The Centurions

by Jean Larteguy

  The coffins were loaded on to a G.M.C., coffins made of plain wooden planks whose thickness was laid down by Ordnance regulations, as was the diameter of the nails.

  It was then Raspéguy spoke, addressing himself exclusively to the reservists.

  “You fought extremely well. You have paid a high price for the right to belong to us; so any of you who wish will be allowed to go on a parachute course as soon as we get back to Algiers. Gentlemen, I am proud of you and salute you.”

  And standing stiffly to attention, straightening his back and squaring his shoulders, Raspéguy saluted the truck which drove off with the Ordnance coffins and the few hundred faces turned towards him, the mutineers of Versailles whose features were drawn with fatigue, but who felt happy, released by the fight from the bloody memory of Rahlem.

  Then, accompanied by Major de Glatigny and Captain Boisfeuras, Raspéguy went off to take leave of Colonel Quarterolles.

  “Colonel,” he said, “I’ve got a present for you.”

  He produced Si Lahcen’s Military Medal and put it on the desk, and also a sheet of paper folded in four and stained with rain and sweat.

  “It’s only a mention in dispatches from Indo-China, Colonel, but it earned Sergeant-Major Si Lahcen his medal.”

  Raspéguy snapped to attention and read out the rebel’s citation:

  “‘Sergeant-Major Si Lahcen, of the Third Regiment of Algerian Light Infantry; magnificent leader of men, stalwart fighter, surrounded in a strong-point by infinitely superior forces, his officer being killed, he assumed command and although seriously wounded refused to surrender, withholding the attack for six hours until the arrival of reinforcements.’

  “It’s the same Si Lahcen, Colonel, that Pinières killed, while he was trying to stem the rout of his men. It would have been easier to have kept him on our side.

  “Ah, I almost forgot, Mayor; I think Captain Boisfeuras has also got something for you.”

  “It’s a receipt for a contribution to the F.L.N.,” Boisfeuras sneered.

  “It must be a fake,” said Vesselier.

  “A receipt which isn’t made out in your name but in the name of Pedro Artaz, the foreman on your Bougainvillées estate. I can’t see how Pedro Artaz, who earns 40,000 francs a month and has a wife and three children, manages to pay 400,000 francs every quarter out of his own pocket.”

  “I’ve also got a present,” said Glatigny. “It’s for Captain Moine. It’s a letter from Ahmed to Si Lahcen which I found among his papers.”

  Puffing at an old cigarette end, Moine raised his head slightly and his little eyes betrayed the bestial hatred he felt for the handsome major who, with one foot on a chair, began to read Ahmed’s letter:

  Brother Lahcen,

  As far as Captain Moine is concerned, you needn’t worry. He’s drunk every night and owes 300,000 francs to the Mozabite, Mechaien. If he makes any fuss, we’ll be able to blackmail him. But he’s much too stupid, lazy and cowardly . . .

  “Here, take the letter, Captain.”

  Without moving, Moine stretched his hand out for it.

  Colonel Quarterolles tried to change the subject:

  “I’ve drafted a number of citations, for I must admit your men behaved admirably . . .”

  Raspéguy replied with exaggerated courtesy:

  “Colonel, I’m in the habit of rewarding my men, both dead and alive, myself, and I don’t entrust anyone else with the task.”

  He saluted and withdrew with his two officers. Moine tore the letter up into small pieces, then ground the pieces under his heel and suddenly raised his head.

  “I hope, sir, you’re going to put in a report about the conduct of Raspéguy’s officers in P ——. They tortured and liquidated Ahmed instead of handing him over to the proper authorities.”

  “But you’ve done the same yourself, Moine, countless times . . .”

  “Yes, but I always made out a report which was counter-signed by the police; I was quite in order.”

  The regiment did not go back to the Camp des Pins straightaway, but wandered all over Kabylie to support the garrison troops whenever an important operation was undertaken . . .

  The “lizards” marched through cork forests, in the indigo-coloured shade of the trees. The ferns bent and crackled under their jungle boots while flies, gorged on sap and plant-juice, came and settled on them as though dead drunk after a clumsy, faltering flight.

  They toiled over the burning stones of the Aurès and Nèmentchas and, with parched throats, dreamt of the fresh springs of France half-choked by watercress and wild sorrel.

  They ran their tongues over the salty sweat which dripped on to their lips. They marched, they laid ambushes, they killed rebels armed with sporting rifles or submachine-guns.

  On 27 July they heard that the Egyptians had nationalized the Suez Canal, which affected them scarcely at all since none of them had shares in the Company.

  They went on marching or devouring the dust of the roads in open trucks. One day they were sent off to occupy a series of little oases at the foot of the Saharan Atlas where they relieved a Foreign Legion unit.

  Esclavier and his two companies of reservists set up headquarters at V ——, on the site of an old Roman camp of Cornelius Balbus. It was just outside the oasis, overlooking a broad expanse of sand-dunes.

  The grove of palm-trees watered by seguias was cool and smelt of apricots. It was divided up into countless little gardens in which the norias of the wells made a gentle rattling sound. The women, unveiled, with tattooed faces, and adorned with heavy silver jewellery, smiled at the soldiers while the children, more persistent than the flies, ran after them begging for chocolate or offering them pleasures which the women of the oasis could not provide without a certain amount of danger.

  The rebellion had not yet reached this area; the regiment took it easy and the officers spent their time calling on one another and showing off their palm groves with the pride and delight of owners. Raspéguy had left Boudin at Laghouat to attend to the administrative questions and supplies.

  One evening almost all the officers had dropped in on Esclavier who, having taken over the legionaries’ furniture, had the most comfortable mess. It boasted a refrigerator, a few fans and, on a whitewashed wall, a primitive fresco depicting the Battle of Camerone.

  Glatigny had brought a gazelle which he had shot from his Jeep, Boisfeuras a case of whisky which he had ordered from Algiers, and Boudin had sent up a small barrel of Mascara wine. They had decided to make a night of it and had started drinking systematically to get drunk as quickly as possible; through drink they contrived to come to grips with the painful, unwelcome memories that dogged their footsteps, to grapple with them, and exhaust themselves in the effort so as to wake up in the morning with a splitting headache and their minds at rest.

  They drank first of all to Merle and all the others who were dead, then to themselves, to whom the same thing might happen any day, to Si Lahcen whom they had had to kill, and to Colonel Quarterolles, Moine and Vesselier whom they would very much have liked to shoot. But as they got more and more drunk they began to forget Algeria and France and presently all of them were talking or dreaming of Indo-China.

  At the same moment all the officers and warrant-officers of the French Army, all those who had known Tonkin or Cochin-China, the Haute-Région, Cambodia or Laos, whether sitting in the mess, lying in ambush or sleeping in a tent, were likewise aggravating their yellow infection by picking at the thin scabs that covered it.

  • • •

  Esclavier had never been able to bear drunken conversation for long and so went out into the cool, blue desert night. He wandered about the ruins of the Roman camp until he came to the edge of the plateau. Sitting down on the base of a broken column, he contemplated the infinite expanse of the sky and the dunes; he felt a shiver down his spine which was perhaps nothing more than th
e cold night air. To reassure himself, he ran his fingers over the column and touched the inscription that he had deciphered on the morning of his arrival: Titus Caius Germanicus centurio IIIa Legio Augusta.

  Twenty centuries earlier a Roman centurion had dreamt by this column and peered into the depths of the desert on the lookout for the arrival of the Numidians. He had stayed behind there to guard the limes of the Empire, while Rome decayed, the barbarians camped at her gates and the wives and daughters of the senators went out at nightfall to fornicate with them.

  The centurions of Africa used to light bonfires on the slopes of the Saharan Atlas to make the Numidians think that the legions were still up there on guard. But one day the Numidians heard they were no more than a handful and they slaughtered them, while their comrades who had fled to Rome elected a new Caesar in order to forget their cowardice.

  The centurion Philippe Esclavier of the 10th Parachute Regiment tried to think why he, too, had lit bonfires in order to contain the barbarians and save the West. “We centurions,” he reflected, “are the last defenders of man’s innocence against all those who want to enslave it in the name of original sin, against the Communists who refuse to have their children christened, never accept the conversion of an adult and are always ready to question it, but also against certain Christians who only think of faults and forget about redemption.”

  Philippe heard the yapping of a jackal in the distance and, closer at hand, the song his comrades were bawling out, as they rapped on their plates with their knives and forks . . .

  He thought of the Communists; he could not help feeling a certain respect for them, as the centurion Titus Caius Germanicus had felt for the nomads prowling round his desert camp. The Communists were frank enough to say what they wanted: the entire world. They fought fairly and no quarter or pity could be expected. Did Titus Caius also know he would have his throat cut?

  But Philippe felt hatred and disgust welling up against the people back in Paris who were rejoicing in advance at their defeat, all those sons of Masoch who were already getting pleasure out of it.

  Titus Caius must have thought the same about the progres-sivists of Rome. The barbarians, like the Communists of the twentieth century, had needed those traitors to open the city gate to them. But they despised them and on the day of their victory they had decided forthwith to exterminate them.

  A strange thought crossed the captain’s mind: “Perhaps we could prevent the empire from collapsing by transforming ourselves into barbarians, by becoming males disgusted with all these females, by turning into Communists.”

  As he rummaged in his pocket for a cigarette, Esclavier came upon a letter from the incestuous Guitte who refused to remain his sister by adoption. He had given her money and clothes, as he would to a real sister; he had even paid the instalments on her small car. She had spread it abroad that it was perfectly normal for him to keep her since she was his mistress and was living with him.

  Old Goldschmidt, who had heard these rumours, had given his daughter a severe reprimand in front of the captain. She had merely shrugged her shoulders and said:

  “It was only to help Philippe. He’s frightened of giving me a bad reputation; now that I’ve got one, what’s he waiting for?”

  Guitte had waited a few minutes, and since he had made no move, she had left the room; he had not seen her again before his departure. But she had just written to say that she had got a lover, which suited her down to the ground.

  Mina kept sending him postcards from the Côte d’Azur where she had gone on holiday. They were photographs of grand hotels, naked girls on the beach, parasols and pedal-boats, regattas and water-ski championships. Philippe stuck them up in the mess; the second-lieutenants and cadets of the reserve came and brooded on these holiday pictures for hours on end.

  How paltry everything suddenly seemed in the middle of this African night!

  He heard a great crash; back there in the mess a table had collapsed.

  Marindelle came out and joined Esclavier.

  “They’re dead drunk,” he told him. “Dia made a bet he could jump over the table and landed right on top of it. Pinières has passed out in a corner of the room, stripped to the waist and covered in bandages. Glatigny is sitting back in his chair quietly smoking his pipe, while Boisfeuras is practising knife-throwing against the door.”

  “And Raspéguy?”

  “He hasn’t opened his mouth but keeps eating, drinking and cutting up his bread with his penknife. He’s not very keen on these systematic binges. He thinks they’re a waste of time, effort and breath.”

  “What about you, Yves?”

  “I’m rather fed up.”

  “Your wife?”

  “I don’t love her any longer but I’ve got to get her out of my system; it’ll take some time. There’s some talk about the French and British intervening in Egypt. You know we’re rather well in with G.H.Q. Algiers since that business at P ——.”

  “I’m not very proud of that . . . We say we come out here to protect the Algerians against the barbarism of the F.L.N., and my men and I then go and behave like Ahmed’s or Si Lahcen’s thugs.”

  “We came out here to win, you know, and for no other reason. It’s thanks to the example you set at Rahlem that we wiped out the best organized band in Algeria, thereby saving the lives of hundreds, maybe thousands, of men, women and children.”

  “When I went into the mechtas with a knife in my hand, I didn’t think of that. I should like to be in a war which wasn’t a civil war, a good clean war where there are only friends and enemies and no traitors, spies or collaborators, a war in which blood doesn’t mingle with shit . . .”

  Raspéguy came up behind them.

  “It’s not a bad spot,” he said. “We might have stayed here a little longer, but in a week’s time we’re going back to Algiers. We’ve just been posted to the general reserve.”

  “What does that mean, sir?” Esclavier inquired.

  Raspéguy put a hand on each of the captains’ shoulders, leaning heavily on them.

  “It means we’ll be the first to enter Cairo.”

  • • •

  Two weeks later the 10th Colonial Parachute Regiment got back to its quarters in the Camp des Pins.

  Before the reservists, who had just completed their six months’ stint, were demobilized, Raspéguy insisted on putting any of them who wished through a parachute course. All the reservists who had taken part in the Rahlem business volunteered.

  “I don’t see how we can very well do anything else,” said Bucelier.

  He couldn’t explain exactly why, but he felt it had to be done. Five or six soldiers who had been put off by the rigours of the training or the fear of breaking a leg just when they were on the point of going home, tried to get out of it. But their comrades did not give them a moment’s peace until they too decided to jump.

  One evening, at eighteen-hundred hours, during the daily Press conference at Government House, the Press Information captain of Area Ten announced that “the mutineers of Versailles” were going to do a parachute jump at the Camp des Pins a few days before being demobbed and that they had all volunteered for it. The journalists had been invited by Lieutenant-Colonel Raspéguy who was in command of the unit to which they belonged.

  The spokesman who was at the meeting thereupon buttonholed Villèle, his favorite butt.

  “You’ll be writing this up in that rag of yours, won’t you, Mr. Villèle—that some reservists, Communists, have asked to do a parachute jump before leaving Algeria?”

  “I’ll see,” said Villèle. “I’m going out there and if it’s true I’ll certainly write about it.”

  He turned to Pasfeuro:

  “Coming?”

  They descended the broad stairs of the forum as far as the war memorial and went into a café where they ordered two anisettes.

  “Had you h
eard about this story?” Villèle asked. “You know the whole Raspéguy outfit pretty well, don’t you?”

  He gave a slight sneer.

  “Especially that fellow Marindelle.”

  “Some day, my fine friend, I’m going to bash your face in if you don’t keep off that subject. No, I hadn’t heard.”

  “Shall we go and have a look?”

  “You said you were going anyway, do you need me as well?”

  “No . . . but I think it’ll be a good story. You could give me a lift . . . Let’s meet outside the Aletti.”

  “Why don’t you hire a car like everyone else?”

  “I’m never in Algiers more than a few days at a time. Please let me pay for your drink.”

  Villèle could not help wondering what Pasfeuro’s reaction would be if he knew that he put the cost of a car down on his expenses although the one he always used was borrowed from a friend. He had even managed to get hold of some blank Europe-Cars receipt forms.

  • • •

  In front of two or three generals, a handful of colonels and a dozen journalists, two hundred reservists led by Captain Esclavier launched themselves for the seventh time into the blue. Their parachutes floated in the air for a few moments. Pulling on their rigging-lines, they landed without mishap and received their brand-new paratrooper’s badge from the hands of Colonel Raspéguy.

  Then they marched back to their quarters and prepared for their departure. Bucelier, who had signed on again because he was now frightened of going back to France, watched them with a lump in his throat.

  The rest of them were quits; they had done their jumps. But he wasn’t yet, at least he thought not.

  Colonel Raspéguy, Esclavier and Pinières went down to the docks to watch the reservists as they embarked on the Sidi Brahim; they remained there until the last moment when the liner cast off. While waiting for them at the bar of the Aletti, Pasfeuro, Villèle, Marindelle and Boisfeuras proceeded to get drunk.