Acts of Desperation

For young French soldiers fighting in Algeria, "to kill becomes a normal game," and conventional rules of warfare are soon forgotten. So testified 35 troubled French army officers last week. They were soldiers of an unusual sort--Roman Catholic priests who as army reservists called to active duty are serving in Algeria not as chaplains but as line officers.

As men loyal to the army, but also disturbed by Christian conscience, they had intended their joint letter for the private reading of their bishops; but their complaint turned up in the liberal French Catholic magazine Temoignage Chretien (Christian Witness). "Arbitrary arrests and detentions are numerous," they wrote. "Interrogations are conducted only too normally by methods that we must call torture. Summary executions of prisoners, civilian and military . . . are not exceptional. Finally, it is not unusual during operations for the wounded to be finished off."

Red Hand. Five years ago such charges might have set off a national wave of self-examination in France. But now fatigue, frustration, and a conviction that the enemy himself is often more barbaric have resigned Frenchmen to barbarism in Algeria. In Algiers last week a Moslem who accidentally exploded a hand grenade, injuring no one but himself, was beaten to death by a street crowd; so, for good measure, was his companion. In West Germany, in an odd echo of the Algerian troubles, the public prosecutor of Frankfurt charged that a French underground organization called "the Red Hand" had murdered five Swiss and German citizens in a clandestine war against Central European businessmen engaged in selling arms to Algeria's rebel F.L.N.

The Algerian rebels themselves, getting nowhere in Algeria, are reviving their campaign of terrorism in France itself. In the past three weeks Moslem terrorists have been machine-gunning cafes and police stations in Paris, mostly directing their attacks on fellow Algerians. Twelve have been killed, among them an 18-year-old English chorus girl accidentally shot down on her way to work at the Folies-Bergere.

Stalemate. Behind much of the barbarism lies the ever-increasing desperation of both sides. Almost a year after Charles de Gaulle's return to power, a political solution in Algeria seems as far away as ever. In an effort to break the rebel hold over Algeria's Moslems, the French army has resettled more than a million of them in centralized, heavily guarded villages--a practice that Paul Delouvrier, De Gaulle's Delegate General in Algeria, last week ordered discontinued because "it might cause deterioration of the economic and psychological climate." But the casualties continue; there were some 4,000 on both sides last month.

This week more than 1,000 Algerian communities began new municipal elections, the third balloting since De Gaulle came to power. Algeria's Moslem population was showing only sullen indifference to French efforts to whip up campaign excitement. And in a rural constabulary, a French army officer admitted that he was not trying to recruit Moslem candidates, because "a few days later those men would be dead. I will not sign their death warrant."

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