Autumn Books — II
No resting-place
Raymond Carr
A Savage War of Peace — Algeria 19541962 Alistair Home (Macmillan 28.95) Occasionally an epic subject encounters a fine historian. This the the case with the Algerian war and Mr Horne. The result is a book of compelling power, written with compassion and understanding.
The relationship of France and Algeria resembles that of England and Ireland in the nineteenth century. Nationalism, like the grave, does not give back. There is no lasting resting-place on the road to full independence. Concessions always come too late and too little. The moderate men of goodwill are always swept into the dustbin of history.
It was the intransigent hardliners to whom compromise smelt of treason who won out in the incessant leadership squabbles within the FLN. At the Soummam 'summit' in 1956 the programme of Abane — no ceasefire before recognition of independence,, negotiation on the basis of the existing Algerian territory including the Sahara on whose oil riches France hoped to base her economic recovery, no double citizenship privileges for the pieds noirs — all this seemed impossibly unrealistic. Yet the FLN hardliners stuck to these terms in face of apathy and military disaster. And after seven and a half years of bitter conflict they imposed their will on Algeria and France. Fehrat Abbas, a westernised evolid, started as a passionate protagonist of assimilation with France on terms of equality for the Muslim population, an equality denied by French governments, victims of pressures from those Mediterranean white Rhodesians — the pieds noirs whose lobby in Paris doomed reformists like MendesFrance to destruction. 'Had! discovered the Algerian nation', Abbas wrote in 1936, 'I would be a nationalist . . . However I will not die for the Algerian nation because it does not exist'. The Algerian nation he could not find in 1936 was created by blood, starting with the Setif massacre of 1945. By 1956 Fehrat Abbas had found fifteen years of 'co-operation, discussion, persuasion' with France 'ineffective'. He flung in his lot with the FLN and the fight to the bitter end. Mr Home argues that from 1955 the philosophy of Abane — that only indiscriminate violence would succeed — 'one corpse in a jacket' ran his maxim 'is always worth more than twenty in uniform' — became the working creed of the FLN. Not that any creed could heal the rifts in the leadership. Abane was mysteriously liquidated in 1957 by his rivals. The hijacking of Ben Bella cured the rivalry between the 'interior' and 'exterior' factions by the simple process of removing the exterior leadership to a comfortable French prison. It also closed all doors to a negotiated peace and left a pwerful propaganda weapon in the hands of the FLN.
The Algerian revolution started on All Saints Day 1954 with a series of botched enterprises and little popular support. But as the FLN painfully expanded its scale of operations it presented the police and army with an insoluble problem: how to deal with terrorism and a guerrilla war that has the enforced — and the FLN ruthlessly struck down Muslim collaborators in order to dis courage the others — or willing support of the population. Massive arrests that pulled in the innocent or the indifferent only proved that prison is the best recruiting ground for revolutionaries. Secret networks can most easily (perhaps only) be broken by torture; when French soldiers found their 'copains' murdered, their throats slit and their mouths stuffed with their testicles, they found it easier to fix 'little electrodes' to a Muslim penis. The veneer of civilisation cracks. Mr Home is particularly perceptive in his discussion of the effects of torture on the torturers; young conscripts returned sickened to feed the propagandists of the left with atrocity stories.
All victories were Pyrrhic victories. Massu's paras won the Battle of Algiers in 1957; they left the city in relief for the war in the outback where soldiers were expected to fight soldiers rather than torture suspects and break strikes. General Challe in 1960 was within an ace of winning in the field, driving the FLN to sustain flagging morale by violence. 'It was only by executing traitors one after another that we managed to survive'. But both Massu and Chalk's victories were statistical: political and moral victory eluded them and France.
By 1958 France was not ruling Algeria. Algeria was ruling France. Massu's victory had been bought at a tremendous price: the surrender of civilian control in Algeria. Nowhere is Mr Home's expertise more in evidence than in his treatment of the army discontents, its determination to win a victory in Algeria that would wipe out defeat in Vietnam, a victory that was denied them by 'inept' and 'cowardly' Paris politicians. When the pieds noirs rose against the civil government in May 1958 the army (grudingly, as Mr Horne argues, for officers had little sympathy for pied noir ultras) joined the cry for de Gaulle.
Yet the army and the pieds noirs were to be sorely deceived by their saviour. What did he want, this 'Prince of Ambiguity'? Did his famous `je vous ai compris' mean he was committed to Algerie Frangaise? By Sep tember 1959 it was clear that he was not, and the pieds noirs took to the barricades, in January 1960, with the obvious sympathy of the army. De Gaulle was now in peril: to modernise the army and France he must get rid of the Algerian incubus; yet to reveal his intentions so to do would produce a revolt of 'his' army that had given so much for Algerie Frangaise. The revolt came with the General's putsch in April 1961. France was on the very verge of civil war.
In the end it was a tragedy for those who crossed the Rubicon to challenge de Gaulle. Mr Home shows especial sympathy and understanding for General Challe 'than whom no more estimable and honourable officer could be found in any army'. His was a tragedy 'that should perhaps be pondered by the leaders of other modern democratic armies should they ever come to impose too great a burden upon the consciences of their generals'. Challe felt a 'crushing moral responsibility' for the harkis (Muslim levees) he had raised to fight the FLN and whom, on de Gaulle's instructions, he had assured 'France will never abandon you'. Now they would be abandoned to the mercies of the FLN. Given the fate of the harkis after independence, surely Challe's was the only decision a man of honour could take?
Statesmen cannot have this narrow sense of honour. De Gaulle's achievement was to get France out of Algeria without civil war and only he could have done it. But he did not, as he wished, get out in his own time; he became an old man in a hurry. Nor did he get out 'with honour' — he left the harkis to be slaughtered. As always, he saw himself as the embodiment of the Rousseauin volonte generale of France. What really mattered to France was to rebuild a shattered army and a shattered economy. 'As for France', he told his Cabinet the day after the final agreement with the FLN had been signed, 'it will be necessary for her now to interest herself in something else'. True, but what a way to dismiss Algeria from the agenda.
This is a magnificent book. It has the poetic sense of place without which no great work of history can be written. It is more• than a narrative, skilfully distilled from a mountain of sources, often difficult to follow in its complexity, but which nevertheless holds the reader. It is an analysis of collective minds: the army and the pieds noirs both with their inferiority complexes which led them to over-react; the Muslims whose negotiators wore down their French opposite numbers by relentless, unyielding argument in smoke-filled rooms — for whereas the French terms for ending the war shifted on the sands of French politics, the FLN never budged from the programme of Soummam. It was the qualities displayed in war and personified in Boumedienne, the hardliner par excellence and a ruthless, selfenclosed politician, that, for Mr Horne, mould modern Algeria as the first leader of the Third World: 'tough and uncompromising, admirable and big thinking, dour and undemonstrative, untrusting and secretive'.
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