A Savage War of Peace

by Alistair Horne

  Of all these measures, the most ambitious — as well as the one that was to leave the most lasting imprint of Soustelle’s regime — was the formation of the S.A.S. corps. Their aim, essentially, was to take into their protective net populations in the remoter bled that might otherwise become subject to the rebels, or buffeted by the army — or both. Some 400 S.A.S. detachments were created, each under an army lieutenant or captain who was an expert in Arabic and Arab affairs and could deal with every conceivable aspect of administration; from agronomy, teaching and health, to building houses and administering justice. The képis bleus, as they were affectionately called, were a selflessly devoted and courageous band of men, who made themselves much loved by the local populace, and for that reason were often the principal targets of the F.L.N., suffering the heaviest casualties of any category of administrator. Foreign journalists who saw them at work in the remoter bled, isolated and in constant danger, never ceased to be impressed. Unfortunately, there were always too few képis bleus with all the numerous qualifications that the job required; and, inevitably, there were the bad ones who transformed the S.A.S. into “intelligence centres” where torture was not unknown.

  Soustelle’s “liberals”

  Soustelle soon found himself instinctively with considerable sympathy for the predicament of the petits pieds noirs, but with little for the “feudal” bosses against whom Mendès-France had warned him. At the beginning he was influenced by two liberals who comprised the so-called “left wing” of his office — Germaine Tillion and Commandant Vincent Monteil. Madame Tillion was one of those remarkable and heroic Frenchwomen who had gone through hell for her passionate liberalism. In 1940 she had founded a Resistance group in Paris, which, among other acts, had helped British prisoners-of-war to escape after Dunkirk. Arrested by the Gestapo, she was the only one of four leaders of the group to survive torture, deportation and three years in the appalling women’s concentration camp of Ravensbrück. For her wartime record she was awarded the Croix de Guerre, avec palme, and made Officer of the Legion of Honour. Before 1940 Germaine Tillion, an ethnologist like Soustelle, had just spent six years in the Aurès — living a fourteen-hour horseback journey from the nearest European, at Arris. There was no Frenchwoman who knew the region better. At the beginning of the revolt she had been in New York, working on an official commission on war crimes — German and Russian. Returning to France, she was asked by Mitterrand to go back to the Aurès that winter to report on conditions. Immediately she had been “deeply shocked to discover how much the level of life had sunk since I had been there fourteen years previously”. It was not so much the fault of the French — “because they simply weren’t there” — but the sheer harsh facts of population pressure. In that grim winter of 1954 she had observed the Aurès peasants “watch their goats dying for want of a little fodder … or starving workers eat their grain seed, their hope for the following year”. She had been equally shocked by the heavy-handedness of the army’s counter-measures.

  Germaine Tillion’s findings on the economic plight of the Algerians were substantially corroborated by the Maspétiol Report, published about the same time as a result of an extensive survey made by a group of senior French officials and economists. They reported that one million Muslims were totally or partially unemployed, while a further two millions were seriously under-employed. About three-quarters of the Muslim population was illiterate in Arabic, and ninety per cent in French. Although France appeared to be spending more on Algeria, in real terms — because of depreciation of the franc — the sum earmarked for 1953 had not exceeded that for 1913. On her return to Algiers, Germaine Tillion met Soustelle and recounted what she had seen. The two found themselves widely in agreement, and Soustelle immediately asked her to join his inner cabinet, charging her to set up a network of centres sociaux. Designed to supplement Soustelle’s S.A.S. scheme, these centres were to bring aid to the more backward Muslim communities in the form of sanitation, elementary education and economic assistance, according to specific needs. She was also given a wider-ranging brief to study and report on the conditions of the rural populations; and, from this moment, she became in effect Soustelle’s liberal conscience.

  Commandant Monteil’s impact on the Algerian scene was both more immediate and more controversial. A fluent speaker of several dialects of Arabic, Monteil had spent ten years in Morocco, followed by several stints served in other Near East capitals as military attaché. Under the Mendès-France regime he had been attached to Christian Fouchet, the Minister for Moroccan and Tunisian affairs, until called by Soustelle to join his staff. The day Soustelle took up his appointment, Monteil was informed that an important rebel had just been captured in the Aurès — one Mostefa Ben Boulaid. Monteil persuaded Soustelle to allow him to make contact with him. Up to this point Ben Boulaid had not been identified as a member of the C.R.U.A., and at first in his interview Monteil gleaned nothing more than that he was a local leader. Then, after Monteil had begun speaking in Chaouia, Ben Boulaid revealed the whole story of the uprising and his own function. Persuasively he pointed out to Monteil how the French ratissages operations were “our best recruiting agent”, and after this extraordinary first meeting between a F.L.N. leader and a French official, Monteil left with the firm impression of “a man of faith, and of good faith, pushed to the limits by a lively sentiment of the injustice that has hit his people”.

  Back in Algiers, Monteil was also influenced by Jacques Chevallier, who told him how he had offered his resignation as Secretary of State for Defence to Mendès-France after the indiscriminate arrest of 2,000 suspects of Messali’s M.T.L.D. in the wake of All Saints. Soustelle agreed with Monteil that Mendès-France’s action had “done more harm than good”, and commissioned him to follow up his interview with Ben Boulaid by seeing the imprisoned leaders in Algiers’s Barberousse prison. Maître Kiouane, at twenty-nine a leading Algiers barrister and a recognised moderate, assured Monteil that he had known nothing whatever of the F.L.N. conspiracy, that he had only been arrested after publishing a letter protesting at the dissolution of the M.T.L.D. He warned Monteil “in six months’ time people like me will be overtaken. It will be too late for any pacific solution.” Ben Khedda, arrested on the same pretext, was then a thirty-five-year-old pharmacist who gave Monteil the impression of being rather timid and buttoned-up, speaking in similarly moderate terms to Kiouane. After this interview Monteil worked on Soustelle to expedite the release of the imprisoned suspects. But, through a combination of the slow processes of bureaucracy and pied noir opposition restraining Soustelle, they were not in fact liberated for another two or three months. Immediately both Kiouane and Ben Khedda, as well as a number of the lesser M.T.L.D. detainees, joined the F.L.N.

  Would the detainees still have gone over to the rebels if they had been released when Monteil interviewed them at the beginning of March? Or if they had never been arrested in the first place? One may speculate, but all one can be sure of is that here Soustelle got the worst of both worlds: the Ben Kheddas were lost to the rebellion; the mistrust of the pieds noirs for French policy was exacerbated. Prison — as was to be relearnt by the French repeatedly in the course of the Algerian war, by the British in Northern Ireland and by every other mid-twentieth-century regime faced with a similar insurrectionary problem — is a marvellous recruiting and training centre.

  The “smallpox chart”

  With the arrival of spring and the F.L.N.’s survival of that first winter, battered but still intact, the inflow of new recruits — whether motivated by French mismanagement or sheer allure of the apparently inextinguishable F.L.N. — soon brought about a sharp recrudescence of “incidents”. At army headquarters intelligence officers maintained what was known as the “smallpox chart”, marking up the occurrence of fresh outbreaks of violence, and the blotches were beginning to spread rapidly. First they appeared in the hitherto unblemished region of North Constantine, between the city itself and Philippeville on the coast; then, in March, at Bône in t
he north-eastern extremity of the country, and in the Nementchas close to the Tunisian frontier. Already the rebels were showing themselves better organised, fighting in sections of ten to fifteen men or even companies fifty strong, more and more aggressive, and even sometimes better armed. On 13 April Adjoul successfully ambushed a detachment of Algerian Tirailleurs near Djellal in the Nementchas; eight were killed and a number of the survivors defected to the F.L.N. — an ominous warning of new perils that might lie ahead. On 24 May the F.L.N. inflicted on the army its most deadly blow to date, wiping out a convoy of thirty Goums on the edge of the desert between Tébessa and the remote outpost of Guentis. Six bodies were found and the remainder of the Goums — and their weapons — disappeared without trace. Among the dead, his head crushed by a rock, was the French administrator from Guentis, Maurice Dupuy, who left eight young children and whom a deeply affected Soustelle esteemed as a “lay saint”.

  Worse still, the F.L.N. seemed to be switching their attacks from barracks and police stations to “softer” targets. Brutal murders of Muslim “friends of France”, from caids to humble village constables, multiplied, totalling eighty-eight in April alone, with a similar number hideously mutilated — as a terrible warning for the rest. At the same time the F.L.N. issued an edict enforcing a ban on Muslims smoking or drinking alcohol, as an economic blow against the pied noir tobacco- or vine-growers like Senator Borgeaud. Penalty for a first offence was the cutting off of lips or nose; for a second, égorgement — or what the army dubbed with black humour, “the Kabyle smile”. Most nations have their favourite unpleasant way of death; to the Algerians throat-slitting is associated with the killing of sheep, and therefore the most humiliating fate an enemy can be made to suffer. On European-owned farms, more and more pieds noirs would wake up to discover vines ripped up, cattle poisoned, dogs with their throats slit or hanged. Although direct attacks on French civilians had hitherto been minimal, May brought the killing of four — also found égorgés.

  With the civil authorities apparently impotent to prevent either the mutilations or the killings, the army could show no substantial success in the field since Ducournau’s tracking-down of Grine the previous November, and it was becoming clear to Soustelle that it was not up to the job facing it. It was still altogether too much of a N.A.T.O.-style force, both in equipment and technique, and it was by no means clear-minded about its tasks. Did “pacification”, for instance, mean trying to regain the confidence of the inhabitants; or did it mean crushing the rebellion by whatever means available? “Limited repression” did not always make the clearest sense to a patrol of young soldiers caught in a vicious ambush. What was needed were new ideas, new leaders, new weapons, and more men. As Soustelle noted, a few planes or guns were enough to destroy a douar: “But to defend the same douar day after day up to the day when it could take up its own arms, that needs people.…” Under strong pressure, the Faure government agreed to send another ten battalions to Algeria, bringing the total there from 74,000 up to 100,000 men — already almost double the number at All Saints 1954. It was a further escalation towards total warfare, yet still too little; and at no time during his stewardship, claims Soustelle, were there to be sufficient troops. “But where to find them?” On his arrival the army possessed one solitary Bell helicopter, rented from a private firm. Soustelle pressed the government into persuading the U.S.A.F. in Germany to turn over eight of its Sikorskys to the French Air Force. It then concluded a purchasing agreement to obtain other helicopters in the U.S.A.

  By June Soustelle had achieved a thorough shake-up of the army High Command; Generals Cherrière and Spillmann had been replaced by Lorillot and Allard; and an officer who had proved himself during the recent “pacification” of Morocco, General Parlange, was put in sole charge of the Aurès, where a state of emergency had finally been decreed in April. Another newcomer was General André Beaufre, leading the élite 7th Rapid Mechanised Division into Kabylia. Beaufre was one of France’s most intellectual soldiers, a precise and analytical intelligence who, as one of the legendary Marshal de Lattre de Tassigny’s right-hand men in Indo-China, had made a close study of guerrilla techniques. Like Ducournau, he believed in an active policy of “living on top of” the F.L.N.; but, again, was to find after the first skirmishes that even his highly mobile units were too unwieldly for Krim’s wily maquisards.

  “Collective responsibility”

  Pressed increasingly by the pieds noirs to “do something”, Soustelle, reluctantly found himself forced into accepting a draconian new measure to redress the army’s lack of more positive results. The dubious principle of “collective responsibility” seems to have been foisted on Soustelle by the army; certainly it was never discussed with the “left wing” of Soustelle’s cabinet, the Tillions and Monteils. Soustelle had issued the following strict, and clear, instructions concerning reprisals that closely adhered to the line originally laid down by Mitterrand:

  every indiscriminate reprisal is strictly forbidden … all individuals arrested, whether their culpability is certain or probable, are to be handed over to the qualified authorities, police, gendarmerie … etc. No one must substitute himself for these authorities to re-establish order or punish the guilty.… Police operations … interrogations, etc, must be conducted without brutality … every offence against human dignity … rigorously forbidden.

  This was a lapidary and admirable code of conduct that was to become a major bone of contention with the army as the years went by; however, early in Soustelle’s term of office he was virtually short-circuited by “Babar” Cherrière, the military commander already under notice. On 14 May he sent this crucial signal to his subordinate in the Constantine area, General Allard: “I delegate you powers to decide, depending circumstances, employment machine-guns, rockets and bombs, on bands in new rebellion zone. Collective responsibility to be vigorously applied. There will be no written instruction given by the Governor [author’s italics].”

  The previous day Cherrière had spelled out what was meant by “collective responsibility” by providing examples: “Destruction of ninety-nine telegraph poles near Oued-Zenati. It is known that all the males of a douar were involved. The douar must pay for the destroyed poles, replace them. Then remove all the males.” To “remove all the males” meant, in effect, to herd them together into newly created internment camps, equivalents of Long Kesh in Northern Ireland and forerunners of the “regroupment centres” that were to cause so much discontent in years to come. What “collective responsibility” often actually entailed for the Auresian villagers at its lowest and least pernicious level is well depicted by Pierre Leulliette: “Cutting down tough tree-trunks at night, digging wide holes in the stony track, menaced by rebel guns. And, in the morning, the exhausting work would hardly be finished when they would have to replant the poles and fill up the potholes, once again menaced by guns, this time ours.” Somewhat defensively, Soustelle claims that “collective responsibility” was effective, at least when applied to repairs of roads and telegraph poles; it accorded with the Arab mentality of respecting strength, despising weakness. At the same time, however, as Germaine Tillion pointed out, it gravely offended the Chaouias’ deep-rooted sense of justice, and, in the eyes of Yves Courrière, based on his interviews of F.L.N. leaders, it provided the F.L.N. with one of its “principal psychological trump cards”.

  Moreover, “collective responsibility” did not — could not — stop at the re-erection of telegraph poles. The unsolved killing of a French soldier, or ambushing of a patrol, would lead to the evacuation of a suspect douar, followed by its destruction. Pierre Clostermann, the French air ace of the Second World War, records how, in 1958, the bombing of these poverty-stricken douars “broke my heart”, while a senior officer admitted to him: “Well, the mechta that I can’t defend, I am obliged to destroy, for above all I have the duty to protect the life of the soldiers entrusted to me.” Then, as the horrible savagery of the war mounted, increasingly blind eyes would be turned on the humani
tarian fiats of Mitterrand and his successor, and villages would not always be evacuated before the bombing started. In his novel The Centurions Jean Lartéguy relates how when two of “Colonel Raspeguy’s” paras were found “with their throats slit, their guts ripped out and the sexual organs stuffed into their mouths”, and bodies pointed towards Mecca, it was followed by a spontaneous, immediate reprisal: “Twenty-seven Muslim bodies were lined up together, their heads turned towards the West.” It was a fair portrayal of how the vicious escalation of brutality established itself. News films of the epoch that were widely distributed in France would show a young French soldier, clad in shorts, kicking a trembling prisoner captured with a rifle in his hands; or there would be shots of jeering troops, with Gauloises dangling casually from the lower lip, twisting the heads of F.L.N. captives so as to make a good pose for the camera. With the increase of rebel atrocities, the time was approaching when the army would regard almost every Muslim as a potential killer.

  In his book Les Français d’Algérie, Pierre Nora recounts an episode that was to become, depressingly enough, perhaps not so exceptional as the war dragged on: near Sidi-Bel-Abbès a Foreign Legion patrol systematically searched a pied noir farm where they believed fellaghas were hiding, and discovered two in the corner of a barn. They were interrogated, with blows of rifle butts, but appeared not to understand French. This enraged the Foreign Legion lieutenant, who accused nine agricultural workers on the farm of complicity. After further interrogation had produced nothing, the two rebels, plus the nine farmhands, were put against a wall forthwith and shot in the presence of wives and children, according to the pied noir proprietor (who told the story). He attacked the Legionnaires violently: “How could you shoot down workers who saw me born! Without warning me? How do you expect me to continue to work now? Even the fellagha respect the harvest. Assassins, vandals — is this how you pacify…?”