A Heady Scent

Standing on a platform alongside the 13th century cathedral of Bourges, the towering, droop-shouldered figure called out the single word, "Algeria!" Then he paused and peered down at the hundreds gathered in the square before him. The crowd had come to cheer Charles de Gaulle's progress on his automobile pilgrimage to Orleans to celebrate the 530th anniversary of the liberation of that city from the English by Joan of Arc.*

Not only the medieval backdrop gave the scene a curiously old-fashioned air. A scrupulous republican, Charles de Gaulle nonetheless seeks to recall a past regal grandeur (last week his photograph, in the evening dress uniform of an armored-forces general, was ordered displayed in every public building in France). And in the same grand manner, De Gaulle at Bourges took up the national nightmare that has haunted Frenchmen for 4 1/2 bloody years:

"I say to Bourges, without of course fixing any date, without making any promises, without vaunting any presumptuousness, yet in the full knowledge of the facts, that the day is in sight when Algeria will be pacified. This will come thanks to a general effort by all those who live there to succeed in a profound transformation of this country in order that all its sons--I say all its sons--can determine their fate and the fate of the lands they inhabit."

Twin Waves. De Gaulle's pronouncement--the most optimistic he has allowed himself--sent a wave of applause through his audience, a wave of astonishment through professional politicians. In Algiers last week the French army boasted that the rebels had suffered an average of 900 casualties a week in March and April --a claim that scarcely suggested that the Algerian fighting was dwindling. A rebel spokesman, far from denying the French claim, declared that the rebels were in fact losing 500 men a day, but that, despite this, their army had grown to 120,000 men.

And only three days before De Gaulle spoke in Bourges, one of the worst riots since the Algerian war began broke out in Constantine, Algeria's third largest city. Enraged by a rebel attack outside town on two young Europeans and their teenage dates--one girl was kidnaped, the other three youngsters murdered--a mob of settlers surged through Constantine's streets wrecking Moslem shops, beating up such hapless Moslem citizens as fell into their hands, and shouting: "De Gaulle to the gallows!" Next day Moslem youths counterattacked in the streets, wielding knives, razors and steel-tipped clubs against Constantine's Europeans.

Candid Admission. Nonetheless, in his oblique fashion, Charles de Gaulle seemed to be indicating that he knew something that everyone else had missed. A heady scent of behind-the-scenes bargaining was in the air. Modifying the rebels' previous insistence that any negotiations must be held in neutral territory, Ferhat Abbas, "Prime Minister" of the Algerian rebel government, announced that he would be willing to go to Paris to talk with De Gaulle after preliminary contacts in a neutral country.

Added Abbas candidly: "There is no military solution to the Algerian problem." In Paris the leftist weekly L'Express flatly reported that the De Gaulle government has been in touch with the rebels, using Indian and Lebanese diplomats as intermediaries.

*As a sign that bygones were bygones, De Gaulle had invited along the popular British Ambassador to France, Sir Gladwyn Jebb.

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