In Algeria's civil war, now in its third
inconclusive year, there are no front lines, no territorial
objectives, no general rules to restrain belligerents—only a war of
repression and attrition. Result: a sentiment d'inquietude spreading
through France, based on the growing realization that while the
Algerian struggle is one the French cannot afford to lose, it is also
probably one they cannot win. Also spreading is the feeling that the
380,000-man French army in Algeria, reduced to waging a gloryless
police action, is using cruel and cynical methods in totting up its
weekly bag of rebels killed.* Pierre-Henri Simon, a left-wing Roman Catholic intellectual, recently
stirred Paris with a controversial book on Algeria, Contre la Torture.
Simon reproduces affidavits by torture victims, statements by French
priests and extracts of journals of French army and police officers,
and he quotes a letter from a soldier: “On the afternoon of Dec. 3 some
gendarmes invited some soldiers to watch tortures of two Arabs arrested
the night before. The first torture consisted in suspending the two
men, entirely nude, by the feet, hands tied behind their backs, and
plunging their heads into a pail of water for long periods to make them
talk. The second torture consisted in suspending them, their hands tied
to their feet behind their backs, this time with their heads up, then
placing beneath them a trestle [sawhorse], and swinging them with fist
blows so that their sexual organs banged against the sharp crossbar of
the trestle.” Simon reports that one prominent Arab swore that his interrogation by a
French army major and two captains lasted 57 hours, during which he was
tortured by electrodes attached to his fingers, ears and testicles,
later by immersion in water and beating with a riding crop. Concludes
angry Author Simon: “We, who have fought against the racist monstrosity
. . . are today conquered by Hitler, if our nation has adopted his
ideas and methods.” Avoiding Excesses. Simon's book drew a supporting protest from Nobel
Prize-winning Roman Catholic Novelist Fran-gois Mauriac, followed by a
solemn declaration signed by all French Catholic cardinals and
archbishops warning “all those whose mission it is to protect persons
and things” that “in the present crisis” they “have the obligation to
respect human dignity and rigorously to avoid all excesses contrary to
the law of nature and the law of God.” A more sweeping indictment of the French army's unenviable position is
that of a reserve officer who served six months in Algeria, won the
Croix Militaire for the Algerian campaign: Lieut. Jean-Jacques
Servan-Schreiber, starbright editor of the weekly L'Express.
Servan-Schreiber tells, in dramatic narrative form , of a French patrol which is
ordered to get the killers of a pro-French Arab, finds a truck with
five Arabs in it, and kills all five on suspicion. That night in the
officers' mess, Captain Julienne suggests:
“It is perhaps bad practice to kill innocent men.”
