Books: The Perfumes of Algeria

LIEUTENANT IN ALGERIA (231 pp.)—Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber—Knopf ($3.50).

The French army jeep squealed to a halt as a sullen young Arab planted himself in the middle of the casbah street and refused to budge. A French private named Geronimo leaped from the jeep, and unlimbering his Tommy gun, faced the Moslem troublemaker. From the sidelines an old Arab shuffled forward and tried to soothe his compatriot: “Go home. Come on, don’t be mulish.” Before the old Arab had finished his plea, Private Geronimo’s Tommy gun stuttered in reply, and the old man “collapsed softly, muttering to himself unintelligibly while his blood flowed down from the sidewalk to the cobbles of the street.” As the red stain spread, the jeep sped away.

This vignette epitomizes Lieutenant in Algeria, a violently angry book about the stain of “lies and bluff” spreading across France and the French army as its three-year-old war of “pacification” in Algeria gradually becomes a degrading massacre of the innocents on both sides. The man who hurls this “J’accuse,” Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, 33, is the brilliant editor of the liberal weekly L’Express and an ex-braintruster of the Mendes-France regime. To a six-month volunteer stint in 1956 as an active reserve officer in Algeria, he brought a young man’s sharp nose for injustice and strong palate for raw truths. By his evidence, the Algerian fiasco seems to have entered the phase where a kind of Gresham’s law of superheated nationalism applies—the fanatics drive out the moderates.

Ribbon-Happy Pols. The Arab fanatics are the terroristic fellaghas who have converted every isolated colonial’s farmhouse, every road, every French-employed work gang into a guerrilla front line. A bout of fellagha Mau-Mauism periodically drives the local European population into a frenzy. Whole villages go on “gook-hunts.” Says Servan-Schreiber: “The police and the army are helpless … so they let the wave pass, hoping that the Arabs are not fools enough to stay out of doors. In a small town, by the time the fun is over, there will be two or three of them lying in the street … It is a phenomenon like avalanches in snowy countries. You have to live with the thing. You get used to it.”

As for the French army, inertia, poor pay, bad quarters and a casual official unconcern for the soldiers’ dependents back home sap morale. Most of the generals, according to Servan-Schreiber, are ribbon-happy pols who insist on military operations in keeping with their inflated status even when their sectors contain no one in particular to shoot—except innocents.

Not all of what Lieut. Servan-Schreiber has to report is dreadful, but men of good will fare almost worse than the corrupt brutalitarians. One officer was so dedicated to winning back the trust of the native population that he founded an Arab-French unit. On patrol, his outfit was betrayed into ambush and he was machine-gunned by one of his own Arabs.

Black Commandos. Servan-Schreiber himself was active in the “Black Commandos,” French army units whose members tried to re-establish friendly contact with Arabs by donning Arab garb, sharing Moslem fare and even bedding down in Moslem quarters at the risk of having their throats cut. For pursuing this “get soft” policy, Lieut. Servan-Schreiber was marked for assassination by French ultra-nationalists whose trigger man lost his nerve and got drunk. After that, two French majors tried to blackmail Servan-Schreiber into writing nothing about his Algerian experiences, on the sordidly bogus charge that he had pocketed the receipts of the regimental brothel.

Small wonder that Lieut. Servan-Schreiber sometimes could hardly believe that he was wearing a French officer’s uniform and talking to fellow officers and gentlemen. Yet wounded French pride has made such a holy war out of the struggle that even Servan-Schreiber does not flatly advocate full independence for Algeria—although the book’s implication is that the nationalist rebellion will eventually secure it through violence. With this book he obviously hoped to shock his countrymen into such a display of firm and intelligent magnanimity that they would magically win back Arab fealty. The book did lead to much soul-searching in France, but it also was noisily denounced as distorted and sensationalist (an indictment against Servan-Schreiber for undermining the morale of the French army is still pending). Perhaps anger did at times color his judgment. But it is difficult to escape the conclusion that France in Algeria is by now so steeped in bitterness and blood that, like Lady Macbeth, “all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.”