A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (20 page)

First repression, then reform

Upon the programme of repression the government now found itself forced to adopt, Mitterrand attempted to impose two immediate and important restraints. First, there were to be no promiscuous bombardments, by napalm or high explosive, of suspected rebel villages; secondly, the police forces in Algeria (which had hitherto been autonomous) were to be fused with those of metropolitan France. By this means Mitterrand hoped to be able to remove some of the more brutal and racist elements. To this day he regards it as one of his most noteworthy achievements — “a test to prove our good will to the Algerians”. On both issues, however, there seems to have been a lacuna between intent and practice; the effect of police fusion proved slight (nine of the senior officers considered by Mitterrand as the most undesirable were simply re-transferred back again from France, after a decent pause); chiefly, it provoked the additional mistrust of the
pieds noirs
, which in turn led to the overthrow of the Mendès-France government. And although napalm may not have been used, there were certainly not infrequent cases where local commanders “used their own discretion” without recourse to the political authorities, and
did
carry out punitive artillery and aerial strikes on
douars
.

Deployed in the Aurès, “Babar” Cherrière’s ponderous, N.A.T.O.-style forces found themselves at an impossible disadvantage. Beyond clearing the road to, and liberating, Arris and T’kout, tanks and armoured troop-carriers proved useless. As the colonel commanding an armoured regiment remarked despondently to Jean Servier, “All that I can do is to hold the road … and as for the rest…,” he shrugged his shoulders; to which Servier commented, “If in 1830 the French Expeditionary Force had had tanks, they wouldn’t have got beyond the beach at Sidi-Ferruch!” There were no mules or horses available and one solitary helicopter in all Algeria, and neither Cherrière — a fifty-eight-year-old veteran of the First World War and a disciple of Weygand — nor his area commander, General Spillmann, had any experience of guerrilla warfare. The troops under their command were equally untrained. An F.L.N. ambush would surprise a road-bound mechanised patrol, burn a vehicle or two, and kill several men; the ambushers would melt into the trackless hills. There was a certain similarity with scenes from Flaubert’s
Salammbô
where the wily Spendius stampeded the Carthaginian elephants by driving pigs smeared with flaming bitumen towards them.

“
A whole winter on our own
.…”

That first winter was a grim one for the French forces in the Aurès. A young regular who had signed on for three years, Pierre Leulliette, was left with enduring memories of the early operations, to which a few days hunting Krim in Kabylia in late November had provided an introduction:

all we had for pillows were our packs, and for mattresses a few large, rotting leaves; not enough to prevent us feeling the cold, hard earth against our backs.… A prelude to what was to torment us most over the three years; lack of sleep, and the cold, the harsh unexpected cold to which we never really got used.…

On arriving in Khenchela (“a dismal town swept by an Arctic wind”), his first reaction was one of shock at the undernourishment of the people and their scrawny goats “the size of small dogs”, living “merely on stones and air”; followed by anger at the rich
pieds noirs
who, when told of this, would indignantly trot out that hardy perennial, “They don’t have the same needs as us!” Though battle casualties were few, conditions were unpleasantly harsh for the French infantry when they did move off on sweeps into the mountains. No army bivouac could keep out the penetrating wind, and glacial rains turned the thin soil into “a revolting, yellow, gluey swamp. Everything was drenched, even our weapons.” Caves that might have concealed rebels crawled with “vicious yellow and black scorpions and snakes with beady eyes”. Unnerving anxiety alternated with boredom, but always physical exhaustion predominated — the fatigue of arduous marches and repeated night patrols.

Rebel intelligence always seemed to be one leap ahead of the cumbersome, weary French columns: “We had to get there by forced marches,” says Leulliette. “Too late: the Arab bush-telegraph — fires which suddenly lit up from peak to peak — had moved faster than us.” Another excellent “early warning system” was provided by the large yellow and white dogs of the Aurès, which the French discovered could hear a patrol of six men in sandals a mile off. It was a tense and lonely existence: “We were to spend a whole winter on our own, more isolated than conquistadors forgotten in some new world,” Leulliette recalled, “if we passed through one of the
douars
by day, the
fellaghas
went there at night. If we camped there at night, they came back the next day, often only a few hours after we had left.” Interrogations conducted in front of the local
caid
produced little: “you couldn’t see any expression in the Arabs’ eyes, except a kind of timid curiosity, but now hatred flashed there, like fire.…” Fear was everywhere. The bodies of loyal Muslims would be discovered, often appallingly mutilated or having been subjected to slow deaths that the adjacent army posts would be powerless to prevent. “Tongues were paralysed with terror.” At T’kout Leulliette records how, almost by the camp gates, the village policeman was found with his throat slit and eyes gouged out, a scrap of paper signed “F.L.N.” pinned to his skin. “In spite of our twenty-four hours a day sentry-watch a rebel could therefore come within a hundred yards of the camp and commit a crime without risk. The colonel was mad with rage.” As soon as the French turned their backs, “honourable old men”, their chests laden with decorations, would grab their ancient firearms and open fire. The army learnt the harsh rules of the game at an early stage: “We don’t take prisoners,” a sergeant instructed Leulliette. “These men aren’t soldiers. Besides they don’t take any either.”

Again and again such punitive expeditions despatched into the Aurès came back empty-handed, and in the face of frustration General Spillmann’s instinct was to withdraw his undermanned forces and concentrate them on certain armed camps, like Arris, thus leaving the hills, temporarily anyway, to the rebels. Cherrière on the other hand was all in favour of the “fine-tooth comb”, the ruthless
ratissage
with resort to exemplary bombardments of suspect areas. But this was expressly forbidden by the Minister of the Interior. Finally it was agreed to bomb the
douar
of Ichmoul — on the condition that, well in advance, warning leaflets be dropped on the populace. Local administrators pleaded that the leaflets should on no account be dropped unless the bombing were definitely to take place, because of the loss of face that this would inevitably cause. Nevertheless, thousands of melodramatic warnings were cascaded on the
douar
:

APPEAL TO THE MUSLIM POPULATION

Agitators, among them foreigners, have provoked bloody troubles in our country and have installed themselves notably in your region. They are living off your own resources.…

SOON A TERRIFYING CALAMITY, FIRE FROM THE SKY, WILL CRASH DOWN ON THE HEADS OF THE REBELS. After which, the
paix française
will reign once more.

But, for all the trumpeting, there was no bombardment — called off after much argument. As predicted, the army gained the worst of both worlds, bringing down on itself as much ridicule as the fruitless
ratissages
that repeatedly let Ben Boulaid and his men slip through the teeth of the “fine” comb. And with such losses of face, combined with the inevitable rigours and humiliations imposed on the Auresians in the course of
ratissages
, a steady flow of the uncommitted began to join the F.L.N. — “more impressed by their cunning and agility than by our ineffectual power”, comments Leulliette.

The first paras arrive

Then the first of the vaunted French paras arrived, the 25th Parachute Division that Governor-General Léonard had called for on the day following the revolt. Leading its combat group was an already legendary colonel, Ducournau, a native of Pau who had distinguished himself as a commando during the 1944 landings in the south of France. Ducournau had recently returned from Indo-China, where he had narrowly escaped the catastrophe of Dien Bien Phu, and he had made a thorough study there of Viet-Minh tactics. With Ducournau the school of Indo-China arrived in Algeria. Setting up his headquarters in Arris, he immediately decided to pursue relentlessly the F.L.N. into the hills, living with the
indigènes
according to Mao’s often quoted principle of the “fish in water”, and taking with him as guides and trackers some of the loyal Chaouias that Jean Servier had recruited for the defence of Arris. On 29 November, after weeks of hard slogging and heartbreaking lack of success, a detachment of Ducournau’s paras was ambushed by an important rebel band in a cave-riddled ravine just north of Arris, and suffered several casualties. The colonel (who had already earned the sobriquet of “Ducournau-le-Foudre”) promptly rushed to the scene and personally took charge of operations. Pinning the rebels down with heavy fire, he encircled them in a swift and skilful turning movement. There was a fierce battle, at the end of which twenty-three dead F.L.N. were picked up, plus eighteen captives. The French lost four dead and seven wounded. Among the rebel dead — clad in an American uniform with two stars on his shoulder — was Belkacem Grine, one of the most celebrated and respected
bandits d’honneur
of the Aurès with a million francs on his head.

Hard months for the F.L.N.

The killing of Grine caused a considerable impact in the Aurès, and a serious blow to F.L.N. morale. It could be rated the first major French success of the shooting war so far; yet, in effect, it was something of a flash in the pan. The F.L.N., growing more experienced, wilier and more cautious about accepting combat with superior French forces, became like mountain sheep — always one ledge, one ridge higher up in the wintry mountains than their pursuers. The war in the Aurès began to bog down, to the deep dissatisfaction of Mendès-France and, even more, of the impatient
pied noir
leaders in Algiers.

Although this could not be perceived by the French, the situation on the rebel side during that first winter was far from encouraging. In the whole country only the Aurès had responded enthusiastically to the F.L.N.’s call to rise, and there their plight became graver week by week as Ducournau’s paras harried them from one sanctuary to another. It was an exceptionally hard winter, and the civil population, itself badly short of food, was not always hospitable to Ben Boulaid’s men. Constantly on the run, they froze and starved; a week after the tracking-down of Grine, Mohamed Sbaihi, the killer of Guy Monnerot, was himself killed; by February, Ben Boulaid had been captured. The revolt touched bottom, reduced to little more than 350 active maquisards. About all there was to show for it in the Aurès was the capture of six French paras, whom Bachir Chihani contemplated offering in exchange for Ben Boulaid.

In Kabylia, Krim experienced a similarly grim period; unable to descend from the icy mountains, and with the Kabyle villagers showing themselves by no means entirely sympathetic, he and his band had restricted themselves to blowing up electric pylons and telegraph poles, and selectively liquidating Muslim “collaborators”. In Algiers, Bitat’s and Bouadjadj’s organisation had been broken within the first ten days by police arrests, and by the spring both leaders were themselves in prison. Mourad Didouche was dead, and much of the original top and secondary leadership had disappeared; this was, admitted Ben Bella, “a terrible hindrance to our movement”. If one could draw up a balance-sheet for that first winter of the war in terms of rebel manpower alone, on the debit side the “old guard” had been largely mopped-up; on the credit side there was a plentiful substitution of new recruits resulting from the indiscriminate mass arrests in the cities and overzealous
ratissages
in the
bled
. But this remained to some extent a potential, rather than actual, asset.

Most disappointingly of all perhaps for the F.L.N. was the fact that, after the initial shock of All Saints had subsided, the
pieds noirs
resumed their way of life as if absolutely nothing had happened; if anything, they had averted their gaze still further from the root causes of Algerian discontent. In metropolitan France, Mendès-France had not been deflected from carrying out his North American tour in mid-November, and it was still not yet considered necessary to decree a state of emergency in Algeria. Deadlock threatened. Says Pierre Leulliette: “Fear engenders cruelty; cruelty, fear, insanity and then paralysis. In the centre of Dante’s circle, the damned remained motionless.” This vicious circle now began in Algeria.

[
1
] The Algerian word for soldiers (singular
Djoundi
).

[
2
] Inevitably there was some dispute as to how deliberate, or accidental, had been the shooting of the Monnerots. The “execution” of Sadok had evidently been predetermined, and one early account suggests that the Monnerots were shot down getting back into the bus afterwards. In support of this, there were warnings received earlier that French teachers might be rebel targets; on the other hand, Ben Boulaid is recorded as having passed on the C.R.U.A.’s strict interdiction of attacks on civilian personnel. None of the F.L.N. principals survived the war; Sbaihi was killed a few months later; Chihani was liquidated the following October by his fellow-lieutenant, who then changed sides; Ben Boulaid was blown up by a booby-trapped radio in the Aurès in March 1956.