Landing on the Moon
From DARSIE GILLIE PARIS
DECIDED in favour of discipline and so also 1 to share the national shame of a desertion,' said a serving general giving evidence in the Salan trial. In thus indicating his sympathy with, even if disapproval of, his former commander-in- chief, he expressed the feelings of many serving soldiers including a vice-admiral and a general who demonstratively shook hands with the man in the dock after giving their evidence. From a distance it seems easy to judge the whole Algerian business in black and white. As far as broad policy decisions are concerned, that is Perfectly right. But such decisions are like map- Ping the moon by telescope. It is another business altogether to stand on it. To apply Algerian Policy was perhaps never quite so difficult as that and in earlier years might have been easier, but as far as terrine affairs go it was always the kind of thing that no parliamentary government with a shifting majority likes to undertake. President de Gaulle, with France's much-vaunted new institutions, has needed four years to swing the boat about and the new screw is churning up savagery, suffering and agony of conscience amongst those directly concerned as much as any Parliamentary paddle-wheel would have done. For, after all, to fight rebels for seven years does mean recruiting allies and promising pro- tection in every section of society. The Algerian Government in Tunis is now issuing assurances of future good treatment to minorities, but what about the men in every village who have bitter occasion for revenge—and still more those who say they want revenge in order to cover up their own past passivity? There will be plenty of those among the Moslems of Algeria.
Satan, of course, is unforgivable because he had sufficient intelligence and political experience to know better than to back the blind forces of rage and prejudice in the European community. kit it is important to notice how many of his brother officers cannot bring themselves to con- demn him because they have felt the bitterness of having been ordered to fight a war and then face about. After all, they say, what is the OAS doing that the FLN did not do before you shook hands with its leaders? Or that you did not do earlier, their liberal critics reply bitterly, and so the tit for tat echoes and re-echoes back to the slave market in eighteenth-century Algiers.
The unhappy Algerian Europeans who have chosen, according to the hallucinating phrase, the suitcase rather than the coffin, are now filling every available aeroplane and boat across the Mediterranean. It is mainly women and children at present with as many from upcountry as from the towns. The former have had the addi- tional shock of seeing on their way out the rapid decay of Algiers and Oran which they had once known prosperous. The folly of the past is evident, but when successive Paris governments have shown themselves unable to tame the spiri- tual ancestors of the OAS it is little use to blame the mediocre Algiers businessman with his com- fortable flat and conscience. He was a fool, as his like have been the world over when given the chance. It is not certain, whether they need to be so frightened as they are today, but the OAS is every day provoking the return of their Moslem opponents to the savagery they have only just abandoned. Then there are the Moslems who have served the French as auxiliaries. The time-servers find a way over to the other side, but those who have committed unforgivable acts or who at least practised the virtue of loyalty, are asking to be taken to France with their families. Some people talk of planting them out in the abandoned mountain villages of the south to raise sheep and mark again with their feet the fast-fading mule tracks of High Provence, but, perhaps for many of them the future will be in somebody's private police: If the Moslem fugitives are an awkward problem, the Europeans may be scarcely less so and will be far more numerous. They must be welcomed, helped and fitted in, but how prevent them from becoming some undesirable's political clients and how make these proud, angry, politi- cally miseducated people liked? In the market town near our own country cottage our favourite pub has just been sold to an Algerois- a prudent early getter-out who has disengaged and reinvested at least part of his capital. As such, no doubt, he does not need sympathy ex- cept in the sense that anyone does after being forcibly uprooted. Our own attitude, and that of most of the little town as far as we can see it, is probably typical of what will happen elsewhere. 'We wish it was not an Algdrois; we said.
There are points in foreign policy which do not really arise from the logical argument in which they are presented, but like the pillar of Odysseus's bedpost, are living trees deeply rooted in the soil of the internal situation. President de Gaulle indicated one of these in his last press conference when he turned from arguing France's right to her own contribution in the concert of allied foreign policy to a sudden assertion of the political and moral necessity of making the French army once more part and parcel of the nation. What he had in mind was the problem of getting the army to forget its role as a bulwark of falling empire and recover its pride as the defender of France herself. He is evidently convinced that this is unlikely to hap- pen if the army is merely a series of divisions integrated into the NATO forces.
The French army is based on a combina- tion of aristocratic and republican tradition with the majority of its younger officers drawn from the lower middle classes. Their choice of profession is due to ambition for social promotion both in class and in function. The motive is no doubt ambivalent but not entirely ignoble, and was encouraged by an out-of-date conception of what was likely to happen in places like Algeria. The problem of re-conversion is the more difficult because even the Algerian rebel leaders are now beginning to admit frankly that under Challe the French army had won the Algerian war in so far as it could be won militarily. This was of course a minor element in the total addition. But this is not a point most officers appreciate. The President stands condemned in their eyes as the man who gave away an Algeria that they had pacified and so gave away their own future. The President feels the necessity of convincing them that his- tory as interpreted by him does not mean it necessary decline of France or a loss of her identity. His 'Europe of States' is to make her a leading element of a new structure with an army equipped by her own industries as modern as any in the world, and a government able with its European confederates to talk on equal terms with Washington and Moscow.
Previous page
