War

I believe this is a story worth telling. The main proponent is dead and I tell it with the utmost respect for him.

One day, when I was thirteen or fourteen, I asked my father if he had ever killed anybody. My father was a paratrooper in the Algerian war. He said flippantly that he would answer that when I would be a bit older. I got very indignant and assured him I was old enough and mature enough to hear anything.

Surprisingly, that seemed to convince him. I think at that moment, he decided to answer as a legacy to his daughter, because he thought she had the right to know. He sat down at the table and seemed to retreat to an inward place. He started talking slowly, with long pauses. To the best of my recollection, this is what he said:

“One day, during the war, we arrived at this little bled that was known for helping the French. The Fellagha had been there first… They had massacred everybody… The men’s genitals were stuffed in their mouth, the women were disembowelled, the kids…”

At that point he started to cry. I had seen my father cry way more often than I would have wished but never ever like this. These were the slowest, deepest, most painful tears I have ever seen a man shed. I sat entranced.

“…I saw a five year-old with an axe in his back.”

I thought my father was a hard man. I would never have imagined that thirty years later, the image of a murdered child could still haunt him the way it obviously did.

“We had never seen anything like that....Not one of us wanted to let it go… We tracked those Fellagha for days and days and eventually, we got them…When we had them, we put them in a group… and then me and another guy, we took them for a walk, two by two…the path meandered out of the village and I remember this elder Arab man, sitting on the corner of his house, who saw up pass…we would go around the bend and out of sight and…”

He was crying so hard he could barely speak.

“…We had our machine guns…one burst each in the back…and the old man kept seeing us walk away with two and come back alone…”

His anguish was so deep it was unbearable to see.

“…the last one was begging me for his life…”Pitié missieur, pitié missieur” he was saying…”

He paused for a long time.

“…I saw the impact of the bullets in his back…”

And as my father cried, bent in two, I realized for the first time that the victims of war are not only the obvious innocent women and children. They are also the soldiers. My father saw things one should never have to see. My father did things that made it hard to live with himself for the rest of his life. It’s easy to feel sorry for the women and children. But that’s also what war does: it forces men to betray their own ideals and live with the pain for the rest of their lives.

My father had buried those memories in a deep, sealed volt. I am honoured that he was willing to resurrect them for my sake. When my son is old enough, I will tell him this story, as his grandfather’s legacy: That’s what war does to people; either kill them or scar them for life. And I’m not sure the survivors are the luckiest.