The Praetorians

by Jean Larteguy

  Gigantic, ruddy and stinking of sweat, Pinières had drawn his pistol out of its holster. The prisoner watched him, with a look of resignation in his eyes.

  He was prepared to die; he knew that when deserters were recaptured they never got as far as prison: they were shot. The army settled its own accounts and did not allow the law to intervene. They had found his military identity card on him, which he kept as a sort of fetish, but which, instead of saving him, was going to cost him his life. What did it matter now if they learnt that the deserter captain’s name was Mahmoudi? He was so thirsty! Like all men from the south, he worshipped water; his dreams always featured water running under palm-trees, wells and norias.

  Ahmed had served in France, at Auvours Camp; on Sundays he used to sit by the side of the river and watch the water flowing past all day.

  He spoke.

  “The captain’s name is Mahmoudi; he’s to be the new chief of Willaya 4 after he’s killed Ziad, if he ever gets there.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “Everything is known, Captain, in a kattiba, as in a company.”

  “Drink,” said Orsini, “but not too much. For you it’s all over; soon you won’t ever be thirsty again, but we’re staying on up here and my water-bottle is almost empty.”

  “It was written.”

  The captain untied the prisoner’s hands and held out his water-bottle. The former sergeant was sparing with the water of the men who were about to kill him. He took three mouthfuls, rinsed his mouth out and handed the bottle back to the captain. Then he made a sign that he was ready. Two soldiers, their fingers on the triggers of their sub-machine-guns, came up on either side of him. They took him off behind a rock, without brutality, as though they were setting out on a patrol with him. There was a burst of fire.

  “You come across some odd chaps in their ranks,” said Pinières. “Only a year ago that fellow was still with us. Now they’re all going over to the other side.”

  “We know why,” said Orsini, rolling his shoulders. “The Arab is always willing to break his word, but he won’t tolerate lies or broken promises from anyone else. It’s only natural, he looks for something in us that he can’t find in himself. De Gaulle has behaved to the Arabs as though he was an Arab himself, and he has forced us to do the same. It’s because of him that we’ll shortly have to kill Mahmoudi if we find him. I don’t fancy the idea of finding him.”

  “Nor do I,” said Pinières. “Do you remember, at Camp One, when he used to come to Mass with us? He sat between Esclavier and me; Esclavier who couldn’t bear the sight of a priest, and myself who had never set foot in a church.”

  “And a week before the 13th of May? We had released him on parole. That was yet another idea of old Esclavier’s, but it was always like that with him. He dared to say openly what we were all thinking. So he’s told all about the plot, that’s to say our plot—there were so many others afterwards. And old Mahmoudi, beaming with joy, speaks up: ‘Nationalism is nothing new to me. I know what you ought to tell the Moslems; I know what they dream about. If you want your coup to succeed with them, leave it to me.’

  “He was the one who drafted all the pamphlets for the Kasbah.

  “What a mess he’s got us into, that chap de Gaulle! What on earth made us think of him! We should have known better: he’s a brass-hat after all.”

  * * * *

  Captain Marindelle’s office in Algiers was in an old Moorish house which served as a rear command post to the division. Each time a visitor opened the door the captain had a glimpse of the corner of the patio, some orange-trees with their golden fruit, a little jet of water which the wind sometimes blew in a shower of spray as far as the door.

  Yves Marindelle had shaved his head and without his comic topknot his lean face was no longer that of an aged urchin but of a restless monk devoured by a great temptation. It was the worst temptation of all: wanting to win men over in order to lead them.

  He re-read the signal that had just come in from the 10th Regiment.

  “According to reliable information, the former Captain Mahmoudi is in the band that we are surrounding south-west of Tebessa, near Jebel Doukane. He is on his way to Willaya 4, of which he is to take command.”

  “I do hope they don’t catch Mahmoudi,” Marindelle said gently. “I should very much like to see Mahmoudi take command of the Willaya 4. If necessary, I would even help him to get it if that were possible.”

  * * * *

  The sunset surrounded Jebel Doukane with blood-red clouds. In a few minutes the temperature dropped and a bitterly cold wind started blowing over the ridges.

  The three colonels sat in front of a fire on which a pot of coffee was being heated. The wireless set crackled faintly.

  The 4th Colonial Parachute Regiment and the Foreign Parachute Regiment had joined the 10th early in the afternoon and their colonels had come to put themselves under Raspéguy’s orders.

  Colonel Parsabel du Mostier, a tall lean man wearing canvas anklets, sat with his stick between his knees. He was the only graduate of the Polytechnic School to be serving with the paratroops, and he laughingly said that it had taken a lot to get used to them. His elegant manners, his easy-going nature, his sense of humour, concealed a violent character with a Reiter’s taste for warfare and an extremely classical conception of honour, country and religion, three notions which he refused to call in question no matter what the circumstances. He went to Mass without believing in God; he considered that no government had the right to abandon Algeria, which was an integral part of France, but he liked neither the French of Algeria nor the Moslems. He lived with a wife whom he hated, but since she had borne him three children he could not contemplate divorce, nor even a separation. He ran after women without much passion, but gave evidence of a perfect technique when he caught them.

  Esclavier used to say of him:

  “Parsabel is a fighting bull enclosed in a cardboard barrier, but he believes it to be made of stone or reinforced concrete and dare not break out of it.”

  Lieutenant-Colonel Millois was short, thick-set, cool-headed. He was a born leader of immense courage, who had risen from the ranks like Raspéguy, and, like him, loved medals, badges of rank, the drums of easy glory, but had neither his complexity nor fascination. Millois was incapable of being moved by his dead and wounded.

  He was in command of legionaries, those machines for making war, who were mere regimental numbers and demanded neither to be spared nor understood. For him warfare boiled down to three figures: the number of weapons recovered, of rebels slaughtered and, least important, of his own casualties.

  Envying Pierre-Noël Raspéguy’s glory, he clumsily tried to imitate him. He would have liked to form a separate unit with him, to the exclusion of all the other colonels, and he was the only one to call him by his Christian name.

  Colonel Parsabel regarded Raspéguy as an equation, all the terms of which were false but the solution correct. His behaviour, his lack of strategical and political knowledge, his breeding, were calculated to make the poorest type of soldier, yet Raspéguy, on the contrary, had shown himself to be the best operational leader in the French army! It had never occurred to Colonel Parsabel that the terms of the equation might also be correct.

  “Well, Pierre,” Lieutenant-Colonel Millois enquired, “what’s the position?”

  “We’re going to have heavy casualties.”

  “But, in the end, a good score. How do we set about it: a general score for the three regiments together or a separate one for each?”

  “A general score,” said Parsabel. “I don’t want our chaps fighting one another for the sake of a Czech rifle or Beretta pistol.”

  “I agree,” said Raspéguy.

  This business of scores suddenly seemed pointless, almost criminal, although he had been the first to create this obsession in all unit commanders.

  At tha
t time he used to say:

  “An officer should be judged like a gun-dog, by what he retrieves.”

  Millois refused to agree.

  “We’ll see,” he said.

  He was thinking: “If my legionaries do better than Raspéguy’s red berets or Parsabel’s blue berets I’ll demand separate scores; if they don’t I’ll ask for the scores to be shared.” But he realized that yet again Raspéguy had read his thoughts. He lowered his eyes and muttered:

  “Good, I’ll settle for a general score.”

  “It’s going to be tough going,” Raspéguy said once again. “Hand-to-hand fighting: one man, in these conditions, is as good as another, and there’s no chance of manœuvring.”

  He called for Captain Naugier and asked:

  “What time does the moon come up?”

  “At ten o’clock, sir, and it’s now twelve past eight.”

  Raspéguy pondered:

  “It will be pitch dark between nine and ten. That’s when the fells may try to break through. In their position that’s what I would do.”

  “Why?” Parsabel asked.

  “They need the whole night to escape. It’s always lighter before dawn, darker before the moon comes up. Between nine and ten at night our chaps have a snack, relax and are less on guard.”

  Raspéguy had already gone over to his W.T. and was calling up his units:

  “Everyone at action stations, cancel all cook-house fatigues.”

  The blood congealed on the clouds and turned black.

  Captain Jérémie called up:

  “It seems to me there’s a little too much movement in the brushwood.”

  Once again Parsabel was dumbfounded by Raspéguy’s intuition. He asked him: “How do you do it?”

  “I put myself in the enemy’s place and assume he is as intelligent as myself.”

  He fell silent for a moment, then went on:

  “The fells don’t give a damn about scores; they’re only out to win the war. We, however, behave as though it was already lost; all we’re after is promotion and a mention in dispatches. We’re killing off fells, it’s true, but we’re not making any headway; in fact we’re falling back. We’re waging a stupid kind of war, to the point of forgetting that a rebel who’s come over to our side is worth ten dead.”

  Millois muttered:

  “Now you’re arguing like an S.A.S.* officer. Our job is to kill. Winning rebels over and all that sort of thing is nothing to do with us. Can you see one of my legionaries asking a fell in German to come over to France?”

  Three rifle-shots broke the heavy silence that had fallen with the dark. A burst from a machine-gun replied, and suddenly the whole valley was ablaze.

  Mahmoudi, Atarf, Ahmed and the wireless operator, bent double under his W.T., had come out of the hiding-place. They were creeping up the rock-slides, trying not to dislodge the stones under their boots.

  “Why are we trying to get out this way?” Atarf asked.

  “It’s as good a way as any other,” said Mahmoudi. “Allah alone can tell.”

  “I don’t give a damn about Allah.”

  “There are too many people you don’t give a damn about.”

  Three little groups of rebels were advancing ahead of them and they could hear the butts of their rifles and sub-machine-guns knocking against their empty water-bottles.

  Ahmed fired.

  “He’s a fool,” Atarf said to himself. “He’ll give away our position. I’m going to tell him off.”

  But before he could say a word his mouth filled with blood. He collapsed on the hard dry earth of the path. He felt someone going through his pockets, and then he understood that Mahmoudi had had him shot.

  * * * *

  The law of the Vietminh! Mahmoudi would be very surprised when he read the papers he was carrying . . . if he succeeded in reading them, for they were in code. The pro-Communist group affiliated to the C.G.T.A.* had given him orders to kill the former captain. It would be a lesson for Ferhat Abbas, who had too great a tendency to play the rôle of Bourguiba and to consider himself the only leader of the rebellion.

  What Atarf had been taught about the revolt of the masses and their recruitment, the subtle intrigues of Moscow, Peking and Tunis, all that had fascinated him, now seemed to him of no importance. All he remembered was Macha, the little Czech girl. There she was, just like the first time he had tumbled her in the damp grass of a field, her skirts drawn up, her belly bleeding, screaming with pain and deriving a painful pleasure from it. Then he heard himself reciting the fatiha, the prayer of the believers on the point of death: La Allah, illa Allah . . .

  It had sprung to his lips from the depths of his childhood. Atarf wanted to defend himself. No, it was not he who was praying or who was about to die. But who then? Achkoun?: It was the Arabic word that had recurred to him—who then?

  Ahmed bent over him and rolled him over on to his back.

  “Ya ba ba! These Chaouia dogs. They always take longer to die than anyone else. They say you’ve got to kill them twice over.”

  Mahmoudi, with his agile highlander’s gait, was clambering over the rocks, and the words of one of his comrades in Camp One kept buzzing in his brain.

  It was in the name of these words—the words of Marindelle, he now remembered—that he had had Atarf killed: “It’s our Church against theirs, and you belong to ours.”

  Fat old Ahmed Maieri, with his sugary homosexual manner, had told him in Tunis before he set out: “Atarf is almost certainly a Cominform agent. But, you see, the Commies are providing us with arms. We’re obliged to give a command to one of their men. But I have a feeling that Atarf won’t keep his command for long”—here Maieri had winked at Mahmoudi—“he left Algeria such a long time ago, and the jebel is full of traps for an inexperienced man. Ah well, may God keep him safe. He’s such a handsome lad.”

  Obscenely, he had run his thick tongue over his lips.

  At thirty or so different points, at about the height of the crests, there was violent fighting going on at close quarters. In some spots rebels and paratroopers were intermingled and were calling out to identify one another.

  “Achkoun? Who goes there?”

  A German legionary would reply:

  “Teufel!”

  And he would fire a burst from his sub-machine-gun in the direction of the voice, but hit one of his comrades engaged in going through a corpse’s pockets.

  A dozen of the rebel groups succeeded in crossing the French lines, but Raspéguy, knowing that by night no encirclement can be complete, especially in broken ground, had laid a number of ambushes on the possible escape routes of the band. The moon had risen and a soft, clear, milky light took the place of the pitch darkness.

  Crouching motionless in groups of three or four round a heavy machine-gun, the wolves waited for their prey. They would let the fellaghas approach to within fifty yards, and on those flitting shadows they would then open fire. Their weapons spat out little tongues of flame. Every now and then a bullet ricocheted off a rock and came buzzing back towards them.

  These isolated engagements went on until daybreak. Some groups which had been thrown back into the valley were trying to climb back up the slopes.

  At ten o’clock in the morning, when the patrols had finished beating through the brushwood, they were able to tot up their score.

  Only forty rebels had succeeded in escaping with their weapons and reaching Jebel M’Zouia. That was all that remained of the two kattibas which had proudly paraded at Kef behind the green-and-white flag and which Tunisian lorries had then transported as far as the frontier.

  A hundred and ten of them had been killed, eighty wounded. Twenty prisoners gave themselves up—for the most part, young recruits who sobbed that they had been compelled to join the A.L.N.* by force, which was untrue.

  One of them, who had hel
ped to dig the hide-out in which Mahmoudi had had the heavy weapons buried, pointed the place out to a legionary without being asked, whereupon one of his comrades spat in his face and called him a foul dog.

  Raspéguy had the whole valley searched to find Mahmoudi’s body. But the former captain and his team had already reached the mechtas of Jebel M’Zouia.

  Atarf’s body, which bore no sign of his rank or importance, was pitched into the communal grave.

  * * * *

  The engagement had been particularly bloody at the entrance to a pass where three goat-tracks met. On five separate occasions the rebels had attacked the post holding this position, and at the fifth attempt had overcome it. The bodies of four paratroopers, each covered in a piece of tent-cloth, waited to be removed.

  Raspéguy, accompanied by Captain Naugier and Second Lieutenant Lamazière, reached the spot by helicopter. Captains Orsini and Pinières were already there; they were smoking and had just broached some ration boxes.

  Raspéguy punctiliously saluted the bodies. The death of any of his men was always a deep blow to him. Dia had once explained to him that in the animist world death was not recognized, that for the Blacks it was never a natural phenomenon. Man did not become decrepit or grow old, there were only evil influences over him. When he fell to a bullet it was not because the shot had been well aimed; the forces of evil had directed the bullet.

  In the mysterious depths in which man keeps the secrets which make his strength Raspéguy held the same belief as the Blacks, whose violent optimism he also shared.

  “A good show, sir,” Pinières exclaimed.

  “At last! Anyway, it’s one of the best scores of the year, and I’m not sorry to finish off my job like this.”

  “Finish off your job?”

  “Yes, I’m leaving you.”

  “If it’s because of the general I could have a word with him,” Orsini suggested. “He can be talked round if approached the right way.”

  He balanced proudly on his neat little feet.

  “Don’t bother about the general. I’m applying for the command of a sector.”

  “A sector!” the captain exclaimed. “A set-up of old women making patchwork quilts, with lollipops for the kids and educational films for the adults! You in a sector, sir?”