Presidential Mission

by Sinclair, Upton;

  Murphy told Lanny about it afterward. The General’s demand was that all fighting should cease throughout all North Africa. Darlan, of course, wanted to wait and see how the fight was going, so he would do nothing but stall; he had sent cablegrams to Pétain, and insisted that he could not act without Pétain’s authority. They met a second time next morning, and then Clark cut short the debate by telling Darlan that Pétain had that day broken relations with the United States and had declared the landing a hostile act. “You’re the man in authority,” said Clark, and gave him half an hour to decide. When he couldn’t make up his mind, Clark ordered his arrest; but General Juin, sitting beside Clark, laid his hand, maimed in war against the Germans, on Clark’s arm. “Five minutes, please,” he pleaded. Clark said: “O.K., five minutes.”

  He gave them eight minutes, during which he and his staff could hear the hysterical arguments going on in the next room. Then Admiral Fenard, a champion quick-change artist, rushed out with the news that Darlan had given way. Clark re-entered the room, and watched while Darlan wrote with a trembling hand the order that all French forces were to cease combat. “I take authority over North Africa in the name of the Marshal,” he wrote. “Present military leaders will retain their command, and the political and administrative structure will remain intact. No changes will take place until new orders from me. Prisoners on each side will be exchanged.”

  That ought to have ended it, and for a while everybody thought that it had. Darlan made a radio address that afternoon, telling all French North Africa what he had done. But next day came the news that the revered old Marshal had repudiated both Darlan and the armistice, and had put General Noguès at Morocco in command, with orders to the troops to fight to the death. That bowled the Admiral over, and he wanted to revoke his previous orders. Clark thereupon placed him under arrest; but the French still wouldn’t obey anybody but Darlan, and there was a pretty mess.

  The only person who could solve that problem, it appeared, was Adolf Hitler; he broadcast an announcement that the German armies were occupying all southern France; and with this as a club, the American commander started beating Darlan once more. They argued back and forth for two days and nights, with Clark threatening to set up a military government and treat North Africa as conquered territory. Reinforcements were coming in, and the French could see them. In the end the matter was settled by General Noguès being flown from Morocco and formally handing back his authority to Darlan. Then they all embraced and kissed one another on both cheeks, and at last were ready to welcome les Américains bien aimés and join with them in making war upon les Boches maudits.

  17

  Honey from the Weed

  I

  Lanny Budd had had a vision of swarms of brown-clad men moving eastward over the roads of North Africa, and now that vision had become reality in a most satisfactory way. New convoys of transports came crowding into the ports; the men poured out of them, and stopped only long enough to get their equipment, and then were loaded into jeeps and trucks and started on their way. Always east, a river of men, a flood spreading over the landscape! The British took a small port called Bougie, a hundred miles or so beyond Algiers—far enough away to spare the feelings of the French officials. From there they moved to the larger port called Bône, still farther eastward. They put their own small army ashore and set out for Tunis, another hundred and fifty miles along the coast.

  The Americans moved by the inland routes. All those youngsters who had bivouacked in the parks and had roamed about staring at Moors clad in ragged white robes and at women invisible except for a pair of mysterious dark eyes—those boys had only a day or two for sightseeing, and then they were started toward Tunisia. They had the lame railroads and all the facilities, for, once the French had signed the armistice, they cast in their lot with the Americans, and there was nothing to be done but to go after the Germans.

  A heavy load off the minds of the American officers, to have this vast country and all its administrative machinery on their side; to know that they were among friends, and that there would be no sabotage and no underground resistance. The entire land, a shelf between high mountains and the sea, was furrowed by a cross-hatching of gullies, called wadis, and this meant that every road was a series of bridges. The destruction of any of them might have delayed the advance, and to protect them would have required an army; but the French took care of them all, and the Americans raced over them; the French, too, as quickly as they could be equipped.

  That was, to Lanny, the most interesting result of the deal with Darlan: the rank and file of the French Army and the sailors of the Navy got a chance to fight the Germans, and it turned out to be what they had all been waiting for. Under the armistice with the Germans, the French had been limited to a hundred thousand troops in North Africa; but they had managed to evade this limit, and they had hidden considerable quantities of munitions. Now all this came out of hiding, and with the promise of American supplies, a draft was ordered and the various populations of the territory accepted it willingly.

  The streets of Algiers in these days looked like the stage setting of a comic opera. In addition to the regular Army, there were Spahis in long red cloaks riding white horses; Goums in their brown galabiehs; the Chantiers in their short green trousers; the Foreign Legion wearing pantaloons and cloaks, and various kinds of kepis and berets; and many sorts of native battalions. There were French sailors in blue uniforms and little round blue caps with red pompons, British sailors in blue and gold and white, and all the different British and American Army uniforms. The streets, which had been so bare of traffic that the crowds walked in them instead of on the sidewalks, were now so crowded with vehicles that it was difficult to get across.

  II

  The intriguing and wire-pulling among the politicians continued, and it was a P.A.’s duty to linger on the scene, repugnant as he found it. Who among the French had burned their bridges behind them, and who were still trying to keep a way of retreat back to Vichy? It seemed to Lanny that Algiers was the most depraved city he had ever dwelt in: its rich the most greedy and reactionary, its governing group the most treacherous and corrupt. It was as if the scum of Paris had been swept off to Vichy, and then the scum of Vichy swept off to North Africa. There was no faith or honor, save among the fighting troops; among the politicians there were jealousy and greed, childish vanity, raging spite, murder barely repressed.

  With this the Americans had to deal as best they could; they had to get what they needed, first by bluffing, and later, when they really had the power, by threats to use it. They tried to get Tunis, and hounded Darlan until he ordered the French general in command there to resist the entrance of the Germans, but Vichy sent an agent to persuade him otherwise, and the agent had a good argument, for the Germans were just across the narrow sea in Sicily, some eighty miles, while the Americans were several hundred miles away.

  Then there was Dakar. The governor-general there was Pierre Boisson, a staunch Vichyite who had resisted De Gaulle’s ill-starred expedition and driven it off. Now, receiving Darlan’s order, Boisson sent a delegation of three officers to investigate the situation at the capital. Later he came himself and talked with Darlan and then with Clark. After long negotiations he decided to come over to the Allies. It was a tremendous gain, for Dakar was a great naval base, as well as an airport from which to hunt submarines trying to blockade the British lines to South Africa and the Near East; also there were three French cruisers, three destroyers, and thirteen submarines, plus the great battleship Richelieu, damaged but capable of being quickly repaired.

  Most important of all was the main Fleet at Toulon. The Americans wanted it to sail and join them, but they couldn’t persuade Darlan to order that move; instead he “suggested” it. Hitler had sent his troops, down to the French Riviera, but solemnly promised not to enter Toulon. Of course the whole world knew by now what Hitler’s word was worth, and the Allies waited in suspense to learn whether the French naval men were going to believe
him, or pretend to believe him and let him get that Fleet.

  Several days after D-day Lanny had received a postcard from Toulon, signed Bruges. It had been sent to Bienvenu and forwarded from there. “I am glad to hear that you have found some good art works. Congratulations. I am looking for the paintings you want and feel sure I can find them.” Lanny didn’t need any codebook to understand that Raoul was referring to the invasion, and was telling him that the Fleet would be saved. A couple of days later the German Army arrived, and Lanny would get no more news by that route.

  He wasn’t sure whether mails would still come through from Switzerland. A week or so previously he had got a card from Brun—cards were safer because they tended to disarm the censor. This one said that Brun had not heard from him, but had made some new friends and was doing very well in a business way. The “friends,” of course meant the O.S.S., and the message told Lanny that Monck had nothing special for him at present; otherwise he would have said: “I have a painting for you.”

  III

  Lanny asked Robert Murphy what damage had been done to the convoys by enemy submarines, a subject that was never reported or publicly discussed. The Counselor replied that the losses had been trifling. “Your little scheme evidently worked,” he said, and this pleased Lanny, needless to say. He wrote the words to Jerry Pendleton, and added: “I expect to have some news for you soon.”

  Lanny told Murphy about this one-time tutor and long-time friend. Jerry had a black mark against him in the records of the United States Army. He had been a lieutenant in World War I, and had fought all the way through the Argonne; but during the long-drawn-out Peace Conference he had become disgusted with hanging round in barracks and had gone off to the Riviera and married his French girl and her mother and her aunt and her pension full of boarders. Thousands of men had quit the Army thus unceremoniously, and the Army had decided to forget them. Lanny thought that what Jerry had done entitled him to another chance, and Murphy agreed. He knew the right officer to speak to, and so, when Lanny saw his friend again, he was in the employ of Army Intelligence, helping to keep track of the enemy spies who swarmed across the border from Spanish Morocco.

  Another person who received his reward was Denis de Bruyne. What he wanted was liberty to sing out loud the praises of General Charles de Gaulle, and this liberty, under the protection of the American Army, he proceeded to take. Over in London this six-and-a-half-foot Jeanne d’Arc in striped trousers was using British liberty to denounce the Allied occupation and to dissociate himself explicitly and completely from it. Then he proceeded to send several agents to Algiers, well provided with funds, who began a propaganda to the effect that De Gaulle was the first and only choice of the French people to protect the glory and honor of la patrie.

  At the same time Denis’s friends, D’Astier de la Vigerie and the Abbé Cordier, also well provided with funds, took up the cause of their favorite, the Comte de Paris, darling of the Royalists. He had been raising pigs in Spanish Morocco, but now he moved into French territory and began raising ructions. His followers were getting ready a coup—that ended in the murder of Darlan. One of their steps was to have printed a quantity of manifestos and newspapers explaining their reasons for the murder and setting forth the claims of their pig raiser.

  One day Lanny read in the Dépêche Algériernne of the death of Eugène Schneider in Paris. Seventy-two years he had lived, carrying on the tradition of his father and grandfather, and had made himself the successor to Zaharoff as the “munitions king of Europe.” He had lived just long enough to confront the calamities that his policies had brought to his country and to the whole of Europe. To Lanny it was one more of those “sad stories of the death of kings.” He had seen this cultivated and agreeable French monarch in his home, and knew that he was one of those many who had adopted the motto “Better Hitler than Blum.” He had got his Hitler, and Lanny could guess that he had died of humiliation.

  IV

  Lanny was of the opinion that he, the son of Budd-Erling, had witnessed a decidedly precarious military adventure, and that it had met with extraordinary success. Newspapers from America were slow in arriving, but from a chance meeting with Pendar he learned that there had arisen at home a storm of criticism of the deal with Darlan, which was considered a betrayal of all the war aims we had put forward in the Atlantic Charter and elsewhere. Darlan was a Fascist and Vichy tool or worse, and now we had put him at the head of the first government we set up in the course of our military advance. What would that mean to all the peoples of Europe who were expecting our arrival?

  Lanny, who had helped to make the deal, was inclined to brush off the complaints, saying that the critics hadn’t been on the ground and couldn’t know the circumstances. But he learned that the storm was continuing to increase, and that Murphy was greatly troubled by it; General Eisenhower, who had come to Algiers, and who wanted to devote all his attention to the race for Tunis, had to divert his mind to answering questions from the State Department and objections from the swarm of newspaper correspondents who had come with the Army.

  There were even people who thought that we should have brought De Gaulle in with us, and put him at the head of the French Army and government. To Lanny it was obvious that this would have meant upsetting the entire administrative machinery of the territory, and would have required a war with the French, who considered De Gaulle a British stooge and would have fought him to the death. We might have spent six months fighting the French instead of the Germans, and we might have needed a hundred thousand men to hold the territory.

  Lanny read articles in which it was maintained that no fighting had been stopped by the “Darlan deal.” He knew that at the moment the armistice was signed, our fleet was about to start a bombardment of Casablanca, which would certainly have wrecked that port and delayed our progress there for weeks. As a result of the deal we got Dakar intact with all its installations, including nineteen vessels of war ready for action, and great airfields which provided the shortest route for our planes flying from America to North Africa. Furthermore we got the loyal services of a French Army, which was to suffer heavy casualties before the fighting in North Africa was over.

  V

  But there were two sides to this question, as to most others, and as the days passed Lanny was forced to see the other side. Just as one could not touch pitch without being defiled, so one could not deal with Vichyites without giving aid to reaction. Darlan and his crowd were helping the American Army, but they were also helping to keep themselves in power, and they were using the chance to punish their political enemies. Some of those fellows who had been too eager to help the Americans ashore, and the ten thousand political prisoners who were in concentration camps, under truly infamous conditions—these people were going to stay where they were because they were dangerous to Darlan and his crowd. Many were fighters from the Spanish civil war; they had come into France to escape the Franco murderers, and the French reactionaries had thrown them into jail and now were afraid to turn them loose. Also, they were afraid to repeal the laws which the Nazis had forced them to pass against the Jews; by two years of propaganda they had made the people of North Africa fear the Jews, and it would be unpopular to tell them to stop fearing the Jews!

  Lanny went to call on the aged Professor of Medicine who had done so much to assist the American landing. He discovered that this lame Jew, and all his friends who had helped in a war for freedom and democracy, had now discovered that the victors had no use for them. On the hatrack in the hallway of the Aboulker apartment there hung a black homburg hat of the latest design and most elegant make. “We are keeping it as a souvenir,” explained one of the family. “That is Mr. Murphy’s hat. He wore it the night of the landing when he came and told us how to risk our lives for the cause of freedom and democracy. In the excitement he went off without it. When somebody told him about it he said that he would get it the next time he came. But there has never been any next time. Three weeks have passed and he has not been near
us.”

  Lanny had to exercise tact and caution in dealing with that situation. He was posing as a friend of the reactionaries, and could not afford to appear tinged with any trace of Pink. But when he took his next report to Murphy, and heard Murphy’s complaints about the “raspberry” he was getting from home, Lanny ventured several mild suggestions as to how the violence of the storm might be reduced. Americans who didn’t understand the situation here would naturally expect the anti-Jewish laws to be promptly repealed and the political prisoners to be released. Might it not be good tactics to advise Darlan to take these steps, regardless of his own wishes?

  In reply Lanny listened to a long explanation about the difference between America and Africa, and the special dangers of wartime. The public at home had been given very little idea of the hard fighting that had gone on here; they didn’t realize the vital importance of the race for Tunis, and the fact that the Germans were bombing our airports every night, and that it was the rainy season, and that on the way to Tunis we had only dirt airfields that were turned into mudholes, while the enemy had hard-surfaced fields at Tunis and Bizerte and in Sicily. Surely this was no time for us to be meddling in the political squabbles of the French, and perhaps inciting anti-Jewish riots, and turning loose a lot of Communists and Anarchists to make trouble for the French authorities who were co-operating with us so amicably.