The Praetorians (16 page)

A sleepy
chaouch
opened the iron gate and closed it again behind Hellion. Captain Bergasse and his car disappeared.

The general was alone in the dimly lit lobby. Outside the bar stood a sentry, but unarmed. He was a handsome young sergeant, with a blank expression and hard-set features.

A fortnight previously Hellion himself had decorated him with the Croix de la Valeur Militaire with palm.

The general strode into the big bar-room at a pace that was intended to be brisk. But his hindquarters spoilt the effect.

There was no one in the bar except the group of paratroop officers and warrant officers in battledress. One of them motioned to the barman, who disappeared.

The general was so short that he had to raise his head to recognize the faces of the men standing there at attention. He thought that Marshal de Lattre, under whose orders he had served a long time, would have admired them with their strong features, close-cropped hair, their skin tanned by the sun, their lean sinewy bodies, their gaze that never wavered.

He hoisted his ample buttocks on to a bar-stool. In front of him stood a glass of beer and, since he was thirsty, he almost drank it down. But he recovered himself: a general does not accept a drink from his officers in revolt.

“Gentlemen,” he began, talking through his nose more than ever and sneezing, “you have drawn me into a trap. . . .”

For a moment he envied the tall men who, at a crucial stage in their career, were at the top of their form. He had caught a cold in the plane and he lacked a good twenty inches to cut an imposing figure.

“I must remind you that by the terms of military law the most serious crime is mutiny. For the last time I'm giving orders for Captain Boisfeuras to take the plane for Paris and for all of you to rejoin your units which you have left without permission. Consider yourselves under open arrest pending the disciplinary measures that I shan't fail to take against you.”

He sneezed again and saw smiles flickering over their faces.

Philippe Esclavier stepped forward:

“Sir, I don't think it will do any good to dramatize this business by referring to officers and warrant officers, who only want to have a word with you, as mutineers.”

“I'm sticking to the facts, Esclavier. I don't want to hear anything else. The Minister, representing the Government, has given the order. . . .”

Major Miguelon stood out amongst these soldiers who still
smelt of war and who revealed a stubborn air and stern features the better to conceal their uneasiness and indecision. He was a slim, grey-haired man who wore steel-rimmed spectacles and, on the lapel of his uniform, the badge of the École de Guerre.

He tried to intervene and did so in a shrill voice:

“There isn't any government left, sir—there hasn't been for years!—and the Minister whom I'm representing here——”

“You're representing the Minister!”

“I belong to his department. The Minister, sir, never intended to give that order. In all good faith he was taken by surprise. I spoke to him before coming here, a few hours ago. . . .”

“Then he must countermand it.”

“That's impossible in the present circumstances, but my presence here . . .”

The little general exploded and reverted to the coarse language of his youthful years when he was commanding a unit of shock troops:

“You're beginning to bore the balls off me with your bloody little plots, your secret envoys from a Minister who with one hand signs an order and with the other picks up the telephone to countermand it! What gives us our strength, us soldiers, in this damn balls-up, is discipline. You're all criminals to call it in question.”

He was getting thirstier and thirstier and the beer tempted him. He gulped it down:

“You bloody little gang of heroes, you remind me of my son. . . .”

Esclavier, who felt the situation was lost if the general started playing on their finer feelings, tried to counter-attack:

“Your son is on our side at the moment, sir.”

“Well, what difference does that make? For the last time, Boisfeuras, I order you to take that plane.”

“No,” said Marindelle.

“No,” said Esclavier.

“No,” echoed the other officers and warrant officers one after another.

“This isn't a mutiny, it's a sedition organized by a soviet of officers and soldiers!”

Boisfeuras's grating laugh made itself heard:

“This is the way, sir, while drinking beer and taking a cue from Mao Tse-Tung and the Vietminh, that the officers and N.C.O.s of the two legions, I mean the two parachute divisions, have decided this evening to cross the Rubicon.”

“If it's anything like the Harrach it must smell pretty filthy, your Rubicon, and France will never agree to follow you.”

“It all depends on the leader we suggest,” said Glatigny. “If it was de Gaulle . . .”

“De Gaulle's a name which means something to me—a Prime Minister who abandoned power in
1946
, leaving France in the lurch after having the nerve to say that all was well. If that's all you've got to offer! Meanwhile I'll have to take things up with the C.-in-C.”

“A little later,” Major Miguelon quietly remarked, “after April
26
th. It's easy, without compromising yourself, to cancel that order. Captain Boisfeuras goes sick and is admitted to Maillot hospital. We've got some friends there. When he has recovered, after April
26
th, he can answer this summons . . . if it is still in effect!”

A fresh explosion from the little general:

“Do you think I'm going to climb down?”

“We're resolved to go to any lengths,” Marindelle chipped in, “to get things moving, even so far as to make your staff officers responsible for keeping you under surveillance. We have their agreement to do so.”

“As I see it, I'm your prisoner.”

“Our guest this evening, sir,” Esclavier replied. “Another beer? We're sorry, but the barman has gone off with the keys and there isn't any whisky. Now then, does Boisfeuras remain in Algiers?”

“No.”

The general was still trying to struggle, but the less gruff he became and the more he attempted to show his officers valid reasons for obeying him, the more ground he lost. His uneasiness
and indecision strengthened the determination of his subordinates. Esclavier said once again:

“Well, does Boisfeuras remain in Algiers?”

“He can do as he likes, and you'll all swing with him.”

He seized Marindelle by the arm:

“It will be much simpler to obey, otherwise you'll be for the high jump. A good soldier chooses this profession because it spares him from having to face problems, and if problems arise, since he has not been trained to solve them, he acts foolishly with deep conviction. And you'd better think twice about Charles de Gaulle, I know him well. He thinks much the same as I do.”

He turned to the officers, tried to make himself look taller.

“All the same, gentlemen, I suppose you're still under my orders as far as operations are concerned. I shan't go and see the C.-in-C. What's the number of my room, Esclavier?”

“A hundred and twenty-four.”

The general put his beret back on his head and waddled out of the room. But no one noticed he was weeping.

“It's as easy as that to topple over an old idol!” lisped Lieutenant Pujol-Veyrier, aghast and at the same time delighted.

“That general was no fool,” said Urbain Donadieu. “As I see it, Esclavier, your comrades and yourself embarked on that venture of May
13
th to defend not the French of Algeria, nor the Moslems, the most dynamic part of whom were fighting you to achieve their independence, but simply your existence. Let's use, if you like, a more pompous word: your honour.”

“For three of us honour had nothing to do with it. After our meeting in the Aletti bar, which ended towards three in the morning, Boisfeuras invited us to have a glass of whisky in his bedroom. Pellegrin was there as well, and I thought he had drunk more than he usually did. Through the wide-open window we could see the harbour packed with boats which were unloading by the light of arc-lamps. For the Moslems and small settlers the war meant hardships, resettlement camps, farms burnt down and vineyards destroyed. For us, tricky and exhausting operations, surrounding the enemy, then closing in to find they had meanwhile disappeared, lives thrown away for nothing. For others, for some others, it meant money.

“Min served us in silence. That mysterious face with the slanting eyes also reminded us of Indo-China.”

 * * * * 

On account of that face, and the damp salty air wafted up in gusts from the sea, and those boats unloading their trucks, their armoured cars and their ambulances, Glatigny, Esclavier, Marindelle and Boisfeuras, forgetting this room with its bad-taste Juxurious furniture, this smell of antiseptic and polish which is the smell of all big hotels, found themselves back in the Far East. It was the memory of Camp One that came back to them.

They recalled the final hours of Dien-Bien-Phu, the long march, their escapes, their self-examination sessions and the promise they had made to themselves never to lose another war.

Suddenly Jacques de Glatigny rose to his feet, glass in hand, and embarked with heavy irony on one of those catch-phrases he used to use in the camp to start off a speech:

“I'm an aristocrat, the son of an aristocrat, a pupil of the Jesuits and a French officer. I haven't got a penny left and my country house has fallen to bits in spite of the repairs my wife had done to it.

“I loved a little Arab girl and I forced her to give away her friends. I don't want her to have betrayed her comrades for nothing because of me.

“Whenever I go to Algiers I go and see Aicha. I don't lay a finger on her; she talks to me about her country, for she is still a Nationalist. I went with her to call on her brother, Captain Mahmoudi, who has been transferred to Paris. He's still under close arrest in Fort I'Empereur

“There are times when I find myself siding with Aicha and her brother. I tell myself it's impossible to hang on to a country against the wish of the people living in it. I see myself then as nothing more than the supporter of an outworn form of colonialism. At other times, when I'm with the settlers with whom I fought in Italy, I find myself siding with them for having developed this land and I feel it's out of the question to abandon them. They have paid the double price of sweat and blood.

“There are yet other times when I dream of the two communities coming to some sort of agreement. Aicha said to me the other day: ‘The only possible peace is the peace of the fighters. If I were asked to design a poster to rally the men of the hinterland I would show a paratrooper and a member of the F.L.N., each with his hand on the other's shoulder but carrying a sub-machine-gun, with the inscription:
Together we shall create a new Algeria.
' Of course, we should have to begin by shooting a few fat settlers and big-time Arabs.

“But what could I do? Hand in my resignation? I'm incapable of any other profession than the army.

“That was the point I'd reached when I met Bonvillain, at the
Ministry of War, and with him I started plotting. I'm grateful to Boisfeuras, whose recall to France has done us a great service by forcing the officers to take a stand.”

Boisfeuras replied in his rasping voice:

“Our friend Glatigny, for whom, as I see it, I have served as a bait, has given us his point of view. We should be glad, however, if he would enlighten us further on certain points. Does he believe that General de Gaulle can work towards a French solution in Algeria? We know the general's suspicious attitude towards the European population—in his eyes, second-class citizens and personal enemies of his—and also towards the Moslems, whom he calls riff-raff. In other words, our friend Glatigny is inviting us to take part in a plot which is aimed at bringing back to power, by force, a man of great standing, maybe, but whom France has dismissed from her memory with a certain feeling of relief.”

“I don't see any other solution,” Glatigny replied.

Marindelle broke in:

“In Algeria we are in a revolutionary era, and times such as these demand quick, brutal, even unjust, solutions, but which at least must be new. De Gaulle is an old man, a general, a northerner, a pupil of the Jesuits and a reactionary. The very words, revolutionary war, make him bristle. . . . But, heavens above, why try to choose a single individual as the representative of Providence at the stage we've reached of communal managements? As a result of applying this principle we have just denied the authority of a general who, from the military point of view, was just as good as de Gaulle.

“I personally have nothing left. I've lost my wife, and, in leaving the regiment to work in Algiers, I've lost touch with my comrades. My one and only concern now is to win this war. Otherwise my four years in captivity, all that I've learnt and understood, my broken home and ruined career, will all have been for nothing.”

Pellegrin, who lay stretched out on the bed with his eyes closed, had not moved. All of a sudden he stretched, gave a couple of yawns, seized the bottle of whisky and took a long swig out of it. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then:

“You make me sick, the whole lot of you. You're like old boy scouts who organize a camp-fire in their Neuilly apartments and tell the same old dreary stories about ‘the days of their youth.' The self-examination sessions at Camp One! All that's a lot of balls.

“Why try and find all sorts of motives in history or the evolution of the world? Think of Indo-China, that's all. Do you remember, Boisfeuras, the rice which our partisans used to cook in huge cauldrons and the moment when one of them stirred it with a bamboo stick? The faint, warm, sweet smell that then arose? What did we do, Boisfeuras, with our partisans whom we swore we would never abandon? After Dien-Bien-Phu, when things were beginning to go badly in the Tonkin delta, that old pirate Wong came to see me. In his skinny hand he carried a faded brown fan. In his clumsy way he was trying to imitate the grand mandarins of Ancient China. I poured him out a big glass of martini. He loved the stuff, but he didn't touch it. He sat there without moving and went on playing with his fan, opening it and snapping it shut again. A ridiculous and touching sight! We were both great friends. He had brought me thirty thousand men, ten thousand of whom knew how to handle a rifle.

“Finally, in his Chinese grocer's French, he asked me if it was true that we were preparing to surrender Tonkin to the Vietminh and that no arrangements had been made to withdraw the partisans and their families.

“The Viet divisions were moving down towards the delta. If the Moncay sector failed to hold out our entire defence system would collapse. Even before signing the armistice at Geneva we had evacuated Northern Viet-Nam. Everything, therefore, depended on this old pirate. So I lied and assured him that we would never leave him in the lurch. I don't know if he believed me or not. His partisans stuck to their guns and held out to the end. In the meantime we were enabled to regroup our forces round Hanoi and Haiphong.

“Needless to say, we never evacuated anyone and my old pirate was captured by the Commies. A people's court condemned him to death and cut off his head.

“You're trying to find a motive for blowing everything sky
high, in Marxism, in history. All you need do is remember the Catholics in Tonkin who likewise believed we were going to stay! They tried to swim out to our boats as we pulled out. For days afterwards the sea washed up the bodies of those we hadn't been able to pick up.

“I had a bellyful of Indo-China. A bellyful of defeat and all the other withdrawals it imposed on us in the south. I broke my word, which was also the word of France, twenty times over in the war of the sects. I'm not a ‘new-style' soldier, I don't think for myself, I haven't read Mao Tse-Tung, and I'm not worried by guilty conscience when I find myself up against an enemy. In Algeria, in order to win the war, we'll have to commit ourselves again, but this time personally with the population, because there's no longer any power, or because this power's too weak, too cowardly, to honour its pledges. Afterwards there'll no longer be any question of leaving; what's done is done, my lads. It's no longer France's word, but ours. We're caught.

“Get this into your thick skulls, my lads—this time Old Uncle Pellegrin isn't going to yield an inch. He won't obey any order to evacuate, he'd rather blow everything sky high, and he's quite an expert with high explosives!”

 * * * * 

Algiers had become a huge spider's web in which the threads of countless plots crossed and re-crossed one another, each as fragile as the other and all vibrating at the same false alarms.

The little team grouped round the antenna of the National Defence started to build up, for what it was worth, some semblance of an organization. But everywhere Glatigny, Boisfeuras, Marindelle and Esclavier, no less than Bonvillain, came up against indifference, lack of cohesion and rivalries which set the various civilian and military factions at logger-heads.

To keep the army informed of their projects, to prepare it for the idea of General de Gaulle's return to power, they created “cadres.”

They had wanted to avoid the phrase “Officer Committees” which was unduly reminiscent of certain Middle Eastern or South American revolutions.

These cadres, which were to consist of fifteen or twenty
officers each, had Intelligence as their primary aim. They were to discuss subversive warfare and the methods to be employed in Algeria which were based on the training in the Indo-China campaign.

During the second stage the man behind the cadre would induce his comrades to criticize the present régime, whose weakness and contradictions would be pointed out. He was imperceptibly to lead the group to conclude that only a strong régime of a presidential type could save the country, provided it had at its head a man who was acceptable to the whole of France. The name of Charles de Gaulle at once sprang to everyone's lips.

Boisfeuras wanted to make these cadres a permanent feature, which, besides the traditional hierarchy, would form a second, parallel and secret one. Glatigny did not agree at all.

“The army,” he said, “may perhaps be capable of winning over the population but not of assuming its responsibilities.”

“Of course,” Boisfeuras replied, “if we confine ourselves to military personnel. But imagine your cadres if they also included all the specialists we lack: technicians, civil servants, policemen, trade-union leaders . . .”

“I'd rather not imagine them,” the major drily replied.

The cadres worked rather badly, except in certain parachute units. Instead of getting together to chat about girls, promotion and cars, they discussed politics and made various speculations, then fell once more to chatting about girls, promotion and cars. With the exception of a handful of former Vietminh camp prisoners and a few others who had taken part in the Resistance and fought with the partisans, the French army was not ripe for political activity.

On April
22
nd three companies of the
10
th Regiment were moved to Algiers to maintain law and order.

They were placed under the command of Major Jacques de Glatigny, who had taken Captain Esclavier as his second-in-command. The Gaullist conspirators had found staunch colleagues in the Commander-in-Chief's headquarters, and that was how they had managed to arrange for the only troops on whom they could rely to be posted to the Algerian capital.

On being informed of the extra-military activities of his officers, Raspéguy had declared:

“It seems a lot of tommy-rot to me. You're having a whale of a time, but poor old Hellion will never recover from it. He didn't deserve this. Anyway, when you need me for anything definite just let me know. But it's understood of course that Big Charles is in the game.

“At the moment I'm reading a story that's rather like yours, not bad at all: the memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, which General Hellion gave me. It's the first time I've ever been given a book by a general, and a leather-bound one at that!”

 * * * * 

Esclavier had met some journalists he knew in Algiers. Some of them suspected that on both sides of the Mediterranean there was something afoot.

“Another more or less faint-hearted move, a plot that's bound to fail!” exclaimed Pasfeuro, who was furious at having to stay on in Algeria to check up on all these rumours. He did not like to leave his wife alone in Paris too long.

But since the directors of the
Quotidien
were becoming more and more insistent, he suggested doing a story in the course of which he would interview a certain number of more or less strange or disturbing figures who were leading a sort of semi-clandestine existence and whose names were beginning to be whispered abroad.

They congratulated him on this idea and asked him to make haste.

At the request of Major Glatigny and Bonvillain, who wanted to get an over-all picture of the situation, Esclavier accompanied the journalist several times on his investigation.

Pasfeuro was living at the Hôtel Saint-Georges, in a big room overlooking the gardens, from which he had a view of the sea far below shimmering through the palm-trees. When Esclavier came to call for the journalist he almost always arrived just when he was telephoning Jeanine, Marindelle's former wife, whom he had married: