I Came, I Saw Part 10

Chapter Nineteen.

IN THE MIDDLE OF April I had a car accident, and when I awoke some time later in the 100th General Hospital it was to find Leopold's face, a vaguely sinister angel from an El Greco background afloat somewhere above me in the unfocused shapes of the tent.

'The story is this,' he said. 'You have a fractured skull and a few other things that don't count for much. We're going into Tunis right behind the a.s.sault troops in about two weeks' time. If you're on your feet by then, OK. If you're not, you're off the section. We've been picked out for the biggest FS operation to date. We're in business at last.' The long El Greco face sharpened with thoughts of military adventures, and acquisition. 'We can't afford to be a man short at a time like this,' he said.

'I'll be there whatever happens,' I a.s.sured him.

Some hours later I saw the MO and explained the situation to him. He was entirely sympathetic to the extent of agreeing to a minor falsification of the records. A skull officially fractured meant a minimum of a month in hospital, but if the nature of the injury in the register were altered to concussion I could go as soon as I could stand on my feet. The MO warned me that if this were done I should deprive myself of an infinitely small disability pension.

The section left for Tunis on 4 May, the first British troops entered the city on the morning of the 7th, and at about the same time I set off alone, riding a motor cycle. I suffered from no feelings of discomfort, but was handicapped by being obliged to drive the machine - which fortunately possessed a foot gear-change - with one hand, due to fractured ribs on the left side. Apart from this I was inconvenienced by a loss of balance that only took effect when I got off the motor bike and prevented me from standing still.

On the whole I managed fairly well. The roads were perfect until Souk El Arba. I slept in a field there, got up at dawn, and within two or three hours reached Beja, sixty miles from Tunis. Here I had bad trouble with truckloads of Germans who had either been disarmed and directed to the rear, or were actually trying to escape. They were strangely exuberant and, seeing the lone motor cyclist in the road, one after another drove straight at me, and in one instance I landed in the ditch - this possibly being my nearest escape from death in the war. After Medjez el Bab the battlefield began, cratered everywhere, and littered with numerous shattered or burned-out tanks. The bodies - where they could be reached in the wreckage - had been removed, but in each case helmets had been left to provide a tally.

Casualty clearing stations had been established in the villages, each one with rows of bloodstained stretchers stood against the wall to dry in the sun, recurrent accents of bright colour in an otherwise drab and desolate landscape.

By mid-morning I was in Tunis, alert in a mind's eye antic.i.p.ation of a Brussels after Waterloo, delivered over to the cras.h.i.+ng of church bells, to flower-throwing, Te Deums and Caesarian triumphs. But what dominated the scene was a great sprawl through the streets and the squares of the city of thousands of unconscious British soldiers - I counted over fifty lying on the steps of a single church - a Goyaesque muddle of bodies and bottles and wine vomit. The crowds, surging without direction hither and thither, trod them underfoot, and the MPs dragged them from under the tracks of tanks and heaved them like sacks of potatoes over the tailboards of the lorries waiting to take them away. If this, I asked myself, was the British in victory, how would they have appeared in defeat?

The Army was on its way elsewhere, to Cap Bon where there was a final battle to be fought, and the crowds watching from the roadside seemed apathetic. In all probability to avoid the innumerable drunks, most of the young women had gone home, leaving a glum collection of the middle-aged and elderly of both s.e.xes, who had had enough of the war. It was astonis.h.i.+ng to discover that numerous German soldiers were included among these onlookers, still free to come and go as they pleased, and a greater surprise still, in the first bar where I tried to buy a beer, to be elbowed from the counter by the Germans that had taken over the place. A group of them were roaring a marching song. Thus it remained for the rest of this day and the next, the British celebrating victory, and the Germans making the best of defeat, each in their own way.

Movement Control directed me to our headquarters in an elegant suburb at the better end of the boulevard. This villa until a day or two before had housed Gestapo personnel, and they had created in it a little haven of pseudo-Bavarian Gemtlichkeit, with drinking-steins decorated with jocose faces, and rackfuls of carved pipes, beery wall-mottoes, and clocks from which small rustic German figures popped as the hour chimed to execute a few clog-dance steps before being jerked back out of sight.

This place was the reverse of sinister, and the hatchet-faced men - as we supposed them to be - who had lived here must have left it with real regret. They had gone off in a hurry, leaving a cupboard stuffed with a huge variety of jams, with innumerable condoms - some with fanciful additions - and an a.s.sortment of feathered hats. Personal correspondence had been overlooked too, in the haste of departure, including letters waiting to be posted. This showed the writers on the whole as sensitive men, caring sons and devoted fathers. 'Persuade Mutti to take regular meals ... Magda's friends sound to me rather wild. Please take care.' Friends and relatives were rea.s.sured as to the correspondent's health and the future of the cause. 'The exercise is good for me. I've never felt so fit ... of course the going's been hard, but I see a break in the clouds.' One Kriminalsekretr was distressed by the condition of the Arab population. 'I've never seen such poverty. To tell you the truth it thoroughly depresses me.'

It was Leopold's moment of triumph, his apotheosis, and he could hardly contain himself for delight. After so many barren months in Philippeville relieved only by weekly orgies chez Fortuna, this unimaginable prize had fallen to us. A great, mysterious and inviolate oriental city was ours for the taking. The first thing was to settle in and, overbr.i.m.m.i.n.g with good humour, Leopold allocated the sleeping quarters. Up to this we had lived to some small extent under the dead hand of the Crimean War, from which time we were a.s.sured a regulation had survived that prohibited Other Ranks billeted upon civilians from sleeping in beds. In each villa, therefore, which we had previously occupied, the beds were removed to allow us to sleep, as in the days of Florence Nightingale, on the floors. But now it seemed even to Leopold unreasonable that we should be denied the modest degree of comfort that had been enjoyed by the Gestapo.

Amid this general euphoria a single note of warning was struck. Captain Merrylees - now FitzClarence - announced that to mark our entry into Tunis he would shortly be changing his name again, but had not decided to what. Next, smiling dangerously, he issued an edict imposing a curfew upon us. The front door would be locked at 11 p.m. He kept his pistol ready by his bed, he said, and might decide to fire through his bedroom window, overlooking the door, at anyone who tried to enter after that time.

No one was quite sure how to take this. Was it supposed to be some sort of stupid joke, or had this strange, confused man drifted so far from the sh.o.r.es of reality that he was capable of putting such a threat into action? As Leopold, shaking his head, remembered, even in the relative calm of the first days in Philippeville there had never been any question of working to a time-table, and that our duties there had occupied us as much by night as by day.

9TH MAY.

Chaos in Tunis is in no way diminished, and as so far no duties have been a.s.signed to us there is little to do but roam the streets. Yesterday the last of the drunks had been carted away before midnight, but today shows promise of producing as heavy a crop as ever, as fresh Eighth Army troops arrive, set up camps in the neighbourhood and soldiers flock into town. Sometimes there is more Hogarth than Goya in the aspects of intoxication. I saw soldiers streaming into a wine-shop, drinking from the necks of bottles as they came out, then almost within seconds falling senseless. One man, unable to remove a cork, smashed the neck off the bottle, and emptied it, the jagged gla.s.s to his lips.

The movement of our fighting troops along the avenue de Paris is settling to something more like a parade, with the top bra.s.s showing off. Every soldier must feel the need to do something to a.s.sert his individuality in the terrible anonymity of Army life, and this is an impulse that has led in the Eighth Army to unusual results. We get away with brown shoes, unorthodox headgear and odd badges. In the Eighth Army the officers go in for polka-dotted scarves and corduroys. Astonis.h.i.+ng that even a general should suffer from the same ambition to stand out in the crowd, to the extent - as one does - of wearing in this sweltering heat a battle blouse with a fur collar.

There are as many Germans to be seen as ever - but not a drunken one so far. They form groups to sing their aggressive songs, some of them having removed their badges of rank, although inexplicably their uniforms remain neat and well-pressed. They treat us with amused disdain, rather as British officers at the time of the Indian Mutiny might have viewed momentarily victorious sepoys.

I go into a pub full of them, and attract a little cold curiosity by having to pace backwards and forwards to keep my balance. Hardly any of the British speak a word of German, but one in three of the Germans has a fair amount of English, and this can be even fluent and colloquial, as in the case of one of them who debars my access to the crowded bar and says, 'f.u.c.k off.'

Served in the end, I make for a corner and there find a defeated adversary who has no objection to talking to me. He is small, and superior in manner with thick pebbled spectacles, and gives me the impression of never having smiled in his life. He appears to be short of cash, accepts a drink from me and a conversation in 50-50 German and English begins. Drinking my beer, he obviously tries to put a brake on his contempt, but starts off, 'As an army, you are nothing. This is an episode of no importance. An interlude.' He does not see the Afrika Korps as defeated. They have responded to the need for strategic adjustment. The outcome of the war, he says, will be decided in Russia, and at this point I agree with him.

His battle career has been a dramatic one, making him sound like the personification of some Teutonic myth. He volunteered for action on the Russian front, collected five wounds - 'I'm like a sieve with bullet holes,' he says - and frostbite that removed two toes. He was then sent to North Africa, where he found the war sluggish and unentertaining, and he had applied to be returned to Russia. Apart from the Germans, he says, the Russians are the only soldiers worth anything. 'When we advanced,' he says, 'we had orders to take no prisoners and kill all the wounded. If you left a wounded man alive he would come round eventually and start shooting again. I live only for war,' he adds. 'There is no other experience in life to equal it.'

Strangely, he is obsessed by the knowledge that months will probably pa.s.s before his mother hears that he has survived after he disappears into a PoW camp, and he presses on me a piece of paper giving an address in Switzerland through which she may be reached with news of him. Suddenly the obsidian Teutonic heart softens. 'Do this for me,' he says, and he takes off his wrist.w.a.tch and tries to make me take it in payment.

10TH MAY.

A chance encounter in the avenue de Paris with my friend Tennant of the Medjez el Bab section whose hunted expression seems much increased since our last meeting back in the winter. Dive-bombing induces in the end its own special melancholy, as I remember from our short experience of it in Philippeville, and Tennant has been under the bombers for six months. Faith and hope have drained from him, and gloomily he unburdens himself of depressing secrets.

'I suppose we outnumbered them ten or twelve times,' he said. 'In Medjez alone we had about 3,500 troops - British, American, French. In the end the Germans got tired of waiting for us and they sent a battalion of 300 men down the road from Tunis to get rid of us. We made an orderly withdrawal to previously prepared positions - in other words we p.i.s.sed off as fast as we could. Three hundred against three thousand. Remember the stuff they fed you in the history books? Remember Clive of India? What's happened to us, for Christ's sake? Why aren't we heroes any more? - or perhaps it was all b.a.l.l.s and we never were. Did you hear how the Americans lost half their tanks? I can tell you because I was there. They weren't knocked out. They heard the Jerries were coming, and they turned round and ran off the road and got stuck in the mud.'

'Never mind, John,' I said. 'We're here at last,' I said.

'Do you know why? Only because you can't go on fighting when you've run out of petrol and ammo. They had nothing left to fight with.'

11TH MAY.

Action at last. A large operation is to be mounted for the search of the German security headquarters in the rue de la Marne where innumerable doc.u.ments that have escaped a back-garden bonfire are to be collected and sorted out for study.

Amid huge excitement we prepare to take control. Captain Merrylees, stiffly animated after some hours spent by his batman polis.h.i.+ng his leather and bra.s.s, leads our exultant convoy to the scene, where something strange in the atmosphere is instantly to be detected. No one has awaited our arrival, and no one seems to notice that we are there. Officers and NCOs, like flying ants in a disturbed nest, rush wildly about with armfuls of doc.u.ments - some badly charred - dodging or sometimes colliding with us. We are mysteriously excluded from all this urgent activity, which in theory we should have directed. Captain Merrylees wanders away to look for a lavatory, and we suspect that is the last we have seen of him. A moment later a red-faced major comes up, twitching and frothing with anger, and yells, 'Who the h.e.l.l are you?'

Leopold explains our business there, and the major runs his eye over us with something like disbelief. He stares down at our brown shoes, then at webbing and belts that have never known blanco, and the trousers that should have been tropical issue, but which in two cases have been made up by a civilian tailor in Philippeville, and now we realize that it is our un-regimental appearance that appals him. Some instinct of self-preservation has saved Leopold on this occasion from wearing his two guns.

It dawns on me that these interlopers must be members of a new section, or sections straight from England, for I recognize them, in their brisk bloodlessness, as men still stunned by their training. They all wear Intelligence Corps badges and caps set at exactly the right angle, where the North African sections have taken to berets, and their equipment is coated by the green blanco insisted on by the Winchester depot. The major stops one of these dazed automata to put some question to him, and the man comes to attention with a crash of heavy boots. He turns his attention on us again. 'You're an absolute shower,' he says, 'if ever I saw one.'

Coming closer to yank at a loosely hanging s.h.i.+rt b.u.t.ton, his fury has sharpened by suspicion. The culprit in this case is Watson, one of our section drunkards, and the major sniffs incredulously. 'Have you been drinking?' he shouts at him. Half the section has been drunk up to half the time since our arrival in North Africa, and two members including Watson have been drunk every day from early morning until late at night. With huge concentration and practice they have learned in the end how to walk without staggering while in this state, but they are never free from the special odour of the so-called pure alcohol used in the manufacture of anisette. Watson, a journalist in civilian life and a persuasive talker, manages with practised dignity to flannel his way out of this situation. Fortunately the major's attention is distracted from our second drunk, Spriggs, who is notoriously incoherent, but who stands perfectly to attention with an expression of extreme alertness.

The major, in charge, it seems, of all the security personnel in the building, now a.s.signs our duties for the day, which consist in opening and closing doors for these earnest, doc.u.ment-laden figures as they dash backwards and forwards from one room to another. The FSO and Leopold make themselves scarce, leaving us to it.

Next day, with excitement everywhere at fever pitch, beleaguered by clamorous citizens who cannot make themselves understood - for there are no French speakers in sight - we are on our door-keeping duties again. All we are allowed to do is to direct enquiries to a bewildered-looking young corporal who waves his arms hopelessly as if trying to disperse smoke while the pet.i.tions and denunciations pile up on his desk top, and supplicants try to trap his hands and bribe him by sticking banknotes between his fingers. We, too, are constantly a.s.sailed by plausible scoundrels who offer women, boys, gold, the kingdom of heaven if we will only find some way of smuggling them into the presence of the Allied Commander, who they are certain can be corrupted if only he can be reached. Some time in the morning a bomb is allegedly discovered, and everybody rushes out of the building, then back again when it is p.r.o.nounced to be a harmless Gestapo souvenir. Every so often our enemy the major flings open a door and brays through it into the ruckus and confusion, 'This must be kept as a pool of silence.' Watson, immutably drunk, copes with all this imperturbably, but Spriggs manages at one point to go to sleep on his feet propped against a door, and falls over when it is opened suddenly.

Back at HQ for the midday meal Leopold makes a shattering announcement. 'We're being shunted into a siding,' he says, looking as though he has just listened to sentence of death being pa.s.sed upon him. He goes on to explain that we are being pulled out of Tunis and moved to the port of La Goulette, six miles out of the city. 'It's a quiet place,' he says. 'Smashed up, with nothing working.' His theory is that GHQ Tunis may have had reports about Captain Merrylees, causing them to lose confidence in him, and they want to get him - and us - out of their hair.

Chapter Twenty.

LANK, SAD-EYED WAREHOUSES dominated the waterfront at La Goulette. The sun had flayed the paint from all the faades, and bleached out all the words where the advertis.e.m.e.nts had once been, leaving nothing but naked silvered wood, lurching cranes and abandoned tackle; hawsers, pulleys, chains insisted that this was a working port, but the s.h.i.+ps had gone elsewhere. Air-raid shelters stood like concrete wigwams among the bomb craters. A Renault car had been sliced almost in half and pushed to the water's edge, and the once bright red stains on its ripped upholstery had turned black. In the exact centre of this desolation the French had erected a wonderfully decorated iron p.i.s.soir and this was visited throughout the day by tattered but scrupulous Arabs carrying cans of water for their ritual ablutions. When not was.h.i.+ng their private parts they sat fis.h.i.+ng over the edge of the quay for small, obscene-looking fish that crawled rather than swam among the seaweed clogging the piers. Oil from a spill in La Marsa slithered over the sea-water, stifling the waves under its coat of many colours. The place smelt of baked bladderweed, oil and dust. The bombs had torn a gap in the harbour wall and through it Tunis showed its small ivory teeth along the horizon, and when the hot breeze puffed over us from the direction of Rades, which was only four kilometres away, it often brought with it the noise of trumpets and drums. Otherwise the war had pa.s.sed us by.

The single distraction La Goulette offered was a waterfront cafe-bar which, although seedy-looking enough, yielded a series of new experiences to those who frequented it. Tunisian Jews formed the backbone of the local middle cla.s.s and owned most of the property, including this bar, where customers were waited upon with extreme solicitude by the owner's three daughters. They were beautiful, though extremely fat, with wonderful complexions of the palest gold and enormous soulful eyes. Their corpulence reflected old-style canons of taste in these matters still surviving in this remote corner of the once Turkish dominions, and, using their fingers with expertness and delicacy, the three sisters stuffed themselves with fattening foods to preserve their desirable fles.h.i.+ness.

Spanish was their first language, and the family possessed genealogical charts written in old Castilian, tracing their origins back to Cadiz before their expulsion from Andalusia at the time of the Catholic kings. The parents were largely invisible presences but the girls were always within beck and call to cook oriental messes, and sing cante flamenco while we spooned our way through them gingerly. Leopold usually found himself inspired to join in the singing, wailing a few bars about the tribulations of a deserted orphan. This was the only cante flamenco song he knew, and although our Jewish friends received it with wild enthusiasm, we were heartily sick of it.

After the first few days of getting to know each other this relations.h.i.+p began to take an unforeseen direction. First we were informed by our young friends that as evidence of the Jewish community's huge grat.i.tude in their salvation from the Germans - who were known to be preparing deportation lists - the Grand Rabbi had issued an authorization, considered unique in the history of the race, permitting Jewish girls to contract marriage with Allied personnel who were not of their religion. The next move was a formal invitation to several of the more presentable section members to a tte--tte held in one of the family's private rooms. These were intended as the first tentative moves in the exploration of matrimonial possibilities. One man was seen by each sister at a time and in one instance I was called in to interpret. The small room was densely furnished in oriental style with wall carpets, complex lamps, bazaar leatherwork, and bra.s.s-ware, and the inert air was heavily overlaid with the odour of incense. The girl had dressed herself up for the occasion like a Turkish cabaret dancer which displayed much of her substantial body, covered by her normal working clothes, through stridently coloured chiffon veils. The guest - guests in this case - were offered the usual sticky sweets, to be consumed while the girl put on display her dowry - consisting largely of several hundred gold sovereigns and louis d'or. While retaining her normal expression of the blandest innocence she then twisted and turned, rotated her stomach, set her haunches abounce, and produced a few sentences which sounded like ritual Spanish in praise of her amatory technique. There was no possibility of the visitor being spurred on to impropriety, because the mother was always present, only half-concealed behind a curtain, and making her presence all the more felt by an occasional squeal of admiration at the quality of the performance put on by her daughter.

n.o.body married a Tunisian Jewess, although I am sure they would have made good, if over-indulgent wives. But they did much to lighten the terrific tedium of life at La Goulette.

We were housed in an opulent villa on the hill at Le Kram, looked after by an Italian couple who performed the daily miracle of transforming Army rations into superb Piedmontese food, but harrowed unrelentingly by the problem of how to kill time. Princ.i.p.ally we played poker and waited for the phone to ring to report the presence of a spy. The first of such calls could be counted upon to happen within minutes of nightfall. Spy alarms were a barometer of morale. A unit on the move never saw spies, but as soon as they found themselves bogged down behind the wire in a camp with nothing to do but dig latrines, the spies began to move in. If one of our drunkards answered the phone, he would laugh into the mouthpiece and hang up, but sometimes a man who was bored out of his wits would get on his motor bike, ride a few miles to some desolate encampment and listen with what patience he could to a farcical story of lights flas.h.i.+ng in the night. It would never be more, he knew, than an innocent householder lighting his way to a privy at the bottom of his garden. But it was something to break up the evening, a new face, sometimes a fresh and interesting form of mania to be soothed. After Captain Merrylees appeared to come suddenly to life again, and began demanding reports, such an abortive experience made something to put into them.

Captain Merrylees' personal resurrection followed several incidents which may have combined in their effect to shock him out of his lethargy. Life at the Villa Claudia, as our moral fibre collapsed, took on an almost western-frontier quality. Leopold claimed to have been warned at GHQ that for reasons undisclosed we could expect to remain where we were for the duration. It was a suggestion that gave rise to paranoia manifested in the emergence of a wild sense of humour laced with delusions. Leopold was a man divided down the middle. Half of him was schemer, the other half plain barrack-room soldier, a man who had undoubtedly enjoyed the training process in which he had been not quite reduced to an automaton and who hated the s.h.i.+ftlessness and vagrancy to which we had been condemned.

Now a craving seized him for the simplicities and exact.i.tudes of the old soldiering life, and he proposed to us that - as a favour to him - we should allow ourselves to be drilled. Inducements including local leave with transportation included were offered. To us it was no more than a joke but, under the threat of limitless leisure, we agreed. He longed to put us through complicated manoeuvres of the kind invented by Frederick the Great and reverently preserved like museum pieces of weaponry at the Intelligence Corps depot, but we were too few. There were not enough army boots to go round, so half of us had to march in our brown civilian shoes, and we sloped and ordered arms with rifles borrowed from the nearest military unit. From behind their shutters our Tunisian neighbours must have watched with amazement as Leopold, stick under arm and two guns dangling on his thighs, put us through our paces. After it was over, there was no mistaking his relief, but it was short-lived and in a matter of hours the pressures began to build up.

One of his delusions, or jokes - or perhaps a mixture of both - was a belief that we were still under the risk of surprise attack by the Germans - all of whom were by this time safely locked away in PoW camps. He took to propping a loaded sub-machine-gun against the leg of the table when we sat down to dinner, and on one occasion suddenly s.n.a.t.c.hed it up and discharged a volley through the French windows into a clump of cactus among which imaginary Krauts were in ambush. Twenty rounds hissed down the table a few inches above the wine gla.s.ses, and riddled the soft flesh of the p.r.i.c.kly pears. Leopold went to inspect the result. 'They've gone. They got away,' he said, with a disturbing chuckle.

It was something to be laughed off, but within days events took a more serious turn. He had invited the local MPs to the villa, and in the course of the meal Leopold said something to their sergeant-major and they both got up and went to the flat roof together. A moment later we heard a cry followed by a crash in the garden and rushed out to find that Leopold had thrown the MP sergeant-major from the roof.

This was the emergency that brought Merrylees in trousers worn with pyjama top on the scene. He tripped over one of our drunkards who was crawling about the floor wearing the crash helmet put on him to save him from knocking his brains out against the furniture, and rushed into the garden where Leopold, laughing uproariously, stood over the unconscious sergeant-major. An ambulance was called to take the MP to hospital, and a threatened court of inquiry was only evaded through the backlog of business occupying the department concerned.

With Leopold's sanity in doubt, there was no way out for Merrylees but a return to normality, and his recovery may have been a.s.sisted by the removal of whatever hold Leopold, as an a.s.sumedly sane man, had had upon him. Merrylees got up in the morning, shaved and dressed himself with extreme care, lined us up in his office at eight o'clock sharp and, as if staring into sunlight, deploying his always alarming smile, he issued his orders. Listening to them, we were plunged again into doubt. Merrylees wanted a full-scale report and Intelligence evaluation with suggestions as to how security measures could be improved in La Goulette, about which there was absolutely nothing to say, and Carthage - remaining roughly as it was after the Romans had dealt with it in 164 BC. The task allotted to me called for less imagination. I was to make a regular daily count of the vehicles using the La Goulette-Tunis road, under the headings, military and non-military, and if military, whether British, American, French, etc. This fatuous information was to be collated and condensed to form the body of a weekly report to GHQ. I wondered what the G2's feelings about it all would be after reading the first few paragraphs before it went into his waste-paper basket.

18TH JUNE.

A letter from Dr Kessous in Philippeville carried by a member of 84 Section sent on detachment to Tunis. The Senegalese troops have run amok there and ma.s.sacred the Arabs, with more trouble expected. Can I do anything?

Clearly nothing whatever. For all that, I feel an overwhelming urge to go to Philippeville to learn for myself exactly what has happened.

Leopold has suddenly turned reasonable again, calm and accommodating - even with his ferocious jokes pushed away out of sight. I told him I had to get away for a couple of days, and should I go to Merrylees about it? His answer was, on no account. If necessary he'd cover up for me. I get the impression the two may be taking up positions for their next private battle, and Leopold has made public his suspicions that Merrylees has blocked his application made back in April for transfer to another section.

I thought I had better tell him where I wanted to go, although not why. It was a good thing that I did because he immediately suggested that I should take my FS card to the airfield, show it to an American and try to hitch a lift on one of their planes. The FS ident.i.ty card, which I had never used to date, is said to be the open sesame to all situations, and really adventurous FS personnel make free use of them to fly themselves back to England for the occasional weekend - a procedure which strikes me as dangerous. At the airfield I produce it with some diffidence hardly able to bring myself to study the American major's reaction as he reads the endors.e.m.e.nt stamped at AFHQ, Algiers. This hints at the possession of huge, secret power. 'Authorized,' it says, 'to be in any place, at any time, and in any dress. All persons subject to Military Law are enjoined to give him every a.s.sistance in their power to facilitate the carrying out of his duties.' Little did the major realize just what these duties have been during the past few weeks.

He handed the card back to me, and I was seized by a kind of panic when he addressed me as 'Sir'. 'Sir, do you wanna leave just now?' It happened that there was a plane leaving for Algiers within the hour, and there would be no problem about an unscheduled landing at Philippeville to drop me off en route.

At Philippeville I went straight to Dr Kessous' house to hear the details of the atrocity. A company of Senegalese, normally the most disciplined of troops, had broken out of barracks, found the armoury mysteriously unlocked, and gone on the rampage killing every Arab they could find.

What had happened to all our mutual friends - to Kobtan, Meksen and the rest? - was my first question.

'Praise G.o.d,' he said, they were all safe. Someone had mentioned that Kessous had started his life as an unbeliever, but religiosity had fed upon success, and now the name of Allah was rarely out of his mouth.

It soon became clear that the ma.s.sacre had claimed its victims entirely among proletarians - perhaps by design, or perhaps because they had no stone-built houses or walls behind which to take refuge. Kessous said the official figure for those killed was thirty-seven, but he put the dead at several hundred, most of them vagrant workers or distant villagers who could conveniently disappear without trace to be buried secretly in unmarked graves.

Listening to him, to the flux of angry rhetoric alternating with the persuasive smiles, I formed the opinion that he had suffered no more than a political setback, to be offset against propaganda gains, leading in the end to a bloodily satisfactory retaliation. What in the end, he seemed to suggest after the emptying of the vials of his wrath, did the death of a few nameless peasants matter, if by their sacrifice the cause of the Algerian people (behind their leaders) could be advanced? He was resigned to the fact that I could do nothing to impede the recurrence of such atrocities, but urged me to do all I could to publicize what had happened.

Madame Hadef, the vivacious taxi-driver's wife, had bad news. She spoke of her husband's last moments, as described by a European friend who had seen what had happened, displaying in the telling of this the simple dry-eyed fort.i.tude possessed equally by an Arab woman of her calibre and the small boys whose toes were crushed by the French police at the base depot.

Every Arab in Philippeville knew that something terrible was about to happen, she said, and all those who could afford to do so left their offices or places of work, went home and locked themselves in. Since the withdrawal of most of the Allied troops, fares were few and far between, and most of the Arab taxi-drivers stayed put until a European drove up to warn them that the Senegalese were shooting every Arab in sight in the town's centre.

They decided to try to escape along the coast road to Jeanne d'Arc, but had only driven a few hundred yards before they found themselves cut off. They left their cabs and ran for it, but the Senegalese chased them to the top of a low cliff, bayoneted them, and threw them over the edge. The ma.s.s funeral, she said, had set off an extraordinary demonstration. All the French and Senegalese had been withdrawn from the town, and some irresistible impulse had sent the women out in their thousands into the streets. In defiance of custom among the Algerian Muslims, they followed the procession to the cemetery and held up their children-in-arms to see the coffins lowered into the graves, 'so that they would remember'.

Afterwards the bayonet-rent cast-off blazers and morning coats were carefully cleansed of blood, repaired, and pa.s.sed on as heirlooms to close relatives, or in extremity sold in the market.

I took a taxi out to Fortuna's farm, pa.s.sing several cars with MP stickers on them on the way. As soon as the taxi pulled up, Fortuna came out of the house, arms outstretched. The appalling fact was that he was unmistakably happy to see me - a man capable of lasting grat.i.tude. He made a joke about pretending to a.s.sume that I had come to pick up 'the Roman thing', and said that I ought to have given him a few hours' notice to be able to have it ready for me.

'Were you mixed up in that Arab business?' I asked him.

'Not personally,' he said, 'but you know me - I can't stand the sight of them.'

I told him that a friend of mine had been killed.

'I'm sorry,' he told me. 'Maybe we could have fixed him up with a pa.s.s.'

For me this was a clear admission that the gangsters of the milice populaire had worked with the officers of the Senegalese.

This was the cloud, no bigger than a man's hand in the sky, that presaged the end of French rule in Algeria. Ten years of terrorism and counter-terrorism followed until, on 20 August 1955, Philippeville was the scene of the most atrocious ma.s.sacre of the post-war period, carried out in reprisal for attacks on settlers elsewhere. French paras flew in and, aided by bands of vigilantes, began the task of destroying the Arab population. Here is a description of the action by Pierre Leulliette, a para officer who took part in it: 'We opened fire into the thick of them at random. Then ... our company commanders finally gave us the order to shoot down every Arab we met. At midday, fresh orders, take prisoners. That complicated everything.' The prisoners were rounded up and kept in the stadium, but next day it was decided to kill them all after all. 'There were so many of them they had to be buried with bulldozers.' The total Arab death-roll was 12,000, a high proportion of them women and children. In the words of the Governor-General Jacques Soustelle, 'Between our two communities an abyss has been dug through which flows a river of blood.'

In this huge final tragedy our section in Philippeville, succouring through ignorance and gullibility such gangsters as Fortuna, played its tiny part.

22ND JUNE.