The Praetorians

by Jean Larteguy

  They stopped to drink some water at a spring. The young girl crushed some mint in her hands and rubbed it on the man’s chest.

  “I love that smell,” she said. “I imagine that’s how Pan must have smelt; I’ll smell it again on you this evening. You look very absorbed. What are you thinking about?”

  “Nothing.”

  He was lying. He had just remembered that in Algeria his comrades were sweating in the heat or dying of cold, feeding on tinned food, drinking nothing but water, exhausting themselves, getting wounded or killed for the sake of a cause which everyone here considered lost. Meanwhile he was bathing, wallowing in the sun, making love, and presently he would partake of old Donadieu’s tasty cooking. But he envied his comrades and he would have liked to be back with the men of his clan instead of lying under an olive-tree beside this beautiful stranger who rubbed his chest with mint.

  Philippe stopped at his house to change his clothes, leaving Irène to make her way home alone.

  Urbain Donadieu was waiting for her in the arbour, drinking his pastis which he made himself. He did not sweeten it, in order to have the pleasure of dripping iced water into it through a piece of sugar and savouring the fresh fragrance rising from the glass.

  “Well?” he asked his daughter.

  “We went for a bathe in the Siagne; the water was icy.”

  Urbain made a trumpeting noise with his lips.

  “All right,” she said. “I can see you know, I can’t hide anything from you. Tonight I’m going to sleep at Philippe’s.”

  He concealed his surprise, so as to appear more shrewd and informed than he was. But his daughter’s cynicism, which shocked him as a father, could only entrance the disillusioned sneering character he had assumed so as not to suffer too much from others, and which had gradually melted into his own.

  “Is it to make him talk that you did that, like a spy of the good old days? But Mata Hari preferred the bedrooms of luxury hotels to the grass on the banks of the Siagne.”

  “No, I wanted to. I like him, and since I want him to give me an account of his life, I granted him what he wanted in exchange.”

  She closed her eyes; she had just caught herself out cheating.

  She was the one who had provoked Philippe’s desire so that she might have this excuse, but afterwards it had gone very well. Somewhat too well, in fact.

  Philippe arrived, with his jacket thrown over his shoulders. Urbain Donadieu told him what there was for dinner, ticking the items off on his fingers: basil soup, frogs, grilled haunch of kid with salsify, vin rosé, of course, and then a bottle of champagne, Lanson 1942, an exceptional year.

  Throughout the meal he watched his daughter and Philippe closely, trying to discern from their behaviour any sign, gesture, attitude or secret understanding which might have indicated that they were lovers and that their bodies, wakened against each other, still desired each other. Nothing. They might have been an old married couple or brother and sister. They addressed each other by the familiar tu, but without the slightest embarrassment, without their words appearing to betray the slightest trace of affection or desire.

  “How deceptive the young are today,” thought Urbain, who had been a great lover. “It’s only natural they’re bored, they no longer respect the ritual of love, or war, or politics.”

  He tasted his champagne: a little too iced.

  “What prompted you to make the 13th of May attempt?” he asked the officer.

  “I took part with some comrades in one of the May 13th plots; it was the most important one, I believe, because without it the others would have come to nothing.”

  Philippe was sitting in the shadows, and only his hands, which were playing with a pellet of bread, were in the light. They were long, nervous, hard, but could also be caressing. Irène knew. In a short while they would be stroking her stomach and running through her hair.

  “It was partly because of the torturing that we brought off the 13th of May.”

  Irène felt as though she were choking.

  Those hands, whose caresses and brutality she had enjoyed, may perhaps have inflicted torture. There was nothing she hated more in the world than torture. It was not to defend the Republic that she had marched behind the banners, but to protest against torture.

  Philippe went on:

  “We went very far in this war—far enough to be damned, a Christian might say, because we could not lose it.”

  Urbain Donadieu had settled down in his armchair and was holding his breath.

  Of all the explanations he had heard to account for the 13th of May, none had struck him as convincing. No one had thought of mentioning torture, that disease which the Middle Ages had transmitted to our age, which the fanatical monks of the Inquisition had bequeathed to the revolutions of the twentieth century. At the bottom of it all there was always this desperate, sincere desire to make man happy by plucking his contradictions from him like rank weeds.

  In Algeria the army, in order to win or convince, had gone so far as to use the same methods as the inquisitors and the commissars. But, because it had scruples, it had not reduced torture to a system, nor displayed the discretion which must surround this sort of practice and which at the same time confers on it an almost sacred horror.

  As members of the “Defence of Man” committee, Urbain Donadieu and Paul Esclavier had formed part of the commission of enquiry responsible for assembling all the statements of evidence on this subject: on the Nazi concentration camps as well as the massacres at Katyn, on the methods of the Gestapo as well as those of the Communist secret-police forces. Leaning over this abyss, they had felt quite giddy, and one day Paul Esclavier had said to him:

  “I don’t know what can be done to cure man of this evil. Some people claim that a great faith, a great aim, can, in the very long run, serve as extenuating circumstances to such crimes. I don’t think so.”

  Urbain shared his old friend’s view; moreover, he had always been convinced that Algeria was a cause that was lost in advance.

  “Did you ever torture anyone, Philippe?” Irène asked.

  “I have been tortured myself, and yet I once had to torture others.”

  She got up, came over to him and seized him by the shoulders.

  “I’ve a right to know.”

  “What right?”

  Irène felt herself blushing. For the first time she felt she had acquired the right over a man for having given herself to him.

  “She’s going to fall in love with him,” Donadieu thought to himself, feeling surprised, intrigued and disappointed at one and the same time.

  “After the battle of Algiers,” Philippe went on, “my regiment went upcountry again. Our colonel, Pierre-Noël Raspéguy, moved us out of that town, which we had begun to hate and love passionately, the town of our crimes and our victories. . . .

  “He sent us slogging along the tracks again, in the belief that only exhaustion, hardship, danger and death could purify us. In his own way Raspéguy is a Christian; he believes in the remission of sins through suffering.”

  “That’s the big colonel with the film-actor’s manner?” Irène asked.

  “Yes, he enjoys playing a starring rôle.

  “We hunted down rebel bands in the burning jebel of the Saharan Atlas, in the gorges, in dried-up river-beds infested with mosquitoes, among vine stumps, once even in some drains.

  “We each had a summons in our pocket from the examining magistrate on account of what we had done in Algiers. We had been summoned, of course, as material witnesses. We felt that the one who had the most to answer for was Captain Julien Boisfeuras. On his own authority he had wiped out a prisoner, Si Mellial, one of the foremost leaders of the rebellion.

  “We were revolted. On orders from the Government we had embarked on this battle, but only with the greatest reluctance. We had not been trained as policemen and we ha
d to act quickly, otherwise Algeria was lost. There was therefore a certain amount of ugly business, it was inevitable. Now we were being held responsible for it.

  “One day an officer from the Judge Advocate General’s branch came and informed us that the case had been dropped, that we had heard the last of it.

  “Paris may perhaps have been frightened of our anger? We resumed our operations. Then we were asked to undertake the same job at Z that we had done at Algiers.

  “Z is a small town hemmed in between the mountains and the sea. It was held up as a model of tranquillity. One fine day a band turned up and massacred the people bathing on the beach: twenty dead and among them Alexandra—Jacquier’s daughter! That was four months before the 13th of May.”

  * * * *

  “Well?” Raspéguy asked Boisfeuras, who had just arrived from Z.

  The colonel had left him behind in Algiers to gather as much information as he could on this business.

  Boisfeuras gave his rasping laugh.

  “We’re up against it again, sir. The whole district is rotten; it even serves as a rear base for Willaya 3. The chief of the Willaya, Si Lharba, hasn’t, of course, made a written agreement with the sub-prefect and colonel in command of the sector to declare Z an open city! But the result’s the same: no outrages in the town, no farms burnt down in the surrounding countryside, but no patrols at night, either, and the O.P.A.* has been allowed to spread like a cancer. The shopkeepers have dealings with the rebels and most of the settlers just sit back and watch.”

  “Then why this shooting?”

  “Marindelle explained it all to me. He’s a bright lad, our little Marindelle; he’s now one of the best-informed officers on the rebellion.

  “Ziad, the chief of Willaya 4, who’s trying to extend his zone in this direction and finds himself hampered by Si Lharba, wanted to play him a dirty trick.

  “So he sent over his band of killers, who were responsible for the massacre on the beach. The result: Colonel Raspéguy has succeeded Colonel de Saint-Marcel and the sub-prefect is weeping in his reinforced-concrete residence while waiting for his replacement.

  “They had both declared that the district was completely pacified. The sub-prefect had actually just been decorated by the colonel with the Croix de la Valeur Militaire.”

  Raspéguy ran his eyes round the room they were in:

  “He certainly did himself proud, Monsieur de Saint-Marcel. . . .”

  It might have been a London club: mahogany furniture, lamps which gave a golden glow and, in the big fireplace, a blazing log-fire which cast dancing shadows on the walls adorned with hunting prints.

  “You who know about these things, Boisfeuras. How much would a room like this cost?”

  “The English furniture isn’t genuine period stuff, but it had to be brought all the way out here. I’d say four or five million.”

  “How many harkis* could have been employed on that amount of money?”

  “There aren’t any harkis at Z.”

  Captains Esclavier and Leroy came in and gave a whistle of admiration.

  “We’ve just done a tour of the town,” said Leroy. “The shop-keepers are all smiles and kept offering us drinks; the natives are as nice as can be. They put their hands on their hearts and ask: ‘Well, how are you, Captain? And your wife and children?’ They seem to look on us like old relations.

  “What brotherly love there is in this spot!”

  “Where’s your pistol,” Raspéguy suddenly asked him, “and yours, Esclavier?”

  Leroy squared his shoulders in astonishment, then he noticed the colonel’s grim expression—“his no-nonsense look,” as they called it.

  “But in such a peaceful little place, sir . . .”

  “I want everyone to go about with his personal weapon, even the duty corporal. Curfew at eight o’clock. Patrols out all night, with orders to shoot on sight without challenging.

  “Oh, the bastards!”

  “Have some of our chaps fallen into an ambush?”

  “We’ve all fallen into one, Leroy.”

  In the corner of the room there was a mahogany sideboard laden with crystal decanters. Esclavier opened them one after another, then sniffed.

  “Whisky . . . and damn good whisky at that.”

  He bent down.

  “A refrigerator, ice, Perrier water. Do you mind if I help myself, sir?”

  “You can drink up all this muck and then go and sleep it off in an armchair in front of the fire. I’m getting out of here; it doesn’t suit me. I’ll have to find another office.

  “You don’t know anyone on whom we could unload all this junk?”

  Boisfeuras had strolled over to the sideboard and was pouring himself out a drink:

  “There’s only one possible purchaser, and he’s the O.P.A. agent for the whole zone. . . .”

  “You know who he is and he’s not inside yet!”

  “His name is Ben Mohadi, sir. Yes, the brother of the deputy—former Secretary of State, and tomorrow, perhaps, a Minister. No evidence against him. Hands off. That’s what they told me in Algiers.”

  “Everything about this war is rotten, and if it goes on we’ll be like all the rest of them.”

  Raspéguy began pacing up and down, bumping into the furniture.

  “This town,” said Esclavier, as he finished off his drink, “stinks of racketeering and easy money. In the barracks the soldiers have sheets; not a single vineyard has been destroyed for a year.

  “Three operations in one month, four shot-guns recovered, but a film show every evening. Sunday-afternoon dances at the mayor’s or sub-prefect’s, bathing parties, fishing expeditions. . . .

  “And, one afternoon, twenty bodies on the beach, including women and children, and a young girl pinned to the sand with a bayonet, like a butterfly to a cork.”

  He poured himself out another whisky and drank it down, then flung the glass into the fireplace.

  “We must bring off something big,” said Raspéguy, “and be quick about it.”

  Colonel Raspéguy’s measures, including the eight o’clock curfew, were not very popular with the local population.

  Macheret, the councillor general, declared over the preprandial anisette:

  “Not only are these military bastards incapable of protecting us and allow us to get massacred, but they also muck us about. They would do better to catch the band responsible for the outrage.”

  “Everyone knows it came from Kabylia.”

  “Yes, but in Kabylia there are mountains to climb. Down here they’re on the flat, and the wine isn’t expensive.”

  Missot thumped the table with his fist:

  “Only a week ago you were all saying: the man we need is Colonel Raspéguy, he’s the only one who can clean up the district. You said so to the deputy when he came and even to Lacoste when he saw you in Algiers.”

  But no one listened to Missot or paid any attention to his outbursts. His farm had been burnt down a year ago; he was poor and lived in two rooms with his old Moslem overseer who did the cooking. Missot had the bitter satisfaction of never having paid any dues to the F.L.N.,* but his wife and son had been killed.

  Some of the shopkeepers employed him to do their accounts or fill in their tax forms and reimbursed him more often than not with a slap on the back.

  “Good old Missot!”

  “Is it true,” Bouvion asked, “that poor Jacquier has gone off his head because of his daughter?”

  “That’s what they say,” Macheret cautiously replied.

  Anything concerned with Jacquier made him feel uneasy and frightened.

  Missot clapped his big hands together, then swept back a lock of grey hair falling into his eyes.

  “Jacquier’s going to come back and there’ll be some bloodshed.”

  Jacquier arrived on the
following day, at the same time as the new sub-prefect. He went at once to see the colonel. Raspéguy had settled into a disused dispensary in the centre of the town, between the town hall and the church. A big deal table served as his desk and he had hung the walls with maps of the district.

  A Virgin of Lourdes in plaster, daubed in blue with a halo and a long chaplet, was still fixed to one of the walls. The statue reminded Raspéguy of his village. On 15th August they carried the Virgin through the streets, stopping at each of the flower-decked altars of repose, while the men chanted canticles in Basque or Latin.

  He began humming one of these age-old canticles, and nostalgia for his country, his estates, the men of his race and his law, for the first time plucked at his heart-strings.

  Jacquier came in without knocking, with his hat on his head.

  “You’re Colonel Raspéguy, aren’t you?”

  Raspéguy slowly raised his eyes and looked at this huge red-faced man with his fur-collared overcoat, the massive signet-ring on his finger, and his cold, steely little eyes.

  All he said was:

  “Get out.”

  At Algiers Jacquier had always called on the governors general with his hat on his head. He did not understand.

  “My name’s Jacquier, Maurice Jacquier . . .”

  “So what?”

  Raspéguy had risen to his feet.

  “If you want to see me you will apply for an interview; you will wait outside and you’ll come in with your hat in your hand. Now get out or I’ll bundle you into the street with a kick in the arse.”

  Jacquier realized that the man in front of him was capable of committing such an act of sacrilege, that he would even take pleasure in doing so, because he held him responsible for all the waste and damage caused by this war.

  He had come to Z to lend Colonel Raspéguy his support, to put at his disposal his whole network of accomplices, all those men whom he had suborned for the last thirty years, in order to unearth the men who had killed his daughter. He had even had Pellegrin appointed sub-prefect, which had not been easy.