Truth in Cold Weather
From DARS1E G1LLIE
PARIS
Tkeep 3,000 officers and NCOs waiting for two hours out of doors on a cold November day, and then td address them, solemn and slow, for half an hour with as your conclusion a patent truth that they do not like to hear, may not seem a Persuasive approach—even if Your prose is magnificent and your logic unassailable. It was President de Gaulle's way of dealing with the army last week: It is true that in other ways -the occasion was well thought out. The liberation of Strasbourg by General Leclerc's light armoured division on Noverriber•23', 1944, was an-admirable example to drive home the President's point that it was he and no other whO had given back ti Prance an army -to be proud of. The parade of neW equipment, mainly. French, together With the first Honest Johns to be shown publicly in Prance. was an excellent .reminder that .there are Other functions • for an army than fighting guerrillas and playing the policeman in Algeria— Where the current of history cannot be swept back- Wards anyway, whatever the brooms employed. But the best part of the President's demonstration Was certainly his conclusion, however unpleasant to his hearers. What is the use of a soldier who tries to reverse decisions solemnly taken by the nation? He is a lost man. He is breaking the machine that gives him his importance and his etlicacity.
Nothing will make the French army love President de Gaulle His own mutiny in 1940 Was the only one that circumstances justified, the Only one with a future. But how few were the soldiers who saw that then! The example remains
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4 constant provocation to them to do likewise, and as Frenchmen, who prefer logic to empiri- cism, they have difficulty in seeing that their mutiny would be 'wrong because it would be a blind alley. But another military insurrection-does look increasingly unlikely. The most discontented soldiers have been posted to Germany or metro- politan France where the background must strike anyone as unpropitious for such action. The spectacle of ex-general Salan in Algeria involved with the organisers of a campaign' of deliberate murder of the policemen and soldiers who are hunting- for. -him and of . those .few Algerian European liberals whose outlook perhaps has a future is pretty discouraging. .
The probability that there will not be any further important mutiny in the army is not, the only favourable factor in the situation.. The negotiations :between -France, Morocco and (through the Moroccans) the Algerian rebel government to settle the problem created by the hunger strike of M. Ben Bella and his four companions, now for five years prisoners of the French, did uncover at least one common motive between all concerned—the. desire that this new obstacle to a Franco.Algerian negotiation should be removed.
So far, so good. But the exchange of murders continues in Algeria, reaching a new intensity over the weekend. The French Government continues to show itself incapable of dealing seriously with the OAS, which can bomb and murder and make illicit broadcasts and. even conduct foreign journalists to interview its leader without much apparent difficulty. The fact is that mutinying yourself is one thing; taking action against somebody else's mutiny is another. The army is at.all events still engaged in fighting the Moslem rebels. As for the Algerian police, most of them are in sympathy with the OAS anyway, so that the fight is conducted by teams of metro- politan police officials seconded to Algeria, getting their information mainly from Moslems, and knowing that anyone they arrest can go sick and then walk out of the back-door of any Algerian hospital Both the Moslem rebels and the OAS are now pretty obviously divided, it does not seem likely that M. Ben Khedda, the rebel prime minister, is particularly anxious that at the .present moment enthusiastic young Algerian patriots should throw hand-grenades amongst men who are playing bowls in the dusty outskirts of Algiers. Some- body intermediate in the organisation wants to keep things hotted up. Nor is it likely that ex- general Salan wants the young Europeans of Algiers and Oran to conduct lynching parties against the Moslems in the streets of those cities. But neither can stop these things from happening, any more than the French Government can end the rebellion or catch OAS agents. It is the spectacle of a situation slipping out of control that is alarming and is now the main threat to a peace negotiation. If in any attempted handover of Algeria to a Moslem authority, the Europeans succeeded in seizing under OAS leadership the two or three urban areas—Oran, Algiers, Bone— where they feel strong enough to hold their own, is it humanly imaginable that the French troops in Algeria would be very keen to put them down? If the Government tried to use its forces, even the disciplined and faithful gendarmerie, to shoot, not specifically at OAS • conspirators, but at 'fellow-Frenchmen,' in other words at a crowd Of -Algerian Europeans, what would be the political consequences? You have only to think of asking any British regiment to fire on the white Rhodesians.
The kind of coid-weather victory that the President won at Strasbourg is an illuminating example. of what he can and cannot do. He has- behind him a majority of Frenchmen who want peace in Algeria, but to whom he has been very slow to tell the whole truth. On other planes than that of Algerian policy, the Government has been involved in serious strike trouble this week, with the electricity workers using the threat of inter- rupting the nation's electricity supply and the transport workers that of holding up railways and buses. At the same time, in a belated fight on the prices front, a young and attractive Minister of Internal Commerce is locked in battle with the butchers in particular and the retailers in general—a battle which Would bring widespread popularity if won, but can cause massive inconvenience while it is waged. In the villages the small farmers can still be heard murmuring angrily. Against all these centres of sectional discontent, the President would claim that he can rely on national support that is wider and deeper—but it is also passive. For if the nation backs the President over Algeria, it is certainly not enthusiastic about his policy in the cold war. While he is the realist over Algeria, it is as often as not his enemies who are the realists about Europe, NATO and the best way to defend general peace.
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