Possibly even worse than the tribulations of cold and hunger was the appalling suffering of the F.L.N. wounded. Unlike their well-equipped adversary, the maquisards had no helicopters with which to whisk casualties from the battlefield to a modern operating theatre in a matter of minutes. There were times when the F.L.N. wounded had to wait ten days or more before their wounds, by then probably gangrenous, could be tended. On one occasion in 1960 a young lieutenant of Si Salah’s, Boualem Oussedik, despatched on an urgent liaison mission to Tunisia, was caught up in a ratissage on the way and had his knee shattered by a bullet. An F.L.N. doctor told him that, without proper surgery, he would lose the leg, but Boualem refused, taking with him a supply of antibiotics to tend his own wound. Bouncing about in agony astride a donkey and finally dragging his useless leg behind him under shellfire through the Morice Line, Boualem with extraordinary stoicism took six weeks to complete his journey. He survived, kept his leg, and together with another grand mutilé, Azedine, was to lead the last battles in Algiers. But many another wounded moudjahid succumbed to his wounds before he could receive treatment.
That any medical services could be organised at all under the conditions of the war was a miracle in itself. “Hospitals” would generally be sited deep in the interior of dense forests, well camouflaged from the air, near a clean stream. The wounded would be scattered about in rough shelters, lying on straw matting on the ground, with the rare mattresses reserved for only the most serious cases. Drugs and medicaments, more precious than gold, would be concealed in safe caches some distance from the “hospital”, so as not to fall into enemy hands in the event of the whole encampment being forced to strike camp and move, dragging the wounded with them. Well-organised networks throughout the Wilaya were responsible for the collection of drugs, smuggled out from F.L.N. pharmacists in the cities, run at great risk through the Morice Line, or stolen from French hospitals — despite elaborate controls to prevent their reaching the F.L.N. Even so there was always a tragic shortage, with amputations all too frequently performed, without anaesthetic, by an ordinary hack-saw sterilised in a flame. Qualified doctors and nurses were equally short. Sometimes the deficit was made up by pied noir sympathisers with the F.L.N. like Dr Pierre Chaulet who, on being forced to flee from Algeria, continued his practice in Tunisia, tending the F.L.N. sick and wounded at the frontier posts. A number of doctors were Muslim women — like Dr Nefissa Hamoud, a petite Algiers pediatrician in her early thirties. The first woman to join the F.L.N. medical service in the field early in the war, captured by the French and released again, apparently because of her influential connections, she immediately rejoined the A.L.N. With considerable ingenuity medical and nursing “schools” were established inside each Wilaya, and more and more young Algerian women began to appear in the khaki uniform of sanitaires — sometimes, initially, to the shocked disapproval of the more conservative Muslim moudjahiddine. Nevertheless, despite the F.L.N.’s efforts and enterprise, their rudimentary field hospitals of the interior could all too seldom cope with the terrible injuries inflicted by modern warfare, above all the massive burns caused by napalm. Thus the percentage of fatalities among the wounded remained depressingly high throughout the war.
…but the political revolution thrives
As hardship and casualties compounded took an increasing toll of the battle-trained moudjahiddine, their replacements — often drafted direct from the fidayine, or village militia, because nothing but a trickle of reinforcements was getting through the Morice Line — showed a distinct drop in combat value. By the time of the Melun negotiations in the middle of 1960, war-weariness and a defensive mentality had made their greatest impact on the interior and, from the A.L.N.’s point of view, the war was definitely running down. Therefore, on this tangible and readily discernible evidence Challe could well claim to have been proved right in all his calculations. Yet, paradoxically, while the armed rebellion might be seen to be “withering away”, at the same time the political imprint of the revolution was imposing itself more and more indelibly on the population. As the katibas disintegrated under Challe’s pressure, their members would filter back to their own villages and often, far from abandoning the cause, they would there reinforce the political struggle by establishing new clandestine cells under the Organisation Politico-Administrative. There was, indeed, a growing resemblance to “that algae which always comes back in the acquariums”, as Lartéguy’s “Boisfeuras” had seen it. Gradually, also, in a number of ways the long years of war had fundamentally infected the lives of the vast majority of Algerian Muslims, despite all the earnest and real efforts of psychological and political warfare made by successive French administrations and their S.A.S. detachments. That simple, cheap and ubiquitous miracle of the modern age, the transistor radio, had brought the war into the most remote Algerian homestead. To possess a transistor, says Frantz Fanon, “was solemnly to enter into the war”. Already by 1959 more than five separate stations, located safely abroad, were beaming their transmissions to Algeria, so that millions of families could hardly avoid following the course of the revolution, discussing it and arguing over it among themselves.
The family and Muslim women at war
It was at that tight-bound, highly conservative and sacrosanct unit of Muslim life, the family, that the revolution had perhaps struck hardest. Obviously first-hand contact with the atrocities of war had the most direct effect. Fanon relates a case of a father beaten up in the street by troops in front of his children, then interned, his wife forced to take over and fend for the headless family; and of the young taxi driver who, after his wife had been raped, became impotent and suffered from repeated obsessive nightmares about his one-year-old baby transmuted into a dead and rotting cat. But the strictly hierarchical structure of the family was also affected in less dramatic ways. A father might, naturally, take the more traditionalist line that the French were stronger, and would always win, to dissuade a son from joining the F.L.N.; but when the son disobeyed nevertheless, the father eventually “discovered that the only way of remaining upright was to rejoin his son”; or, says Fanon, there were the grievous occasions, shattering to family unity, when a son might have to be present at the trial of a father guilty of renouncing, or “betraying”, the revolution. Then there were the cases of a militant wife castigating, or even breaking with, a husband condemned of cowardice in her eyes through not going off into the maquis.
“The Mediterranean woman”, says Germaine Tillion, “is one of the serfs of the contemporary world.” In the register of this serfdom the Algerian female stood very low down the scale, and it would be hard to find any other aspect of life more profoundly affected by the coming of the Algerian revolution. Because of her traditional seclusion inside her house and behind her haik, hitherto the Algerian woman had always remained more immune to French culture and social penetration than her menfolk; thus, when the revolt began, in many a household it was the woman who provided a hard nucleus of anti-colonial militancy. According to Fanon, she would use her haik as a weapon of war, wearing it as a symbol of resistance against the infidel “occupier”; then dropping it when called upon to mingle among pied noir crowds and carry bombs for Yacef and his terrorists; next resuming it when (following that brief day of fraternisation in May 1958) French psychological warfare experts had endeavoured to exploit unveiling and emancipation as a means of weaning the women away from the F.L.N. (or, says Fanon, of striking “at the culture of the male Algerian”). As far as emancipation was concerned, the Algerian woman had much to gain from the war — from both sides.
Even though, by the beginning of the war, polygamy was becoming rare in Algeria, in general women’s rights remained deplorably medieval. For the young Algerian girl life tended to hold but two stages; childhood — and puberty, which meant marriage (usually in her early teens). The espousal would be arranged by the families, and it was not unusual for the couple to meet each other only on the day of the wedding. It was hard for a young girl to find any employment o
utside marriage, so that the longer she remained unmarried the more of an economic embarrassment she was to her family. Divorce, or “repudiation”, was easy, brutal and total — for the male. Matters were worst in Kabylia, where conditions for women were the most inequitable in all the Maghreb. Although permitted the superficial privilege of freedom to walk about unveiled, with inheritance limited strictly to the male a repudiated Kabyle wife could be turned out of her husband’s house, deprived of her children and the dowry which her father had put up at the time of marriage, and forbidden by her divorcing husband to marry again — or allowed to do so only upon payment of a certain sum.
Hesitantly, because fearful of offending the “chauvinist” sensibilities of the Muslim male, French administrators made groping moves towards emancipation; at the referendum of September 1958 a major success was registered when something like eighty per cent of Muslim women turned up at the polls. On the other hand, the women left behind by their menfolk in “rebel” douars all too often had the French “pacifiers” to reproach for their excessive suffering. Mouloud Feraoun writes angrily of the women of his native Kabylia carrying the cross of villages emptied of men: dying at the hands of the rebels if they betrayed them to the French, or arrested and perhaps tortured by the French for helping the rebels. Rape, if one is to believe Algerian sources, assumed appalling proportions and left permanent psychological scars among the female population. All in all, the F.L.N. seemed to have far more to offer Muslim womanhood by way of an escape from thraldom than the French.
Fanon speaks of the “intense drama” of the sudden coming to maturity of the Algerian woman when drafted into the revolt. They were carefully vetted: first, married women whose husbands were militants; then widows and divorcees; single girls were rejected initially, because of the difficulty they encountered in leaving the home, but they too eventually became involved. “For months on end”, writes Fanon, “parents would be without news of a young girl of eighteen who was sleeping in the forest or in caves, roaming the djebel dressed as a man, a gun in her hands.” Here, for the first time, she met and coexisted with unmarried men on equal terms, and with equal rights. She adapted herself to guerrilla activities with remarkable speed and effectiveness. It was a heady experience: “The woman ceased to be a mere complement for the man. Indeed it might be said that she had pulled up her roots through her own exertions,” says Fanon. The female recruits for the A.L.N. were not just limited to the évoluées, young intellectuals used by Yacef to place bombs during the Battle of Algiers, but they came from many walks of life. On occasions the role of the female in the egalitarianism of the maquis was viewed with mistrust by the more traditionalist moudjahiddine. “The Angel and the Man work for unity; Satan and the Woman for division,” an Algerian proverb declares contemptuously. Sometimes she would be allotted little more than a propaganda function; nevertheless, on the whole the F.L.N. woman was treated with a respect never experienced before — either from her own menfolk or from even the most liberal French emancipators. Discipline was strict; as in many guerrilla movements, illicit sexual relations were ruthlessly punishable by death. For the women, perhaps even more than for the F.L.N. men, revolution and the pursuit of independence — with the promise of personal liberation at the end of the road — became an irrecusable way of life. (Alas, the promissory notes issued then in the heat of battle have yet to be fully honoured.)
Revolutionary schooling
The capture of the minds of the young, and indeed the very young, has to be one of the primary objectives of any revolution. As Mouloud Feraoun illustrates in his moving novel, Le Fils du Pauvre, the Algerian schools were always of capital importance in the breeding of national consciousness. The burning of new schoolhouses, proudly built by the French as part of their “cultural offensive” against the F.L.N., the terrorising of “loyal” schoolteachers — these were seldom random acts of savagery. Gloomily Soustelle records a conversation during his tenure of office between an F.L.N. leader and a teacher: “We shall not cease, even after we have thrown all the French into the sea. We shall destroy all the schools because they represent the French culture, which we want nothing of.” Somehow, as with their “hospitals” in the maquis, the F.L.N. managed to establish and maintain their own schools, fighting illiteracy, providing “evening courses” for adults, and keeping up the pressure of indoctrination on Muslim children. Whole new interpretations of history were introduced, sometimes going to excess in their zeal to revise the French version of the colonial past. For example, in 1830, “the Mitidja was not a barren pestiferous swamp, but a cultivated region”; “literacy was higher in Algeria [because of the many religious schools] than in France of the same period [!]”, and so on. To what extent the F.L.N. was winning the battle for young minds was graphically revealed in essays shown the author by Germaine Tillion, written by ten-year-old Algerian children in answer to the question: “What would you do if you were invisible?” — a topic brightly suggested to the 22-year-old French teacher on a recent “psychological education course”. Composed (with illustrations) spontaneously in the classroom, and not as homework under parental influence, the pupils wrote:
“I’d rob a French bank….”
“I’d kill French soldiers; even the Zouaves….”
“I’d steal my mother’s sugar to make a bomb….”
And so on.[1]
This was in 1957. Four years later Richard and Joan Brace, two Americans invited by the F.L.N. to inspect refugee camps in Tunisia, noted in the boys’ dormitories:
faded and cherished newspaper clippings tacked to his wall telling the fate of one or another Algerian hero…the closed, tough little face of Krim, looking like a gangster from a George Raft movie, more often than not it was the prisoners of Aulnoy — Ben Bella, Boudiaf, Ait Ahmed, Khider, and Rabah Bitat — dressed in casual clothes and holding hunting guns, snapped during some happier time.
Many of the children were orphans; one ten-year-old, Mustapha from Tébessa, had seen his parents shot down in front of him, one after the other, by French soldiers when he was seven. He claimed that they had then tortured him, burning his arm on a stove, and added fiercely:
I will burn them as they burned me. I will not burn a child, however, because the children haven’t done anything wrong. Those who burned me, however, I will make suffer, and I will kill them. And I will not ever forget those who burned me; even if they come and ask my pardon, I won’t pardon them.
Since 1954, alleges Frantz Fanon, common crime among Algerians had almost disappeared, for “the national conflict seems to have canalised all anger”. Certainly, after six years of war, hatred and violence and their habit had become etched deep into souls, deeper than could be excoriated by any amount of purely military successes.
F.L.N. ideology: Marxist or home-grown?
“I will not die for the Algerian nation, because it does not exist.” So an anguished young Ferhat Abbas had cried in the 1930s on being unable to discover an Algerian fatherland. In place of a nation a whole ethos had had to be created from 1954 onwards. When furnishing itself with a provisional constitution at the Third C.N.R.A. of January 1960, the G.P.R.A. had declared: “At the same time that it is conducting the war of liberation, the F.L.N. is also directing a revolution….” Thereby “revolution” had been made statutory. But what now were its ideological well-springs? Was it Marxist—Communist, as the French colonels of the Cinquième Bureau so often proclaimed in their endeavours to frighten successive regimes in Paris with the bogey of “the Soviet Navy at Mers-el-Kébir”?
It will be recalled that the F.L.N. had sent its first team to Peking and Moscow in December 1958, gained a warm reception from the Chinese and promises of two milliard francs’ worth of arms, but coolness and no firm promises from the Russians. The initiative had been proposed by Ben Khedda, who led both the first delegation and its successor in September 1959. Ben Khedda, the convert from Messali’s M.N.A., was generally regarded to be ideologically the most Marxist-orientated of the F
.L.N. leaders, but he never belonged to their inner circle. China was among the first countries to recognise the G.P.R.A. in September 1958, while a somewhat grudging recognition was not forthcoming from Moscow until more than two years later. A more powerful delegation to Peking and Moscow had been led by Krim (in his new capacity of Foreign Minister), Boussouf and Ahmed Francis at the end of April 1960, which had included side-trips to North Vietnam and North Korea. Again, a rapturous welcome from tens of thousands of cheering Chinese (plus offers to supply more arms than all the Arab world put together) contrasted with a coolly, diplomatically correct reception in Moscow. Five months later Ferhat Abbas was being received officially, as president of the G.P.R.A., in both Communist capitals; in Peking his visit happened to coincide with the celebrations of the tenth anniversary of the Chinese Revolution, and Abbas was placed ostentatiously as guest-of-honour at Mao’s right; in Moscow he managed to extract de facto recognition but little else — except for a promise to supply arms once the G.P.R.A. was in control of a piece of “liberated” Algerian territory — a highly unlikely prospect in the prevailing military state of the war.
A Savage War of Peace Page 59