Smoke to the south-east rose up slantwise as if to avoid the sun. Shame at this picture of massacre made him want to die, to never get out, to kill his uttermost and perish here. Those who saw it were robbed of their manhood, never able, to face women and children again without remembering what they had been powerless to prevent. Did it shrivel the souls of those men who acted in this way? He didn’t think so. German Nazis from the Foreign Legion had set up torture-houses in Algiers, trained others in the same game. Yet thousands of Germans had also deserted. The Algerians didn’t like them, but took them carefully to the frontiers on an arduous trek of repatriation. The Germans handed over weapons and ammunition as the price of their ticket to friendly soil. Tell the world about our struggle when you get out, the FLN officers said, and some Germans organised arms traffic, sent money to collecting-points in Paris. A few of the deserting legionnaires — Italians, Germans, Yugoslavs — changed their minds in Tunis and Rabat, and came back over great and perilous wasteland routes to rejoin the FLN.
They lay on a hill-top, hidden among stones and gorse, a ferka of thirty men with twenty rifles, three LMGs and a mortar. Warmth spread through cloud and sweated them like a Turkish bath, became a knife-edged autumn sun. There’d been no water for a day, and then only a few hand-cups of green slime that he’d preferred not to look at. He could only croak, impossible to converse with Makhlouf, so looked with care and interest between the bushes and across open ground of the uplands. It was hot and silent, a smell of stones and sweat, and of cedar bark rising out of thick forest. Faint notes of a cowbell came from a far-off meadow. They expected nothing, yet had never waited when nothing came.
Helicopters, ‘those putrid horseflies of pacification with ten maggot-murderers in each body’ — to quote a leaflet he had just read — passed over now and again, and they collectively willed one to descend on impulse. It was a good landing-ground, uneven but tenable, as perfect as one could allow if they weren’t to suspect a trick.
Flies and midges hounded them, touched eyes, walked up nostrils, bit lips, but such torments were set apart from his patience. Five hours passed, and at times he almost slept. It was an inviting hilltop to occupy, pacify, fortify, employ as watchpost or base from which to send out patrols. Lost and isolated, it looked as if no soldier’s boot had ever stepped on it. To sleep meant chaos and death, sudden fire and nightmare, so his eyes stayed open, unseen slits between flesh-puffed bites he’d thought himself immune to after a year in Africa. In the Kabylie mountains they bred more fiercely than in the south, venom his blood could not yet absorb without pain.
They were ordered by radio to keep their position all night, sweat out dreams on to thorn and gravel. Biting mist hurt into his marrow. The greatest fight during the crossings of successive wildernesses had not been with the French, but to keep up with the physical tenacity of people around him who had come to the FLN because they could no longer bear to be treated like dogs, who had lost friends and families in endless and unendurable massacres, and who had reasoned that the only place for them was under the green and white flag. Bitterness and idealism toughened them even more than the previous hard life.
A green light near the coast lost itself in cloud, finding the one free hole to heaven, and good luck to it. Man-arsed sparks would disintegrate, unseen cold dust falling back to earth after they had lit up some poor bastards for a hail of bullets and phosphorous. Springs in his eyes snapped open when he tried with great effort to sleep.
Insects flung their last bites before being banked down by snow. He could smell it. Over six thousand feet up, it was ready to float on to them, hail in by crosswinds. What if some bullbrain mulling over a map in Legion headquarters should spot the subtly formed contours of their hill and decide to pacify it in the morning, to attack from landward on all sides and destroy their fondest hope of a godsent ambush. It was a game of psychic hide-and-seek, of pulverising the rectitude of Lambert gridlines on the map one by one. An attack would chase them down from the hills like frightened stallions into the flaring waves of the sea.
He sweated, began to see more in the world than the next tree, the oncoming rock, the ragcap in front. Gates of fire and chaos fell on him. Unable to sleep, he wanted to get up and make for the nearest barrage or deathpost, through darkness into the blackest night of all. He gripped hard so as not to let go, a sharp stone and the magazine of his rifle, the pack of bombs and ammunition between bare feet. Chafing fleas were armed with minute hooks, power and virulence that for months his flesh had resisted or brushed off as too unimportant to kick against. Another rash of lights went up, green lace flickering along the pale-blue undergut of cloud. A low rumble of guns or thunder followed. An attack at night was rare. After the vicious scrambles of the day you either slept at the backend of exhaustion or, more often, moved elsewhere in an endless game of musical chairs that, going on long enough, was designed to paralyse the less arabesque mind of the adversary. He imagined it would be difficult for a man who had commanded or been involved in this kind of revolutionary war to take over in peacetime, to set a raw and idealistic country along the line of material progress and development, especially one just out of complete and utter ruin. Maybe a man stored up the sort of energy and talent that would let him make a good job of it.
Moonlight flaked on surrounding pinnacles, tall fingers, rockhands, light-grey fists and knucklebones, a frightening sight, blue flames and limbs of panic ready to rush down from the highest peaks like overpowering ghosts and finish off all contenders whether they were guilty or innocent. The machine and metal of his gun squashed such terror, pushed fear into locked cupboards from which it would not emerge until or unless the age of machinery was destroyed. A gun saved him from the despair of not being able to distinguish good from bad, ghost from reality, day from night. In normal life maybe he would not need it, but now he did, in this eternal insanity of move and countermove. Its clean hard metal and machine-shaped wood set him apart from trees and rocks, and told him on which side of them he stood, even though other machines and metal were trying to destroy him unless he could take cover and sufficiently hide among those same trees and rocks.
Metal and living wood fused in him as he fell asleep.
When madness ended, sanity began. Thirst, fleas, hunger and midges pulled away with the magic scene of a helicopter gliding towards them up the valley.
It hovered over clear but bumpy land, looking for the softest point to set down its wheels. Cloud had lifted, woods and lesser hills below had lost their smoky purple of the morning, lay flat and green, hillocks and ridges waving away to the next upshoot of high peaks. LMGs were sighted on the door, rifles and the mortar set for intervening space. The expected monster looked fragile and vulnerable. His vacillation and fear had vanished in an hour’s sleep.
The pilot took care but suspected nothing. Guns swept the ground but they lay with iron control, hidden. The first soldiers came out skilfully, throwing themselves to the ground at great speed. He would have heard the thumps they made, but four were caught in mid-flight by the first bursts, and fell dead or wounded. Six others fired from under the helicopter’s belly, then moved forward. Frank lined his sights at the petrol-tank, sent his magazine into it.
Shouts and gunfire shut off engine-noise. His second magazine went for the cockpit, calmly manipulating trigger and bolt as if on piecework at his old job in the engineering factory, but still as always keeping up the quality of articles sent out. Nightmare had gone, and a workshop of calmness and order closed around him. Mortar smoke flashed along open ground. He fired on fixed sights, unmoving elbow dug painfully in.