The Mysteries of Algiers

by Robert Irwin

  ‘Oh, forget it. My little joke.’

  This is the first time she has come to my room in the fort. We have kept our liaison pretty quiet, for Chantal estimates that we shall have more weight on the security committee if no one realizes that we are involved with one another. It is better if we are perceived to be two independent voices in its deliberations.

  I am indeed surprised that she agreed to this afternoon’s assignation, for she has already begun to flirt with other officers at Fort Tiberias, and in the committee meetings we do indeed speak with two independent voices now. In these meetings she is sounding increasingly critical of my plodding methods and poor results. Too many files, too much plod and no one could understand how the files were organized apart from me.

  We lie quiet for a while in bed watching the great fan slowly turning on the ceiling and drinking Martini from the bottle. Then Chantal begins to talk about item one – now item two – on tomorrow’s agenda (neither she nor the colonel would say anything at all about the new item one). I lie back and contemplate Chantal talking and speculating. Chantal has what I have always privately classified as fascist good looks – unfairly, doubtless. One sees many American girls like Chantal – strong teeth, strong jaws, big bones, large milk-giving breasts, healthy diet, assurance that comes from family love and a good income.

  I try to pull her over on to me again, but she keeps going on about the damned security agenda. It was I who had put the possible existence of a traitor on the agenda and argued forcibly with the colonel that none of the officers, not even the most senior, especially the most senior, could be considered above suspicion. Colonel Joinville’s eccentricity verges on madness – madness to the point that he does not even resent my suggestion that his strange ideas render him suspect. Captain Kolbetranz is one of those rare officers who has risen from the ranks, a refugee from East Germany, he could be a Soviet plant. Captain Delavigne is an intellectual. God knows what goes on in the minds of those who read Le Monde. Captain Yvetot is an excessively conventional and conservative officer. He may well be secretly and implacably opposed to the nuclear test about to take place at Reganne and to de Gaulle’s new force de frappe. Major Lacan is a ghost of a man. He has left his soul in Dien Bien Phu. It is enough to run through the long list of possible suspects to see why France is going to lose this war.

  ‘You suspect even me, don’t you?’ says Chantal.

  ‘No, there are limits even to my suspicious nature.’ But I take care to put the slightest note of hesitation in my reply, for I am careful always to keep her a little off balance. And if she is only having a game with me, it is also true that at this stage I am by no means wholly besotted with her. My natural cast of mind is to have two minds – on anything. I can see that Chantal is a magnificent creature, but at the same instant that I marvel at her body I find it revolts me. The big breasts, the flesh round the hips, superfluous flesh everywhere, the big eyes which out of the context of her carefully made-up face might be mistaken for jelly fish, smells that allure and repel. I have seen so much flesh in other contexts, electrocuted, charred, drowned, dismembered and smelling, that my response to any human body cannot be unambivalent. It must be the same for all of us serving in Algeria.

  Temperamentally and politically too there was a great divide between Chantal and myself. It is enough now to remark that Chantal’s politics are the politics of the shoulder-blades. So she herself has described it to me. The shiver that travels up the spine, between the shoulder-blades, and tingles at the nape of her neck and brings tears to her eyes, this shiver is her political master. The manifestations of the political shiver are rare and not announced in advance, but they are crucial. The singing of the ‘Marseillaise’ in a night-club, the Spahis cantering by on full-dress parade, a child, miraculously still alive, dragged from the rubble of an FLN bomb outrage, suchlike stuff. My view of politics is more logical.

  And there is her class. I am not of her class. Who is? In Algeria, only members of ‘the hundred families’. The de Serkissians own vineyards, olive groves, tobacco plantations, a bauxite mine and a casino. And despite that frivolous champagne and Jaguars look, she is an intellectual and a reader of books. I am not fond of all that. It’s the negation of action. It is after all the intellectuals, the academics and the journalists who are paralysing the military offensive now. The French are going to surrender Algeria after losing a series of debates in a coffee bar. And a lot of men on both sides have got killed, while the intellectuals maundered on. Killed for nothing. I am serious about this.

  In Chantal’s favour it has to be conceded that the books she likes best are about or by men of action – Saint-Exupéry’s Voyage through the Night, Junger’s Storm of Steel, Ouida’s Under Two Flags. Most endearingly of all, she is devoted to The Three Musketeers. She knows all their adventures by heart and she has told me that on the day of her first communion she took a secret vow before the altar to live her life exactly as D’Artagnan would have lived it – if D’Artagnan had been a woman living in French Algeria.

  I lie silent for a while thinking of the case that could be put to the colonel that the traitor has only just arrived at Fort Tiberias and that Chantal is that traitor. She has had access to most desert operation files for over a year now. She met Mercier. The family estates were vulnerable to an FLN protection racket …

  We continue idly discussing the shortlist of suspects, though really shortlist is a misnomer. A full-blown traitor in the army, as opposed to some liberal intellectual officer with a queasy conscience, a full-blown military traitor is so rare in this war that internal security procedures have become very sloppy here at the fort, and at Laghouat and Tizi-Ouzo. Almost every officer knew or could have known about al-Hadi’s trip to Algiers and the tail that was being put on him. Most of them knew about the planned swoop on the Bani Fadl, and again could have known about the July pipeline patrol arrangements. Most disturbing of all from a security point of view, almost every man, commissioned or other ranks, in Fort Tiberias has a pretty good idea what was going on thirty miles to the south at Reganne and how the nuclear test could be disrupted by the FLN. Even if fears of a full-blown traitor are judged to be without foundation, still desertions from the Legion are a common enough occurrence, and escaped legionnaires often like to make a new start in civilian life by selling their story to the papers. I at first assumed that the three civilians and the para major who were going to be present tomorrow were to do with arrangements at Reganne, but the way in which Chantal and the colonel do not discuss the matter now makes me doubt this.

  When we have been through the list, she leans back again. She is struggling not to show too much excitement. ‘Philippe, I’m just beginning to realize … It’s been coming to me all afternoon. I think I know who the traitor is. But I’m not sure …’

  ‘I’m not even sure that there is a traitor. Who do you think it is?’

  ‘Oh, I’m not sure yet. And besides it’s going to be my coup. I will perhaps suggest the name at tomorrow’s meeting. You go back to your archives, and that Arab you’ve got on the board. I shall be very interested to hear what you get out of him.’

  I go to the window and look down through the slats of the shutters at the Legion at drill below. The sex is OK, but how long can I keep up these games with Chantal?

  Chantal is looking thoughtful.

  ‘That board with the leather straps. Does it have to stay down in that dingy cell? Couldn’t you think of some reason to have it brought up here?’

  Chapter Four

  We are three-quarters of the way through my lecture on insurgency technique. I used to be nervous about lecturing. A surprising number of soldiers who have seen action are. These days I reckon that if my shirt-tail isn’t hanging out and if my flies are done up, than at least the lecture has reached the minimum standard. The lecture is a waste of time. Only experience teaches us about the enemy. The platoon is squeezed together on what must be old school benches.

  ‘Men! Mao as we have seen des
cribed the guerrilla as moving among the people like a fish in the water, quiet as a goldfish in his pool. But this applies only to the first stage of guerrilla warfare. In the second phase our goldfish acquires teeth and becomes a shark cruising around among the other more innocuous fish. The aim now is to detach these innocuous fish, the “oppressed” from the “oppressor”, and the guerrilla’s trick is to get the “oppressor” to do most of his work for him. General Giap proved himself a master at this strategy.’

  I do not have to think about what I am saying. Instead I am reflecting that it is given to few people to think when they wake up in the morning, ‘Today I am going to murder a man,’ but that was my first thought this morning. I have yet to commit the murder. I have this lecture to get through first and then some work on those blasted files.

  ‘So now I want to turn to the tactics of outrage and how the terrorist and the guerrilla turn reprisals against terrorism to their advantage. A bomb is thrown. The authority – military or civil – must take reprisals. They can’t find the actual culprits, or it may be that they do have them in their net but they can’t distinguish the terrorist in their net from all the other fish. So they practise mass reprisals. Now we should note here that from the “oppressor’s” point of view – and, for the sake of argument, let us here classify ourselves as oppressors – this strategy is not as senseless as it seems. For often the original programme was ordered by a particular sector of the liberation movement, without authorization from the command cell. In any case the liberation leadership have certain responsibilities towards the people they are supposed to be liberating. So the bombing campaign may be called off. Corporate responsibility and mass reprisals can be made to work on behalf of the occupying power – in the short term. Look at Massu’s successful operation in the Algiers kasbah a couple of years back.

  ‘But more generally, and in the long run, mass reprisals and so forth only play into the hands of the insurgents, for they alienate a previously friendly or at least neutral populace. They make more visible to the masses the naked oppression of the occupying power. These ideas I am telling you about do not originate with the FLN, or with General Giap. They go back to Trotsky. It is not helpful or accurate to regard the perpetrator of a terrorist outrage as a criminal psychopath – any more than it is to so regard the torturer. The terrorist is an able strategist. We must respect him and understand him. Know the mind of the enemy, gentlemen.’

  The lecture is not arousing much interest. True it is a very hot afternoon, but all afternoons are hot down here, and if I had been talking to a platoon of conscripts or even of paras, some of the ideas I had been discussing would have aroused argument and some of the deliberately provocative terminology I had used would have drawn criticism. More than half the French army in Algeria are barely more than schoolboys, and most of them have a vague idea that they are here to fight ‘international communism’, but beyond knowing that international communism is evil they don’t know what it is. A few months before they got shipped out here, their parents were worrying if they went out for long bicycle rides on their own.

  But my legionnaires are different. A few of the old lags in this room, mostly the older ones, know their Trotsky pretty well. They fought for Trotsky – or for Stalin – in the Spanish Civil War and when the war was lost, they signed up and came here. Another, slightly younger, group came face to face with the real menace of international communism on the Russian Front. They know what it is about. So we have a lot of Waffen ss in this platoon too. Then we got a lot of refugees from Eastern Europe in the late forties. Even the criminal recruits prove to be surprisingly politicized, but they are not going to argue it out here in this classroom.

  I have a brief fantasy of a couple of the hard-bitten old Stalinist thugs in this room turning up at a dinner party at the de Serkissians’, bristling and sweating in the unfamiliar monkey suits. I pride myself on my ability to think two things simultaneously and, while the lecture is delivered by automatic pilot, I start to think back on the last of the de Serkissian dinners at which I was present. Mercier was there too …

  Now, suddenly, it occurs to me that the men may be more interested in learning what was said at the dinner party than in me going over the whys and wherefores of our defeat in Indochina. They should know what the civilians think of us. They should be reminded of what life can be like outside the Legion. I will paint the scene for them. I will rub their noses in it. Toughen their spirits up a bit. That sits well with the philosophy of the Legion. So now the lecture abruptly changes course.

  ‘It is vital to know the mind of the enemy. It is also useful to know what your friends are thinking of you. I should like now to describe a dinner party which I had the honour to attend in Algiers last week …’

  The lights were strung out along the Bay of Algiers. We dined out of doors beside the swimming pool. But as Maurice, Chantal’s father, was swift to point out, this was not a barbecue. (‘Beastly American custom. Probably copied from the Red Indians.’)

  Instead Maurice sat at the head of the table, looking on his guests and his napery with equal pride, and houseboys wearing fezzes and white gloves brought the food out from the kitchens. With the coming of autumn, Maurice’s mind had turned to thoughts of hunting. But the Challe offensive is still going on, and every day there are reports of skirmishes, sometimes small battles with the fellagha in the Aures. The hunting season started a month ago, but only that week had Maurice wangled a permit to do some shooting in a restricted military zone. A couple of his companions from the chasse, thickset heavy-browed men, sat further down the table. Pierre Lagaillarde, the ex-para briefly over from the Paris Assembly, was the guest of honour. Lagaillarde had brought with him one of his political allies and protégés, Raoul Demeulze, the brightest of the young Algiers lawyers. Chantal and I had met Raoul before. Indeed it was clear that Raoul and Chantal had become very well acquainted of late. Raoul liked to pose as wit and flâneur of the boulevards and she seemed to find this pose attractive. Mercier was at the far end of the table, ill at ease to be seated so far from Chantal or myself. (This dinner was on Tuesday night. Mercier was to die on Thursday. I was already pretty sure by Tuesday that Mercier was going to die. Only I still did not know when or how.) Raoul sat opposite me and Chantal next to him.

  As I describe Chantal to the men in the platoon I know for certain that I have them with me and, in my mind’s eye, they enter Maurice’s garden one by one and file behind us at the table and each one leans over the woman’s shoulder to get a better look at her breasts. Now of course I am not going to tell the men what I knew about Mercier, nor what I felt about Chantal and Raoul. I am not going to tell them anything about my thoughts and feelings. Nor will I tell them how halfway through our argument about music in the barracks, I noticed that Raoul’s flies were open and how Chantal’s hand rested tenderly on that place. But I will tell them what was said at my end of the table, and I make sure that they can picture the scene, the cut glass and the candelabra, and I tell them what we ate – moules marinières, casseroled pheasant, oranges in chocolate and salad and cheese – and what we drank – Muscadet, Côtes du Rhône and brandy. And I am careful to point out to the men that of course we did not have to fight for it as they do in the Legion canteen.

  Maurice and his pals will be hunting wild boar and partridge and just possibly lynx. In past years I have taken legionnaires through the area they will be hunting in. My men were on search and sweep exercises against the FLN.

  Maurice and his pals wanted to compare notes. Flushed and jocular, they were keen for me to acknowledge that we are all one brotherhood of men with guns – as if their weedy potting of birds really compared with our manhunts against the FLN.

  ‘Don’t suppose you have left any for our beaters to flush out?’

  ‘Your fellagha is a wily bird. You can practically walk over one without seeing him.’

  ‘Come on now, Captain. Admit, for all the seriousness of things, there is still an element of sport, of fun
even in a manhunt …’

  ‘The trouble with the sort of manhunts I take my men on is that from minute to minute one can never be sure who is hunting whom,’ I replied.

  It was at this point that Raoul decided to join our conversation.

  ‘It seems to me that there is something, how shall I put it – well it seems to me that the pleasure can be as great for the hunted as the hunter. At the risk of seeming absurd, yes, I will venture to suggest that there is something in being sought after that is pleasurable, and that pleasure has something of sex in it. Yes indeed, but I can see that you do consider this absurd.’

  Maurice certainly looks very grim, but Raoul plunges on regardless.

  ‘Gentlemen, I urge you to consider …’

  (This affected manner of speech is something that Raoul has picked up in his practice as advocate in Algiers.)

  ‘… no, to reflect back on your childhood. Those games of hide and seek in the dark, the panting and feeling for limbs, at times a sense of orgiastic release. And when, in those enchanting games, you were finally discovered was there not a flush of pleasure that was at its roots a thing of sex? For myself, I believe it was.’

  (My platoon finds Raoul rather hard to take. Only Corporal Buchalik is guffawing.)

  But the de Serkissians were becoming used to Raoul and his conversational provocations. Even so, I wondered if Raoul might not have gone too far this time. I hoped that Maurice would tell Raoul to shut up. But Maurice was distracted from immediate response by one of the guards. From our table we had a view of the blackly gleaming sea in the Bay of Algiers. Maurice clearly felt that he owned the panorama and he boasted that, though he had been advised to have the north wall of the estate raised and wired, he had refused, for the sake of the view. A life directed by fear was not worth living, he said. However a couple of Corsican retainers with antiquated Lebel rifles patrolled the edges of the grounds and from time to time in the course of the evening one of these guards would come in from the shadows and take a glass of wine from his master’s hands. The lights of the bay were distant, the villas of Maurice’s neighbours gave no light. They were boarded up, their swimming pools drained.