The Praetorians (25 page)

 * * * * 

At ten o'clock in the morning the Forum was black with people. The shops, which were open earlier in the day, had pulled down their iron shutters—Mozabite and European shops alike. But the regular customers continued to slip in through the passages and back parlours to buy oil and sugar, which were rising in price day by day. It was known that Metropolitan France had decreed the blockade of Algeria.

In the Public Safety Committee it was anything but plain sailing. The activists distrusted the Gaullists and the military, and all of them distrusted the Tojun. In the manner of ancient diviners everyone was trying to read the future in the entrails of this crowd yelling under the windows.

Towards eleven o'clock Françoise Baguèras, Pasfeuro and Malistair clambered through the broken window-panes of an office on the first floor of the Government General and perched on a sort of cornice forming a terrace. At their feet the people of Algiers seethed, swelled and writhed, shouting oaths and acclamations.

“This crowd frightens me,” said Pasfeuro.

Françoise retorted:

“Let's not exaggerate. They come to the Forum in the same way as, in Spain, they go to the bull-fight. I heard a Martinez
say to a Hernandez: ‘I say, are you coming to the serenade by and by?'”

Orator after orator spoke from the microphone on the balcony. Many of them had no gift and brayed the slogans of the day, but the crowd acclaimed these stars.

Massu made a brief appearance and a round of cheers went up at his scowling face.

Puysanges slipped into the office in which the Public Safety Committee held its meetings. He took Glatigny by the arm:

“Would you come over here a moment, old boy. I want to ask you a favour.”

“Well, sir, what's the new game?” Staff Sergeant Pieron asked Esclavier. “Our chaps have done every kind of job—policemen during the battle of Algiers, war veterans on April
26
th. What part do they play in this show?”

“You remember, with the Viets, the part played by the
can-bos
?”

“Do I not! They're the ones who organized the meetings, created the committees, made the people shout out slogans which the
ngacs
would not have thought of by themselves. ‘
Ho Chu Tich-Muon Nam
'—Long Live Uncle Ho! You're telling me! Many of them would have watched Uncle Ho dying without raising a finger, with the greatest pleasure in fact!”

Esclavier gave a curt laugh.

“We're going to do the same as the
can-bos.
We're going to teach this gang of nitwits that they can't do without a certain Charles de Gaulle whom actually they have never been able to bear.”

Glatigny, who had just come out of the Government General, placed his hand on Esclavier's shoulder.

“We must first of all teach them to like the Tojun.”

“What's that you say? We've got nothing to do with him.”

“I've just seen Puysanges. We're going to have his boss voted in. In exchange, the Tojun is sending an appeal to de Gaulle. He has taken the bit between his teeth ever since poor old Pflimlin back in Paris called him a factionist general. Salan wallows at his ease in false situations, but he doesn't like them
to be revealed in broad daylight. Bonvillain has agreed. It's an opportunity that mustn't be missed.”

Glatigny added with a smile:

“So now I'm leader of the hired clappers! But we must have Salan acclaimed. It's only natural, after all. The army has seized power, it must remain united and Salan's the head of the army.”

“You're not frightened, by any chance?”

“I beg your pardon . . .”

“Frightened of calling in question all that old system of dead-and-buried hierarchies which you agreed to condemn when you were with us in Camp One?”

“It's a question of the unity of the army. If there's a rift in the army we're lost. Oran has followed us—half-heartedly—and the mayor, Fouques-Duparc, has formed a Public Safety Committee which looks more like a Radical Socialist general council. But in Kabylia that old satrap Vignon has dug in his heels. And there's no news from Constantine!

“If Salan sides with us openly all the generals will follow suit. There'll be no more danger of our fighting one another.”

“There's no danger of that now, as you know perfectly well. But Salan, whom you can't bear, reassures you because he wears five stars on his cap.”

“So you refuse?”

“I told you I'd follow you. We'll therefore have the Tojun acclaimed, but this sort of thing needs a little preparation! In cold blood, his name will never go down the throats of the French Algerians.”

“Can you and Marindelle fix this show up for tomorrow, with him dealing with the civilian side and you with the paratroops?”

Boisfeuras appeared and chuckled:

“Tomorrow's Ascension Day. According to the new calendar, May
15
th is the Ascension of the Tojun!”

“Well, where do we start?” asked Pieron, who was getting restless.

Esclavier drew a sheet of paper from his pocket.

“You kick off with ‘Algeria is French,' then ‘Long live the
Army,' ‘A Public Safety Government,' ‘One Single Country from Dunkirk to Tamanrasset' . . .”

“At that moment,” said Glatigny, “I'll have the messages of support coming in from the Sahara read out on the balcony.”

“We soft-pedal on Soustelle, then turn up the volume and afterwards throw in de Gaulle to see what effect it has. All right, Pieron, action stations, and jump to it!”

The crowd was roaring and rumbling delightedly in front of them.

One woman, then another, hemmed in too tightly, fainted. Some paratroops, with their sleeves rolled up, carried them away in their arms.

“We have to do every kind of job,” Pieron grumbled, “down to wet-nurse and hospital orderly.”

He started counting off on his fingers.

“First I start them yelling ‘Algeria is French,' then ‘A Public Safety Government,' then ‘Long live the Army' . . . no, first of all ‘the Army' and then ‘Public Safety.'”

Pieron had a worthy north-country head. The effort of memory which he had had inflicted on him made the thick veins in his neck bulge and swell.

“What's Mahmoudi doing?” Glatigny asked Boisfeuras.

“I left him in the villa at Birmandreis struggling with a duplicating machine. He was printing pamphlets for the Kasbah and turning the handle, swearing in Arabic and French alternately. I asked him what he had said in the pamphlets. ‘I've played up nationalism,' he replied, ‘which is right up my street!'”

“What news of Pellegrin?”

“He has formed a Public Safety Committee at Z. He wants it to be presided over by Raspéguy, who's playing hard-to-get.”

 * * * * 

Captain Marindelle leant forward above the crowd, which was gradually calming down. A few minutes earlier it had still been a single cohesive mass. Now it was breaking up into thousands of men and women who were suddenly thinking of lunch, a date with a boy- or girl-friend, of the end of the month which was
going to be difficult if the employers didn't pay them for the days spent on strike in the Forum.

At thirty different points simultaneously the cry of “French Algeria” broke out. The crowd took it up half-heartedly, then more and more loudly. “A Public Safety Government” . . . “Long live the Army.” Pieron had got the order of the slogans muddled. The crowd reassembled, forgot its worries, its habits, its empty stomach and parched throat, and became once again that powerful, impulsive, warm-hearted, violent animal with a thousand voices and a thousand arms.

Marindelle gazed down upon it and for the first time felt a mounting desire to embrace not a woman but an entire people. The captain had turned pale and his ears were buzzing. Pasfeuro seized him by the shoulder:

“Yves, don't get taken in by this. You won't be able to do without the crowd. Since it's unreliable, so as not to lose it you'll go to any lengths. Wake up!”

“I'm all right . . . a little tired. Give me a cigarette. Thanks. How's Jeanine?”

“She's fine. Every time I ring her up she asks me what you're doing, if you're happy, and tells me to keep an eye on you.

“She also asks me if you've fallen in love with anyone else. I'll tell her it's not a woman you're in love with but a whole town. She won't understand, she'll just wrinkle her pretty brow and put on a gramophone record. You wouldn't by any chance like to go out and get dead drunk this evening?”

“No, thanks, I've got a lot of work to do. It's funny, Herbert, how we've never come to loathe each other. You feel you have to keep an eye on me, and three days ago I prevented a little group of extremists who'd turned nasty as a result of one of your articles from beating you up on a street corner. Why do you love Jeanine?”

“I can't think. When she goes to sleep she turns her back on me, pulls the bedclothes up to her chin and won't let me touch her. Like a great big sentimental poodle, I then stay awake for hours watching over her.”

“I never knew a Jeanine like that. We always slept in each other's arms.”

“Yes, a couple of shivering brats! But I was the one from whom she borrowed money to buy you that smoked salmon from Petrossian's that you liked so much.”

The crowd uttered a deafening yell:

“Long live Soustelle!”

“It's the first time,” said Marindelle, “that we're winning not merely a battle but a crowd. We shan't ever be able to forget it.”

 * * * * 

“What are we going to do about Restignes, Colonel?”

“He's lying low. The Commander-in-Chief is on quite good terms with him. When normal relations have been re-established with Metropolitan France we'll ask him to be good enough to go back to Paris.”

Arcinade drummed with his stumpy little fingers on the big desk which he had been occupying since that morning at the Government General. Entrusted with the task of establishing communications—what sort of communications was not specified—between the Public Safety Committee, the army and the Press, he had at his disposal a telephone with several lines, three secretaries and an assistant, a pale, harassed young man who never stopped picking his nose.

In his formal dark-blue suit, which did not succeed in flattering his tubby form, and with his pearl-grey tie, Arcinade tried to look like a senior civil servant, which he had always dreamt of being.

He exuded happiness. But his white shirt was too tight and felt uncomfortable round the collar. He would have liked to be elegant, handsome and easy-mannered like Colonel Puysanges, who was sitting back in an armchair with one leg crossed over the other, dreamily puffing the smoke from his cigarette towards the ceiling.

“Restignes is a dangerous nuisance, Colonel. He'll be even more so if ever General de Gaulle is in power. And our worthy Commander-in-Chief appears to be resolved to play that card.”

“For the time being.”

“Restignes has had contacts with the F.L.N.”

“I know. So have our special services. They were the same sort of contacts.”

“In Algeria he is looked upon as a traitor.”

“Just as Soustelle was when he first arrived, and Lacoste . . . and our general! Have you forgotten the bazooka incident?”

“I warned you of the danger at the time.”

“That doesn't prevent there being two characters in the Public Safety Committee who were up to their necks in that business and who claim to be loyal to you. But let's get back to Restignes.”

“I took it upon myself to have him watched. Mahmoudi has called on him. And yesterday, late at night, two of his friends—one of whom was an agent of mine—went and advised him to leave Algiers and take refuge in the Oran district. He told them he was in no danger and that if the situation deteriorated there were men ready to protect him. Some people, he added, would be even extremely surprised to learn that his protectors belonged to the very group which only yesterday wanted him arrested. Then he burst out laughing with his usual self-sufficiency.”

“This is beginning to sound interesting, Arcinade. Who will protect him? Bonvillain?”

“No, not Bonvillain. He's a clever lad. He's playing too difficult a rôle to saddle himself with such a handicap, and then he has certain ambitions . . . short-term ones, shall we say. He has arrived at the very moment he hopes to see himself rewarded for his pains and derive a little benefit out of life. He has developed a taste for the salons of Algiers.

“Mahmoudi leads us back to Glatigny, Esclavier, Boisfeuras, Marindelle, all that group who've been deeply marked by Indo-China and Vietminh Communism.

“Restignes is a man of the left. They say that in his youth he had Communist leanings. He once made a journey to Russia.”

“For several months, Arcinade, I thought that certain officers might veer towards Communism; I was wrong. Too many things hold them back in our camp. Whatever they might do, even if they haven't been baptized, even if they're freemasons, they still remain Christians and nationalists. We see them dabbling in Marxism; at a pinch they're capable of adapting some of the practical methods of Communism to the problems confronting us at the moment, which are the same for all over-developed
countries, but they'll never go any further. As for Restignes, his thoughts may be left wing, but his private income, his way of life, his rich bourgeois manners, place him on the right. What do they want to do with him?”

“Make him a Minister of Algeria.”

“Since yesterday the Commander-in-Chief has been wielding full civil and military powers. I can assure you he's not ready to surrender them!”

“Restignes is a street-vendor of empires.”

“Come now, Arcinade, when there are just the two of us present there's no need for grandiloquence. Keep that for the Forum. Go on having him watched and keep me informed. But, above all, don't intervene.”