Goats, Gazelles & Guerrillas

Out of the southern Algerian garrison town of Colomb-Bechar one morning last week crept a strange train on an expensive errand. Its locomotive, heavily armored, was preceded by six freight cars loaded with sandbags. Its average speed on its way to Ain-Sefra, another garrison town 170 miles to the northeast, was a hesitant 13 m.p.h. Whenever it reached a bridge, invariably a bridge thrown up temporarily by French Army engineers--it slowed down to a walk.

Slow and unprepossessing as it was, the Colomb-Bechar-Ain-Sefra Express was a valiant symbol of what Frenchmen like to call "the French presence" in Algeria. Conceived by Napoleon III and completed under the supervision of Marshal Louis Lyautey, greatest of France's North African proconsuls, the Colomb-Bechar-Ain-Sefra line is the southernmost portion of a railroad that runs all the way from the Mediterranean port of Oran to the rim of the Sahara.

Nine months ago Algeria's rebels set out to destroy this iron limb of French imperialism. Basing themselves in newly independent Morocco--at some points the Colomb-Bechar line runs within a mile and a half of Moroccan territory --the guerrillas slipped into Algeria by night, laying mines, blowing up bridges and ripping up track. By last week they had blown up all of the line's 116 permanent bridges, destroyed 40 freight cars and six electric engines.

Under this bombardment, the train's former passengers have taken to flying, and the coal once carried to Oran from the mines of Colomb-Bechar is now diverted by way of Morocco. But for the prestige-conscious French, the train must chuff on. Once a week it sets forth from Colomb-Bechar, but only after two regiments of Foreign Legionnaires and Senegalese have inspected every inch of the line.

Since the rebels are capable of ripping up a mile or more of track in a single night, the train sometimes has to turn back despite all precautions. And so far, French attempts to ambush the guerrillas a-t work have been generally unsuccessful. Disappointing, too, is the radar system which the French set up to catch the guerrillas' movements. "The echo is fine against the rebels," said a French officer last week. "Unfortunately, it works just as well against goats and gazelles."

The rebel force harrying the Colomb-Bechar Express is only one of a number of Algerian guerrilla bands which have long operated in and out of neighboring Morocco and Tunisia. Last week on Algeria's eastern border, a patrol of the French Army's 26th Motorized Infantry Regiment, ambushed by a small band of Algerian guerrillas, chased its attackers 300 yards inside Tunisia. When Tunisian troops tried to intervene, the French killed six Tunisians as well as six Algerians. In response to an indignant protest from the Tunisian government, French Commander in Chief in Algeria, General Raoul Salan (who once commanded the troops that lost Indo-China), coldly announced that henceforth his troops would exercise "the lawful right" of hot pursuit.

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