A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (34 page)

Continuing his tersely unromanticised account of service with the paras, Pierre Leulliette describes an episode in the Nementchas during the summer of 1956. The time had passed “since the wounding of a
fellagha
was considered an event. Deaths now came in dozens.” A strong rebel band had been pinned down and was being strafed by French planes; but instead of attempting to slip away into the maquis, as in the past, “They went on firing back at the fighters, very confidently, at the helicopters, at ourselves, and at everything that moved or glittered.” Leulliette’s detachment, themselves now pinned down and unable to reach a nearby
oued
(river bed), began to suffer atrociously from thirst. An air-drop was made to them and they prepared to dig in for the night. Meanwhile, two hundred yards in front of them lay two wounded paras. Three men had gone out at intervals in an effort to reach them, but after each had been wounded the captain forbade any further attempts. One of them, V., returned to consciousness in the cold night air, and called ceaselessly to his comrades for succour:

My poor friend V. lay howling on his bed of stones till morning. He suffered unimaginably, both physically and mentally, a prey to mortal terror. He only really stopped at dawn, when we could perhaps have saved him. For several hours a rebel had been slithering towards him. He could have seen him all that while. There he was. The rebel touched his body. He took away his weapons. Then he gouged out his eyes. Then he slashed his Achilles’ tendons, afraid, perhaps, that he might still come back and die with us. But he didn’t finish him off, merely wanting him to have to lie still and suffer. His friend T., the
sergent-chef
, also died shortly afterwards, a hundred yards away, his eyes gouged and tendons slashed; a slow death, while we were waiting for the dawn.

… He [V.] was crazy about war. It was just one lark as far as he was concerned.… It was his way of enjoying life.

In the latter part of the Second World War it was customary in the French army to vaunt the ferocity of “their” Algerian Tirailleurs against the Germans, much as the British took pride in the deeds performed by the Gurkhas with their terrible kukris. But when one’s own comrades became the victims… well, that was different. In his
Lieutenant en Algérie
Servan-Schreiber notes how soldiers in Algeria accustomed themselves never to say “‘Watch out, you’re going to get yourself killed,’ but one repeats several times a day, ‘Make a mistake, and you have your balls cut off.”’ It was what the French soldier expected, and he reacted accordingly. In an article entitled “Stretching a Soldier’s Patience”,
The Times
of 7 June 1973 described how Belfasters cheered when four British soldiers were blown up and horribly mutilated by a mine, and how other British soldiers witnessing the episode “were shocked and embittered by what they thought was a callous disregard for life”. Multiply this several hundred times for the additional horrors of the fighting in Algeria (such as the experience of Leulliette’s), for the far greater numbers involved, and for the altogether less phlegmatic character of the French soldier, and the occasional angry backlash or infraction of discipline becomes inevitable.

By 1956 accounts of such cases in Algeria were legion. Leulliette himself recounts relieving in the Nementchas the 1st Parachute Regiment of the Foreign Legion (1st R.E.P.), just after one of their sergeant-majors had been knifed in the street. A quarter of an hour later the entire company descended on the Arab quarter: “Sixty-four people, mostly men, were slaughtered by automatic rifle or bayonet in less than an hour. Fire did the rest.” Earlier, near Philippeville, Leulliette’s own unit had been involved in a massacre of civilians. The rebels had proved elusive that day. “Everything seemed to slip between our fingers. We no longer knew what we were doing.” Then, suddenly, a group of women and children instead of
fellaghas
had run into the paras’ fire:

… could the bloke thirty yards ahead of me, firing his automatic rifle at a child of ten lying astride the path, his leg broken and chest heaving, have sworn that he couldn’t see? Women, old women, stiff and awkward with fear, were massacred in full view of everyone, in broad daylight, almost as if it were a game, to make our bullets “talk”. Some of us would have done anything. Back at home, civilians again, they’d think: was it possible? Yes, it was with all sorts of corpses, old men’s and children’s mingled with those of the rebels. The sight of an old woman, with her hair down, flattened in front of you by a burst from an automatic rifle was something you never forget. “If you’ve no imagination,” said Céline, “dying’s nothing; if you have, it’s too much.”

Later this scene was followed by the “inevitable looting” of abandoned
mechtas
:

We turned the village over like a field. After a while, unable to find anything, we amused ourselves by smashing the whole place, through sheer joy of destruction. Old wedding dresses, which we discovered carefully folded at the bottom of every box, were hung derisively from trees in grotesque shapes, and then dragged through the mud. Some dressed themselves up in women’s clothes.…The waste was so great that there was nothing left to eat amongst the rubbish. Picture of a gone age. But then war is ageless.

Conscience
—
a costly luxury

Describing how the eyes of a twenty-year-old French national serviceman were opened to the facts of life in Algeria, Alain Manévy relates experiences not dissimilar to those of Leulliette. After an eight-hour journey for the 200 kilometres from Algiers, during which they had passed a burnt-out train on the way, Manévy and his draft arrived in Orléansville where the first sight to greet their eyes was a group of people gathered around a large tree, with a dead F.L.N. slumped beneath it. Over the corpse was hung a black placard: “I will not kill my brothers any longer, I will throw no more grenades.” It was a standing order in Orléansville, the conscripts were told, for any rebel killed to be displayed thus for a period of twenty-four hours. Their next shock was to hear, during the boring routine of barrack life, distinct murmurs about the application of torture. Then their sergeant-major gave them an introductory lecture of nannylike matter-of-factness: “Watch out for malaria, watch out for dysentery, never less than three together for a stroll in town with at least one weapon among the three, please; curfew at 20.30 hours, no lateness, please, because otherwise the sentries have orders to shoot on sight.…” Then Manévy was transferred to Constantine where he witnessed a terrorist grenade attack on a 14 July parade. Several paras were wounded. One of Manévy’s age panicked, fired into the crowd, and killed a Muslim woman on a balcony. Next, a hundred of the paras, some evidently fortified with anisette, broke loose, heading towards the Casbah to avenge their wounded with shouts of “
Les melons! Les melons!
” Unable to find any Muslims, they first smashed up a Jewish shop. At the height of the
ratonnade
a large French civilian intervened angrily from a nearby billiard saloon: “I am Captain Bottier; I fought myself; I did thirty-seven jumps with the Resistance.… You band of little idiots — you’re doing exactly what the F.L.N. terrorists count on you doing.…” To Manévy, Captain Bottier disclosed that he was an S.A.S. officer in from the
bled
, adding, “Two months of work as an S.A.S. officer are wrecked in one evening like this.”

After the paras had withdrawn, Manévy learned that twenty Muslims had been lynched in the affray. Earlier, in Orléansville, he had noted the conspicuous lack of hatred with which the F.L.N. “was presented to us as the indirect enemy”; something difficult to visualise, quite unlike “the Fritz with his swastika” of the Second World War. Now, with deep shock, he recorded: “In the Quartier Latin, certainly I had seen some fights — but never such extensive hatred of this sort.…” As the war went on, what became almost worse than hatred was the indifference that grew in the army towards the hunting-down and killing of
fellaghas
; it was an indifference, experienced by troops of many another nation in similar situations, that also spread to embrace the all-too-frequent cases where innocent civilians were shot down in error by frightened, angry or trigger-happy soldiers. In a book that aroused the French conscience more than any at the time,
Lieutenant en Algérie
, one of several such episodes is described by Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, the founder-editor of
L’Express
, then serving his time as a recalled reservist lieutenant. At a village near Palestro a
pied noir
postman, employed there for twenty-five years and liked by everyone, is found with his throat cut. The next day two Muslims are sitting at a café table, quite innocently. Getting up, the younger one is nearly run over by a French jeep. His friend goes to pick him up. The private in the jeep waves his automatic at the older Muslim. It goes off, “by mistake”, hitting the man in the stomach. The jeep drives off rapidly, for fear of attracting trouble in the Muslim quarter, and leaving the mortally wounded man in the road. A U.T.[
4
] detachment now arrives and, in a state of nervousness because of the recent killings, assumes the victim to have been shot by the F.L.N. Next, a truck loaded with “loyal” Muslim mine-workers comes past. Terrified by a recent lynching in the nearby village, they recognise in the demeanour of the U.T. “that sort of excess of fever and physical fury which overtakes the European population of any village, when exasperated by a series of assassinations by the
fellagha
”. So the driver of the Muslim truck panics, and drives off at full speed. The U.T. fire at it, inaccurately. A further army vehicle arrives on the scene and its occupants are informed by the U.T. that the Muslim truck just passed was full of F.L.N. and had been responsible for the shooting of the man lying in the road. The truck is overtaken and, refusing to halt, shot up. All its occupants are killed — but, strangely enough, not a weapon is found. Meanwhile, the culprit has reported the shooting “accident” to his commanding officer. In recording the episode, however, regimental headquarters decides that awkwardness would be avoided if it were stated that arms
had
been found in the shot-up truck. So the final communiqué reads: “Yesterday at … the occupants of a truck machine-gunned passers-by, miraculously only wounding one.”

Discussing this episode in the officers’ mess with a newly arrived captain who has expostulated that it was “a bad practice to kill possible innocents”, a hardened campaigner points out that there are only two choices:

Either you consider
a priori
that every Arab, in the country, in the street, in a passing truck is
innocent
until he’s proven the contrary; and permit me to tell you that if that is your attitude … you will immediately be posted, because the parents of reservists one has had killed don’t like it, and will write to their deputies that you’re a butcher.… Or you will … consider that every Arab is a
suspect
, a possible
fellagha
… because that, my dear sir, is the truth.… But once you’re here, to pose yourself problems of conscience — and treat possible assassins as presumed innocents — that’s a luxury that costs dear, and costs men, dear sir, young men themselves also innocent, and our own.…

The choice posed was a hard one for any young soldier to have to face, and in Algeria by no means all — or even a majority — of the French army opted for the alternative of suppressing the “problems of conscience”. But, as indicated by the examples above, the fierce reprisal and the cruel, indiscriminate injustice
did
take place on the French side — as indeed they take place in every similar war. What is equally sure is that, as the S.A.S. captain pointed out to Alain Manévy, such acts usually militated against French interests in the long run. Looked at from the other side of the lines, this is confirmed by Herb Greer. Reporting a particularly brutal French reprisal in which women were killed, he quotes a member of the F.L.N. as declaring: “
Voilà
, we’ve won another battle. They hate the French a little more now. The stupid bastards are winning the war for us.” The conscious suppression of “conscience” also led logically to another step in the escalation of brutality, the significance of which will be seen in the following chapter. It inclines the soldier, says Pierre-Henri Simon, towards a confusion in his mind between “licit violence and culpable brutality. It is thus that one arrives at this monstrosity: the practice of torture by the military.”

“
Why we must win
….”

If there is one factor which might be found lacking in, say, British army operations in Northern Ireland but which played an important role affecting the intensity of the war in Algeria, it was a certain peculiar determination within the regular French army that it should
not be lost
. This determination did not entirely spring from a belief in the sanctity of the
présence française
— less still from any kindred feeling for the
pieds noirs
— and to understand it one needs to recall sympathetically the recent history of the French army. Generals like Beaufre were captains at the time of the 1940 debacle, regimental commanders like Bigeard either N.C.O.s or lieutenants, and all remained profoundly conditioned by it. For although, from Bir Hakeim onwards, the resurrected French army under such towering figures as de Lattre, Leclerc and Juin had covered itself with repeated distinction, there lingered a nagging complex about its inferior role alongside the vast British and American war machines perforce imposed upon it by 1940.[
5
] Intolerable to an army so steeped in legends of
la gloire
, the complex died hard. Wrote François Mitterrand in 1957: “When the war in Indo-China broke out, France was able to believe that the 1940 defeat was nothing more than a lost battle, and that the armistice of 1945 was going to restore its power at the same time as its glory.”