Part 10 (2/2)

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.

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