The Mysteries of Algiers (6 page)

Looking out of the window now, a Hungarian doing
la pelote
under the supervision of Schwab provides a centre of interest. Schwab is making him run and crawl round the armoured cars with a sack of stones on his back. They are watched by a queue that is forming outside the dispensary. Delavigne is supervising the putting out of the screen and chairs for the evening’s film show. I can’t see round the corner, but I know that McKellar will be watering the colonel’s garden. A sentry with a sten marches back and forth in front of the steel gates. Two more pace the walls above, watching and waiting for the cloud of dust on the horizon, waiting for the wild screams and popping guns of the nomad horde. The nomads will never come. We are fifty years too late for all that. The only men outside the walls are the sharp-shooter team on the range and I can hear that the command to fire at will has been given, so, soon, they will be coming in again. Captain Delavigne will do the evening kit inspection and then there will be
la soupe
. I think that I can see the boredom rising in shimmering hot waves from the courtyard. Without moving from my place in this room, I can list what everyone in the fort is doing now and will be doing in an hour’s time and will be doing this time tomorrow, moving at the direction of the rosters, to the sound of bugles. I can count it all off on my fingers like a rosary. I was young when I elected to take my commission in the Legion. I thought that I was opting for endless movement and adventure. I did not anticipate the deep monastic peace of the military life. This fort is like a beautifully functioning timepiece. Only there is this dirt – this traitor – in the works …

I am intrigued by Chantal’s revelation that she is confident she knows who the traitor is. I wonder which poor bastard she is going to put the finger on. I don’t think she can be on to me yet. If she is, I think I can talk my way out of it, for a time at least. She is widely regarded as a society girl who rather fancied being something to do with spies and intelligence, so daddy wangled her a job. It’s not true, but I can use it. She will be certain that I am not the type to be the traitor. She likes my uniform, my tales of bedouin life, my romantic nonsense with the gardenias. But I don’t think she thinks I am bright enough or tough enough for the sort of operation I have in fact been running. Raoul has a mind she can respect, she once told me. The clear implication was that she didn’t respect mine. I am looking forward to tomorrow’s meeting. I would like to know who the three civilians are and what the para colonel is doing with them. If I do make a run for it, I don’t want to go to my masters empty-handed. But I shouldn’t like al-Hadi to be interrogated by anyone but me. We have not needed to speak. He knows that I have been handling the interrogation as gently as I can. At times, I think, he has even managed to exaggerate the agony for Schwab’s benefit. He has courage, but that courage cannot be sustained forever.

It is time to tie up this loose end.

Al-Hadi strains eagerly under his bonds.

‘You are getting me out?’

‘I am getting you out, sidi.’

‘Alhamdulillah.’

I fix the electrodes to his skull, bring the magneto up to maximum voltage and keep it there an instant. Then I hastily disconnect the beastly thing and hurry up into the sunlight. It is hard. Of course it is hard. At least there was a reason for al-Hadi to die. Too many people have died in this war for no reason. I might try ‘heart failure while under questioning’ at the security panel meeting tomorrow. It will probably go down on the registers as ‘killed while attempting to escape’.

‘Have you ever thought of suicide, Philippe?’ The colonel’s question seems to have been prompted by his prolonged contemplation of the sands and now he reluctantly turns away from those sands to let his eyes gaze into mine. The whites are large and brilliant. They seem to belong to some sacred animal – perhaps a panther chained to the pillar of an Egyptian temple.

‘Never, my colonel. That is, not since Dien Bien Phu. In the last days at Dien Bien Phu I thought about it every day.’

‘Ah, yes. Tell me once more about what you saw at Dien Bien Phu.’ And he turns back to gazing on the sands as I make another attempt to describe what I saw and felt during those fifty-five days in the spring of 1954. I tell him about the continuous rumbling barrage of the artillery on the hills around us which went through the bones as vibration even when one could not hear it. It never stopped in all those fifty-five days. I describe the weird labyrinth of waterlogged subterranean trenches whose walls in the last days were infested by long white maggots which burrowed over from the impromptu mass graveyard close by the airfield. In those dark passages one might encounter a Meo tribesman in traditional warrior gear or one of the Rats of Nam Yum in a uniform looted from a dead paratrooper, or one of the Ouled Nail madames from the army’s mobile field brothel. All of these our subterranean friends had been trapped in the enemy’s closing of the noose round our fort. Little hollows had been scooped out from the sides of the main passages and served as wards for the wounded, as store rooms and as wayside chapels.

Colonel Joinville listens attentively. It is just these details that he wants to hear. He does not want the standard précis of the siege itself, for after all, though he was not at Dien Bien Phu, he is, like so many of us here, an old Indochina hand himself. He was with De Lattre de Tassigny on the Red River Delta Campaign. Then he came out here and, as he describes it, at the age of fifty-four he fell in love for the first time. He fell in love with the Sahara. As he said to me a few weeks ago, ‘I should like to make love to all this, these fierce blues and yellows, this horizon line and these dunes whose crests seem to have beem sculpted with an invisible knife. To make love to it all … I should not say that it was impossible … only I have not discovered the way yet …’

But now it is I who am talking. I describe the Legion’s last pitiful attempt to celebrate Camerone Day with Vinogle wine concentrate. I recall Mercier leaning against the mud wall with a stethoscope to his ear listening to the sound of the little yellow men burrowing their way towards us. And there were the human bombs, suicide squads who came over the wires, arms stretched out towards us smiling and nervously attempting to conceal the explosives which they had strapped to their chests. And those last sordid days when we fought among ourselves for soap and razor blades. Half our commanding officers seemed to have had nervous breakdowns or committed suicide already. Naturally I thought of it too. Only I should have liked to have found a razor blade …

And here Colonel Jean-Marie Joinville stops me.

‘But you have not thought of suicide since?’

‘Not since. No.’

‘It is not a bad thing to think of. Surely it is impossible that such atrocious suffering should have no meaning. If there is one thing that I am certain of it is that the meaning of human existence is closely bound up with the transference of suffering. I should like to take some of your pain from you.’

I make a sort of shrugging gesture which he may interpret as meaning that he is welcome to it. The colonel has said that, when he dies, he would like to be buried in these beloved sands of his. I should like to bury him in them.

The photographer – attached to the Services des Renseignements photographiques militaires – is waiting for us at the foot of the stairs. I know him. I have seen him working with Chantal in the records section. Together Chantal and he pore over the thousands of passport-sized photos, checking and breaking down the month’s body count and labelling the heads on the table.

After conferring with the photographer and Captain Delavigne, Joinville hands his
képi,
white wool cape and swagger stick to Corporal Buchalik and hurries off to change. That cloak always makes me laugh. The men love it – and him of course. A real aristocrat, just like his old commander, De Lattre de Tassigny. It was an aristocrat, General Henri de Navarre who sent me to Dien Bien Phu and another, Colonel Christian de Castries, who actually presided over the bloody shambles. And now here in Algeria, they are everywhere, men like our former commander-in-chief, Raoul Salan, mandarins and military Jesuits. In his white cloak Joinville likes to appear among his men as Crusader and mystic. Yet I think it absurd, for in fact the colonel is short, close-cropped, muscle-bound and overweight (though even the paunch is muscle-bound). In fact he looks very like me.

In any case, today Captain Delavigne, who is responsible for liaison with the Algiers Ministry of Information, is determined that we are to present a different image. No
képi,
no
fourrageur
epaulettes, no Croix de guerre. The word from Algiers is that the public want to see men of action, relaxed, utterly informal but tough. They want to see an image of future victory. The fashion this year is for camouflage-striped combat fatigues and green berets. That is what we are seeing in the glossies. The ‘Lizard’ forage cap is an acceptable alternative to the beret and since Colonel Bigeard redesigned our uniforms, the trouser leg is nicely tailored and ever so slightly flared. Bigeard is another old Indochina hand. We all came out here. Salan the mandarin, Massu the victor of the Battle of Algiers, Trinquier the counter-insurgency expert, Argoud the tough-talking hero of the paras. We are all here in Africa, keen to apply the lessons we learned from Ho Chi Minh and General Giap. Only the lessons I have learned are different from the lessons they have learned.

When the colonel reappears, we all pile in after him into the committee room. A corner is selected by the photographer and while he fiddles about with his flash, a map is spread across the table. Cigarettes are distributed in the corners of mouths and heads are arranged over the map. I find myself standing next to Captain Rocroy, but the colonel calls me out -

‘I don’t want you in this picture, Philippe. I don’t want the faces of intelligence people in this picture. So not you and not Chantal.’

He takes my place in the huddle of officers and self-consciously rolls his sleeves up. The tattooed number appears. After covering the retreat to Dunkirk, Joinville joined the Maquis, was captured and sent to Matthausen, escaped from Matthausen, joined the Free French in North Africa, fought against Vichy in Syria and finally pioneered guerrilla operations in the jungles of the Indochina Delta before finding peace of a sort in the desert. That tattooed number on his arm is his reply to insinuations that he might be a colonialist oppressor and a crypto-fascist.

It is going to make a good photo. The striped bars of sunlight from the shutters spread over the men in their camouflage kit making them look like a pack of beasts posed over their kill in the jungle. Short hair, scars, hard jaw lines, the pipe hovering over the map and pointing to some decisive spot, the heads bowed in concentrated unanimity. It seems incredible that this army will lose this war, but it will. I was in a similar photo taken in this command bunker at Dien Bien Phu. I appear just behind Bigeard, who was presiding over the morning’s briefing. We looked relaxed, but formidable. The reporter who took it went out on one of the last planes to get off the airstrip. I think the picture appeared in
Life
with the caption ‘French Para Colonels make plans for crushing offensive against the Reds’. Here, too, in Fort Tiberias, at this very table, in a few years’ time commissars of the People’s Army will be holding their briefing session. But now the cameraman’s task is done and they all break away from their studiedly relaxed tableau. I spoil it for Delavigne by telling him, ‘I prefer the more formal type of military picture. You know – where the back row are standing, the senior officers are on chairs and the front row are cross-legged in front of them and we have a few dead fellagha splayed out in front of us as trophies.’

Captain Delavigne gives me a dirty look. We spread ourselves round the tables in the committee room. We are a ‘fine body of fellows’. My fellow officers would rather die than allow the honour of the Legion to be sullied.
Legio patria nostra.
On the other hand, they would not lift a finger to save the honour of an Arab woman. They are the black heart of white Africa. The colonel and Chantal go off to fetch the guests who will be sitting in on our conference.

Chantal reappears with a bundle of files. Then Joinville enters accompanied by Major Quénault of the Eighth Foreign Legion Parachute Regiment and our three civilian guests. I am startled to see Raoul Demeulze among them. Raoul smiles briefly in my direction. I had not known that he was in the fort. I recognize one of the others as Potier, a big shot in the Oran Chamber of Commerce, but the third man I have never seen before. Potier wears the Knights of Vercingetorix golden-eyed tie-pin, and now I notice that though none of us is wearing military decorations, Joinville also displays the Vercingetorix tie-pin.

There is always an elegant carriage clock placed beside the blotter at the colonel’s place, so that he may pace out the day’s agenda. Today the colonel carries in an armful of objects which he carefully places beside the carriage clock – a small samovar, a scorpion in a bottle and a sand rose. The colonel explains that he has brought along these objects for the purpose of demonstrating something -

‘All will be revealed at the end of the meeting, gentlemen.’ And he smiles gently. The colonel is famous for such eye-catching, mystificatory gestures.

‘You may smoke.’ Then the pained look of one who has been drawn into politics only by his duty as a Christian gentleman comes over Joinville’s face –

‘If you will turn to item one on the agenda –’

Surely the matter has been decided in advance? Important issues on the agenda usually are. Joinville will have taken soundings with the majors. But we will have to go through the forms of consultation on item one, before turning to the problem of the possible traitor in Fort Tiberias. Then we have matters arising from the testing of de Gaulle’s first H-bomb at Reganne some hundreds of miles to the south of us. We will be responsible for policing the necessary evacuation of tribesmen in the region. Then there is a run of items concerning desertions and the disciplining of other ranks. Al-Hadi’s death has been scribbled on as a late addition to the agenda.