Algeria: The Not So Secret Army

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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 Algérie Française, 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