‘And one arm,’ said Frank. ‘We’ll get you seen to.’
Frank left, and Shelley flipped through the book on his knee, print which anthologised the intellectual passion of his mind: when forced into a passive disposition through some false march, a guerrilla unit must try to get itself out — quickly. How this is done depends on the circumstances, but the ability to move away must always be given first consideration. Those who learn to retreat and not flee, move and not be seen, secretly join other groups to attack in force when the enemy is weak, retreat and not scatter after having defeated him so as to avoid giving battle to reinforcements which will nearly always outnumber you, disperse unseen after memorising complex arrangements to meet again, will become invincible and survive continual attacks. But to retreat and not flee you must be aware of the point you are heading for, otherwise you lay yourself open to defeat. Since there is no God in heaven to watch over you or to destroy you, you must take care of yourself and make cause together for the common good. In retreat know where you are retreating to, then the advantage lies with you and the initiative is but one step away. Make sure everyone is assigned clearly defined tasks, topographical limits of manoeuvre, times and places for re-assembly, foolproof means of communication. Rigidity, inertia, self-satisfaction, temptation to sloth, lead to passivity, panic, loss, either the living death of shame and slavery or complete annihilation. Those whose conditions of life you are trying to change will help you and suffer with you if you have a passionate and convincing answer to everything. You must be known to be everywhere by the enemy when he is not there or is weak; and nowhere when he is there and is strong. His weakness is your strength. His strength is your opportunity to weaken him and thereby grow strong yourself. If he is well supplied, then you must live off him and pull him down. Unless the strong can be made to fall, the world will stagnate, people will wither in the spirit and succumb entirely to the unchanging forces of nature. Evil is no mystifying concept. It is the inability to change for the good. It is being slothful among bad conditions of life, and preaching that the acceptance of present suffering makes the adventure of change unnecessary, thereby implying that suffering is sufficient adventure for the soul. One must prove that it is not — by making it possible for the weak to inherit the earth and become strong, and to use their newly-won strength in order to help those still weak in the world, which is no less than the fight for eternal justice, a uniting of mankind to give everyone equality and food and dignity that will enable them to become individuals in a universal sense. The tree must purify and burn, shed its leaves in the fires of insurrection. Trees catch fire, incendiarised by napalm. Those who look on it as an antidote to the upsurging ant-spilling poor of the world can brew it to their heart’s content, but wherever it falls another tree goes up in flames and spreads its light for the so-far unconvinced to witness, to stop wavering and join. Whoever makes it, distributes it, drops it, is destroying his own soul. The art of retreat is foreign to them, skill and cunning far away. Their intelligence is sealed off, the limits of their humanity inexorably narrow, and the seeds of their own annihilation gradually emerge from the vile fungus of reaction into which they sank when faced with newly-moving forces of the earth.
In order to mislead, decoy and confuse the enemy there should be continual use of stratagems, such as making a ploy in the east but attacking from the west, appearing now in the south and now in the north, hit-and-run attacks, and night actions in which the attackers, though weaker, must always gain because the ways of retreat are infinite and cover is perfect even over open ground. And yet such infallible-sounding advice is nothing until applied by the malleability of the mind and the courage of the human body. One may lecture and discuss, but the endurance of those who fire the gun and run in the night is what counts.
Frank had climbed up and out of their hiding-place, and the grey edges to the sky disappeared when he reached the highest point of the rock-wall. It was fiery blue, butane gas burning from the holy pivot of the sun. The flat of the valley was small in area, enclosed by jagged sides down which the helicopter hadn’t descended low enough to pick out their hiding-place. Machine-gun fire riveted the western end, as if a real fight were going on. It was rumoured that Boumedienne, the military brains behind the FLN, had come into the area to enliven it. Mokhtar might know what their part was to be, or he might not.
Nothing ever came of going into the desert to avoid your fellow-men. You go there to find them, find yourself, by seeking one to find many. Revolutions are initiated by those who, in order to inspire themselves, have to prove to the wretched of the earth that they, too, can be inspired. It is a search by those who want to prove to themselves and the world that they are not spiritually dead, but such effort changes everything. In their crude simplicity they may not see themselves as the makers of a new world, because such striving begins without philosophy, and there is no name in the beginning for what is to become a prime mover of people. Some may give it a name in order to control it, but this is necessary if the wretched of the earth are to become collectively strong and not be defeated by genocidal maniacs.
He lay watching for an hour before seeing a figure descend the opposite slope and walk directly across the dry riverbed towards him. In all the time there had been no shepherd nor nomad, not a friend nor enemy, and no animal life but the noise of insects and the flurry of an escaping scorpion, the sliding flight of a bird. The dry day seemed to eat up all life in its eternal oven. He sweated and stayed flat, binoculars trained, gun ready.
It was a young man wearing a blue silk shirt and khaki trousers, open jacket and brown laced shoes. He smiled, as if out for a walk on the edge of the town. Frank showed himself when he was twenty yards off, but the man, thin, of medium height, gold teeth flashing, walked on with no surprise. Leaflets flapped from his pockets. A row of pens and biros were spread like medals along his chest, and he lifted his hand in greeting. ‘I have information,’ he said in French.
He came sweating down the slope, and his jaundiced face was both freckled and rashed where smallpox had eaten over it. Frank picked a leaflet about to fall from his pocket, holding the gun level with the other hand towards the centre of his back. The man slid down over loose stones towards the waiting gun of Idris, who greeted him Moselm fashion and led the way into the hideout. Frank stayed on watch. A lizard warmed itself among the quiet rocks. Others came out as he lay still. One went over his wrist. A scorpion ran, and a horned viper curled itself up some feet away, as if after a long journey, and he stoned it to death. In the rocks he became a rock himself, because movement would betray as much as shade or colour. You must outdo a lizard in patience for a war like this. Who knows how it will turn out, in spite of such extremist patience? — ‘extremist’ being what you are labelled by those incapable of changing their ways of life, or of believing that people can change the world instead of the world changing them. He cannot expect his extremism not to be tempered later by those whom he helps to power. It is no use snivelling that a god has failed when a few of those who were weak turn into rats after you have made them strong. You move on to help others but do not lose faith. A god only fails you if you are less than a god. Strength in yourself takes time to grow. Tame the wild grit and put it to work. If you learn how to suffer, thank the earth and those who walk over it for teaching you.