtas round P ——, drink cool water, listen to the radio and entertain the girls?”

  “Go on,” said Glatigny.

  “Supposing Si Lahcen, who has seen how the Viets work, had set up an intelligence network and a good politico-military organization in the town. He would know everything: every movement of our troops, the departure times of the convoys. While Colonel Quarterolles is forced to protect himself on all sides, he would be able to strike where he wanted, when he wanted.

  “The group or section that had laid the ambush would do the job and scatter through the mountains immediately afterwards. It would have its own arms dumps; it would return next morning, mingling with the peasants coming into market. For that, all that’s required is to have the popula
tion well in hand.

  “Meanwhile we’re rushing about the bare mountains, exhausting our men; we shall never be able to find anything.”

  “So, according to you, we ought to establish headquarters in P ——?”

  “Yes, and hold all the surrounding villages, collect information at any price and by any means, force Si Lahcen and his men to really take to the mountains, and cut them off from the population which provides them with information and feeds them. Only then will we be able to fight them on equal terms.”

  Colonel Raspéguy came back to camp with his men exhausted by the heat and a hard march through arid gorges, over razor-sharp stones, and along dried-up river-beds.

  They had found nothing: not a trace of Si Lahcen’s band, not even one of those little walls made out of a few boulders that are called choufs and are used by look-outs to shelter behind. But ten miles away, in the plain at the foot of the mountain, some agricultural labourers and their families had been found with their throats cut because they had stayed on in a settler’s farm after he had left it.

  Leaning back against the white wall of a little marabout and smoking his pipe, Raspéguy watched the shadows sweep over the plain in a series of waves which presently came and broke on his rock.

  When he was a child, he used to hate coming down from the mountains. The town with its sly, worldly shopkeepers, its crowds on market days, its strident voices, its cafés and its music made him feel ill at ease.

  The lights of P —— began to twinkle down below and the searchlights started sweeping the barbed-wire entanglements. The loud-speakers blared. Raspéguy had laid ambushes on every trail, at every approach which the fellaghas could possibly use, and had made arrangements to be notified as soon as anything happened so as to be able to be on the spot at once.

  Esclavier sank down beside him and Raspéguy handed him his packet of cigarettes and flask of coffee. Then Glatigny, Marindelle and Boisfeuras came and joined them. They in their turn sat down.

  A sentry could be heard loading his submachine-gun and, farther off, a man singing. The slightest noise was wafted up to them, stripped of its bare essentials in the clear air and thereby endowed with the gravity of prayer, the purity of crystal.

  “It’s nice up here,” said Raspéguy, “it’s clean and cool and we are on our own.”

  “But it’s down below that things are happening,” Boisfeuras retorted in his grating voice.

  “Let’s hear what you’ve got to say,” said Raspéguy wearily.

  • • •

  On the following day the paratroops came back to P ——.

  During the siesta hour, while the whole town was sleeping, they marched through as though on parade, six deep, moving silently in their rubber-soled boots, looking straight in front of them with a blank expression in their eyes, and singing that slow, melancholy song from Indo-China which was also the song of the American Marines in the Pacific.

  The Moslems crept out of their shacks and silently watched these soldiers who were not like any others, who appeared not to see them as they marched by at their slow, steady pace. And they felt vaguely apprehensive, for, like all men, they were frightened of the unusual and unknown.

  Through the slits of a shutter in a Mozabite store, Si Lahcen was also watching this strange march-past.

  He turned round to Ahmed:

  “I’d rather they were up in the mountains but, as you see, they’ve come back. They’re going to settle down in our midst and stir up the ant-heap until something emerges . . .”

  “We could make life impossible for them in P ——. This evening a couple of men can go and pitch a few hand-grenades into the two cafés on the Rue Maginot.”

  “You don’t know what they’re like, Ahmed. It’s easy to see that you were never out in Indo-China with the ‘lizards.’ If they catch your grenade-thrower they’ll hang on to him themselves, they won’t hand him over to the police and the man will talk; and you won’t know a thing until they come and drag you off—you, the official Intelligence interpreter—to the garrison commander himself.”

  Ahmed shrugged his shoulders. He did not care very much for the Kabyle Si Lahcen, with his sergeant-major attitude, his slow reactions and caution. The band he was commanding was becoming more and more like a regular company, and if it was left to him, he would dole out badges of rank and insignia, forbid looting and rape, in fact everything that endowed this war with its powerful attraction for the primitive creatures under his command.

  At heart, Si Lahcen had a deep respect for the French Army and disliked being considered a bandit. He was a skinny, unprepossessing little man, but as tough and hard as a vinestock, whereas Ahmed had the indolent beauty of a desert Arab.

  Ahmed was the political commissar of the area, and Si Lahcen the military leader. The rebel headquarters had not yet decided which of the two branches, political or military, had priority over the other, so that the two men often found themselves in conflict.

  Si Lahcen whistled the paratroops’ song between his teeth. He had often heard it out in Indo-China, when the battalions used to set off on some suicide operation from which very few of the men returned.

  One day, while serving on the edge of the delta, he had witnessed the arrival of those paratroops who had been reported dead or captured for over a month. They had struggled hundreds of miles through the jungle, surrounded by Viets. They were using their rifles as crutches; many of them were barefoot, their faces were swollen by mosquito bites and the sweat had rotted the skin under their arms and between their thighs. They stank and could hardly stand upright, but they kept on singing this tune, for they knew that if they stopped they would not be able to take another step.

  Sergeant-Major Si Lahcen had been proud that day to belong to the same army as them.

  That battalion, he remembered now, had been commanded by the same Raspéguy who had marched through P —— just now, at the head of his men but wearing no badges of rank.

  “Well, what do we do now?” Ahmed inquired, this time in French. “Do we just wait to be picked up?”

  “It would be best to lie low for the time being,” Si Lahcen replied pensively. “Stay up in the mountains as long as they’re in the town, come back here if they take to the mountains again, and avoid a show-down . . .”

  “No. The population’s still undecided, in spite of the few examples I made. They’ll veer towards the stronger side, that’s to say the one they fear the most. For the moment that’s us; but tomorrow, if we sat back and did nothing, it would be the paratroops.”

  “You’re coming back to those hand-grenades of yours again.”

  “I think I can do better than that and make your lizards lose face once and for all.”

  On the following day Ahmed became the official interpreter of the paratroops for the duration of their operation and was attached to Captain Boisfeuras. He was issued with a cap, a bivouac tent and a pistol. He had become a lizard himself.

  Ahmed soon noticed that the sort of Chinaman who was always with the captain never took his eyes off him for a second. On two occasions he saw him reach for his carbine, making sure that the gesture did not pass unnoticed. It was an unconcealed warning.

  The paratroops crowded the cafés and shops, and prices began to go up; there were one or two brawls between them and the garrison troops.

  Raspéguy, who had taken over the school building, had all the barbed wire round it removed. “All it’s good for is giving one a sting in the ass when one gets back after dark,” he explained.

  In a class-room, which still had its desks and blackboard, he had assembled all the leading members of the community: Caid Djemal and his brother, the mayor Vesselier, the representative of the Mozabite merchants, the president of the veterans’ association, and Captain Moine. Also present were Boisfeuras, Glatigny, Esclavier and Merle, whose company of reservists were quartered round the school. Ahmed att
ended the meeting as the official interpreter; and Caid Djemal’s brother, who knew what part he played in the rebellion, kept darting little glances of admiration at him.

  Raspéguy stood on the platform, a piece of chalk in his hand. The civic dignitaries and the officers were seated at the desks and had unconsciously assumed the attitude of schoolchildren, leaning on their elbows, shuffling their feet and scratching their noses.

  Merle was hiding behind Esclavier’s back and poring over Micheline’s letter yet again.

  Olivier, my love,

  I’ve been thinking things over since you left for Algeria and I now know I love you like the most besotted little shopgirl and, as in the song, “until the end of the world.”

  As children we used to play at that cruel and treacherous game of hating each other, loving each other, tearing each other to shreds, making each other jealous. When you came back from Indo-China I could not help going on with the game, and besides you know how I like to shock people. I had a good time making a scarecrow out of my little Olivier at Tourangeaux.

  I’m glad you left our town slamming every door behind you, glad that you’re out in Algeria, earning no more than 80,000 francs a month and running the risk of getting killed, whereas my faithful spouse, “little Bezegue,” gets ten times more for trailing around bars and eyeing the little barmen.

  But I feel like screaming when I’m alone in my room. Olivier, I’m through. I’m going to ask for a divorce and then come out and join you. Whether as your wife or your mistress, I shall live with you and this time I’ll know my place, which is that of every woman, not by the side of the man she loves but slightly behind him.

  I love you and am at your orders.

  MICHELINE.

  Merle would have liked to read this letter out to his comrades, but Piniéres was rushing about the mountains and only the other evening he had heard Boisfeuras say to Esclavier:

  “No world is more alien to women than the world of soldiers, priests and Communists, by which I mean fighting soldiers, militant Communists and evangelizing priests . . .”