Chapter Fifteen.
AS THE DAYS WENT by, we slowly began to grasp the realities of the situation. The friendly, expansive Algerian French appeared as wholly pleasure-loving opportunists, supporters at the bottom neither of Petain nor de Gaulle, concerned neither with a collaborationist France nor an independent one. There was no intellectual life, nothing of the spirit to be discovered in Philippeville. No one picked up a book, listened to music, read poetry, or found entertainment in anything but the most mediocre Western films. The Algerians ate too much rich food, drank too much, slept too much, indulged in too much s.e.x. Chronic complaints of the liver and stomach plagued them. They suffered from gout, hypertension, giddiness and worn-out hearts, and their life expectancy was in the neighbourhood of fifty-five years. It was the good life carried almost to its fatal conclusion. The preferred drink, for example, of Philippeville was anisette made instantly by dissolving a chemical supplied by any pharmacist in pure alcohol. Under the brief rule of the Vichy government this nefarious beverage had been outlawed, but with the restoration of democracy it was back, with dozens of gla.s.ses of it lined up on the counter of every bar. In the first weeks of our presence cases were reported of citizens going into a bar and drinking anisette until they died.
The full-blooded climate and the way of life took their toll of the character of all Frenchmen who had been born or settled in Algeria. They lost control of their pa.s.sions, were p.r.o.ne to a kind of hysteria which drove them into mutually antagonistic feuding groups. Nowadays they were pro-Vichy, or pro-de Gaulle, taking furious sides in causes which were only old quarrels under a new name. The Algerians had become irrational. This was a country where ripe fruit hung for the picking on every tree and if a man wanted a woman there was always an unpaid Arab girl around about the house to be pulled into a quiet corner. The Algerian had grown to expect the instant satisfaction of his slightest desire. With all this, and perhaps inseparable from it - because in this interminable underground civil war every man was on the look-out for an ally - went a tremendous drive towards camaraderie. There was no more generous and firmer friend than the Algerian. He was willing to give, as well as take, on a scale no metropolitan Frenchman would have understood. There was something infectious in the atmosphere of this country, leading to a loss of Nordic restraint. Likes and dislikes tended to become coloured with love and hatred. I wondered how long it took to turn a man into an Algerian, always ready to hug someone or reach for a gun.
The common foe of all the Algerian factions was the Arabs. A tiny percentage of exceedingly tough-minded individuals formed the Arab bourgeois cla.s.s. There was a doctor (one of two in the whole of Algeria), a few minor officials at the Prefecture, and a handful of sardine merchants who were prosperous by very low Arab standards. The rest of the native population lived in conditions inconceivable to Europeans. Most of the males observed on our arrival wore garments made from sacks, on which in many cases the stencilled mark of whatever produce they had contained was still visible. A woman forced for any reason to leave her village and go into town might only be able to make this journey after several neighbours had clubbed together to provide her with sufficient clothing.
We were a.s.sured by the French that the Arabs were pro-German, but what they really were was intensely and bitterly anti-French, after a century of intellectually planned subjugation. The French system was to rule through cads, once democratically elected but now appointed by the government. They levied taxes, provided recruits for the Army, and labour for the colons" great farms. In return they were left in peace to pillage the villages as they saw fit. The weapon of the colons was unemployment, and therefore starvation, and a large surplus labour force was always there to see to it that the system worked. Suddenly - and quite by accident - with our arrival, the colons found themselves defenceless. As more and more Allied ships carrying warlike stores docked in the ports of North Africa, an ever larger supply of labour was required to unload them. Where the colons paid 7 "old" francs a day, the Allies offered 50 francs, plus two pounds of bread, several ounces of olive oil, and a little sugar and salt. Within the week there was not an unemployed Arab left in Algeria. Moreover, the Arabs were deserting the farms and flocking down to the coast. It was an inevitable outcome of the war situation that earned us the hatred of the colons, for, Algerians as they were, and subject to the pa.s.sionate irrationality of this land, they saw in this nothing but an attack on themselves.
The Arabs shared with us this outburst of hatred, and although the colons realized there was little they could do to revenge themselves upon us, they made no secret to Brown, who was able to talk to several of them, that they planned drastic retaliation on their former labour force as soon as we had left the country.
12TH DECEMBER.
Michel Fortuna"s dinner for the section turns out to be extraordinary in every way. In the first place, the house of this supposedly rich and powerful man is rather like a barracks; vast, bare, and almost devoid of furniture. Secondly, it is next door to Philippeville"s brothel, doing at the moment of our arrival lively business with the British soldiery, who have formed a long and orderly queue along the street. A woman standing at the door reminds me of a pantomime fairy G.o.dmother, and actually holds something remarkably like a wand with which she controls their entrance. The FSO pretends not to know what this is all about and seems amazed when the implications of this un-English sight are explained to him.
Fortuna, too, comes as a surprise. A small, thin man whose collar-bones stick out, dressed showily in a Palm Beach suit and bow tie, with a polka-dotted handkerchief protruding from his breast pocket. The jaunty attire contrasts with his expression, which is one of sorrowful resignation. Sergeant Brown translates for the benefit of our nine non-French speakers. "He wants us to regard this as our house. All we have to do is to let him know when we want to move in." Next Fortuna puts his arm round the FSO"s neck and kisses him on both cheeks. After that he stands back, shakes his hand, and says, "Tu es mon copain." Every member of the section, one after the other, gets the same treatment, and they show varying degrees of embarra.s.sment. Next we are presented to Michel"s wife, Madame Renee, an ugly woman with an underslung jaw, tiny eyes, hair like copperwire, and a perpetual suggestive smile.
We go in to eat and find a number of people already seated at a narrow table stretching from one end to the other of a vast, bare room, painted a depressing shade of green. Despite the fact that Christmas is only two weeks away, the weather is warm, and I am amazed to see bats flying in and out of the open windows.
Among those seated at the table I recognize several officials we have already met at the Mairie, including Monsieur Gaudinot, chef de cabinet, all of them accompanied by dowdily respectable-looking women I a.s.sume to be their wives. The impression I get is of an unusual mixture of the social cla.s.ses, which includes an extremely distinguished elderly man with a square-cut grey beard who is identified by Brown as a chevalier of the Legion of Honour, and a member of the Academie Franaise on a visit to the vice-prefect. Yet others are described by Brown as small shopkeepers, and there is one villainous-looking French sergent-chef with a hare-lip, and arms covered by tattooing. Apart from the Academician these people are like Breughel"s feasting peasantry in modern dress.
Inevitably a gla.s.s of anisette stands on the table before each guest, and when emptied is instantly refilled by an attendant Arab. My impression is that a number of those present are a little drunk already and, downing an anisette myself in an attempt to get in the mood, feel instantly dizzy.
Such conversation as has any point is about the past misdeeds and the evil intentions of the pro-Vichy faction - claimed by this dedicated gathering of Gaullists to be intensely engaged in treasonable activities - and the desirability of persuading the Allied authorities to permit the formation of a popular militia to deal with them. More and more though, under the influence of the raw alcohol, the gathering slides into a good-humoured, fatuous and rather noisy occasion. The meal is vast and interminable, the main course being wild boar saturated in garlic, and there are innumerable libations in local red wine of great body, but like most Algerian things devoid of finesse. The diners begin to sleep with their heads on the table, and fall on the floor where they are left undisturbed. Two of our comrades are out for the count, and the distinguished member of the Academie Franaise is carried off to bed. A moment later his lady companion who is somewhat younger than he is gets up and says in a ringing voice, "Excusez-moi. Il faut que je p.i.s.se." At this moment Madame Gaudinot changes places to seat herself next to our youngest section member, offering in the coa.r.s.est of argot ("veux-tu voir ma belle craquette?") to show him her s.e.xual parts. The FSO is well in control, and laughs with insistent politeness at bawdy jokes he does not understand. Sergeant-Major Leopold watches this scene with sardonic composure.
I find myself in the corner of the room, discussing with Michel the state of mind of a prisoner in the condemned cell. "You know what"s coming to you," he says, "because they"ve lined you up to watch it all happen before. They chop your head off in the courtyard. Last couple of times a fellow called Professor Dornier was there. He was doing some experiments about consciousness. He was got up in a rubber suit and rubber gloves, standing by the basket, and as soon as the head came off he would grab it up by the hair and shout into an ear, "Eh Jacques! Tu m"entends? Reponds!" They say the eyes always opened once. Sometimes twice."
"As I understand it, you were framed," I said.
He laughed. "Put it that way if you like. They knew I was for de Gaulle, so someone took a contract out on me. I decided to get him first, that"s all."
14TH DECEMBER.
An urgent signal from GHQ Algiers to send an NCO to Bou Zafra in the Monts de Constantine, for an interview there with a Cad Slalil. Several queries are raised. In the first place, surely this area is under the responsibility of 312 Section at Constantine? Leopold gets back to Algiers only to learn that the Intelligence major making this request has no idea of the existence of a Constantine section. After that it comes as no surprise to learn that there is no such place as Bou Zafra, and - according to the French - no such person as Cad Slalil. The French point out that the name is not an Arabic one.
Much detective work is required before a Cad Shallal is finally located in the village of Bou Zerqa, and GHQ confirms that this is their man. Captain Bouchard of the Gendarmerie, who has come to our help once again, calls the cad, entre nous, a disreputable ruffian, to be approached with great caution, as he is believed to have been involved in several kidnapping and ransom incidents. He conducted a reign of terror, says the captain, in the Djebel Ouasch mountains to the north of Constantine, where previously he had to some extent been held in check by the presence of garrison troops in Constantine itself. Now, since these have been withdrawn, he is on the rampage again.
In discussing this business the captain appears shifty and troubled. He has made it evident, as best he can, that it would suit him if we left well alone where the Arabs are concerned. His distaste for them proclaims itself in an original way. When referring to an Arab he habitually garbles or misp.r.o.nounces his name. Thus Gaudinot"s immediate subordinate, Meksen - a man having some status in the town - becomes Meknes. Meksen is the name of an ill.u.s.trious ancestor who made the pilgrimage twice, and gave most of his worldly goods to the poor. Meknes that of a dull little provincial town - an Algerian Bootle. Toukousch, another Arab notable, is always referred to as Touschkou, which most people find unbearably funny. To sum up this view on Arabs in general, Captain Bouchard concludes our meeting with the muttered verdict, "C"est une race infecte."
15TH DECEMBER.
Leave for Bou Zerqa at nine in the morning. So far as I understand, the Allied forces have kept to the main roads in their occupation of Algeria. Penetration has been shallow, hardly exceeding a hundred miles at any point, and I look forward with some excitement to a view of an undisturbed hinterland. Bou Zerqa could be reached more easily and directly through Constantine, along the main north-south highway, which is first-cla.s.s, but for some reason Leopold fights shy of an intrusion into 312 Section"s territory, as if they exercise exclusive rights over hundreds of square miles (little of which they will ever see). This means that I have the benefit of the main road only as far as El Arrouch, and am obliged thereafter to cross the Monts de Constantine by a second-cla.s.s highway leading down through the gorge of the Oued-Zenati River to reach Shallal"s headquarters, said to be in a feudal castle built over Bou Zerqa.
The day is one of perfection, like England in April at its best. The sluggish old Army Norton copes somehow with the gradients and carries me into an entranced landscape from the dawn of history, pristine and empty of humanity, ma.s.sed with cork oaks, with deer and wild goats scrambling on the mountain sides and eagles swinging like pendulums in the sky.
Bou Zerqa, Shallal"s capital, is a squalid place built by the Europeans, although long since abandoned by them, and his castle the sh.e.l.l of an old Esso filling station with great rubbish-filled caverns where the pumps have been uprooted. Several Arabs with inflamed eyes squat on the cracked cement with their backs to the sun. The cad and three henchmen await me in what was once the office, now a void of stained walls smelling strongly of urine. Inbreeding has furnished them with identical triangular faces, and deeply cleft chins. Their sore, watchful eyes never leave my person, and after shaking hands the cad scratches himself vigorously. The meshwi - the usual lamb roasted whole - awaits outside at the back, over the ashes of a fire, and we squat to pick at it with our fingers, and sip mint tea. A ceremonial silence is maintained for some minutes, then, after using his cloak to wipe his hands and his eyes, the cad, who as a nominally French official is obliged to speak French, puts some questions from which it is immediately clear that he suffers from basic misapprehensions.
"You are German?"
"No, English."
"Ah. So you are fighting with the Germans? On their side?"
"I"m on the other side. I"m fighting against them."
"Then you are with the French? Their brothers? Their brothers in this war?"
"Yes."
"Ah-h." The cad picks the sprig of mint out of his tea and chews it, eyes narrowed. The lean, brown, supple fingers are outstretched to stroke and tap on the blackened carcase of the lamb like a musical instrument before tearing away more shreds of flesh. The cad rips out a blackened t.i.tbit and thrusts it into my hand. "So you fight with them? The French? Ah-h."
"They fight with us if that sounds better."
"And tell me, oh my brother," the cad asks. "Who will G.o.d give victory to in this war?"
"To us."
"Ah-h. There are many of you?" he asks.
"Many thousands. We have many cannon, aeroplanes and ships. The enemy cannot resist."
The cad seems to be crossing himself in a gesture of astonishment, in the Christian fashion. To his three followers he says, "They will win the war."
He turns to me again, clicking his tongue as beggars do locally before imploring alms. "You and the French, ah-h. You and the French. We all of us look for allies, for friends in a war. We could become your friends, too, my brother. We could come to your aid."
The outcome is that, disappointed as the cad and his followers are that we are on the wrong side, he is quite prepared to do a deal and send a hundred hors.e.m.e.n to strengthen our war effort, and naturally there would be some unspecified quid pro quo. I a.s.sure him that I will pa.s.s on this offer to the general.
At this point when I am ready to shake hands all round and take my departure, it suddenly becomes clear that the transaction is incomplete. "Le cadeau," the cad shouts, in his strangely thin, high-pitched voice, "faites entrer le cadeau," and I realize that there is to be a ceremonial gift.
The door opens, a form wrapped in a blanket is shoved through it, and a moment later the blanket is pulled open to reveal the face of a girl of about thirteen. She is bright yellow from what I a.s.sume to be hepat.i.tis, and covered in pock-marks.
"This present is for you," the cad says. "To take with you."
The best way out of this in a diplomatic fashion seems to be to point out that I lack the proper means of transportation, and this seems to be accepted with good grace. Perhaps it is only a polite and hospitable gesture, after all, and not intended to be taken seriously.
Chapter Sixteen.
THE FIRST MAIL TO arrive from England brought letters from my mother, the Corvaja parents and Ernestina. My mother had important news for me. She had been taken to a seance in London where the medium - she quoted her name as being a celebrated one - giving a demonstration of clairvoyance had asked, "I"m being given the word mistletoe. Does it mean anything to anyone here?"
My mother had naturally claimed the a.s.sociation, whereupon the medium had continued, "Your husband is on the other side. He is trying to reach you. He asks you to help him make contact by projecting your thoughts to him." What followed sounded like a long-distance call on an extremely bad line, with the message given by the medium so broken up and intermittent that hardly any of it made sense. From what my mother could gather, and pa.s.sed on to me, it seemed that my father had little enthusiasm for life after death, and had failed to shake off the boredom troubling him in his existence on earth. All he could say of it at best was, "I am making progress," adding that he missed his friends.
Spiritualism would seem from my mother"s letter to have been on the upgrade again. First they had insisted that the war would never happen. After that, during the so-called "phoney war", they had tried to explain it away as an "astral confusion". Then only at the start of the Blitz had they accepted the reality of the conflict, many of them, including my mother, taking the view that G.o.d had only really made up his mind and come down on the British side at the time the Americans had done so. The congregation at her church had doubled since then, my mother said, adding that she had been in the local newspaper after curing its editor of arthritis following two sessions of laying-on of hands. Finally she mentioned that a bomb had blown all the windows in and that in falling out of bed when this happened she had cracked a couple of ribs.
The Corvajas soldiered on unflinchingly in their shattered house. They drew water from a stand-pipe in the street, were able through the disruption of the wiring only to switch on the light in one room, and even this rarely, due to frequent power cuts. They kept out the cold by wearing several sets of underclothing, and wound crpe bandages, of which they had a good stock, round their legs. Rats colonizing the ruins across the road had to be kept at bay, and Ernesto had acquired some skill with a catapult in order to do this. He mentioned having damaged a hand slightly while shovelling fire bombs from the roof in one of the earlier raids. They lived, like the rest of the population, on nine ounces of meat and three of b.u.t.ter per week, and one egg per fortnight, plus unlimited potatoes, and found their health much benefited from the simple diet. They had only suffered one major crisis since the great bombing: the dog Mazeppa"s sudden and painful illness, reducing them as animal lovers to a state of panic. The vet diagnosed this as the result of a surfeit of condoms picked up in the gardens of Gordon Square, from which the railings originally excluding the general public had been removed to make weapons of war. This had become a death-trap for dogs without superb digestions. Fortunately, an operation had been carried out successfully, so all was well again.
Maria mentioned that they heard from Ernestina with increasing rarity, and put this down to the state of the mails.
Ernestina"s letter spoke of a world that was as remote and unreal as Celtic Britain of Arthurian legend.
I was asked to a party at Ubico"s new finca at Comalapa. Entertainment rather barbarous for my taste. The male guests were given horses but had to ride at a full gallop under a line from which chickens were hanging, tied by the legs. Winner was first past the post holding a b.l.o.o.d.y chicken"s head in his hand. Prize: an Arab stallion. This is Central America, and it"s the kind of thing you learn to accept.
The people I went with were the Iglesias. I believe I told you they invited me to stay with them as long as I felt I could. Nominally I"m paying my way by giving the children the odd lesson in English and acting as companion to Doa Elvira, who is perfectly sweet. Back to the General. The Iglesias" town house is only about a couple of hundred yards from the Palace and every morning he and his officers - all of them are obliged to ride Harley-Davidson motorcycles - come tearing past down Fourth Avenue. If you"re one of the fourteen families, as the Iglesias are supposed to be, you can go out onto the balcony to watch them. If not you have to stay inside.
In spite of his fearsome reputation the Old Man, as we call him, is really quite charming. His one outstanding weakness seems to be a hatred of criticism, and it"s suicidal to suggest he"s a stooge of the Yankees. Did you see the story in Time about the deal with United Fruit? There was just the slightest sign of hesitancy in Congress about signing up, and he went in with a troop of dragoons. When a congressman brought the thing up again last week the Old Man walked up to him and broke his jaw.
We had another small earthquake yesterday. You can count on a slight tremor every second to third day. The latest fad here is earthquake parties. Most of the houses are built on one floor of very light material, so it"s rare for one to suffer serious damage. You have a rather glamorous-looking lightweight boiler suit to put on if a quake starts in the night, and you take your lamp and go next door, or maybe your friends come round to you, and you have drinks, and pa.s.s the time, and wait for it to stop.
With every letter Ernestina seemed to have gone farther away, and she was changing.
So far our duties in Philippeville had been largely ceremonial. Three NCOs, as ordered, patrolled the port, watched people fishing on the quay, occasionally boarded a ship to gaze blankly at the crates holding the cargo, then withdrew. In this way an hour might be used up after which they would stroll under the bland winter sun as far as the square for an illegal anisette at the Cafe du Commerce, or the Cafe de la Marine. Here, sooner or later, they might be joined by the pair who had paid routine visits to military units and installations in the area, where there was never anything to report. Frequently Sergeant-Major Leopold would come on the scene. He spent hours every day scrubbing and polishing his equipment and was the most perfectly turned-out soldier in the area, but had taken to the most bizarre fashion of wearing two guns. Hangers-on would come up to our table to bow and shake hands, and occasionally whisper secret information which - unless a French-speaker happened to be there - would not be understood. At this time a French presence had begun to manifest itself by the arrival of a battalion of Senegalese, black automata so intoxicated with the military life, according to one of their officers, that field punishment took the form of depriving them of drills and fatigues, instead of imposing more of such exercises and penances upon defaulters in the way of our armies. Few sights could have been more pleasant than to watch from our seats outside the Commerce the st.u.r.dy approach of the Senegalese, led by their trumpeters, on parade. And no more delectable moment than the silence following the end of a musical phrase when, with a single corporate movement, a score of trumpets would be flung high into the air, turning smoothly as they fell, splashed by the sun with a row of bra.s.s stars, then deftly caught, pressed to the rich indigo lips in readiness for the next perfectly synchronized spurt of martial music.
Back at the section office the informers, with an occasional word of encouragement in Latin from the FSO, would be wasting their poison on the desert air. When one of the French speakers happened to look in he was instantly captured and compelled to listen to horrific stories of plotted treacheries and intrigue. There was really no point in listening to any of it, because it was always the powerful colons who were the villains, and they were beyond our reach.
Where to some small extent we could make our presence felt was in the case of the enormous base supplies depot established within the walls of one of the great farms owned by a colon called Redon. Here large-scale thefts were taking place, and I was called there after an Arab intruder had been shot dead by a guard. This man"s grotesque dress - a time-rusted frock coat worn over football shorts - convinced me that he had been a beneficiary of a hand-out of old clothes shipped from England, for distribution among our contracted work force, and that therefore he had been shot by mistake. This turned out to be true, for a pa.s.s found in his pocket showed him to be employed at the base.
A number of Arab boys averaging about thirteen years of age had been picked up at the time. n.o.body knew what they were doing there, and they could not make themselves understood. They were taken to a shed for questioning by one of Bouchard"s gendarmes who as a preliminary measure - and he told me this was always done - had stamped on their toes with his heavy boots. I got rid of the gendarme, and took the boys - who had astonished onlookers by the stoicism with which they had supported the injuries inflicted upon them - to the commanding officer of the depot. He, horrified at this spectacle of crushed and bleeding toes, had them taken in a command car to Philippeville hospital. This incident opened a breach between myself and Captain Bouchard.
While at the base depot I took the opportunity of inspecting the stores that were being guarded so zealously. They included innumerable crates of non-freezing margarine, engine oil for use in sub-zero temperatures, and hundreds, possibly thousands - for they were crated up - of snow shovels without handles. The base unit"s sergeant-major confided in me that these were supplies intended originally for the abortive Norwegian campaign and, after having been transhipped in turn to Malaya and the Gold Coast, had finally been deposited here.
No case was ever reported of the loss of Arctic stores but depredations upon petrol supplies were constant and severe. Much of the petrol was contained in five-gallon cans which were easy to remove, and on the black market such a can fetched about fifty times its regular price. Petrol had come to be regarded as a form of wealth at a time when the bottom had fallen out of every market, and we heard rumours of huge quant.i.ties stolen from this and other bases being hidden away in caves in the interior. The rich colons, we knew, were at the back of those losses, although the thieves could only be Arabs mingling with the labour-force the Army employed. The wild shooting that had taken place may have discouraged these but the ensuing panic among the legitimate workers virtually brought activity of all kind to a standstill at the base.
Intelligence Corps sections worked largely through informers of which Michel Fortuna was a valuable example. Nine-tenths of the information we garnered by one means or another was rubbish, pa.s.sed on in most cases by persons seeking to use us to settle private grudges. But Fortuna revealed hard and often startling facts, and made himself indispensable to the section. Soon a few truths relating to his own personality and career began to be revealed, but by the time we began to understand the kind of man we were dealing with there was no question of cutting ourselves adrift from him. Moreover we were slowly becoming acclimatized to a situation where people took allies where they could find them, prepared if necessary to make a short-term pact with the devil. There was little British suburban respectability in Philippeville. A day or so after our dinner at the Fortuna mansion one of the town"s upper-crust citizens happened to make reference to Madame Renee"s firm belief in the value of church attendance, adding that she compelled all her staff to attend regular Ma.s.s. At this point we understood that she ran the brothel. It was not an occupation that caused the raising of local eyebrows.
Fortuna worked diligently for our cause, moved undoubtedly by self-interest, although possibly grat.i.tude as well. Whatever information AFHQ called for, Fortuna could always unearth it for us, and in consequence the FSO was complimented for his efficiency. Captain Bouchard, who was turning sour, warned us, "Always remember this man is a plain straightforward gangster." That was his problem, Leopold told him.
Bouchard came to us to complain about his lack of transport. His old Citron was out of action for hopeless, makeshift repairs one day in three, and the three men of his Philippeville half-section were riding bicycles. How was he to be expected to carry out his duties, including among them the protection of our supplies depot from thieves? The FSO asked him what he proposed, and Bouchard asked him to requisition Fortuna"s car, to which our captain"s reply was, "We can"t let our friends down."
A small favour granted to Fortuna for his numerous services was a permit to drive his elderly but perfectly maintained car through the streets of Philippeville bearing a windscreen sticker that proclaimed its owner to be engaged in essential duties for the Allied forces. By this valuable concession he achieved the advantage of mobility. He had established himself as boss of an ill-defined area within a radius of possibly thirty or forty miles of Philippeville, of which he had lost control during his imprisonment. Now, with our aid, he was able to visit all the small towns and villages that had seceded and take over again. Anyone who opposed him - and this included several mayors - would be denounced as a pro-Vichy plotter, and placed on our blacklist, or that of any other section operating in the area. We only knew half of what was going on, but apart from that we did not greatly care. Let the Algerians settle their differences in their own way, was the general verdict, so long as they were kept out of our hair.
The theft of petrol continued to be the greatest of our problems and Fortuna promised to solve this, too. The worst culprit, he told us, was a colon of White Russian origin named Malakoff, the owner of a huge vineyard, producing an annual ocean of hard Algerian wine, much of which went to France for blending and bottling under a French label, while the rest was turned into industrial alcohol.
All the colons dealt in stolen petrol, and having notified the Sous-Prefecture, as agreed, of our intention to do so, we had already searched several farms. No petrol was ever found, but it was not unusual for the house to be filled with the stench of its disposal down lavatories. Clearly Malakoff was one of Fortuna"s personal enemies, and this was his way of dealing with him.
Malakoff too had done his best to ingratiate himself with the Allies, and with some success. He had recently arranged a boar-hunting party for important British and American officers from AFHQ. They took part in this under the impression that Malakoff was the personal representative in Philippeville of General de Gaulle. He had shown our FSO a letter from the General, which Captain Bouchard a.s.sured us was forged.
By all accounts this hunt had been a singular affair, organized in such a way that however terrible a shot a guest might be, it was virtually impossible for him not to get his boar. There were no boars on the Malakoff estate, but Arabs had been sent into the interior to trap a large number of them which had been scientifically lamed in such a way that while able to walk without an obvious limp, they could not run. These were released from the top of a low hill after the guns had been stationed at intervals along a road that encircled it. Dogs then drove the boars down the slopes to their inevitable execution. A shortage of shotguns and cartridges at the time compelled some of the junior officers to use tommy-guns, or even pistols, but even these got a boar. At the end of the fusillade one of the guests was found dead with a bullet through the heart. With so many bullets flying about there was nothing extraordinary about this. The French were unaccustomed to take serious precautions to prevent sportsmen from shooting each other, and this they frequently did. Discussing the incident with Fortuna we learned, however, that the dead man was a French liaison officer at AFHQ who was known to have done Malakoff a bad turn in the past. "He must have been weak in the head," Fortuna said, "to fall into a trap like that."
However much General de Gaulle may or may not have sought to recommend Malakoff, he laboured beneath the disadvantage of being on our black-list, and therefore had been unable to obtain a sticker like Fortuna"s to affix to the windscreen of the spectacular Delahaye mouldering away in one of his outhouses. He had lost ground too, according to the FSO, not so much because one of his guests had had to be taken back to Algiers in a coffin, but because he had directed the ma.s.sacre of the boars in an absurd red jacket and peaked cap of the kind worn by French fox hunters. From other sources we learned that, some years before, Malakoff and Fortuna had been in a High Noon-style encounter, which Fortuna had lost. I tackled him about this and he readily admitted what had happened. Malakoff, having been warned by Fortuna to stay out of Philippeville, had strolled into the Cafe du Commerce one day, accompanied by two friends, and told the waiter to get a message to Fortuna that he was there and waiting. "I got into the car and went down straight away," Fortuna said, "making the mistake of taking with me a new Walther pistol I had never operated before. As I walked through the door Malakoff stood up. I pointed the gun at him and pressed the trigger. Unfortunately the safety catch was on. Next moment I felt a kick in the stomach. Somehow or other I dragged myself out, got into the car and drove home." At this point he took out his most cherished possession - an X-ray photograph showing a bullet lodged against the wall of his heart. "It"s still there," he said. "They don"t want to take it out. Funny about the pain in the stomach, though. It"s all I felt."
Fortuna directed the plan of attack against Malakoff. One of his contacts placed an order with him for petrol, to be collected on a certain day, and on that day we were to descend on the farm, this time without notice being given to the Sous-Prefecture. Malakoff"s stock had fallen so low, we thought, that no one would particularly care what happened to him. To be on the safe side, Fortuna suggested, we might take a gendarme with us, although on no account revealing to him the ident.i.ty of the target. To conserve the element of surprise he thought we should take the farm in the rear, and in this way avoid being held up by a man stationed at the gate, who might be able to give the alarm.
So often in the surgery of the Army is the wrong limb removed. The intelligence on which we acted was beyond question, our planning meticulous and our preparations thorough. Our weak spot was our maps. The large-scale maps issued to us were of the wrong area, and the small-scale ones we had been able to procure locally seemed vague, and possibly out-of-date. However we set out enthusiastically enough in the section truck, our sergeant-major wearing his two guns for this important occasion, and our accompanying gendarme with hand-cuffs in his haversack and an arrest warrant in his pocket on which a s.p.a.ce had been left blank for the name to be filled in.
It was five days from Christmas, the weather eternally fine, with a thin, piercing sun and the pink laterite of the vineyards hatched with the innumerable lines of the vines out of leaf. Nothing is more anonymous than a vineyard, and the domaine houses, set well back from the road at intervals of two or three miles, seemed to have surrendered to this conformity, for they were alike in every detail of their architecture, and at this season devoid of all signs of life, except those that provided a temporary perch for storks migrating from southern Europe. We pa.s.sed the Malakoff farm"s guarded gate, on the main road, from which there was no building in view, and then watched for a side-turning, marked with dotted lines on the map as a track. When one came into sight a map-reading argument arose between those who believed that we were turning off too soon, and the old soldiers, led by the sergeant-major, whose word was law and who insisted that we were on the right road.
In a matter of yards a house came into view, porticoed, with a wide roof of shallow pitch, identical with all the other domaine houses, and - apart from a forecourt of crazy-paving - remarkably like a villa in a Roman mosaic. The sergeant-major posted two men to guard the rear of the house. The windows were shuttered and the atmosphere was one of abandonment. There was no one about but some excited Arabs who seemed to spring like startled genii out of the ground when we began to hammer and kick at the door. They received my Adenese-plus-School-of-Oriental-Studies Arabic with expressions of the most profound bewilderment, and many valuable minutes were lost before a French-speaker could be found to tell us that the Malakoff house was two miles away.
With this it was clear that the operation had collapsed. Nowhere do the jungle tom-toms of communication work more efficiently than in North Africa. We saw no remedy other than to return to the road and make our entry to the Malakoff domaine by the main gate, and by the time we arrived, Malakoff was ready for us waiting to open the door. He held out a soft, well-manicured hand: a young, bald man with an ivory, light-shunning face, a velvet smile and gold ornaments at the opening of his shirt and his cuffs. "Messieurs," he said. "Soyez les bienvenus." In the cool, vaulted background, a betrousered Vietnamese girl waited with a tray of champagne. Malakoff as an Arab-hater was known to recruit his female staff, as did many colons, in the Far East. The Algerian French called them boyesses and they were much appreciated for the extreme subservience of their deportment and the relative hairlessness of their bodies.
Malakoff did not long outlive this encounter. At about this time a number of severe air raids by German and Italian planes were carried out on the harbour of Philippeville and, in the course of one of these, a man seen wandering in the prohibited zone of the docks, said to have been signalling to the raiders with a torch, was shot dead by a sentry. This was Malakoff. Later, though, another version of his end was supplied by a contact. Malakoff, he said, had been kidnapped, drugged, carried by rowing boat into the port, and put ash.o.r.e and abandoned, reeling and staggering about in the semi-darkness. After that someone had rung up the unit guarding the port and told them that a spy had just landed from a submarine. Whatever the truth of it, Malakoff died, and by local custom was buried within twenty-four hours, his funeral said to have been the most splendid since the outbreak of war.
The week of almost nightly attacks by dive bombers provided a cla.s.sic, oversimplified vision of war, not devoid of its savage poetry. We had ring seats for these regular performances, for the Villa Portelli was close to the centre of the raiders" target. The planes came in, five or six in succession, flying at low alt.i.tudes, circling with premeditation, and clearly visible in the dusk. One after another, at intervals of a minute or two, they would carry out their bombing runs, going into their dive - as it seemed to us - when immediately above us. We would listen to the howl of the accelerating engines, interrupted by that of the high-pitched and penetrating scream of the approaching bomb. At this point the gunners operating the two anti-aircraft guns at the bottom of our garden would give up and jump for their slit trenches, although the pageant of fire and flame was kept going by many other guns placed round the harbour.
The gla.s.s fell away in an icicle shower from our windows and all that we saw through it had been balefully transfigured. Hundreds of guns were pumping thousands of sh.e.l.ls into the sky, which opened up to spew fiery lava over ten ships sitting in a carmine lake. Our white arums in the garden had turned pink, and so had the naked, scaly branches of the plane trees. Tracers from the multi-barrelled "Chicago Piano" came up out of a pink mist, only miraculously deflected in the last hair"s breadth of time from our balcony. A near miss drove the gunners out of another emplacement, and they ran hunched like men caught in a driving hail-storm. We too were transformed, at one moment ruddy and grinning horribly in the light of a great vermilion explosion, and the next aghast in the white sheet-lightning of a magnesium flare. We heard the walls crack, and the villa shift and settle, breathed layered smoke and felt the concussion of the bombs in our eardrums and the soles of our feet. Our two worst cases of uncontrollable apprehension were clasped together under the table in the foetal position of twins in the womb, but even Sergeant-Major Leopold, our man of steel, seemed influenced by these happenings, revealing suddenly his Sephardic origins in an urgent outburst of cante flamenco. The FSO, after declaiming a pa.s.sage from Ovid, bounded up to the roof, where he stood - as he admitted later, in a state of disbelief - while the shrapnel from anti-aircraft bursts tinkled around him.
The bombing was accurate and could be expected regularly to take place after the arrival of a convoy. Backed by the opinion of Signals radio technicians who detected the existence of clandestine transmitters, GHQ ascribed this to the presence of spies. We were ordered to drop everything and track these down, and to enable us to do so we were supplied with a van fitted out with the latest equipment, including a direction-finding aerial. It was quite a new toy for us, and at last after the wasted weeks we were to be put to effective use. Unfortunately, spy-hunting too soon turned into farce. Once again we were defeated by the system which surrendered all responsibility to our old soldiers. Only these were allowed to twiddle dials and perform the simple calculations necessary to locate the illicit transmitter. These, through educational limitations, were unable to cope with magnetic variations, and simple mathematics, so although we broke into a number of houses at the dead of night, and aroused their blameless occupants from their sleep - to confront them with wild accusations of espionage - no arrests were ever made, and the transmissions continued undisturbed.
Chapter Seventeen.