The Praetorians

by Jean Larteguy

  “Then, once again, out in the open, we shall be able to fight as they did in the days of old.”

  “There’s one thing you’re forgetting, my dear Raspéguy: I’m in command here.”

  In a weary voice the colonel went on:

  “I requested complete independence for this operation, but they omitted to notify you clearly. It’s always the same.

  “I could shelter from the establishment, keep under cover—the cover would be you—and we’d carry out our little raking operations. I would report to you with all due respect every morning and evening. We’d march our men off their feet and wear out our equipment, our helicopters and trucks. We’d certainly manage to unearth a few rebels, or manufacture some. We would collect a few arms. It seems the Spanish sell them in large quantities at Ifni. You would give me a splendid report, mention me in dispatches, I would put the ball back into your court and everyone would be happy. Ah, what a fine army we have, people would say, in which they all get on so well together! But France would lose this part of the Sahara and it wouldn’t be long before the remainder followed suit, which would provide Paris with fresh reasons for wanting to abandon Algeria, since we shouldn’t have any more oil. . . .

  “I’m asking you to help me, sir, yes, to help me wear myself to the bone, but on condition I’m given a free hand with my chaps. Leave your Sahara troops in peace. Let them go on dreaming as they gaze up at the stars and thinking what fine fellows they are, the worthy sons of Laperrine and Foucauld.”

  Raspéguy shook his head.

  “When I was a kid I read a book about Father de Foucauld. Like him, I wanted to be a soldier and a missionary and, above all, to roam around on the back of a camel. But what shocked me is that this former officer let himself be killed without defending himself.”

  “You’re not a good Christian, Raspéguy?”

  “I know my prayers. When I’m at home in my village I go to church and I sing hymns with the men. After which I settle down in the pub. . . .

  “Well, sir, do we keep your Sahara troops out of it? Or, rather, let them go out and roam around the desert? They’re lucky not to know that in this war we have to fight sometimes as policemen, at other times like pimps, always in blood and shit.

  “When the time comes to fight out in the open, in the soft evening light or on a cold morning with a nip in the air, we’ll invite them all with their blue caps, their gandourahs and white meharis. And if they get killed they’ll leave this world with a clean conscience, without being saddled with remorse as we are, and they’ll be received in paradise with blasts on a bugle.”

  General Murcelles was moved by the tone of this big colonel covered in glory and medals, by his manifest concern, bitterness and also selflessness: Raspéguy was prepared to soil his own hands in order to spare the others.

  “Do as you see fit,” he said. “Only I insist on certain formalities. You will send me a written report every day in which you will sum up your activities. Once a week you will report to me in person and tell me what you’re doing and how you’re progressing.”

  “Do you really want to be tarred with the same brush, sir?”

  “I do, because I’m in command, and therefore responsible if you fail or commit too many irregularities. I shall personally organize this diversionary operation which you say is useless but which might help you all the same.

  “I’d been given a stylized, not to say unpleasant, picture of you, Raspéguy. It’s not the man whom I have here before me today, and I’m glad of that. The other man I should have been reluctant to understand, and therefore to help. Good luck, Colonel.”

  * * * *

  In a reconnaissance plane Raspéguy flew back to the M’Zil Valley, a dark, almost black patch in the middle of the tawny “cemetery.”

  Esclavier was waiting for him at Tiradent. The colonel, bubbling over with high spirits, gave him a great slap on the back.

  “I played on the feelings of that general of ours. He’s going to leave us alone and not saddle us with his Saharans, and maybe even help us. He doesn’t look such a bad chap!”

  Esclavier, who knew Raspéguy inside out, realized that the colonel, as usual, was mingling an ounce of duplicity with a lot of sincerity. But it was always the duplicity he stressed and on which he prided himself.

  The colonel inhaled the stifling, sand-laden air.

  “Tell me, Philippe, how does the situation strike you in your sector?”

  “Not so good. I wander about with my chaps under the palmtrees. Covered in flies, we listen to the norias pumping up the water, we watch the little blind donkeys going round and round, and the turtle-doves singing—it’s full of turtle-doves. The kids pester us for chewing-gum and cigarettes. In the morning, in the dunes, I instruct my drivers on vehicle management in the sand and show them how to use their sheets of metal when they get bogged down. They’re wasting away before my very eyes.

  “Crouching on the little clay embankments, the inhabitants of Tiradent look on as though we were a circus show.

  “No outrages, nothing, no one has come out into the open yet. Some evenings, when there’s an aircraft available, I go and see Boisfeuras at Foum el Zoar. He’s in the dumps.”

  “If he had a job to do, that chap, he’d get better. I don’t think it’ll be long before he sees some action.”

  “All my chaps have dysentery. They’re green in the face.”

  “The same as at Ilghérem, it’s the magnesium water. Dia will send you some pills.”

  “Sir, I don’t like the look of this business at all.”

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “Even the old warrant officers, even Pieron, are jumpy. Last night a sergeant loosed off several bursts with his machine-gun. This morning one of the men had a nervous breakdown. They’re all dying of heat, but they freeze as soon as the sun goes down. The sand gets into their weapons and clogs them, and they’re frightened of not being able to use them as quickly as they should. I make them go out on patrol at night, which they don’t like at all. They have a feeling that they’re being followed in those narrow alleyways hemmed in between two mud walls and that someone is going to fire on them from behind.

  “But the Saharans, with their blue caps, big baggy trousers and twenty anisettes a day, see nothing and feel nothing. Full of their desert lore, they hand out advice which sounds more like witches’ prescriptions than anything else.”

  “It’s our chaps who’ve the right idea, Philippe. The whole of this valley stinks of murder and violence, in spite of the turtledoves. Don’t be caught off your guard.”

  * * * *

  On the eve of his departure Ahmad Lahouène, carrier and dealer in dates, invited Captain Marindelle to dinner. He had spread it abroad that he was buttering up the captain in order to be given a contract for the transport of some particularly interesting foodstuffs.

  His house, built of clay and palm-trunks, looked as dilapidated as any of the others. Situated in a well-watered garden, it was surrounded by crumbling walls. A smell of apricot and mint rose in the evening air, which was suddenly free of its usual sand.

  An extremely strict Moslem, Lahouène provided no alcohol, only tea, iced fruit-drinks, mutton roasted in an oven which had been dug out of the earth in the Moorish manner, and pastilla.

  Slightly obese, full of affability and distinction, Lahouène confined himself during the meal to amiable small talk. He spoke about a journey he had made in France and about the Eiffel Tower, which he had climbed to the top.

  Marindelle was likewise all smiles, relaxed, belching at the right moment and making the prescribed conventional remarks that he had learnt the evening before from a Camel Corps officer.

  “I shall be away for a few weeks,” Lahouène eventually said. “About the transport of those supplies from Colomb-Bechar, go and see my son; he’s my eyes and my right hand.”

  The merch
ant accompanied his guest down to the garden gate.

  “You should also go and call on the grand marabout of M’Zil, who’s also the richest landowner in these parts: Sheik Sidi Ahmou. He’ll be flattered by your visit, I’m sure. His zaouia is the most powerful one in the south. The faithful come all the way from Senegal to see him. May God keep you, and don’t forget our little arrangement about the transport. . . . Fix up the prices with my son. The roads are bad, the trucks wear out very quickly.

  “It’s a shame that such a remarkable man as Sidi Ahmou doesn’t confine himself to dealing with the faithful and his lands but has let his head be turned by that nasty one-eyed dog Abdallah.”

  Marindelle now held one end of the thread.

  * * * *

  Sheik Sidi Ahmou was a giant of a man. He was six foot six tall. From his mother, a black slave, he had inherited a deep solemn voice, crinkly hair which was going grey and a taste for highly spiced greasy food. Through his father, the head of the zaouia before him, he descended from the celebrated Sheik Ma el Ainin, who had supported the Moorish tribesmen in all the rebellions against France, providing them with arms, advice and his blessing. At the age of seventeen Ahmou had already made the pilgrimage to Mecca, by way of Dakar, where he had taken ship for Jeddah. Then he had disappeared for fifteen years. As a young man, Ahmou had wanted to educate himself and get to know the modern world. He had taken a job as a factory hand in the outskirts of Paris, then managed a small boarding-house where his compatriots put up. Ahmou had drunk wine, eaten pork and slept with white women whose pubic hair was unshaven.

  After the boarding-house he had worked for an anarchist chemist and learnt, for what it was worth, the usage of certain powders and pills and at the same time the right of nations to shape their own destinies.

  He read at random whatever came to hand and he retained everything. But these various branches of knowledge, instead of blending together, were piled one on top of another in his mind.

  Generally speaking, he remained faithful to the primitive Islam of the brotherhoods, full of superstitions, magical practices, questionable saints and the remnants of a fetichist past, to which he added only a few “modernist” ideas. While he was still quite young, the France of the great pioneers astride their camels had made a deep impression on him. He had subsequently known another France, the country of misery and want, of abjection and Arab brothels, and he now remembered only the latter.

  On the death of his father he had come back to Tiradent and had donned the long blue-and-white robe and the black turban. He taught his own version of the Koran and, mingling the magic secrets of his ancestors with a few prescriptions of modern medicine, had started curing the sick.

  He was accused of poisoning another great marabout belonging to the rival Tidjiana sect, whose influence clashed with his own. But since Sidi Ahmou had straight away shown himself to be extremely amenable in relation to the French authorities, he was never bothered and one day even received the Légion d’Honneur from the hands of a Minister who was passing through.

  Twenty thousand followers rallied in his name, all of whom wore his amulet in leather bags hung round their necks. They were mainly nomads who roamed periodically as far as Spanish Rio de Oro, where arms are to be found at a reasonable price provided the retailers are assured that they will forthwith be exported into the French zone. A year earlier a man had come from Algiers with greetings from one of the sheik’s former friends in France, old Maieri, who was now in Tunis as one of the leaders of the rebellion. The man had stayed on. He was known by the name of One-eyed Abdallah, because he had lost an eye in the war.

  Being gifted as an organizer, he had rapidly become the sheik’s adviser and secretary.

  To inspect the zaouia’s followers and collect their subscriptions he roamed all over the French and Spanish Sahara.

  One evening, when One-eyed Abdallah had just come back from one of these long journeys, he had said to the sheik:

  “Ahmou, the time has come to stir the south up against the French. But first the organization must be put on a sound basis, and for that we’ll have to cut off a few tongues that are wagging a bit too freely.”

  Two rich merchants of M’Zil were seized with vomiting fits and died within a few days of each other, in the same way as the old Tidjiana marabout. The caid of the Imeraden tribe was killed in mysterious circumstances. A quarrel over money or some woman, the investigating officers concluded. A week earlier they had received complaints from some men of his tribe, some of them accusing him of having raped a young girl, others of having demanded substantial sums of money from them “so as to go and drink wine from Paris.” It was One-eyed Abdallah who had drawn up the list of these complaints.

  At Milsa two harratins, two Negroes who were regarded as the gossips of the palm-grove, were found hanging upside down. Since the oil men had arrived they had been earning a great deal of money and used to go drinking in the Café de France, a sort of hole in the wall frequented by the wireless N.C.O.s of the bordj. The captain in charge explained in his report that their former masters had wanted to punish them and thereby make an example of them for the benefit of anyone who wanted to leave the palm-grove to go to work on the drills.

  Secret dumps were arranged all over the place, arms began to arrive and also men, who were transported in the big trucks coming from Oran.

  Caravans assembled at certain points in the desert, away from the wells, the water points and guerbas, and buried them out of sight in the rocks or sand.

  One night One-eyed Abdallah brought Staff-Sergeant Hocène of the Camel Corps company to see Sidi Ahmou. The staff sergeant had to leave again next morning to take the camels to their pastures where they would stay for three months.

  The marabout gave him his blessing. Hocène knew that at the other end of the Sahara, at Metlili—near Ghardaia, where the mosques are adorned with horns—his wife, his children, his father and his mother would have their throats slit if he did not prove amenable. He therefore had a personal reason for resenting his lieutenant to the point of plucking up the courage to kill him.

  Yet One-eyed Abdallah himself had once been guilty of talking too much. Chancing to be in the Dra with a couple of leaders of the Moroccan Independence Army who were preparing an attack on a post in Mauretania, he had said to them:

  “How can free, warlike men like you agree to being commanded by that pig in Rabat? The days of the sultans and caids are over. Follow our example and elect your leaders!”

  One of the two Moroccans was an agent of the Sultan’s. He sent in his report and did away with his comrade who had lent a somewhat over-attentive ear to the conversation of the F.L.N. agent.

  Thus it was that Lahouène one day received a visit from one of his cousins in Fez, a dealer in dates, and a carrier like himself. Then the Adrar Camel Corps company mutinied and disappeared, the oil men were massacred, because, it was claimed, they dug up the cemeteries to defile the bones of the faithful; and finally the paratroops arrived.

  One-eye came to see the marabout after the evening prayer, which Sidi Ahmou celebrated among his followers in the little white mosque of Tiradent.

  He sat down beside him, knees crossed, and accepted a glass of cloudy tea with a sprig of fresh mint dipped in it.

  “Brother Ahmou,” he said, “they’re pleased with us in Tunis, and Maieri asked me to remember him to you. The lies of the 13th of May unsettled our moujahedines for a moment, but the fight is being resumed everywhere with greater strength. The French, who know they’ve been beaten, want to detach the Sahara from Algeria to save it from their collapse. It’s up to us to show that the desert and its oil belong to the Algerian Republic.”

  “What about the paratroops?” Ahmou asked in an off-hand manner, playing with his big amber beads.

  “They know how to make the people they catch talk . . . you know, electric shocks . . . ‘the treatment,’ as they call it. But
after torturing them they let them go instead of killing them. They must be mad. The paratroops that have just arrived, so I was told by our friend Meskri who’s dealing with them, don’t go in for the treatment, but they do kill.”

  “So what?”

  “You know what the general is like. He’s a Christian and goes to church with a big book. In a few days’ time you’ll go and see him and tell him that the paratroops have tortured some of your followers and have stolen money from them and raped a young girl.

  “You’ll also tell Father Roger about this and ask him to go with you. When the general comes to Tiradent he always stays at his mission. If all goes well, Insh’ Allah, the paratroops will be recalled to Algiers before they do us too much harm.”

  But two days later, during the night, as he was leaving Foum el Zoar, where he had come to see Staff-Sergeant Hocène who was hiding out in a grocer’s shop, One-eyed Abdallah disappeared without leaving a trace.

  * * * *

  In the big hall of the ksar, with its flaking walls and dim flickering light provided by a portable power plant, Captain Marindelle was interrogating One-eyed Abdallah, who was tied to an iron chair.

  Boisfeuras sat back with his feet on a table, casually smoking a cigarette.

  On the wall facing Abdallah was a large chart on which, in thick black lines, intersected here and there by small white squares, was traced a sort of pyramid. At the apex of the pyramid was a photograph of Sidi Ahmou. Beneath it, that of Abdallah. On the left other spaces were occupied by the photographs of Hocène and the five Moslem warrant officers of the Camel Corps company.

  “You see,” said Marindelle, “when all these spaces are filled, when they’ve been crossed out in red pencil, then we shall have finished our job and we’ll leave. This is what’s known as an organigram. You figure on it as the leader of the politico-administrative rebel organization, but under the orders of the marabout, in the same way as Staff-Sergeant Hocène is the military leader.”