The Not So Secret Army
Algiers, once one of the most beautiful of cities, is becoming the ugliest. To the casual eye, there is no change. The square white houses still climb on each other's shoulders up to the wooded heights. In the Moslem quarter, the casbah's tunneled alleys are filled with turbaned men and neat-stepping donkeys burdened with panniers. Beneath the leafy shade of the Forum and along the Rue Michelet in the European district stroll some of the loveliest girls in the world, giggling and gossiping as if they were not a step away from a daily round of slaughter.
"They are born for pride and life," wrote Albert Camus of his fellow Algerians. He added somberly that in Algeria "everything is given to be taken away." Perhaps Camus was right. The Algerian cities last week were ravaged by death and disfiguration. The immediate cause, ironically enough, was the prospect that the grim, seven-year war in Algeria might end in a cease-fire now being negotiated between the French government and the Moslem F.L.N. rebels. According to Paris reports, an agreement is scheduled to be signed within a month--or possibly sooner. To most of Algeria's 1,000,000 Europeans, the prospect of an agreement meant only one thing: that Charles de Gaulle is handing over Algeria to its 9,000,000 infuriated Moslems, that the Europeans' homes, their livelihoods, perhaps their lives will be in the hands of the Moslems they have lorded it over for so long. To prevent this at all cost is the avowed aim of an ugly, desperate new force on the Algerian scene: the Secret Army Organization (Organisation de l'Armee Secrete), an underground band of Europeans using the F.L.N.'s own terrorist methods. Lead er of the S.A.O. is not a European of Algeria but a Frenchman born in France --ex-General Raoul Salan, 62, white-haired veteran of a dozen of France's wars, now under sentence of death for treason to the Republic. So is most of his staff, a collection of renegade army officers dreaming of old flags and vanished glories, and of hard-boiled European settlers determined to hold on to their possessions and privileges in Algeria. They would not hesitate to destroy the present France to build the new France of their muddled dreams.
New Madness. Salan and his men intend to keep Algeria French, and threaten a bloody uprising either before or after peace is concluded. To succeed in the long run, Salan must not only crush the powerful Moslem F.L.N. (Front de Liberation Nationale) but also bring down De Gaulle himself--tasks that seem far beyond his powers, particularly since his S.A.O. has not won any sizable support in Metropolitan France. But, even in failing, Salan can seriously endanger France by releasing mutiny in the embittered French army in Algeria, which would conceivably spread to barracks in Metropolitan France and trigger civil war between the right and left. Salan has already succeeded in jeopardizing France's role as a leading European power--and the Western alliance--by imperiling the Algerian settlement that France must have to survive.
The Algerian war used to be waged between the French army and Moslem rebels fighting for independence. It has cost the lives of 18,000 French soldiers and an estimated 360,000 Moslems. Two million more Moslems were herded by the French into vast "regroupment camps." The S.A.O. has turned this war into a three-way madness; most of the S.A.O.'s terror is directed against the Moslems, but they are also ready to strike at those Europeans who oppose Salan. The overwhelming majority goes along with him--either out of conviction or fear of reprisals. That support might well collapse if the French army in Algeria were to side decisively with De Gaulle. For the present, Algeria's Europeans, a melodramatic people, often say that their only choice is "the suitcase or the coffin"--to pack their bags and leave, or fight to the death.
City of God. At dusk, in the Algiers suburb of Le Ruisseau, Moslem patrons in the Cafe de l'Esperance looked up from their mint tea and coffee as Europeans sped by. From one car, machine-gun bullets swept the oilcloth tables, from the other a hand grenade was lobbed into the doorway. Five Moslem men and a child died instantly; 26 others sprawled wounded among the tumbled chairs. Revenge-seeking Moslem crowds raged into the streets, stoning passing cars. Three autos were halted, their European drivers dragged out and beaten to death.
The scenes of horror spread. In Oran, a legless Moslem veteran was pulled from his wheelchair and murdered, while near the city's imposing Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, European teen-agers gleefully urinated on the body of another slain Moslem. Near Algiers, a French jeweler was "executed" as a traitor by the S.A.O. because he planned "to flee the country when it was in danger." At industrial Bone, where 1,500 years ago St. Augustine preached the City of God, a bomb destroyed a Moslem tenement, killing ten women and children, and Europeans drove off rescuers with rocks and pistol shots.
Most European parents approve their sons' taking part in ratonnades--the hunting down of "rats," a French epithet for Moslems. Explained a father: "Our sons are all we have left to make us respected here. They are our only means of resistance." A Moslem says: "For each Moslem killed, we will kill a European." A European answers: "Since we are an eight-to-one minority in Algeria, eight Moslems will die for every one of us."
In less than ten months, Salan has caused the breakdown of government in Algeria and has substituted the S.A.O. as the effective authority. Salan's illegal transmitters repeatedly break into broadcasts of official Radio Algiers, particularly when De Gaulle speaks. S.A.O. orders for strikes, the hoarding of food, or the withdrawal of savings from banks are widely obeyed. Overnight, the S.A.O. can plaster Algiers with posters and proclamations. In the morning's mail, Europeans find mobilization orders, complete down to their actual army serial number, ordering service not in the army but in the S.A.O.
Revolution with Anisette. The S.A.O. phenomenon is in part explained by the special character of the 1,000,000 Europeans of Algeria. They hold French citizenship, but only one-quarter of them are of French origin. The rest are immigrants, or descendants of immigrants, from Spain, Italy, Greece, Malta, Corsica and other Mediterranean lands. Out of this melting pot has emerged a distinct race who call themselves pieds-noirs, or "black feet" (supposedly because most of their ancestors arrived without shoes), combining Spanish poise with Italian exuberance and Levantine guile. They make a cult of the body, delight in being alive in a land of sea and sunlight. They respect courage and brute force, but have no tradition of political loyalty. Pieds-noirs run after demagogues, but soon lose interest and go back to eying the. girls and sipping anisette at sidewalk cafes. Grumbled a French officer, "Even if they started a revolution, they'd take time out for anisette."
Salan has what other pied-noir leaders lacked--executive ability and discipline. Though he has the gift of phrasemaking ("The Mediterranean crosses France the way the Seine crosses Paris"), he is no mere rabble-rouser.
The Organization. At Salan's signal, pied-noir demonstrators rush from their homes shouting "De Gaulle to the gallows!" and hammer out on dishpans the deafening rhythm of "Al-ge-rie Fran-caise!" Salan's nod is sufficient to explode plastic bombs* under the bed of a Gaullist security chief in Oran or on the doorstep of a police inspector in Algiers. After each deed, Salan's men boast: "The S.A.O. strikes when it wants, how it wants, where it wants!"
The S.A.O. headquarters staff consists of Salan and 20 to 30 intimates. It has set up three Algerian departments, which, in turn, are subdivided into zones, sectors and subsectors. On paper there are some 77 subsectors--mostly in the cities, for the S.A.O. has little or no support in the Moslem countryside. This framework is fleshed out with men: first, 1,000 to 2,000 terrorists, gunmen and bomb specialists; next, up to 20,000 block leaders, spies, fund raisers and agitators. At bottom is a reserve of some 100,000 former militiamen who were disbanded in 1960 by De Gaulle as untrustworthy allies.
Chief of operations for Salan is Colonel Yves Godard, a paratrooper who escaped from a Nazi prison camp on his third try, fought as a Resistance leader in France, and served with distinction in Indo-China and Algeria. Since New Year's Day, when Godard's terror squads swung into coordinated action 347 people have been killed in Algeria and 624 wounded. In his most impressive exploit to date, Godard smashed the special 100-man anti-S.A.O. commando unit that was sent from Paris to go after Godard with his own terror tactics. Last October, Godard was picked up in an Algiers street for carrying false identity papers. At the central police station, he privately told a top cop: "I know you and you know me. I'm Colonel Godard. I appeal to you as a Frenchman and a patriot to let me go." The policeman did.
Triple Fence. Not only the police but practically all Europeans will hide or help S.A.O. terrorists. The few who are brought to trial are quickly freed by intimidated judges. The police cannot find Raoul Salan, but newsmen have no difficulty in arranging meetings; and three months ago, Salan--with hair dyed black and a new mustache--gave a TV interview to a U.S. broadcasting team without police interference. Salan's whereabouts are shrouded in mystery: on the same day he has been reported in Belgium and at Algiers' Otomatic cafe, an S.A.O. hangout. When he first went underground, he was hidden in the fertile Mitidja plain south of Algiers, whose well-to-do pied-noir farmers are pro-S.A.O.
Officials loyal to De Gaulle lead a more hunted life than do the S.A.O. terrorists. The prefect of Oran hides in an apartment on the top floor of a 15-story building that can be reached only by taking two separate elevators and passing through a complicated maze of locked and guarded doors. The prefect of Algiers and his staff dodge from one hiding place to another, frequently changing cars and routes. The top Gaullist administrators have abandoned Algiers and huddle together at Le Rocher Noir, 25 miles away, behind three rings of barbed wire, defended by armored cars. S.A.O. spies are everywhere. Last fall, the French government sent 200 more policemen to Algiers; shortly after they arrived, they found that the S.A.O. had a complete list of their names, as well as their photographs.
War of Nerves. The S.A.O.'s most conspicuous failure has been its attempt to transport the movement to France itself. It has made a lot of noise in Paris and the provinces with the explosion of 400 plastic bombs at carefully selected targets* and with the theft of guns and munitions from U.S. and French army camps--always well publicized by the press. But the attempts to blackmail funds from the rich and prominent have often backfired: Brigitte Bardot made the S.A.O. seem ridiculous by publishing their threatening letter. In France, the S.A.O. has an estimated 7,000 active members, among them about 500 plastiqueurs. This is enough for a limited war of nerves, but not enough to cause serious trouble--at least not yet. Interior Minister Roger Frey, one of De Gaulle's staunchest supporters in the government, has crippled the S.A.O. in France by infiltrating the S.A.O. apparatus, formally outlawing the organization, permitting his police to round up sympathizers as well as S.A.O. members.
A recent opinion poll shows that only 9% of the French sympathize with the S.A.O., 26% have no opinion or are undecided, 65% are against it. The S.A.O. label in France covers all sorts of right-wing crackpots, from Poujadist tradesmen to old men who were purged as Nazi collaborators at the liberation, to hard-breathing young militants of the neo-fascist Jeune Nation group. The working class is vehemently anti-S.A.O.
Nation's Spearhead. The philosophy behind the S.A.O. is a muddle of authoritarian, imperialist and populist ideas. S.A.O. propaganda is the sort often found in flights from reality--orotund, florid, declamatory, and so ecstatic as to approach hysteria. Communists delight in identifying themselves historically with Spartacus and his slave revolt; the S.A.O. officers see themselves as Roman legionnaires holding off the Red barbarians on the marches of empire and sending back semaphore messages warning Rome--or rather, Paris--to "beware of the anger of the Legions!" A typical S.A.O. manifesto recalls French soldiers fallen in colonial wars: "Our dreams are full of their death, and often at night we hear the desperate cries of the colonial peoples whom we were forced to abandon as our departing boats tore the last French flag from their gaze. The thought of our Tricolor, having led everywhere, having cast the shadow of French peace on the soil of Africa and Asia, gives us a heavy heart. But our dead, our battles, our faith forbid us the cowardice of weariness. The last battle is joined. We will win it."
Such incantations make it difficult to pin down the S.A.O.'s ideas. In literature, proclamations, and clandestine broadcasts, the fantastic S.A.O. platform shapes up like this: 1) all Algerians will remain French on French soil, and partition into separate Moslem and European states is unthinkable; 2) the Moslem population will get equal status--some time in the future; 3) in the new France, the S.A.O. will rip out the "Communist and Christian-Progressivist cancer that has undermined the state"; 4) the S.A.O. will eagerly join the French army as the "antiCommunist spearhead of the nation"; 5) having won France, the S.A.O. will then defend Western civilization through nationalism, which is "France's permanent vocation--the only means of fighting Communist expansion."
Leading political thinker of the S.A.O. is Jean-Jacques Susini, 28, a gifted pied-noir of Corsican descent. His ideas are frankly fascist ("Why don't we come out and say so?") but, publicly at least, they are devoid of racial overtones--largely because the 130,000 Jews of Algeria are pro Algerie Franc,aise, and because S.A.O. propaganda has to insist, preposterous though the claim is, that the majority of Moslems love the S.A.O. better than the F.L.N. Susini, the young doctrinaire, and Salan, the old politician-general, have become close friends. He listens intently to Susini's urgings that France needs a regime like Generalissimo Franco's in Spain, "only tougher." But Salan prefers the role of a mystical statesman, without making any public declaration on future policy. Salan operates in politics as he has in war--slowly, thoughtfully, his undoubted courage overlaid with caution.
The Mandarin. Without these qualities --and luck--Salan could not have survived the past 44 years. In that time he has fought against Germans, Lebanese, Nazis, Free French, Indo-Chinese Communists, Algerian Moslems and Frenchmen. The self-styled "centurion" was born in 1899 in the tiny Cevennes village of Roquecourbe but reared in the ancient sun-warmed city of Nimes in Provence. The Salan family was neither aristocratic nor military; his father Louis was a minor tax official and an ardent Socialist. His brother, Georges, two years younger than Raoul and now a physician in Nimes, remembers him as a bright student and as anything but austere. The brothers' friendly relations are not disturbed by politics, and even though Dr. Georges Salan, a Gaullist, was recently bombed by the Nimes branch of the S.A.O., he does not hold it against Raoul. "Until last April," he says, "He was as every French officer ought to be, that is, a straight military man without any political convictions."
In 1917, after only one year at St.-Cyr (France's West Point), Salan went to the front, was wounded in action, won the Croix de guerre. After the war, he was sent to the French mandate of Syria and Lebanon just in time to be plunged into fighting against the Djebel Druse tribesmen and be wounded again. Next, he served in French Indo-China as administrator of a corner of jungle near the borders of China, Burma and Laos. In the solitude of his post. Salan dabbled in Oriental philosophy and astrology, is said to have experimented with opium. These predilections won him the nickname of "the Mandarin." Like many French officers, he took an Indo-Chinese mistress, who bore him a son named Victor. Unlike most, he recognized the responsibilities of parenthood. Dr. Georges Salan says proudly: "Raoul brought his illegitimate son home with him instead of abandoning him to his mother." Lieut. Victor Salan, now 26, and like his father a graduate of St.-Cyr, is studying nuclear-war tactics at St.-Maixent military school.
Late Switch. Five months before the outbreak of World War II. Raoul Salan married Lucienne Bougnin, 28, daughter of a Vichy hotel owner. A cool, tenacious blonde who is called Babiche (little doe) because of her large, soft eyes. Lucienne has never wavered in her loyalty to her husband, is thought to have shaped his ideas and been a spur to his ambition.
Raoul Salan fought with "remarkable courage" (according to the official citation) against the Nazis in the six-week war of 1940. The armistice with the Germans confronted him with the first of many crises of conscience: Should he support the government of Vichy's Marshal Petain or switch to De Gaulle and the Allies? Stationed in Dakar, Salan waited four years before joining De Gaulle.
After the Normandy invasion, he commanded a brigade under General de Lattre de Tassigny on the Alsace front. Veterans of that winter campaign remember Salan as a competent and "correct" soldier: when touring outposts, Salan would remove his glove even in zero weather before shaking hands with a soldier.
After the war, as deputy to De Lattre, Salan went back to his old colonial paradise of Indo-China, which was now threatened by nationalist rebels under Communist Ho Chi Minh. The struggle against the Communists proved a nightmare that dragged on for years and pitted swift guerrillas against a ponderous French army fighting a classic war with tanks, planes and heavy artillery. It was like trying to swat mosquitoes with a sledge hammer.
When De Lattre died, in 1952, Salan succeeded him. He did no better and no worse than those before and after him. In 1954, covered with praise and new medals, Salan returned to Paris, and another ill-starred general took over the hopeless Indo-China war.
Paladins of the West. Salan thought deeply about the causes of the French defeat. Some veterans, like Colonel Jean Gardes (now chief of ordnance for the S.A.O.), held seminars to devise answers to Red tactics. Infused with his own brand of religious mysticism, Gardes would pose such questions as "Can one indulge in torture without sin?" His conclusion: "Yes, provided you are torturing a Communist or a Communist suspect."
Other officers blamed the defeat on political factions in France and on the slack ness of civil life. While they fought and died for the cause of antiCommunism, they felt they were being betrayed or ridiculed by Parisian intellectuals. They decided that all revolutions in Asia and Africa are essentially Communist, and that a hidden conspiracy lurks inside Western society which seeks to destroy it. Members of this conspiracy were by turns identified as liberals, Jews, left-wing Catholics, the newspapers, and (later) De Gaulle.
Most of all, the officers were sick of fighting rearguard actions that always ended in defeat. These wars, wrote one veteran of his fellow officers, "have cut them off from France, from their families, from their friends. They have the sense of having been made use of, duped, often betrayed by the forces of civilian politics. Their own consciences are clear because they feel themselves to be, I do not hesitate to say, the paladins of the Western world!" What all of them desperately wanted, anywhere, against anyone, was a transcendent victory.
"Republican General." Salan and another general handed the government a secret report on the difficulties of the Indo-China war. When it was ignored, Salan leaked it to the newspapers, only to find himself virulently attacked by right-wing politicians as a defeatist and 'passionately embraced by left-wing Socialists and radicals as a "republican general" who was against colonial wars.
Thus when Socialist Premier Guy Mollet took office in 1956, he turned to General Raoul Salan as the man best qualified to liquidate the Algerian war. The fearful pieds-noirs, convinced that the "republican general" meant abandonment and betrayal, prepared his execution. At dusk one evening, two months after his arrival in Algiers, Salan sat at his desk in the general-staff building. On a terrace only 50 yds. away, a pied-noir named Jean Castille took aim with a bazooka, closed his eyes to mutter a prayer, then opened them and fired. In that moment of prayer, Salan was called from his office--the rocket struck and killed another officer, who was passing the desk at the instant of firing. Two years ago in Spain, when both were fugitives from De Gaulle, Salan and Castille met and were reconciled.
End of the Fourth. Although in Algeria Salan cracked down hard on the F.L.N. and brought in the loth Paratroop Division from the field to counter its big terror campaign, the pieds-noirs continued to distrust him. In May of 1958, the chaotic Fourth Republic had its final convulsion. Its last Premier was Pierre Pflimlin, a man the pieds-noirs suspected of favoring a deal with the F.L.N. The European mob poured into the Forum, still jeered at Salan as the "republican general." But in private talks with the Europeans' "Committee of Public Safety," Salan announced that he was with them. He appeared on a balcony overlooking the impatient thousands in the Forum, and this time they listened as he shouted, "Algerians! I am one of you!" Salan concluded his speech with "Vive de Gaulle!" The crowd, like Salan, believed De Gaulle in favor of a French Algeria, and broke into pandemonium.
To Salan and his backers, De Gaulle proved a bitter disappointment. As De Gaulle more and more spoke in terms of self-determination for Algeria and even of a cease-fire with the F.L.N., the pieds-noirs saw one more betrayal. To their disgust, Salan was recalled to Paris by De Gaulle, who correctly gauged him as an obstacle to his policy. Salan was assigned to the purely honorary post of Inspector of Defense. He was without troops, without even an office.
In June 1960, having reached the required age limit, Salan retired from the army and was soon delivering flaming speeches, urging war veterans "to take justice into your own hands." In October 1960, Salan eluded Gaullist security guards assigned to watch him, slipped across the border to Spain. From a Madrid hotel room, he resumed his links with the conspirators in Algiers and with other anti-Gaullist exiles like Susini and the two Algerian leaders, the roughneck cafe owner Jo Ortiz and the flamboyant student leader Pierre Lagaillarde (both are now held by Franco in custody on the Canary Islands as a favor to De Gaulle). Every day, at noon, Salan phoned his wife Lucienne, living with their daughter Dominique in the Salan villa in Algiers.
Bloodless Collapse. At 1:30 a.m. on the morning of April 23, a plane touched down at Maison Blanche airport outside Algiers, and out stepped Raoul Salan. The city was already in the hands of Salan's fellow plotters: Generals Maurice Challe (who had succeeded Salan in Algeria), Andre Zeller and Edmond Jouhaud. Rushing to his villa in Hydra, Salan kissed his wife, put on his uniform and all 36 of his decorations, and hurried to Challe's headquarters on the Forum.
He found his fellow conspirators plunged into gloom. The only soldiers they could count on were the three paratroop regiments that had rebelled with them. The rest of the armed forces in Algeria were either in opposition or sitting on the fence. Challe, who had hoped to win by a bloodless coup d'etat, collapsed. Salan made a last effort to keep the Revolt of the Generals going--again from a balcony overlooking the Forum, where a supercharged Algiers mob was again screaming that it had been betrayed. But Salan's words could not be heard--someone had cut the microphone wires.
At dawn, a newsman asked Salan if he were going to surrender. Curtly the general answered, "No!" Weeping, Lucienne Salan tied a silk scarf about her husband's neck in a farewell gesture. Generals Challe and Zeller returned to France as prisoners; Generals Salan and Jouhaud, with some 100 deserters from the ist Foreign Legion Paratroop Regiment, disappeared into the underground.
A few weeks later, Salan emerged from silence as the chief of the Secret Army Organization.
For Their Lives. At first, Premier Benyoussef Benkhedda of the F.L.N. Provisional Government smugly announced that the S.A.O. was not an F.L.N. concern; it was an "affair between Frenchmen." But as the toll of Moslem deaths mounted in gunfights and ratonnades, Benkhedda reversed himself. This month, in an official communique, the F.L.N. declared war on the S.A.O. In Algiers, underground fighters stood guard at Moslem cafes and clubs; "self-defense units" were formed in the Moslem bidonvilles (shanty towns). Fellagha gunmen stopped skirmishing with the French-army patrols to step up attacks on S.A.O. terrorists.
But Salan's real enemy is not the F.L.N. It is President Charles de Gaulle. Both, in their own way, are playing for their lives. Salan has already been condemned to death in absentia for his part in the Revolt of the Generals. De Gaulle has already escaped one S.A.O. assassination attempt. When it failed, he is reported to have remarked with a trace of regret, "Une belle sortie [a nice exit]." At 71, what De Gaulle dreads more than loss of life is loss of reputation, a downgrading of his place in history.
Whether or not De Gaulle originally wanted the terrible burden of settling the Algeria problem, 45 million Frenchmen have delegated it to him. Most Frenchmen, enjoying unprecedented prosperity, are on a delayed spree of buying everything from refrigerators to ski trips, and are simply not in the mood to worry about politics. Alone in his responsibility for Algeria, De Gaulle operates from a precariously narrow ledge. From far left to far right, De Gaulle is under attack by France's politicians. Members of his own government are suspected of opposing his Algerian solution, especially Premier Michel Debre, who on the record has favored a tougher line than De Gaulle in opposing the F.L.N. and supports a French Algeria. With the French people, De Gaulle's popularity may have somewhat diminished, but he still has a powerful hold on them. He and they are locked in a special political embrace: they need him because they know that no one else stands a chance of securing an Algerian settlement; he needs them because he knows that the support of the nation, over the heads of the politicians, over the heads of dissident or doubting generals, enables him to act for France.
Last week strong hints that an Algerian settlement was near came from Louis Joxe. 60, Minister of Algerian Affairs, an unconditional Gaullist, who is in charge of the delicate treaty dealings with the Moslem F.L.N. Back from a quick visit to Algeria. Joxe pointed out that the bloodletting in the cities was obscuring the peace and quiet of the populous countryside. He seemed to hint that a tacit cease-fire already existed between the French army and the F.L.N. to enable the Gaullist government to deal with Salan. The F.L.N. was reported ready to 1 ) recognize the "quasi-permanent'' nature of several French military bases in Algeria, 2) concede that Algeria's economic future is linked to France and that the departure of the entire European population would be catastrophic, and 3) accept that the presence of some French armed forces in Algeria, even after the ceasefire, will contribute to peace.
Informal Charges. With a settlement near, the S.A.O. faces a set of difficult alternatives. An immediate mass uprising might actually work to De Gaulle's advantage by giving him the chance to invoke martial law in Algeria--which he has so far hesitated to do--and thus choke off the rebellion by drafting men into the army, requisitioning property, arresting and interning suspects without formal charges. On the other hand, the uprising could also come too late; Salan cannot possibly hope to prevail against the F.L.N. without at least partial army support, and there are signs that the longer his terrorists go on murdering Gaullist officers, the greater becomes the disgust of the French army.
Both Salan and De Gaulle are gambling on the response of the army to an uprising. Salan is convinced that the soldiers will not open fire on Algeria's Europeans, and that a sizable body of troops will actually join him. De Gaulle believes that the majority of the army will support the government because 1) it recognizes that Algerie franc,aise is dead, and 2) it does not wish to go against the will of the French nation, which is overwhelmingly for an Algerian settlement. De Gaulle guesses that when the French-F.L.N. treaty is signed, the S.A.O. might seize Algiers, Oran, and possibly Bone. He is betting that the army will then obey his orders to cordon off the S.A.O. rebel cities and choke them into submission.
Man on Horseback. The French army of 1,000,000 men (about half in Algeria) and of venerable traditions has developed a schizoid personality. It is the only army in the world that has been fighting continuously for the past 22 years--World War II, Lebanon. Syria. Indo-China, Madagascar, Tunisia, Morocco, Suez. Algeria --and has either lost each war or felt cheated of complete victory. With a long record of involvement in politics, the French army played a part in the overthrow of each of the republics preceding De Gaulle's Fifth--except for the Third, which was destroyed not by the French but by Hitler's army.
It has also a history of producing men on horseback, from Napoleon Bonaparte to Napoleon III to the "brav' general" Georges Boulanger, who failed to seize power only through a crucial loss of nerve in 1889. The first elected President of the Third Republic was a soldier, Marshal MacMahon; the last act of the Third Republic was to surrender its powers to another soldier, Marshal Petain. The rebirth of France began when General de Gaulle disobeyed the Petain government, which had made peace with the Nazis, and launched the Free French movement.
But no matter how volatile the army may be politically, the one thing that fills it with horror is the prospect of fighting within itself. Last week the army seemed still ready to take orders from De Gaulle--provided he gave his orders with care. That De Gaulle sharply appreciates the thinness of the balance is obvious in his reluctance to appeal for support in this crisis to any parties of the left. To a visitor at Elysee Palace, De Gaulle said bluntly: "The left without the Communists is zero. The left with the Communists is unacceptable to the army."
Wailing Siren. At week's end Algeria still seemed a smiling white city lying between a blue sea and distant snowcapped mountains. In the nightclubs along the Rue Michelet, couples danced until the midnight curfew, although traveling strippers have taken Algeria off their itineraries. At a movie house on the Rue d'lsly. Moslems and Europeans queued up to see Spartacus; the line moved slowly not because of a lack of seats, but because each moviegoer was frisked for gun, knife or bomb before admittance. At sidewalk cafes, no one turned at the familiar wailing siren of an ambulance racing to Babel-Oued or Belcourt or Climat de France, where someone--European or Moslem--lay wounded or dead.
In their crowded tenements, Moslems listened dourly to a clandestine S.A.O. broadcast. The S.A.O. announcer told them: "You must understand we are in this country and we will never leave." And then he added: "Moslems, we are both of us in the same boat. The storm is raging. We will all be saved or we will all perish together.''
*The plastic bomb, developed during World War II, has become the trademark of the S.A.O. It is a puttylike substance made by mixing two explosives, Hexogen (known as R.D.X. in the U.S.) and TNT, into a rubber compound base, and can be exploded either electrically or by fuse. Terrorists prefer the plastic bomb for two reasons: it is so stable that it can be cut into strips and easily transported; at the site marked for the blast, it is adhesive enough to stick to almost any surface -- under a window ledge, on a mailbox, or around a fence or lamppost.
*Among the intended victims so far: eight Cabinet ministers, 35 legislators, about 30 mayors, an equal number of journalists, the rest assorted officials, politicians and anti-S.A.O. intellectuals, including Jean-Paul Sartre (twice), Francois Mauriac, Francoise Sagan. Because, at this stage, the S.A.O. wants to intimidate Frenchmen, not infuriate them, the bombs are usually exploded at times and places when they are not likely to kill. So far, only two have died in S.A.O. bombings in France.
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