The French Art of War

by Alexis Jenni

  He would set the aperitifs down on the table, with some olives or some lupini beans, depending on the hour. ‘Your good health, messieurs.’ Then he would go back to his bar to wash glasses and listen to the radio softly playing endless sentimental songs.

  Salagnon and his uncle sat in silence, gazing down at the bay stretched out before their feet. The sea in winter was an unbroken expanse of pale blue, the whitewashed buildings clustered along calm shores.

  ‘That’s what they all say,’ the uncle muttered after a moment. ‘They say they understand them, because they went to school together. That’s why it’s so terrible. That’s precisely why.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The pieds noirs don’t understand the violence being done to them. “We were all getting along so well”, that’s what they think. But, strangely, the Arabs have no trouble understanding the violence being done to them. So either they’re a completely different species or they live in completely different worlds. Going to the same school and ending up in different worlds is dangerous. You can’t go teaching the concepts of liberty, equality, fraternity to the very people you deny them to.’

  They drank, stared out at the perfectly flat horizon; the winter sun warmed their faces and the part of their forearms that protruded from the permanently rolled-up sleeves of the uniform jackets.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Salagnon asked at length.

  ‘Much the same as you, I imagine. Only somewhere else.’

  He said no more. His uncle’s face looked drawn. His complexion was sickly and pale; the corners of his mouth drooped, sinking into his cheeks, gradually twisting his lips.

  ‘If we manage to achieve nothing. If we are forced to leave some day, then what we have done will simply be a crime,’ he whispered, his voice barely audible. ‘We will be despised.’

  Silence returned. It weighed on Salagnon. He glanced around, looking for some way to change the subject, to set it on a new course. The pines swayed gently, the glassy waters of the Mediterranean stretched out to the horizon; below them, the large white buildings, like blocks of plaster, huddled together to form shady alleys.

  ‘Are you still learning the Odyssey?’ he asked.

  The uncle’s face relaxed; he even smiled.

  ‘I’m getting there. You know, I read something very strange. Odysseus visits the House of Death to ask the prophet Tiresias how it will end. He offers a sacrifice to the dead and Tiresias comes, eager to drink.

  Stand back from the trench – put up your sharp sword so I can drink the blood and tell you all the truth.

  ‘Then he tells Odysseus how it will end: ten years of war; ten years of violent ventures to get home in which, one by one, his friends will die without glory, and finally a massacre. Twenty years of carnage that Odysseus alone will survive. Tiresias, the voice of the dead, who had drunk the blood of the sacrifice to tell the truth, also tells him how he can endure, how he can live after the war.

  go forth once more, you must…

  carry your well-planed oar until you come

  to a race of people who know nothing of the sea, […]

  When another traveller falls in with you and calls

  that weight across your shoulder a fan to winnow grain, then

  plant your bladed, balanced oar in the earth

  and sacrifice fine beasts to the lord god of the sea,

  Poseidon – a ram, a bull and a ramping wild boar –

  then journey home and render noble offerings up

  to the deathless gods who rule the vaulting skies,

  to all the gods in order.

  And at last your own death will steal upon you…

  a gentle, painless death, far from the sea it comes

  to take you down, borne down with the years in ripe old age with

  all your people there in blessed peace around you.

  ‘When people no longer recognize the instruments of war, it will be over.’

  Far below, on the glassy mirror of the sky, a white ship sailed towards Algiers. Very slowly it grew in size, glittering in the winter sun, trailing behind a wake that quickly closed up again, scarcely rippling an impassive, oil-blue sea. It probably carried passengers, people coming home, French officials and recruits, countless recruits coming here to do things they never imagined themselves capable of. Some would not go home, others would go back steeped in blood, all would be marked.

  ‘Do you think it will end some day?’

  ‘It took Odysseus twenty years to make it home. Twenty years is the usual span to repay a debt. We haven’t quite finished yet.’

  They carried on. They squeezed Algiers to extract the last drop of rebellion. As they did so, they discarded the dry skins left in their hands. They daubed numbers on the houses in black tar. They knew each one; every house was a file on which they wrote down names. They interrogated the bricklayers, since they could build secret caches; they interrogated the builders’ suppliers, since they could supply materials that would explode; they interrogated the clockmakers, since they could create detonators; they interrogated those who went out at odd hours; they interrogated those who were not at home when, as good fathers, they should have been at home; and those who visited other people’s homes with no pressing family reason. The slightest deviation from routine required clarification. Four paratroopers in a jeep would fetch the person who could offer an explanation. He would be interrogated in the cellars of a Moorish villa.

  They searched behind the faces. They tracked through the jungles of the body. They hunted the enemy in the other, strapped to a chair in front of them. Medieval questioning with the aid of implements was the only tool in this internal war, this war of treachery, this war that could not be seen, since it was inside each man. They used what evidence they had to hand. They categorized the faces. They believed in the truth of pain. They squeezed using questions. They squeezed until there was nothing left, nothing but dried husks of skin that they discarded. Unable to win, they devastated; in this war of interiors, there was scarcely room to fight. The battle they waged was a phenomenon that was simultaneously cognitive, ethical and military. It spawned many incredible techniques, new policing methods, original ways of flouting human rights, the elevation of common sense to new levels, and it was an astonishing success; one that paved the way for abject failure.

  It ended when no more bombs went off in Algiers. There was no longer any noise from the cellars of the Moorish villa, just a fetid smell that stagnated like a heavy gas unable to escape. All the agitators had been eliminated or they had fled. All those capable of voicing opposition had been reduced to silence. All that remained was a voiceless, mutual hatred, beating like a muffled heart in the peaceful streets. You could hear it as you walked through the Arabic quarter, but no one walked there now. Then the paratroopers were sent out into the bled to track down outlaws living in groups in the mountains. The task of the paratroopers was to destroy the maquis. In Algiers, the water had been drained, the fish were dead.

  He was assigned young men fresh from France, little more than children, who had just left school, just left their families, who stepped off the boat shouldering big green kitbags; they climbed into trucks behind tight-lipped paratroopers in tight-fitting uniforms with rolled-up sleeves, and they crammed into the back, their cumbersome green kitbags wedged between their knees, and were driven through Algiers. Most of them had never seen a city like this, bustling, coastal, squalid, a teeming city, the streets filled with people in strange garb, who passed each other without seeing, and soldiers, soldiers everywhere, in assorted uniforms, carrying guns, on patrol, standing sentry, passing by, on foot, in jeeps, in armoured cars, in dusty trucks. If they arrived on a fine day when the sun blazed on the whitewashed façades, it had a certain style, and the unhealthy tension that fell from the sky of sheet metal, blistering and blue, electrified them. The trucks drove through the garrisoned gates of the barracks, fortified with sandbags and chevaux-de-fris, and pulled to a halt on the parade ground. Next to the flagpo
le from which fluttered the tricolour, lean and stiff, stood Capitaine Salagnon in battledress, feet apart, hands clasped behind his back, his red beret tilted at an angle; and those in the truck did not yet know what the colours of the berets meant. It was something they would learn, together with many other things. But curiously, the colour of the berets and colours of the uniforms would be one of the most important things they would learn here; they would learn not to confuse the blues, the greens, the reds, the blacks, not to have the same feelings for those who wore this colour or that. They clambered down and immediately orders were barked; they fell into line, stood to attention, the kitbags at their feet. Chins up, they waited, looking at Capitaine Salagnon planted in front of the flag.

  The young men came from France and had never been so far away; they were all volunteers. On their smooth faces it was hardly possible to tell what they were. They had trained in France, had learned to present arms, to shoot, to jump – this last simply to see whether they were capable, since they would not get to jump; the greatest height they would jump was from the door of a helicopter as it landed, its rotor still whirring. In their bright eyes, where an innocence and a toughness both born of childhood vied with each other, they fanned that little flame that tried to give the impression they were raring to fight. When, finally, they were still, Salagnon addressed them in a loud, clear voice. Everyone spoke to them like this: loudly, so they would hear; clearly, so they would understand. ‘Gentlemen, I intend to make paratroopers of you. It is something that is hard, something that is earned. You will be soldiers and you will command respect; you will suffer more than you have ever suffered. You will be admired and you will be despised. But those who follow me will never be left behind. That is the only thing I can promise you.’

  And in this he kept his word. They expected no more; this was why they had come.

  The first time they met was in a little hotel on the rue de la Lyre. Salagnon had arrived early; lying on the bed, he waited for her. He did not like the place, the drab wallpaper, the dark, old-fashioned furniture, the mirror that returned a warped reflection of half his body, the dreary curtains, the constant noise from the street. She would not like it either. He considered getting up, asking for another room, but at that moment she knocked, came in and joined him on the bed before he even had time to sit up. They slotted together. She pressed herself against him, buried her face in his neck, nuzzled his ear, whispered his name and something else he did not understand. She sat up and gazed at him intently.

  ‘I’ve waited so long for this moment, Victorien. The worse things got, the more I dreamed they would send you here. That they would send little Victorien, now that he is battle-hardened, send him to save us, to save me especially, and you would come and save us from all this, from this terrible violence, from the senselessness, the treachery, the endless grief.’

  ‘You never told me.’

  ‘I didn’t really realize myself. I’ve realized it now, as I’m saying this, but I always felt it. When I read in the paper that they were sending the paratroopers here, my heart leapt. My unspoken wish had been granted. All this, all this war, all this violence and all these horrors have led to this moment, to us, here, now. We were so far apart, we were born so far apart that it has taken two wars to bring us together. I secretly hoped that things would get worse, that you would come soon. The others don’t know why they’re fighting. I’m the only one who knows: they are fighting for us, so that we can be together.’

  She kissed him. He was no longer thinking about the room. It no longer truly existed. They spent the whole day there, and the night, but parted the next day. At 6 a.m. Capitaine Salagnon climbed into the lead vehicle and, followed by a column of trucks filled with soldiers, they set off on their mission.

  He wrote a brief letter on which, with a single brushstroke, he traced the curve of her hip as he remembered it; he gave her the address where he would be stationed, so that she could reply. Eurydice borrowed her father’s Peugeot 2CV and came to visit. She had draped a white haik over her clothes, keeping it fastened by holding the ends between her teeth. Behind her she left a trail of confusion and amusement. It is rare for a woman wearing a haik to drive across the country at breakneck speed. She did not go unnoticed: someone is trying to disguise herself, to hide, people thought as she passed. We don’t know who she is, they thought, but we know she is hiding something, because she is clearly not who she pretends to be. Spectral and feverish, she arrived at the paratroopers’ camp. She asked the dumbfounded orderly if she could speak to Capitaine Salagnon. She shrugged off her haik as she spoke, pushed open the door and fell into the arms of a startled Victorien, who told her she was crazy, reckless, anything could have happened to her on the road.

  ‘I came in disguise,’ she laughed. ‘No one can see me.’

  ‘This is a war, Eurydice, not a game.’

  ‘I’m here.’

  ‘And your husband?’

  ‘He doesn’t exist.’

  He found this answer satisfactory.

  * * *

  A brief cloudburst had scoured the air clean. It quickly dried, cleansing the distance, the sky, the horizon, of the tawny dust that floated here and shrouded everything. The landscape unfurled in every direction, as dazzling as a freshly laundered sheet, beneath a clear blue sky. They left in Salomon’s 2CV, taking the rocky path to the mountain pass of Om Saada. There they would find trees, shade, a scant expanse of grass on which they could lie down. He had shown Eurydice the sketchpad he was bringing with him and, without telling her, slipped a revolver into the holster beneath the passenger seat. They drove slowly, chatting and laughing about everything. The flaps of the windows were open to let in the whipping breeze that smelled of hot stone, scorched grass and pine trunks oozing resin. The winding road played havoc with the weak suspension of the 2CV, which jolted along like a carriage on springs. They jostled and bumped against each other, laughing, steadying themselves on a thigh, an arm; from time to time they tried to kiss, but risked banging their heads together, and the absurd risk made them laugh all the harder. Eurydice was behind the wheel. He was happy to let himself be driven, gazing out at everything, the landscape, the clear air. He watched her as she drove with touching concentration, forgetting the gun stowed under his seat. At the Om Saada gap they took a narrow trail that led to the edge of a forest of twisted pines. They were greeted by a grassy meadow. In spring, plants believe they can triumph over the scree, and cushions of vivid green, short-stemmed flowers, patches of grass, had set off to conquer the world. Things would be different come summer, but today, the season’s life force was victorious. They left the car and sat in the shade of the pines, whose lowest branches, as fat as a human thigh, snaked along the ground. She brought the haik and spread it on the ground like a white sheet they could lie on. Far below, like the floor of their bedroom, a carpet of hills rippled as far as the horizon, gold and green, beneath a sky of unbroken blue; they could see no road, no villages, nothing more than stone on stone, infrequent and infinitesimal – from here no man-made structures were visible. The warm air stirred, their lungs quivered like set sails and swelled with the landscape. An auspicious Algeria lay spread out before them.

  They spent the whole day there: chattering happily, kissing until their tongues were sore, making love bare-arsed in the sunshine, consuming the basket of food they had brought, sketching a little, dozing in each other’s arms, twitching briskly to shake off a lone, persistent fly that buzzed around them. They could not believe that twelve years had come between them. Twelve years is a long tunnel; by rights the memories at the far end should have faded into the distant haze; by rights they should have changed. But no. These twelve years had simply been a page: it takes time to read a page, time to turn the page and read the next if one follows the lines; but the previous page is still right there, on the other side of the thin sheet of paper; elsewhere, but close enough to touch.

  The afternoon was passionate, a fat sun painted everything the colour of
copper. Pressed together, their skin melted into one. Victorien’s cock never tired, though he began to ache a little. He could have carried on for ever, going in and out, plunging into Eurydice as into cool, refreshing water, and it made him laugh, the way someone in a swimming pool might laugh, their warm skin warm, sprayed with cool water, revelling in a limitless freedom.

  ‘We have to stop and head back,’ he whispered into her ear.

  ‘Is the capitaine sounding the curfew?’

  ‘In this part of the country, the capitaine knows what he’s doing. Come.’

  The car would not start. Teetering on the edge of the road, covered in dust, it gave only a wheezing cough when Salagnon keyed the ignition. He pored over the engine, checked the wires, nothing happened. The sun had vanished, the air was turning blue.

  ‘We’re stuck.’

  ‘We’ll go back on foot. It’s not far.’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Being on the road at night is dangerous for people like us.’

  ‘Like us?’

  ‘Two Europeans, one of them an officer. This area isn’t safe.’

  ‘Did you know that before you were sent here?’

  He didn’t answer. He took the gun from beneath the seat and tucked it into his belt. He picked up the haik and the remains of the food.

  ‘What are we going to do?’

  ‘Hide somewhere, sleep a little. Then at dawn we’ll set out to meet the search party looking for us.’

  ‘Will they find us?’

  ‘Yes,’ he smiled. ‘Safe and sound, with a little luck, or dead and maimed if we run into the Big Bad Wolf.’