Epic Terror

By John T. Elson

A SAVAGE WAR OF PEACE by Alistair Horne Viking; 604 pages; $19.95

All Saints' Day, a Christian feast that commemorates the spiritual heroism of the early martyrs, has a double significance to the French. With a canny sense of symbolism, Algeria's fledgling Front de Liberation Nationale (F.L.N.) chose Nov. 1, 1954, as the day to launch its rebellion. In the wintry mountains of the Aures, Muslim djounoud (soldiers of the faith) attacked a police station at Biskra, wounding two gendarmes. At Khenchela, a lieutenant, Gerard Darneau, was mortally wounded by machine-gun fire--the first French officer to die in the conflict.

The troubles in Algeria were barely noted in Paris newspapers, even though an F.L.N. proclamation of the struggle for independence was broadcast by Cairo radio and circulated in pamphlets throughout the country. Nonetheless, the All Saints' uprising--swiftly followed by savage reprisals against Algeria's Muslim majority--marked the beginning of a bloody conflict that lasted for nearly eight years. It led to the birth of a new republic and the eradication of the French presence in North Africa. But at what a cost! According to Algerian figures, as many as 1 million Muslims died during and after the war. French casualties, military and civilian, are estimated at 27,000 killed and some 65,000 injured. When the end came, a terrible exodus began. Forced to choose between "the suitcase or the coffin," nearly 1 million white pied noir settlers tearfully abandoned their homeland. For more than a century it had been considered as much a part of France as Brittany or Provence.

As A Savage War of Peace notes, France's involvement with Algeria proved more trap than treasure from the beginning. Armies of the Bourbon King Charles X first laid claim to the old Barbary coast in 1830; in 1847 Algeria was formally incorporated into France as three huge departments. The white colons were French citizens; the native Muslims were merely residents, subject to taxes and military service but with very limited voting privileges. From time to time, men of good will suggested various ways of expanding Muslim rights, only to see the reforms rejected by the pieds noirs and their archconservative allies in Paris.

Algeria was the last colonial war, although, as Author Horne observes, the situation that created it has certain parallels to Rhodesia and South Africa. Embittered by its recent defeat at Dien Bien Phu, the French army was determined not to let it happen in Algeria, and twice the war was nearly won. In 1957 the feared paratroopers of General Jacques Massu, using torture on a scale that shocked and sickened Frenchmen, destroyed the F.L.N. underground network during the Battle of Algiers. Two years later, punishing French raids shattered the morale of starving, undersupplied F.L.N. units in rural strongholds.

Many of the cadres seemed ready to sue for peace. With some justice, French commanders complained that decisive thrusts against the F.L.N. were frustrated by the waffling of politicians in Paris. Thus the generals had plotted to undermine the rudderless Fourth Republic and restore De Gaulle to power.

On his first visit to Algiers, De Gaulle sent a cheering mob of colons in the Forum into near ecstasy with his celebrated opening words: "Je vous ai compris" (I have understood you). To the pieds noirs, it was a sign that De Gaulle accepted the idea of Algerie Franc,aise -- and perhaps at the time he did. Yet to the dismay of the army and the fury of the settlers, De Gaulle eventually concluded that Algeria would have to be sacrificed for the greater glory of France.

In 1961 there was a generals' putsch that failed ignominiously. At its end, the battle-tested "green berets" of the proud First Foreign Legion Parachute Regiment, who had backed the coup, were trucked off to Zeralda for the disbanding of their disgraced unit. The watching pieds noirs wept; the Legionnaires roared out the words of Edith Piaf's plaintive song, "Je ne regrette rien. " The Algerian war has elements of epic grandeur and terror that cry out for a Thucydides, if not a Gibbon to describe them. British Historian Horne, whose previous books include three studies of Franco-German conflicts, may not be in that league, but it is difficult to imagine the story much better told. His lucid, compelling narrative is studded with snapshots of insight; Algiers without the boisterous pieds noirs, he reports, is today a surly, unsmiling city, "with the architecture of Cannes, but the atmosphere of Aberdeen." Horne's judgments are generous and fair, to winners and losers alike. Of the latter, undoubtedly the most pathetic were the thousands of harkis, Muslim soldiers who fought bravely, even desperately with the French armies. Unprotected by the 1962 Evian accords that ratified France's exit, they were disarmed by their comrades and turned over to the vengeful justice of the F.L.N. Some of the harkis were castrated and burned alive; others were forced to swallow their decorations and then buried in graves they had dug with their own hands. Moderation and reason, Horne grimly concludes, remain the first victims of revolutionary war.

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