A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (17 page)

Yet another obstacle was bitter opposition equally from Lahouel’s and Messali’s factions of the M.T.L.D. Soon after the creation of the breakaway C.R.U.A., Bitat and Boudiaf were both beaten up by the Messalists and retaliated with a violent assault on the M.T.L.D. headquarters. Warning his members against being drawn into the C.R.U.A. “slaughterhouse”, Lahouel had considerable success in Algiers — with the result that, when D-Day came, Bitat, the local leader, found himself having to rely extensively on Krim’s maquisards imported from Kabylia.

The provision of arms was even more critical. A network of bomb factories was set up in the Casbah and at Souma, thirty miles outside the capital, under the supervision of Zoubir Bouadjadj, the chief of the Algiers area. Bouadjadj was a dedicated terrorist from the first, with a bitter hatred for the French; his father had died as a consequence of being gassed on the Western Front, his mother had lived in miserable poverty as a laundress, and at the age of ten he had been arrested on a trifling charge of stealing photographs. The episode, he claimed, had nearly broken his mother’s heart, and from that moment he never looked back; already by 1942, when he was seventeen, he was distributing illegal tracts for the P.P.A. Bouadjadj’s first factories started fabricating a series of primitive devices from black powder and sodium chlorate, encased in sections of iron piping or empty Esso oil tins. Among several early disappointments, one bright young student, introduced by Bouadjadj as an expert on nitro-glycerine, managed to distil barely a glassful of the lethal explosive, while wasting vast quantities of raw material.

Under the nose of the French police, immense risks were run daily in smuggling firearms to various assembly points in readiness for All Saints. A miscellany of weapons from the Second World War — German Mausers, pistols abandoned by the Vichy French, equipment collected from careless Americans and stored in caves round Oran since the 1942 landings — trickled in. But the largest part of the initial arsenal consisted of sporting guns of uncertain antiquity and accuracy. Ben Bella claimed that the F.L.N. started the revolt with only 350 to 400 miscellaneous firearms, and virtually nothing heavier than a machine-gun. Not a weapon, it is worth noting, at this stage or for several years to come, was provided by the Communist bloc; nor was more than a modest quantity of guns acquired elsewhere abroad with the F.L.N.’s slender funds. Thus, from the very beginning the theft of French arms from depots or their recovery on the battlefield became a prime military objective.

Nasser disappoints

One of the F.L.N.’s bitterest early disappointments lay in the failure of Nasser’s Egypt to come forth with material aid. As
the
great exponent of pan-Arabism, the man who had kicked the still powerful British out of the Suez Canal zone and whose Cairo radio beamed a constant flow of anticolonialist propaganda at the Maghreb, Nasser had aroused the most fervent hopes among the revolutionaries. All sides alike were taken in. Jacques Soustelle, writing as late as 1957, still insisted that the original impetus for the revolt came from Cairo, that the explosion was caused by the conjunction of “two inert chemicals … Egyptian pan-Arabism and Algerian terrorism”; it was a notion that would die hard and exert a fundamental, and disastrous, influence over the Suez operation of 1956. Meanwhile, in the immediate aftermath of the revolt, many a simple Auresian hillman, having heard Egypt’s “Voice of the Arabs” promise extravagantly to “offer her sons in holocaust for the Arabs of the whole world”, was convinced that a legendary Egyptian army of 70,000 greenclad horsemen was imminently coming to the rescue. The truth was quite otherwise. The Algerian delegation to the “exterior” had a powerful triumvirate from the C.R.U.A. “nine” — Ben Bella, Ait Ahmed and Khider — based in Cairo, but it was dogged from the beginning by personal quarrels and disputes. Partly it was a matter of communication; Ben Bella was aggravated by having to express himself in French because the Egyptians were unable to understand his Arabic. Eternally offering money and arms, when it came to the crunch the Egyptians temporised, their line being “Start the revolution first … then aid will follow.”

French suspicions

Meanwhile, as preparations for All Saints inched forward through every obstacle, the French administration was beginning to form a menacingly accurate picture. As early as April 1954, the office of the governor-general, Roger Léonard, received a tip-off from an informer about the formation of C.R.U.A.; but it appears to have been filed away in some forgotten drawer. In August, Ferhat Abbas was received in Paris by Premier Mendès-France — thereby establishing a hopeful precedent for an Algerian nationalist leader — at which time he issued a clear warning that, if the 1947 statute was not applied “without fraud, and with the minimum delay”, then the Algerian liberals like himself would be “swept away” by events. In Algiers, a steady flow of disquieting intelligence was reaching the competent director of the Sûreté, Jean Vaujour, including a list of camps inside Libya where Algerian guerrillas were being trained. During the course of the summer he too visited Paris, with the aim of obtaining a direct audience with Mendès-France or his Minister of the Interior, Mitterrand. But as it was the holiday season he was fobbed off with minor functionaries, who listened with apathetic disbelief when he warned them “if Algeria moves it will be in December”. By October Vaujour knew the whereabouts of the main bomb depot in the Casbah (which already contained some two hundred complete bombs). Momentarily he toyed with the idea of getting a double agent to plant a bomb detonating the stock, but was deterred by the loss of life that this would inevitably cause in so crowded a quarter. Instead he decided to shadow the bomb manufacturers in the hopes that they might lead him to the rest of the group. By mid-October French intelligence had identified Ben Bella as “leader” of the coming revolt (an exaggeration that was to have many a distortive effect on future French policy), but Vaujour had still no clue as to the identity of the C.R.U.A. members in Algeria.

Léonard, the governor-general, who during the Vichy era had been sacked by Pétain as head of the gendarmerie for courageously refusing to take action against Georges Mandel, was essentially an administrator rather than a man of action and known for his calm (it might almost have been called placid) temperament. Neither he nor the French army command took the various warnings seriously until some ten days before the revolt broke out. At a top-level conference convened by Vaujour at Constantine on 29 October, just two days before All Saints, one French colonel, when told that a hundred armed
fellagha
had been spotted in the Aurès exclaimed contemptuously: “
Monsieur le Préfet
, I’ve been patrolling the roads for a very long time, and I’ve never yet seen a
fellagha
in front of my jeep!” It was not likely that he would have done; Ben Boulaid’s men were hardly moving along the highways. Even Vaujour himself, however, did not believe until after the
dies irae
that a general revolt was in the offing. Among the highest echelons of the French government the first person to register serious disquiet seems to have been François Mitterrand, the minister directly responsible for Algeria. Soon after assumption of office that June he had given voice to premonitions: “I sense something … the situation is unhealthy.” Several trips to Algeria, culminating in a visit on 19 October after Orléansville had been shattered by a devastating earthquake, had confirmed this nervousness. Laquière, the ultra-conservative president of the Algerian Assembly, had done his best to reassure Mitterrand that all was quiet, but a warning from Vaujour that something was going to happen “within three weeks or a month” rang in his ears. Yet, curiously enough, Mitterrand seems to have done singularly little to act on his fears when returning to Paris on the 23rd, even though this coincided with a long report to the government from Léonard, expressing for the first time grave concerns by an official hitherto distinguished by his imperturbability. Certainly nothing was done to place security forces in Algeria on an emergency footing. The only minister to act positively on Léonard’s letter seems to have been Jacques Chevallier, the
pied noir
Secretary of State for Defence and former Mayor of Algiers, who telephoned Mendès-France to announce: “I’m going to take advantage of the long week-end of 1 November to go to Algeria. The news is bad, and I’m going to see on the spot what is happening.”

On the brink

During these last days of October a kind a tense game of “grandmother’s footsteps” was played out in Algeria, with the F.L.N. completing its last preparations and French intelligence gradually catching up on their tracks — the net closing in all the time. One last, totally unexpected, hitch came with the Orléansville earthquake which, killing 1,400 people, disrupted Ben M’hidi’s organisation in Oranie, where the F.L.N. were already at their weakest. On 24 October, the Sunday before All Saints, the six leaders of the C.R.U.A. still in Algeria held a valedictory meeting together, to check through operational orders once again and to vet the wording of a proclamation to be disseminated on 1 November. On leaving they went into a Bab-el-Oued photographer, each emerging with a still-moist print of a group photo in his pocket. It was an uncharacteristic breach of their previously impeccable security, as well as being perhaps a strange display of vanity; yet no copy was ever to find its way into French hands. Inept and under-exposed as it is the photograph is an historic document. With their ill-fitting clothes and awkward poses the six — only two of whom were to survive the war and its aftermath — look somehow more like the over-earnest members of a local darts team, or parish council, than hardened revolutionaries about to plunge two peoples into seven and a half years of war and, in the course of it, bring the mighty French republic crashing. Trying to divine the thoughts of the men posing there, one wonders how many genuinely reckoned that their actions, backed by such slender means, would ultimately lead to an independent Algeria; and how many would have persisted had they been able to foresee the length and immense difficulties of the struggle, let alone the terrible sacrifices it was going to impose on their fellow countrymen.

In France, all insouciant, a spate of “flying saucers” had provoked a deputy to ask the Secretary of State for Air what he was doing about them; Dérain had died at 74, after being knocked off his bicycle by a car, and Matisse was on his death-bed. The literary salons, while they mourned the death of Colette, were still chattering about the exciting first novel called
Bonjour Tristesse
by an eighteen-year-old girl; and about the Nobel Prize awarded Ernest Hemingway. Otherwise thoughts were preoccupied with Emperor Haile Selassie’s impending visit to Paris, and Mendès-France’s to Canada and the United States; with the American congressional elections, and the London—Paris agreements rearming West Germany. In Britain — an unusual state of affairs — the dockers were about to go on strike.

On the eve of All Saints, Vaujour in Algeria received from the Deuxième Bureau the first example of an F.L.N. bomb, a crude device encased in a tin of jam. All day he had toyed with it in his office at the Gouvernement-Géneral, wondering whether he should not, after all, have laid hands on the bomb factory pin-pointed in the Casbah, but finally procrastinating. At Teniet-el-Abd, a small village in the Aurès, Jean Servier, a thirty-six-year-old ethnologist very popular in the area, received the last of a series of warnings to get out. While he was recording the songs of a blind singer, he was warned by a friendly
caid
: “It’s going to be tomorrow.” Just in case they might be a target of attack, all French schoolteachers were also ordered out of the Aurès. Only two could not be reached, a young couple called Monnerot, who were returning from their honeymoon sightseeing in a bus somewhere between Biskra and Arris.

The Aurès, 30 October

Already the first cutting winds of winter were whistling through the bleak mountains of the Aurès, causing the shepherds to huddle deeper into their thick, dun-coloured
cachabias
, which, like their rock-built villages, afford so immaculate a camouflage against the natural backdrop. To the casual visitor it seems a region almost devoid of humanity; and yet, from the valley-bound roads, one is conscious of every movement being observed by a thousand eyes in the invisible villages above. Each one is like a watch-tower, ideal for providing advance warning of the approach of an enemy or a policeman in a country where the
bandit d’honneur
and the partisan have been honoured since before Roman times. On the plains fringing the Aurès, at Timgad and Lambesis, the Romans built splendid great cities, the glories of which still remain; their legions made frequent punitive forays into the turbulent massif but they never attempted any permanent occupation. Over the centuries the Chaouias managed to keep their own language, customs and beliefs, and to resist all attempts at assimilation. The various tribes habitually lived in a state of bloody, Corsican-style vendetta with each other, but would unite when threatened by an outside force. They would complain to the administration at its failure to protect them from banditry; yet, at the same time, they would as a matter of principle not denounce a bandit, or refuse him food and lodging. It was a system ready-made for exploitation by the F.L.N. The Aurès had revolted in 1859, 1879 and 1916 against the French, who — like their Roman predecessors — had never really succeeded in penetrating it. Instead they built a dusty and cheerless garrison town at Batna to the north, and protected the few roads, plus the one highly vulnerable railway to Biskra on the edge of the Sahara, with a series of scattered concrete guard-towers, or mini forts. Utterly isolated in the hostile landscape, they remind one of the Turkish-built structures along the Hejaz railway which Lawrence and his irregulars took such delight in blowing up during their desert revolt. Apart from Batna, the only other administrative centre was the pleasant small town of Arris, nestling in a valley in the centre of the Aurès, and dependent entirely upon the easily severed north—south road. To control the sixty-thousand Auresians of Arris and its far-flung
commune mixte
, there was precisely one French administrator, two assistants and seven gendarmes. From Arris eastwards one trackless range succeeds another, until the Aurès merge with the equally inaccessible Nementchas, and on across the Tunisian frontier. Geographically, it was ideal guerrilla country, and meanwhile, since 1951, a remarkably sophisticated political structure had been superimposed over the existing simple tribal structure. On top of the long-standing discontent with economic hardships following the fall of Dien Bien Phu, a marked waning of respect for French suzerainty had been noted in the region by well-informed residents like Jean Servier and Jean Deleplanque, the Batna sub-prefect.