The Centurions

by Jean Larteguy

  “It was an absurd, heroic nightmare: Ubu turned hero. I could imagine that little fool Isabelle, while they were setting fire to the mosques and palaces of Cairo, licking her lips with the satisfaction of a well-fed cat.

  “Do you know what I thought, Pasfeuro? For God’s sake listen, because it’s serious . . . much more serious than your sentimental problems. Those paratroops are all free and unattached, they’re on the look-out for a master. And the only ones capable of producing this master who would know how to break them and at the same time cover them with glory, inflict on them the discipline they’re longing for and give them back the admiration of the people which they feel they are being denied, are the Communists. That night they were passing through a phase of infantilism, the last in their lives perhaps. While they were fondling the girls, breaking the furniture and draining their glasses, while the Negro, banging on a copper pot he had discovered in the kitchen, kept urging them on before the horrified eyes of the men ‘responsible’ for those ladies who were now transformed into spectators and stood rooted to the spot, I was thinking of that story in Salammbo and of the orders the Senate of Carthage gave to Hamilcar to herd the mercenaries into a deep ravine and there exterminate them. Because one day those cohorts of yours will have to be exterminated, and a bourgeois government will have to take the responsibility for doing so.

  “Pasfeuro, you can stand me a double whisky. I’ve just told you an extremely interesting story.”

  “You told it me, because neither of us could use it as copy because no one would understand it . . . You don’t happen to know the name of that girl who was with Yves Marindelle, do you?”

  • • •

  Paul Pélissier met Arcinade the day after the “scandal,” at the house of some mutual friends. He was still somewhat fuddled from the night before; and his injured feelings and wounded vanity made him feel as though he had just been flayed alive.

  Mr. Arcinade knew how to soothe wounds of this sort. His stout little body was carefully ensconced in the depths of a big arm-chair, and in his hand he was warming a glass of brandy.

  “My dear fellow,” he said to Paul, “I’ve heard so much about you, your illustrious family which has been established here ever since the conquest of this land of Algeria from which they want to drive us out, and the influence you have in certain circles; that’s why I wanted to meet you. You’re no doubt aware of the vast plot which is threatening Algeria . . . a plot with countless ramifications . . . I know, you’re thinking at once of the left wing, the Communists . . . No, that aspect of the plot isn’t serious. There’s another side to it, an infinitely more pernicious side, which has gained ground with the middle class, among business circles and even part of the army . . .”

  “Really?”

  “Do you know Colonel Puysange? Only the other day he was telling me how uneasy he felt about it. A number of officers, including some of the best, contracted the virus out in Indo-China. Some of them didn’t even wait for Indo-China. You know Captain Esclavier, I believe?”

  A hot flush rose into Paul’s cheeks, but Arcinade appeared not to notice it.

  “A splendid war record, undoubtedly . . . but with de Gaulle and in the Resistance, which gives it a certain . . . political character . . . Above all there’s his family which has been associated for ages with international Communism. Captain Marindelle and Major de Glatigny appear to belong, like him, to an organization which is, shall we say”—he gave a scornful, superior pout—“liberal. Colonel Raspéguy takes a special pride in his working-class origin. Those aren’t the sort of defenders we need in Algeria. We need tough men with conviction, real soldiers of Christ and of France, who are settlers, merchants, labourers or officers by day . . . but at night-time are handy with a knife or submachine-gun . . . These men should be organized by specialists provided with arms, the latest technique and proper support, in Paris as much as in Algeria, in the army as well as the civilian population . . . But because these men are honest and sincere, they’re sometimes short of money . . .”

  Paul gave a slight start. He had a reputation for “tight-fistedness” in spite of his great wealth. With his finger-nail Arcinade traced a heart surmounted by a cross on the table-top.

  “That’s the sign of Charles de Foucauld,” he said, “but it’s also the sign of the Chouans.”

  And in a piping voice, which recalled the noise of frogs on certain summer evenings, the astonishing Mr. Arcinade suddenly burst into the Chouans’ song.

  Your remains will be flung to the waves,

  And pledged to dishonour your names,

  We’ve one honour alone in the world,

  And that is to follow Our Lord.

  The Bluecoats, while leading the dance,

  Will lap up the blood of our heart,

  We have only one heart in the world,

  And that is the heart of Our Lord.

  “I hope we shall meet again, my dear Pélissier, and very soon. I must ask you to keep all this to yourself, of course. By the way, did you know Captain Esclavier was a freemason? Quite a senior one, too . . . like our commander-in-chief and our resident minister.”

  As he made his way home, Paul decided to see no more of this madman with his mealy-mouthed manner. The sound peasant sense he had inherited from his ancestors put him on his guard, but he had to admit that what Arcinade had to say was extremely disturbing and he seemed to be well informed.

  As he got into his car, he whistled the Chouans’ song between his teeth:

  The Bluecoats, while leading the dance,

  Will lap up the blood of our heart . . .

  The Bluecoats, that meant Esclavier . . . And all the suppressed romanticism of a rickety child rose to his lips.

  • • •

  On 20 October the paratroops of the 10th Regiment received orders to embark in the aircraft which were to fly them to Cyprus.

  Colonel Raspéguy, in full uniform, with his badges of rank on his shoulders, and with two armed guards sitting behind him, drove up in his Jeep to say goodbye to Concha.

  The whole of Bab-el-Oued was leaning out of the windows. The washing flapped in the blazing Mediterranean sun.

  He kissed the young girl, gave her a pat on the behind and went off to capture Cairo amid the frenzied applause of a crowd in which Spaniards, Maltese, Arabs and Mahonnais rubbed shoulders with a handful of “Frenchmen by extraction.”

  On 5 November, at six o’clock in the morning, the paratroops of the 10th Regiment were dropped just south of Port Said so as to seize the bridge over which the road and railway line led to Cairo. This bridge lay across a subsidiary canal connecting the Suez Canal to the Lake of Manzaleh, and the dropping zone consisted of a narrow strip of sand between two stretches of water.

  The aircraft dropped them from a height of 400 feet, the minimum safety height being 350. They had to slow down to 125 miles an hour, thereby providing a splendid target for the Egyptian anti-aircraft batteries.

  Anti-aircraft batteries which were massed round the bridge, opened up as soon as the first plane appeared in the sky, thereby revealing the position of their quick-firing cannon, twin pom-poms and heavy machine-guns. The aircraft had only dropped equipment: a couple of Jeeps and a recoilless 106 mm. gun, which had landed in the canal. In the still water the white parachutes looked like gigantic water-lilies that had just burst into bloom. The paratroops had jumped behind a smoke-screen and most of them managed to land on the strip of sand. Casualties were less heavy than had been anticipated.

  Esclavier and his men had made for the company’s lock-chambers so as to approach the bridge from the rear. To achieve their objective, they had been obliged to cross a thicket held by the fedayin, Nasser’s suicide squads. Each of these fedayin, concealed behind a tree, was equipped with a regular miniature arsenal: submachine-gun, rifles and bazookas. They opened up on the French with all they had got, but without causing much dama
ge, for their fire was hopelessly inaccurate and the paratroops knew how to make the best use of the slightest irregularity in the ground. Seeing that the paratroops, far from retreating, were continuing to advance, they suddenly broke off the engagement, abandoning a position from which it would have been difficult to shift them, together with their arms, uniforms and all their ammunition. While pursuing them, the paratroops crossed the bridge and actually went two hundred yards beyond it. The road to Cairo was open to them. But the other companies, who were having a harder time of it under heavy artillery fire, took several hours to catch up with them.

  Glatigny doubled across the platform of the bridge which was once again being swept by machine-gun fire and flung himself into Esclavier’s fox-hole just as a mortar shell burst behind him.

  “First of all,” he said, “many congratulations. Raspéguy asked me to tell you not to overreach yourself. We’re at the apex of the entire Allied force . . . for this time, at last, we’ve got an ally, which hasn’t happened to us since 1945. This is real war, Philippe, and it does one good.”

  “Yes, real war, with Cairo as the final objective.”

  “Do you know what Cairo means in Arabic? El Qahirah, the Victorious.”

  “We’ll behave like Napoleon,” Esclavier grinned. “We’ll loot the museum. My father once told me it’s one of the richest in the world and the worst arranged: a real Ali Baba’s cave . . . The gold of Tutankhamen!”

  “We haven’t got there yet.”

  “What’s stopping us? A few bands of poor fellahin who don’t know what they’re meant to be defending, some theatrical warriors festooned with ammunition belts, who take to their heels at the very first shot—in other words, nothing. We’ll live in the Semiramis, on the banks of the Nile, we’ll climb the pyramids and go and visit the Valley of the Kings. We’ve at last escaped from that prison called Algeria . . .”

  Another salvo of mortar shells burst near their fox-hole, raising a cloud of dust. But their only reaction was to laugh, because they had taken Cairo.

  Pinières and fifty of his paratroops took the fedayin barracks of Port Fuad by storm. They killed or captured a hundred and fifty of them and collected enough arms and ammunition to equip an entire regiment.

  “A fine war,” he said, mopping his brow.

  Captain Marindelle and Lieutenant Orsini, with a truck-load of paratroops, forged ahead without orders down the El Kantara road and got to within a few miles of the town. There they were machine-gunned rather half-heartedly by some regular regiments who were rapidly retreating in the belief that the Israelis were already in the Egyptian capital. They took so many prisoners that they had to release them again, merely taking the precaution of removing their trousers.

  Raspéguy established contact with the one-eyed general who was circling over them in his flying headquarters, a Dakota.

  “The Suez road is free,” the colonel reported. “One of my units is just outside Kantara. What are we waiting for? Shall I go ahead?”

  “We’re expecting orders at any minute.”

  The Dakota went on circling over the company’s workshops, then suddenly made off in a northerly direction towards the sea and Cyprus.

  “What the hell’s going on?” Raspéguy inquired, feeling suddenly uneasy.

  It was the pilot who replied:

  “Nothing. We’re going to refuel.”

  A brief signal now came over the air: “The Franco-British troops are advancing on Suez.” All the strategists were making calculations on their maps: the tanks moved at sixteen miles an hour, but the French AMXs could do over sixty. Ismailia would be taken in the course of the night and Ismailia was just under a hundred miles from Cairo. The rout of the Egyptian Army was gaining momentum. Raspéguy was fuming with impatience. He was frightened another unit might go through ahead of him.

  Next morning the navy started unloading the trucks, Jeeps and heavy material at Port Said and Port Fuad. Seething with rage, Raspéguy saw the vehicles of Fossey-François’s and Conan’s regiments being taken off first and then those of Bigeard’s, and it was not until the evening that he at last got hold of his “rolling stock.”

  At ten o’clock that night the general in command of the parachute division sent him an urgent summons.

  “Everyone ready to move off for Cairo in an hour’s time,” he barked. “No stores, no supplies, just weapons and ammunition. We’ll pick up what we need on the way.”

  The general was boorish, not to say uncouth, but Raspéguy who did not like him at all—did he ever like anyone commanding him?—was willing to admit that “he had guts.”

  “Sit down,” the general told him.

  He handed him a glass and a bottle of whisky.

  “Have a drink. No, a bigger one than that, for heaven’s sake!”

  He was suddenly addressing Raspéguy as “tu,” which made the colonel realize that things were going badly.

  “Now listen and don’t blow up . . . because I feel like blowing up myself. I’ve just received the order to cease fire. We’re pulling out.”

  “But we’ve already won!”

  “Eden has been forced to give in, Guy Mollet tried to save the situation but without much conviction. We haven’t won, we’ve lost. An ultimatum from the Russians, threats from the Americans. I don’t know what’s happening with the Russians, but it seems Hungary is up in arms.”

  “I don’t give a damn about Hungary. Supposing we hadn’t received this order, we’d now be advancing on Cairo . . .”

  “Do you think that hasn’t crossed my mind as well? But we’d have to be covered, anyway as far as the French command is concerned.”

  “That could be done.”

  “I’m afraid not. Our commander-in-chief is a graduate of the staff college, unlike you or me. He wages war with maps, statistics and sand-tables. He can’t believe that four parachute regiments on their own can send a whole tin-pot army packing . . .

  “So get this into your head, Raspéguy: I forbid you to move an inch. But if you want to get drunk with your officers . . . I can send you a truck-load of whisky. There’s no shortage.”

  “What’s in store for us after this?”

  “Algeria again, though the solution to Algeria is probably to be found here . . .”

  “Algeria, that shit-house!”

  “Yes, we’re condemned to that shit-house again. Do you know the garrison of Port Said has just surrendered?”

  “It’s a bad business, sir, giving up like this when victory was within our grasp . . . and we badly need a victory. It’s specially bad for our men. They thought they had escaped from prison. Now they’re going to be taken back to their cells under police escort . . .”

  The paratroops of the 10th Regiment embarked on 14 November, a few hours before the arrival of the U.N. police, ninety Danish soldiers in blue caps. They had skin and hair the colour of butter, weapons which they had never used except on exercises, and complexions as clear as their consciences.

  On 20 November the Regiment disembarked at Algiers in the dark. Colonel Raspéguy had arranged for them to be sent off at once into the mountains for he felt he had to take his men in hand again. A fellagha band had just been reported in the Blidian Atlas. On the very next day the lizards set off in pursuit of it.

  • • •

  On Saturday, 30 September, at five o’clock in the afternoon, while the streets were swarming with people, a bomb exploded in the milk bar on the corner of the Rue d’Isly and the Place Bugeaud, just opposite the flat which the commander-in-chief occupied in the headquarters building of Number Ten Area.

  At the same time, in the cafeteria in the Rue Michelet, a second bomb went off. This one was made of the same primitive explosive as the first: “schneiderite,” manufactured from potassium chloride. The two bombs killed three people and injured forty-six. The casualties included a number of children who had their le
gs blown off.

  At the cafeteria some medical orderlies had just laid a child, screaming with pain, on a stretcher; they were about to close the doors of the ambulance when one of them noticed he had left the child’s foot and shoe on the pavement. He threw both under the stretcher and, leaning against a tree, promptly vomited. He was called Maleski. Regularly once a week, at the Swiss Restaurant, he used to take a nurse, with whom he occasionally spent the night, out to dinner. He was a happy man and until that day had never been assailed by any political, moral or sentimental problem.

  The fuse of another bomb placed in the main hall of the air terminal failed to function. It consisted of an alarm-clock connected to an electric battery, and contained the same explosive as the cafeteria and milk bar bombs: schneiderite.

  On 5 October yet another bomb exploded in the Algiers-Tablat bus, killing nine Moslem passengers . . .

  Horror reigned in Algiers, to the sound of wailing ambulance sirens and in the midst of shattered shop windows and pools of blood hastily sprinkled with sawdust.

  Stretched to breaking-point, the nerves of the Algerines quivered at every rumour, at the most improbable report. But sometimes these very same men appeared to be unaffected by the most atrocious sights and, as they drank their anisette, would raise their glass to the next grenade of which they themselves might be the victims. Then they would work themselves into a frenzy over a conversation about football.

  Horror was succeeded by fear and hatred. Moslems began to be beaten up without rhyme or reason, simply because they had a parcel in their hands or because they had “a nasty expression on their face.” Europeans got rid of their old Arab servants and fatmahs who had been part of the family for twenty years.