The Centurions

by Jean Larteguy

  Arouche ran his fingers over his scar in the hope that it would revive the hatred that gave him his strength. He remembered the punch in the face which had sent him flying and the subsequent kick that had broken his jaw.

  It was on his return from Paris. Back there, there had been a few girls in his life but he had never been able to keep them for long; for there came a day when he could not help calling them whores—in many cases they were whores, but they didn’t like being reminded of the fact.

  In Paris he used to see a lot of the French students from Algeria, who treated him more or less as one of themselves. He had changed his Moslem name of Ahmad to Pierre; were not his ancestors Christians at the time of Saint Augustine?

  Algerines together, they formed a united front against the Frangaouis, whose lack of virility they derided—this enabled them to forget their own idleness.

  On his return to Algiers Arouche had moved into a European quarter of the town; he had found his old Paris friends again but did not realize their relationship was now on a different footing.

  One evening, after a professional dinner, he had gone out with them to a night-club; he had then—not without encouragement—made a rather too obvious pass at the sister of one of his friends. The friend had promptly flown off the handle:

  “What the hell does this nigger think he’s doing? He’s forgetting himself!”

  He had then been beaten up in public and thrown out. Ever since that day hatred had replaced every other sentiment in his heart.

  He knew he would not talk. He could see that the paratrooper, in spite of his lean, handsome face, was a weakling, full of contradictions, a phrase-spinning type.

  Let him go on spinning phrases to his heart’s content! In the meantime the minutes were ticking by. The captain would never find the bombs which were cunningly concealed in packing-cases containing tinned food and had already been planted in the shops thanks to the co-operation of a delivery boy. They were timed to go off at half past nine.

  Esclavier weighed his words carefully, racking his brains to find some argument based on reason and humanity which might appeal to this motionless, unshakable body sitting in the white-upholstered arm-chair.

  In spite of himself, all he could produce were his father’s threadbare theories on non-violence. His words sounded false, his phrases trailed away into the void, for they found no echo.

  The captain noticed the imperceptible gesture Arouche made to glance at the clock and his expression of relief when it struck eleven; all he wanted was to gain time.

  Esclavier tried another tack.

  “Arouche,” he said all of a sudden, and in a dry tone of voice, “I was tortured once myself. I know what it’s like, and I know that one talks, for everyone talks in the end . . .”

  And, while Arouche kept his eyes on the clock, he embarked on this confession which was so painful to him that the sweat broke out on his forehead and he found himself panting for breath:

  “It was in 1943, Arouche. I was dropping for the third time into the occupied zone; the Germans were waiting for me down below. Before I could even get out of my parachute harness and draw my revolver, I was caught, with a pair of handcuffs round my wrists.”

  Arouche glanced at him, with an almost amused expression, then switched his gaze back to the clock.

  “It’s not so much the beating-up that’s hard to bear, Arouche; it’s the waiting for it and not knowing what the pain will be like. The Gestapo man was dressed in black; he had a smooth, shiny face and wore steel-rimmed spectacles. He kept looking at his hands pensively, as though they reminded him of some unpleasant memory. It wasn’t he who frightened me, but something behind him, a clock like this one here. What frightened me was what was going to happen.

  “He asked me who I was and what rank I held; he knew everything about my mission, which was to blow up the power-house of a factory, but what interested him far more was the names of the people I had to warn in case of an accident, the recovery team . . . ‘To some extent or other,’ he told me, ‘everyone talks over here; and the proof is that we’ve got you in our hands. I’ll give you half an hour to think it over.’

  “After that, Arouche, I kept watching the clock, as you’re watching it now, with its chubby Tritons blowing on their trumpets and the minute-hand starting on its course. Would you like a cigarette, Arouche? The German offered me one before leaving me alone in the room.

  “The instructions we had been given in London were quite simple: to hold our tongue long enough for the networks to be able to take the necessary security measures. This length of time was never precisely defined.

  “So, as I watched the clock, I kept trying to persuade myself that I wouldn’t talk, that I would rather be mutilated for life than admit that if anything misfired I was to go to a certain bookshop in the Rue Guynemer at Vannes and ask for the rare edition that Mr. Duval had ordered.

  “I pictured the owner of the bookshop as an old white-haired lady who had nothing more to expect out of life . . . whereas I was only twenty years old. How old are you, Arouche?”

  Arouche shrugged his shoulders without replying, unable to take his eyes off the clock.

  “The German displayed no emotion, neither hatred nor pity, nor even a trace of interest. He actually told me:

  “‘I don’t think the information you’ve got will have the slightest effect on the eventual outcome of the war, whichever side wins, but what you’ll suffer will mark you for the rest of your life.’

  “He came back half an hour later; he sat down at his desk and, like the good, conscientious official that he was, he checked his wrist-watch by the clock.”

  Automatically Esclavier pushed back his cuff and likewise checked his wrist-watch by the clock. It was now a quarter to twelve.

  “Then the German pressed a bell and three men in civilian clothes came in; one of them was a Frenchman. They dragged me out of the room.”

  Esclavier had risen to his feet and was pacing round the Kabyle.

  “It’s the first blow that hurts. It takes you by surprise, you’re not expecting it, you think it won’t be possible to stand another. Then, just as you’re beginning to persuade yourself that the pain is just bearable, the second blow comes down and shatters your resistance, all the little illusions you’ve so carefully built up.

  “It’s then you begin waiting for the third blow, which does not come right away; your wincing, throbbing flesh prays to get it over as quickly as possible until the moment comes when it begins to hope that there won’t be a third blow, and that’s the very moment it comes.

  “And this goes on, Arouche, hour after hour, with men who have got all the time in the world, who stop every now and then for a drink or a snack. You tell yourself: now they’re going to leave me in peace for ten minutes, for a quarter of an hour. But suddenly one of them gets up and gives you another wallop, still chewing on a piece of sausage he has just popped into his mouth.

  “I held out, Arouche, up to the moment they began thumping me over the head with a sock filled with sand; I felt as though my skull was coming apart, that my brain was being bared: a wretched, quivering jelly.

  “I gave them the address of the bookshop in the Rue Guynemer; I told them everything I knew. After the war I spent six months on garrison duty not far from Vannes, in the Meucon camp. I never dared go near the Rue Guynemer or ask about the bookshop there. What if the old lady had been a young girl of twenty!

  “You know why I didn’t hold out, Arouche? For the same reasons that you’re going to talk. I didn’t have a sufficient motive, nothing but vague ideas and theories: peace among nations, anti-Fascism, high principles and all that sort of nonsense, meanwhile taking care not to catch a cold in the head and to avoid sitting in a draught; I also felt a certain amount of resentment and scorn for my father. But that’s not enough to turn a man into a martyr.

  “All you’ve got,
Arouche, is hatred, and what a petty little hatred it is! You’ve never been able to have the sort of girl you wanted—a European girl—isn’t that it? I realized that just now. That’s not a good enough reason to blow up a whole town and massacre women and children.

  “You won’t hold out; and you’ll know as I do what it feels like to be a coward and to be saddled with that cowardice all your life.

  “Come on now: where are the bombs?”

  Arouche still kept silent, but Esclavier could now see how fragile the dentist’s courage and resolution were. Out in Indo-China he had once known a Viet who had refused to talk. He had had the impression that the man had withdrawn into himself and was sealed off by a trapdoor in some mysterious refuge where he no longer felt, heard or saw a thing.

  Arouche did not have such a refuge. The twelve strokes of midnight issued with a gentle tinkling sound from the clock.

  “Arouche, the bombs?”

  Once again Esclavier felt like a coward because he was incapable of making another man go through what he had been through himself. He would have to ask Bordier and Malfaison to deal with the dentist.

  The telephone rang—no doubt Boisfeuras was getting impatient. It was Isabelle, with a sob in her voice:

  “Philippe, they’ve killed grandfather and his three servants, set fire to the farm and destroyed the vines. I want to get out there at once, but because of the curfew . . . Oh, Philippe!”

  She burst into tears. After a short silence she went on:

  “He was so fond of them! Come and join me as soon as you can. Yes, I’ll be waiting at the Bouzareah.”

  It was not until dawn that Esclavier reached his mistress’s flat. The news of the murder of old Pélissier had made him see red, and what he dreaded most of all he had managed to accomplish all by himself, without having to appeal to his N.C.O.s.

  By the time the dentist was carried off on a stretcher, in the early hours of the morning, he had confessed everything; none of the fifteen bombs went off.

  But when Philippe tried to make love to Isabelle, he found he was incapable. The young woman had been too involved in his mind with the ghastly hours he had just spent and a little of that horror still clung to her. And since there was no one else he loved or desired, he suddenly discovered the inferno of love in which all those who cannot quench their desire have to live.

  Philippe stroked Isabelle’s hair and went and lay down on the other bed; he felt he wanted to die.

  • • •

  The general strike broke out on 28 January. During the morning it was almost universal. Following the instructions of Radio Tunis, the inhabitants of the Arab quarters who had laid in enough foodstocks for a week did not set foot outside. The streets were empty, the shops closed.

  The Zouaves strutted about the Kasbah in full-dress uniform and distributed sweets to the children whose numbers gradually increased until they swarmed around the soldiers like flies. Other units were busy driving these children off to school in trucks.

  A large number of Moslem school-teachers followed them; out of a sense of solidarity or because they were frightened, a few Frenchmen went on strike. They were replaced by soldiers and were meanwhile set to work emptying the garbage cans.

  The 10th Parachute Regiment was entrusted with the task of opening up the shops. Its squads hooked the metal shutters on to the rear of their trucks and tore them down bodily. Some of these shops were looted, but none of the owners came and protested, for the looted shops all belonged to F.L.N. subscription-collectors. Boisfeuras had carefully compiled his list from the documents Arcinade had provided.

  Marindelle no longer slept at night. His past life stuck in his gullet until it almost choked him. That evening, while in the room next door Aicha and Glatigny kept embracing and recoiling, loving and hating each other, he tried to imagine the bonds that linked them together and the motives which had driven the young girl to go even farther in her submission to her lover, farther even than Glatigny wanted. It was she who had asked to attend the parade of suspects. Sitting at a school desk, with her head concealed in a coarse hessian sack which had been pierced with two holes for her to see through, she had picked out the members of the F.L.N. organization from among the men who were marched past for identification.

  Aicha was consumed by a fire, the fire of her love, and she was feeding it with everything in her past life that had been of any importance. When she had nothing more left, she would plunge into the flames herself.

  This state of mind could be traced to her inordinate and passionate nature, but still more to her spirit of rebellion against the social system in which she had lived. Even in a sophisticated family like Caid Tletla’s some traces of a nomad, warrior society still survived, and a woman, even if she wore Paris dresses, was regarded solely as a source of pleasure and as booty.

  For the first time in her life Aicha felt she was being treated as an equal by a man who was at once her lover and her enemy. She had just discovered that dignity had the lean face of Glatigny, his slightly pursed mouth and his frequently sad eyes.

  Through the medium of Aicha Marindelle realized what immense power lay in this spirit of rebellion which had been stored up for centuries by millions of women. There was enough explosive there to blow the whole of the Maghreb sky-high. The Algerian F.L.N., like the Tunisian Neo-Destour and the Moroccan Istiqlal, had been frightened of it and had not dared touch it, even in their struggle for independence.

  How could one awaken the Moslem women, how could one make them feel that their emancipation might come from us? Certainly not by treating them to feminist lectures . . . At this point an idea occurred to the captain which most of his comrades found extremely odd, not to say unpleasant. On the following morning he had a number of women and young girls rounded up in the Kasbah; he filled three trucks with them and drove them off to a wash-house. There he made them scrub away at the paratroopers’ sweat-stained vests and pants. These women had been hauled off without any of their menfolk raising a finger to protect them. They thereby lost their prestige as warriors, which suddenly reduced the ancestral submission of their wives and daughters to nothing. Bent all morning over their washing, these women felt as though they were submitting to being raped over and over again by the soldiers whose garments they were purifying.

  When they came back to the Kasbah without having been molested, when these strong young men had helped them out of the trucks with a courtesy which they were rather inclined to exaggerate (more often than not their fiancés or husbands were old, decrepit and ill-mannered), some of them thought of abandoning the veil, and others that they might take on a lover who was not a Moslem.

  • • •

  Algiers became a paratroop city. It got used to living to the silent, stealthy tread of patrols in camouflage uniform who, with a blank expression on their faces and a finger on the trigger of their guns, paced up and down the narrow lanes and stairways.

  The paratroops did not mingle with the local population; they lived on their own, outside the town and its customs, like occupants from another planet. They answered no questions, refused the wine and sandwiches that people offered them. They broke the strike, they destroyed the bomb network, but even the best-informed journalists could not tell “what was going on.”

  Si Millial was the brains behind the strike. Once he had vanished, the entire organization he had built up fell to the ground. The paratroops were able to penetrate the rebellion at various levels. Some of the former F.L.N. followed them through fear, because they had given away their comrades and could find no justification for this except in the victory of the paratroops; others, the greater number, because they always veered towards the stronger side, those who were able to protect them.

  Within the framework of the 10th Parachute Regiment each company began to assume an autonomous existence, thereby escaping to a certain extent from the colonel’s control.

  Esclavier becam
e the specialist in bomb networks and Lieutenant Pinières dealt with the Communist groups who were assisting the rebels by providing them with explosives.

  One morning in February Pinières laid hands on the schneiderite factory, which was installed in an isolated villa on the seashore. There were four Europeans there, including a chemical engineer called Percevielle, and a single Arab, Khadder the Vertebra.

  So as to avoid all complications, Pinières used the schneiderite to blow up the villa with all its occupants.

  On 28 March Raspéguy applied for an interview with the general, which was forthwith granted. The 10th Parachute Regiment had covered itself with glory in the battle of Algiers and its colonel had become the most popular figure in the paratroop units.

  The general began by congratulating Raspéguy on his promotion to full colonel.

  Raspéguy puffed pensively at his pipe.

  “This is certainly the first time I’ve felt no pleasure at being promoted, sir, maybe because this isn’t the proper way to earn promotion.”

  “You’ve saved Algeria.”

  “And I’ve lost my regiment. We need a little fresh air. We’ve fallen into bad habits. The lads are drinking too much in order to forget what they’ve been forced to do. We’ve achieved better results than the others because we’ve wallowed in the shit more than they have. So we ought to be dragged out of it before the others: the process of disintoxication will be longer. Come on, sir, we’ve done our job, we’ve got our hands good and dirty, please let us go.”

  “I still need you here.”

  “Boisfeuras isn’t the only one I’m worried about, sir. Marindelle blows all his pay in the Aletti casino in a single night and you know all about Glatigny and that Moslem girl of his. I don’t know what’s happened to Esclavier, but there’s something wrong with him as well.”

  “Reinforcements are needed for the Némentchas.”

  “We’re all set to go.”

  “Perhaps it would be better after all if you left Algiers, while there’s still this little matter to be settled . . .”