Days in Kabylie
Mattei, G. M.
In I956 the author was recalled to service in the French army, assigned to Algeria from June to December. Below we print a very small excerpt from his diary of "Days in Kabylie" The Mountain...
...I was ashamed, but I wanted at least this one to get away, since I could warn him...
...At quarter past 8, there's a burst of machine gun fire over the huts...
...Don't you know that...
...To him, I was also a torturer...
...I left in silence...
...I was afraid he might recognize my voice...
...Cruel ambushes had prepared the ground for that psychology of hate which I saw develop in the course of those six months...
...we already know all about the village of T...
...If the children are late, the sentry will shoot on the roof tiles...
...IT WAS some time [in August] that I went as a volunteer on a local operation, in a village near our post...
...Old men whose pride had been wounded said to me with irony, "Do you think I've got any money...
...That same day I also saw a scene which made me laugh in spite of myself, because it made a proud noncom lose a lot of his dignity...
...The events which follow took place between the months of June and December, 1956...
...Schools open today...
...If I had some money I'd go back to Marseille to work at the SaintLouis sugar...
...I had told him to talk...
...He had a wife and four children, and had been a prisoner of the Germans...
...But not even tomorrow...
...It's not worth it, playing the hero...
...Finally the absurdity of the situation (he was going to be tortured to no purpose, just to hear the same thing once more) made me say to him softly, "Listen, in a little while the chief is going to question you...
...One of my comrades kept the men of the village in order, while farther on another fellow-soldier tried in vain to keep the women quiet...
...They must uphold the respect for the hierarchy, encourage the competition for promotions (a "chief corporal" received 80,000 francs a month, a corporal 18,000 francs, a private 10,850 francs, after their original service time of 18 months...
...He was scared, he said how strange life was, he could have easily taken another road and not have been picked up, but he wanted to sell his figs...
...The children come sadly, they don't understand...
...I saw a shadow crumpled into an old easy chair, moaning with a rope around his neck, and his wrists tied...
...The men called back to active duty were not well liked in North Africa...
...I counted out the sums of money, since a large sum of money is suspicious...
...When my group arrived, there existed a wide gap between us and those young soldiers whom fear, prej...
...I was assigned to the collection of cards of identity...
...Somewhere down at the foot of the Djurjura, near the village of A.M., the Kabyle children are called to school by the sound of machine guns: At 8 o'clock, the children aren't there yet...
...I knew he had been chosen, he would be "questioned" that night...
...udice, a desire for vengeance and the legend of the "tough soldier," all encouraged by Captain B., had changed into specialists at war...
...I was put in charge of a Kabyle who had been picked out as a suspect in this village, a native of the village of T., against which we were at that time preparing an operation, because it habitually harbored one of the sections of Ouamrame...
...The battalion to which I belonged was principally composed of young draftees, led by regular army officers and non-commissioned officers who had all had a year in North Africa...
...While he was shouting at a woman to be quiet, she took one of her breasts from the infant she was nursing, and pressed it so that a burst of warm milk hit our humiliated non-com straight in the face...
...Mokram was tortured for 8 days...
...There I was, with the pockets of my combat uniform full of the papers of all the men in the village...
...Another mistake of the government which used them...
...anyone we questioned could tell us no more than we knew already...
...I felt over dirty bodies, opened wallets and discovered their little secrets: letters from their children, certificates of good behaviour, awards of medals...
...So I told him, haltingly, with a guilty conscience, that we were the fall guys, he and I, that he must think about himself, his wife, and his children who were waiting for him...
...he talked to me about the "Liberation...
...I was getting solft, I tried to explain to him that it was all set up, that we were both prisoners, and that the only really important thing for him was to see that his four kids could eat, and tomorrow...
...Above all, the "recalled" soldier was the unwelcome influence, capable of making those impressionable youths, whom their officers had well in hand, come out of their torpor...
...We were stop-gaps, and suspect...
...The man was walking beside me...
...Below we print a very small excerpt from his diary of "Days in Kabylie" The Mountain Region of Algeria], originally published in the periodical Temps Modernes...
...One evening when I was substituting for someone on duty, I went into the torture room...
...The men "recalled" were, for them, sad sacks, cowards, screwballs...
...You can only know hate without understanding it...
...In I956 the author was recalled to service in the French army, assigned to Algeria from June to December...
...My company had at the time suffered the most, three dead and some twenty wounded...
...Those twenty-year old French boys had settled themselves into war: work details, missions, searches, "gestapism," building fortifications, getting drunk, and medals for the most deserving...
...I had talked to that man, he had talked to me...
...We had not yet realized into what a melting pot of ideas we had been thrown...
...We already had quite a bit of information on it and it was practically impossible to get more...
...A bad reputation had preceded us, and all the officers remembered the events of May, 1956, when hundreds of youths had withstood a regular siege by the riot-police, the C.R.S., in a barracks in the North of France...
...I was disgusted with myself...
...I won't go into the way the village was searched, how the women, children and old people were pushed with shouts and insults towards the "djemma...
...Suffering and dying...
...I was a cop...
Vol. 5 • September 1958 • No. 4
