The Praetorians

by Jean Larteguy

  “‘Those two,’ he told the soldiers, ‘will be given every military honour, just as though they were our own men.’

  “Colonel Raspéguy always attached a lot of importance to the ritual of death.

  “While the companies were fighting in the jebel, Boisfeuras was liquidating the O.P.A. It was a dirty job he had to do. Though decimated, the bands were incessantly reborn as long as they had the support of the population, and that support was provided by the O.P.A.

  “It is not by liquidating a few willaya or mintaka leaders that the rebels can be made to stop fighting. With them new leaders rise up every day and, to assert themselves, some of them don’t hesitate at treachery or murder. That’s what made Boisfeuras say that their army was in a healtheir state than our own. It was difficult to know when Boisfeuras was joking.

  “It was at this juncture that Major Glatigny came back from leave, together with Albert Bonvillain, who was on the staff of the Minister of National Defence.”

  “The U.N.R.* deputy?” Iréne asked. “He’s dropped out of the limelight since the 13th of May.”

  “Bonvillain regarded himself as a revolutionary; perhaps he had the necessary qualifications, but he accepted a prebendary-ship; from then on he lost all credit in our eyes, and also with the régime. This régime is quick to show contempt, especially for those who helped it to achieve power.”

  “Contempt,” said Urbain Donadieu, “is no longer a form of government these days. People educated by the Press, the cinema and television want their leaders to be fashioned in their image. To arrogance and contempt they prefer a dig in the ribs, even if the hand that gives it is clammy or dirty.”

  “And yet,” Esclavier went on, “in spite of his little tricks, which reveal the politician in him, Bonvillain made a great impression on us. He was then animated by a sincere passion and we felt he was prepared to take risks in this adventure.”

  * * * *

  Albert Bonvillain was tall and thin, with a handsome, nervous face and a warm voice that emotion made raucous. When he got heated he panted like a wild beast at bay and broke out in a sweat. His enemies used to say that he looked like a car salesman with a hard-luck story.

  Glatigny had brought him to the 10th Regiment officers’ mess on the evening he arrived. Raspéguy was absent. He rarely ate with his officers in the evening and preferred to dine in his quarters on the men’s food which his driver went and fetched from the cookhouse in an old mess-tin. He liked coarse sausages and beans swimming in a nice greasy sauce. Then he went straight to bed so as to be up before dawn and, with his elbows tucked in to his sides, go for a ten-kilometre run before reveille.

  Even if it had not been contrary to his habits he would have refused to appear that evening. Raspéguy was wary of all civilians, and all the more so when they were bearers of official orders; the only exception he made was for journalists, whom he artlessly trusted but if necessary could use for his personal propaganda or to help him settle certain disputes. The colonel was very fond of them, though amazed that anyone should choose such a profession.

  A big log-fire blazed in the hearth that Colonel de Saint-Marcel had had built. Captain Pinières had shot a stag and, encouraged by a promise of leave in Algiers, the cook had acquitted himself fairly well. Brandy was brought in, drawn this time from Ben Mohadi’s cellar.

  “You seem nice and comfortable here,” said Bonvillain, gazing round from the depths of his armchair. “Yet in Paris they say that conditions in the 10th Regiment are rather on the Spartan side. But then they’ll say anything in Paris, because no one comes out here to see for himself what’s going on in Algeria.”

  “I don’t like this chap,” Esclavier whispered to Piniéres. “He looks too damned honest and straightforward not to be a bastard. Doesn’t he remind you of Colonel Puysanges?”

  Glatigny told his guest that these quarters were inherited from the former zone commander. It was certainly the first time since it had come into being that the regiment had enjoyed such comfort.

  “Capua and its delights,” said Pellegrin.

  He was wearing battledress and there was nothing about his turn-out to show that he was a sub-prefect. Bonvillain took him for one of the officers in the regiment.

  He took up the phrase:

  “No, Capua is France. The Fourth Republic is coming to an end. We can see it falling to pieces before our eyes. Power has degenerated into a Parliament which is palsied and omnipotent at one and the same time. This Parliament goes on laying claim to a Resistance it has betrayed and in which precious few of its members really took part. The deputies have even done their best to rid it of those who were its true promoters, General de Gaulle and his followers.

  “Among the men still in power there are some, however, who are aware of the danger; because they have remained true to the spirit of the Resistance they want to hold it in check. With the present régime, and the constitution applied as it is at the moment, it’s impossible. The Ministry of National Defence, which has sent me out here, is composed of those men.”

  “One doesn’t spit in one’s own soup,” said Pellegrin. “Your Minister must first resign, then we’ll be able to talk.”

  “You’re very naïve, Captain!” (Putting him at about thirty-five, he had addressed him as “Captain” rather on the off-chance.) “A new Minister selected at random from among the army’s enemies would have you closely watched and, favouring the policy of abandonment, would probably try to do you in.”

  The civil servant was twisting his hands, feeling he had not managed to get hold of these men and overcome their defiance. At the same time he felt reassured, for he saw how deep the army’s contempt was for anything directly or indirectly affecting the régime.

  He turned to Esclavier:

  “What will you do if the Government comes to terms with the F.L.N.—that’s what it intends to do—and if your defeat in Indo-China is followed by defeat in Algeria?”

  “I’ll go fishing,” Esclavier quietly replied, “but with hand-grenades.”

  Bonvillain appealed to Glatigny:

  “I beg you, Major, to tell your comrades that I’m not an agent provocateur. I was parachuted into France three times during the war; the last time resulted in my being condemned to death. I escaped being executed by a miracle. When de Gaulle created the R.P.F.* I was by his side and never spared myself. I never sought office, but I was sick with rage at seeing my country hastening to its ruin. This time I decided to do something about it. I had certain scruples, for I belong to a family in which the old republican traditions are carefully preserved. You young officers represent the only real substantial force in the country; without you we could do nothing.”

  His nostrils quivered:

  “Decomposition is going to destroy every structure in France. At the end of it: Communism or an increasingly great submission to our allies who will play with France like a puppet. I believe I represent the real France, which is healthy; all those who prefer liberty to refrigerators, the young who are not idlers, the men who work nine hours a day and for the last five years have been wearing the same threadbare suits, but which they keep clean, the girls who are not dreaming of being Brigitte Bardot or of being presented to the Duke of Edinburgh. . . .

  “You’re obsessed with Paris, its crooks and racketeers, its abstract painters, tycoons and queers. All that’s nothing but empty wind. There’s nothing left in front of you, neither police nor political parties, nothing but a huge inertia. The fellaghas will soon be able to come and camp under the towers of Notre-Dame, and the people will bring them lollipops.”

  “They’re already there,” said Pellegrin. “Round the Rue de la Huchette it’s an absolute kasbah. They’re taking all the whores away from the Corsican pimps. . . . Orsini’s cousins are going to find themselves high and dry.”

  “With a mere heave of your shoulder you can overthrow that pasteboard edifice.
Behind it you’ll find France.”

  “And after that?” asked Boisfeuras.

  “We’ll install a strong government led by an honest man who loves his country, who is a man of dignity and whom the French could show to the rest of the world without feeling ashamed.

  “We shall no longer see a Prime Minister inviting his friends in to celebrate his first hundred thousand, which he has stolen, or a Minister of Justice acquit his mistress after she has been a little too trigger-happy and sent her husband into the next world.”

  “Yes, but we’ll see the great Charles back. Personally, I’ve got nothing against him, it’s more against the people in his set-up. They practise the cult of personality with the accomplished air of elderly bigots. You haven’t anyone better than that up your sleeve?”

  “Listen,” said Bonvillain, “either it’s de Gaulle or else we give up the ghost. And it would be really too silly for a country like France, which is on the way up and in the best of health, to disappear through the fault of a few tycoons or a little band of perverts. For that’s the point we’ve reached.”

  “I agree with Bonvillain,” said Glatigny. “I noticed when I was on leave that my family, which still clings to its military traditions, nevertheless held me at arm’s length. The Reverend Father de la Gramadière, my first cousin, had the nerve to say in front of my children, after an anniversary Mass: ‘Let us all pray for Jacques. He has allowed himself to be carried away and to commit in Algeria acts unworthy of a Christian and a soldier.’

  “It was my eldest boy who reported this to me and who asked me what I had done. We can’t stand this sort of thing any longer. We must change this régime at once, or else one day we’ll be driven to going out into the street and killing.

  “General de Gaulle seems the only possible solution to me.

  “Esclavier, you once shouted out in the Némentchas: ‘Let Rome beware of the anger of the Legions!’

  “That phrase has haunted me and nowadays I admit that it’s only the Legions who can rebuild Rome. While I was on leave in Paris I got in touch with some Gaullists. They asked me to help them uphold the name of General de Gaulle, and that’s why I brought Albert Bonvillain back with me. De Gaulle struck me as being the only man who could remain loyal to the principle of French Algeria and at the same time grant the Moslems the rights which it would be criminal to deny them any longer.

  “The Moslems of Algeria, even more than the Vietnamese whom we knew, are thirsty for dignity. They have neither the past nor the civilization of the Indo-Chinese, they are the tramps of history. They clumsily invent a history for themselves, as a tramp invents a fabulous past for himself. But at the same time they get themselves killed in the name of this history which doesn’t exist and, simultaneously, they create it.

  “Above all, I want to see the army get out of this war with honour. I feel that’s even more important than hanging on to Algeria.”

  As Bonvillain got up to leave, he followed the good rules of electoral policy and made a point of shaking hands with Pellegrin, who had been his chief contradictor.

  “I’m delighted to have met you, Captain——”

  “I’m not a captain, I’m the sub-prefect of Z.”

  Bonvillain went pale.

  “Don’t worry,” said Glatigny. “Monsieur Pellegrin is a rather special type of sub-prefect, closer to the War Ministry than to the Ministry of the Interior. He has been one of us for a long time.”

  Bonvillain and Glatigny strolled to and fro in the dark for some time, passing and repassing the villa which the major occupied at the exit of Z. Every now and then, wafted on the wind, could be heard the distant cry of a jackal or the whining of a dog.

  “I don’t feel I really convinced your brother-officers,” said Bonvillain.

  “You’re wrong. Their first reaction to anyone coming from outside is defiance. Furthermore, they are wary of anything to do with politics—Paris, the ministries. Actually, they were surprised that the envoy of a ministry should suggest overthrowing the Republic. However startling their conversation may be, they still abide by a certain number of conventions. They must get used to you, to your project, and I’ll see that they do.”

  “Do you think we can count on them?”

  “Not yet. They’re only at the stage of reflection. Some external incident will be necessary to drive them into action.”

  “What sort of incident?”

  “I don’t know . . . a fresh campaign against torture, for instance, or something even more direct, something that concerns them personally.”

  * * * *

  A few days later Captain Esclavier was summoned to Algiers to “play the clown” in front of a lot of journalists. They wanted him to give an account of the fight during which he had killed Si Lharba, the head of Willaya 3.

  Glatigny insisted on accompanying him, and Pellegrin, who wanted to fire a broadside, went with them.

  Esclavier spoke in front of thirty or so journalists, some of whom were the correspondents of big papers in Paris or abroad. Half of them asked nothing better than to believe him, even if he were lying, the other half were firmly resolved not to accept a word he said as true, even if he were telling the truth.

  The captain saw some familiar faces there, notably Pasfeuro, the local correspondent of the Quotidien, an ugly, rather likeable man, who still believed that the best way to defend liberty was for a journalist to tell all he knew, and Villéle, of the weekly Influences, a renegade French Algerian who came from Saint-Eugène, an intelligent, beguiling man, capable of every kind of underhand trick, but also, on occasion, of fits of courage or outbursts of temper. Born on the borders of the Maltese, Arab, Jewish, Spanish and Greek worlds, he betrayed without any sense of shame, and even with a certain jubilation, his country and his friends.

  Villèle asked if this Si Lharba really was the head of Willaya 3, whereas a report from Tunis claimed the opposite, and whether it was not the paratroops who had dressed him up in camouflage uniform.

  Françoise Baguèras, of the French Algerian paper La Dépêche, insulted him in her Bab-el-Oued accent by calling him by his real name—Villèle was ashamed of his origins and hated his family.

  “Oh, Zammit, you old bastard, you know perfectly well the captain’s speaking the truth. To hell with you and your lot!”

  Françoise Baguèras was a hard-featured, almost masculine-looking woman, with her hair scraped back from her forehead. In her veins there flowed as many different kinds of blood as in those of Villèle, but, instead of infecting each other on contact, they had formed a sparkling, dynamic and generous mixture.

  She defended her fellow-countrymen, the French Algerians, in front of foreigners with the intransigence and violence of a Passionaria. Yet she was fully aware of their faults, their defects and the many mistakes they had made. When she was with them she never stopped inveighing against them.

  Swinging her bag or crushing out a cigarette with her heel, she would say:

  “These nitwits, I can’t leave them in the lurch now that they’re in the soup, and yet they’ve done all they could to get landed where they are!”

  Whenever he was in Algeria Malistair was her constant companion. In her company this impassive American journalist became as vehement as a Mediterranean. He had proposed to her repeatedly, but Françoise was not an animal to put in a cage. Resigned to her refusal, Malistair had followed her into isolated posts in the depths of Kabylia, into the little alleyways of Bab-el-Oued, into the houses of settlers on the coastal road of the Dahras, to activist meetings and even—for the young girl’s generous nature opened all doors to her—into the homes of F.L.N. supporters.

  He had ended up by being well informed on the Algerian situation. He was one of the few foreigners who had been in physical contact with this drama.

  During Esclavier’s press conference Malistair asked this question:

  “Ca
ptain, don’t you think that if this war lasts much longer, you paratroops and the fellaghas will begin to resemble each other, just as the French Algerians already resemble the Moslems? Each of the two races and two armies, instead of assuming the other’s good qualities, adopts its defects, which is always much easier.”

  The French-Algerian journalists shouted in protest and rattled their chairs, and Esclavier took advantage of the confusion to slip out. Glatigny was waiting for him in a car.

  He took him to dinner at the Sept Merveilles Restaurant, where they found Albert Bonvillain, Pellegrin and Captain Marindelle. During the battle of Algiers Marindelle had become a specialist in anti-terrorist activity; he had therefore been posted to General Massu’s H.Q.

  During this dinner Bonvillain asked Esclavier to try to persuade Raspéguy to join them. The colonel was popular in Algeria and in Paris. Everyone knew that his officers and his men would follow him even if they were not in full agreement with him.

  The name of Charles de Gaulle and of the Minister of National Defence was bound to reassure Raspéguy, who had been in the F.F.L.* and who felt great respect for a certain form of law and order. But Esclavier, who did not care for this sort of mission, tried to get out of it:

  “I know my Raspéguy,” he replied, “as suspicious as can be, with his great shepherd’s feet firmly planted on the ground, proud of his career and success. He is firmly resolved not to jeopardize either by what he calls ‘damn-fool tricks.’

  “It’s not the first time they’ve tried to approach him. But when they do he assumes an air of candour bordering on stupidity, which quickly discourages his interlocutors.

  “I’d rather you found someone else to talk to him. Why not Glatigny? Besides, before Raspéguy decides, he’ll first have to see de Gaulle.”

  “De Gaulle will be rather difficult, I think, but the Minister, that’s not impossible.”

  The vin rosé was nice and cool, and Pellegrin, who regarded himself as already in the plot since there was promise of something unforeseen and dangerous, had downed three bottles.