The Mysteries of Algiers Read Online Free PDF Page B

Giap. They go back to Trotsky. It is not helpful or accurate to regard the perpetrator of a terrorist outrage as a criminal psychopath – any more than it is to so regard the torturer. The terrorist is an able strategist. We must respect him and understand him. Know the mind of the enemy, gentlemen.’
    The lecture is not arousing much interest. True it is a very hot afternoon, but all afternoons are hot down here, and if I had been talking to a platoon of conscripts or even of paras, some of the ideas I had been discussing would have aroused argument and some of the deliberately provocative terminology I had used would have drawn criticism. More than half the French army in Algeria are barely more than schoolboys, and most of them have a vague idea that they are here to fight ‘international communism’, but beyond knowing that international communism is evil they don’t know what it is. A few months before they got shipped out here, their parents were worrying if they went out for long bicycle rides on their own.
    But my legionnaires are different. A few of the old lags in this room, mostly the older ones, know their Trotsky pretty well. They fought for Trotsky – or for Stalin – in the Spanish Civil War and when the war was lost, they signed up and came here. Another, slightly younger, group came face to face with the real menace of international communism on the Russian Front. They know what it is about. So we have a lot of Waffen ss in this platoon too. Then we got a lot of refugees from Eastern Europe in the late forties. Even the criminal recruits prove to be surprisingly politicized, but they are not going to argue it out here in this classroom.
    I have a brief fantasy of a couple of the hard-bitten old Stalinist thugs in this room turning up at a dinner party at the de Serkissians’, bristling and sweating in the unfamiliar monkey suits. I pride myself on my ability to think two things simultaneously and, while the lecture is delivered by automatic pilot, I start to think back on the last of the de Serkissian dinners at which I was present. Mercier was there too …
    Now, suddenly, it occurs to me that the men may be more interested in learning what was said at the dinner party than in me going over the whys and wherefores of our defeat in Indochina. They should know what the civilians think of us. They should be reminded of what life can be like outside the Legion. I will paint the scene for them. I will rub their noses in it. Toughen their spirits up a bit. That sits well with the philosophy of the Legion. So now the lecture abruptly changes course.
    ‘It is vital to know the mind of the enemy. It is also useful to know what your friends are thinking of you. I should like now to describe a dinner party which I had the honour to attend in Algiers last week …’
    The lights were strung out along the Bay of Algiers. We dined out of doors beside the swimming pool. But as Maurice, Chantal’s father, was swift to point out, this was not a barbecue. (‘Beastly American custom. Probably copied from the Red Indians.’)
    Instead Maurice sat at the head of the table, looking on his guests and his napery with equal pride, and houseboys wearing fezzes and white gloves brought the food out from the kitchens. With the coming of autumn, Maurice’s mind had turned to thoughts of hunting. But the Challe offensive is still going on, and every day there are reports of skirmishes, sometimes small battles with the fellagha in the Aures. The hunting season started a month ago, but only that week had Maurice wangled a permit to do some shooting in a restricted military zone. A couple of his companions from the chasse, thickset heavy-browed men, sat further down the table. Pierre Lagaillarde, the ex-para briefly over from the Paris Assembly, was the guest of honour. Lagaillarde had brought with him one of his political allies and protégés, Raoul Demeulze, the brightest of the young Algiers lawyers. Chantal and I had met