A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (55 page)

Yet the Battle of Souk-Ahras undeniably marked a decisive defeat for the F.L.N.—ironically, on a line whose eponym, Morice, had recently fallen from power. In the course of the seven months since its construction, the F.L.N. was reckoned to have lost 6,000 men and 4,300 weapons (including casualties, though much less significant, on the Moroccan frontier). It signified the end of any serious attempt to breach the barrier. Henceforth the Wilayas would be virtually cut off from the exterior. It was a major military victory for the French, and clearly recognisable as such in army messes.

It was against this background of warfare on the Morice Line that the Sakiet raid of February 1958 had taken place. There were many senior French officers who agreed with Colonel Trinquier that, although the Line had served its primary purpose well, it was accompanied by all the traditional disadvantages of fixed fortifications (plus the mentality that had led, painfully, to Dien Bien Phu). The only way, they felt, to deal decisively with the F.L.N. was to strike into the foreign territories harbouring rebel forces—as indeed, noted Trinquier, had been the accepted norm in the pacification wars of the nineteenth century. In the months preceding Sakiet, French army frustration had been rising at the audacity with which the F.L.N. barrier-crossers trained in full sight of the frontier posts, mortared and machine-gunned them sporadically, and then launched fullscale raids across the Line. More and more lives were lost in this fashion, while the “neutrality” of Tunisian territory afforded the F.L.N. impunity from any riposte. After the ambushing of the French patrol on 11 January, the Gaillard government had come under strong pressure from the military of the kind that brought the Nixon government into the Cambodian adventure of 1973, or that persuades Israeli governments to hit back at P.L.O. camps in the Lebanon. Finally, at the end of January, it had acceded to this pressure and granted “right of pursuit”. It did not, however, specify precisely what form this should take, nor how far it might be pressed. Too much responsibility was left with the local commanders, some of whom had evidently been thinking in terms of an armoured raid to destroy the F.L.N. camps. On 7 February Bigeard—reflecting the impatience felt by the whole army—remarked angrily to Lacoste during a visit to the frontier:
“Monsieur le ministre
, it can’t go on like this! We must intervene.” The very next day the provocation, followed by the reprisal bombing of Sakiet, took place. Quite clearly the action, and the excessive force of it, had been invoked by the local air force commander acting on his own initiative. Certainly Lacoste had not been consulted, and when informed of it exploded characteristically:
“Ils sont vraiment trop cons!”

Sakiet was a revealing example of how, increasingly, the French army had become accustomed to acting without the backing of civil authority from Algiers, let alone from Paris. The first army reaction after Sakiet was one of relief; here at last was a tough line. Then, dismayed by the vehemence of international condemnation of the raid, the government had back-tracked and seemingly let the weight of calumny fall upon the local commanders responsible. Air strikes across the frontier, it was suggested, had never been envisaged. A widespread feeling of disenchantment ran through the army in Algeria that, not for the first time, it was being let down by the politicians.

The army disenchanted

Soldiers, by the very nature of their upbringing, see little more than what lies to their immediate front. The lieutenant observes what is happening to his platoon, but is little concerned with the affairs of the battalion; the colonel knows little of the overall fortunes of the division or the corps until his battalion is ordered to advance or retreat. And so on upwards. Thus, in Algeria, the senior French army commanders, under pressure from foreground events, were constantly blinkered to higher realities; to the state of the war in the international, political arena, or, later, to public opinion at home. By the spring of 1958, however, they could deduce with the most clear-cut conviction that they were winning the immediate shooting war on all fronts—and for the first time since November 1954. The Battle of Algiers, Agounennda, Souk-Ahras, the blocking of the barrier-runners on the Moroccan frontier as on the Tunisian, the new successes in the underground war; every sign vindicated this conviction. Yet, at the same time, more thoughtful senior officers felt menaced also by a mounting and harrowing sense of urgency. Was this perhaps the last moment when a military victory could be exploited? How long would it be before the flow of weapons from the Communist bloc, and possibly more direct means of support, might reverse the tide? The smell of victory was strong, but there was also, coupled with it, a nasty smell of negotiations in the air; the
bons offices
episode and other indications all pointed to this. And negotiations implied surrender. Were the politicians getting ready to sell the army down the river once again? The memories of the Third Republic and 1940, of Dien Bien Phu and Mendès-France, were always too close for comfort.

There were other factors, many of them of the order of minor gripes, but all adding up to a massive resentment against the civil government in metropolitan France. The deepening economic crisis there had led it to impose a series of meanly petty privations on the army in Algeria; allocations of petrol and rations had been reduced, leave had been cut, and so on. Salan, for one, could perceive that, for all its fine military successes, the army’s morale was suffering. Yet, more than ever before, the army of Algeria now realised how immense its power and influence had become, and far beyond just the realm of military matters. The process had started with Mollet’s expansion of the army by recalling the reservists, and it was under that good Socialist that it had been truly introduced to politics through his encouraging it to indulge in political warfare. With Massu’s takeover of civil powers during the Battle of Algiers, a point of no return had been reached. By January 1958 an estimated 1,600 army officers and 1,000 N.C.O.s—among the best in the army—were totally employed in civil affairs of one category or another. The lengths to which, from 1956 onwards, some individual officers would go to avoid losing the war, moreover, were illuminated by such episodes as the hijacking of Ben Bella and the bombing of Sakiet.

The sense of involvement in Algeria was profound. At its less idealistic level, to some of the regulars, as Colonel François Coulet noted, the war “was their
raison d’être
; they feared seeing it end one day”. It meant professional security and promotion. On the other hand, there was a deep undercurrent of fairly noble-minded reformism, of genuinely wanting to do something about the economic plight of the Algerians, of wanting to save the country from the maw of Communism. Grafted on to it there was now a new sense of destiny that—in the face of the total debility of the civil regime in France—the army alone could influence and ordain matters in Algeria. By the spring of 1958, says General Allard, a brilliant and dedicated soldier, the military

felt themselves neither aided, nor encouraged, nor supported. It seemed to them that those responsible had not the courage to look the situation in the face and to fight the war with a will to win, but perhaps rather to put an end to it by some kind of negotiation…. After Sakiet, the army felt itself betrayed, it lost confidence, not in itself, but in the effectiveness of the regime. From then on it was ready to welcome, and to take advantage of, any event announcing a change that would force Fate….

The army had reached a highly explosive state; all that was needed was a detonator.

In Paris the Sakiet affair had effectually inflicted the death wound upon the Gaillard government; but, like a frog in a laboratory, the corpse had continued to twitch on for another two months.
Messieurs les bons offices
had not helped matters, the suggestion of Anglo-American interference in Algerian affairs alienating the centre from its support of Gaillard. Soustelle declared emotionally, “It’s the total liquidation of the French positions in North Africa that is being prepared. That’s the policy of the petroleum monopolies who want to kick us out of the Sahara.” On another occasion he was heard to utter the loaded words: “A government of Public Safety must take over.” Another bout of massive strikes shook the country; in March even the police demonstrated in front of the Assembly for “danger money”; on 1 April all the public services went out. On 15 April the Gaillard government fell by 321 to 255 on a vote of confidence about the
bons offices
. The Communists and the centre had improbably united forces, with Deputy Soustelle—now cast in the role of premier-slayer—putting in the boot as he had with Bourgès-Maunoury six months previously. Once more France faced a vacuum of leadership; this time, the most perilous yet.

Nevertheless, in Algiers the sturdy Lacoste soldiered on with his intention to promulgate the
loi-cadre
as soon as possible, announcing that in June he would hold the first elections for the proposed territorial assemblies. But the long-fought-for
loi-cadre
was beginning to look more and more anachronistic—both to the Muslims, who had hardly been consulted, and to the
pieds noirs
, among whom hatred for
ce traître Lacoste
was growing in violence with each successive day. Senator Borgeaud and Alain de Sérigny’s
Écho d’Alger
were well to the fore in whipping up opposition to the
loi-cadre
, but among new voices joining in the noisy fugue against any legislature of moderation were now the militant
pied noir
students of Algiers University, under the lead of a recently demobbed ex-para, Pierre Lagaillarde. On the other side, the F.L.N. had launched an offensive of
égorgements spectaculaires
against the ever-shrinking numbers of “third force” Muslims upon whom Lacoste would have to rely for the success of the
loi-cadre
. In the political vacuum that succeeded the fall of Gaillard, Lacoste was in effect a “lame-duck” governor; and, in the storm that was shortly to sweep France, his cherished
loi-cadre
would become a dead letter. Speaking to the author years afterwards, he rated its demise as “my greatest disappointment”:

I was sure that if it were put into operation, we could have continued our work towards a progressive independence. Then, when de Gaulle arrived, he swept away the
loi-cadre
. It was a
très vilain coup
, giving full satisfaction to the “ultras”. If it had gone through, without sacrificing one community to the other, I do believe that all but a small fraction of the
pieds noirs
(and those would have been the
grands bourgeois)
could have stayed…. Maybe the rebellion would have continued, but with less force. Who can say what might have happened, because it was never tried?… Metropolitan France never understood. It could never understand that the F.L.N. was not fighting to create a
bon bourgeois
government—like Abbas…. I saw the problem
durement
, but could see no solution. They did not see it
durement
, but saw every conceivable solution.

Meanwhile, Lacoste continued with his tough measures to crush the rebellion (and to sugar the pill of the
loi-cadre
for the
pieds noirs
). On 24 April, despite Germaine Tillion’s endeavours of the previous year to halt the chain of executions, Yacef’s bomb-manufacturer, Taleb Abderrahmane, and two other convicted terrorists were guillotined in Algiers. In advance of the execution,
El Moudjahid
had warned that henceforth “each Algerian patriot to mount the scaffold signifies one French prisoner before the firing squad”. On 9 May the F.L.N. Press office in Tunis announced that three French soldiers had been sentenced to death by a special A.L.N. tribunal on charges of torture, rape and murder. The unfortunate soldiers had already been in F.L.N. hands for over eighteen months and, far from there having been any semblance of a “fair trial”, it appeared, for want of other evidence, that they had simply been selected at random and killed. The French reaction, both in France and Algeria, was one of profound shock and horror. For the army, it was the missing detonator.

[
1
] That mere captains, like Hentic, should come to acquire quite vast powers, both in military and civil operations, had—by May 1958—become in itself a commonplace and significant feature.

PART THREE

The Hardest of all Victories: 1958–1962

As for myself, when General de Gaulle came to power I dreamed aloud. Drunk with wild hopes, I prophesied to my friends: “In one stride he will step over the obstacle against which every other government has come to grief. He will tell the army: ‘You have won the hardest of all victories in our history, the victory over ourselves—our egoism, our stupidity, and our complacency. You have given the Algerian people a freedom and dignity it has never had, even from its own leaders. Fraternally united with it and its combatants, you will make peace….’ ”