Foreign News: No Time for Soldiers

Out of the French army's soul-destroying trial by fire in Algeria there has so far emerged one superlatively good combat commander, a 42-year-old ex-bank clerk from Toul named Marcel Bigeard (TIME. April 28). So notable is Colonel Bigeard's tactical genius and so successful his Spartan training methods that for three years, whenever French troops scored one of their rare clearcut victories over the Algerian rebels, French newspaper readers automatically looked for the name of his 3rd Colonial Paratroop Regiment. Last week, to their confusion, Frenchmen learned that there was no longer any place in Algeria for Marcel Bigeard.

At the root of Bigeard's troubles lay the publicity that his military triumphs had won for him. Had the tall, sinewy colonel been a graduate of St. Cyr (France's West Point), his superiors might have put up with him. But they begrudged such acclaim to a "jumped-up ranker" who perennially poked fun at "generals with middle-aged spread.''

Noncom's War. Last April, Bigeard's enemies succeeded in getting him assigned to command a special school designed to train junior officers in "revolutionary warfare." Unlike many other paratroop officers, he stood aloof from the army coup of last May, earned the further dislike of the balcony generals and colonels of Algiers by scornfully condemning their coup ("The army, instead of waging war, is indulging in politics"). And early this month, when Paris Presse's Reporter Jean Larteguy visited Bigeard's school in search of material for a series on "the sickness of the French army," the outspoken colonel gave him an earful. Dismissing General Raoul Salan, commander of French forces in Algeria, with the mocking nickname "Papa" Salan, old Noncom Bigeard hammered away at his favorite thesis: "The staff officers want to run a staff war when really this is a noncom's war . . . The colonels must march with their men, not circle overhead in helicopters while the poor wretches sweat it out in the hills. The rebel leader we are up against marches with his men, draws the same pay as they do eats the same rations."

Neither Left nor Right. This was the opportunity for which Bigeard's "political officers" of Algiers had been waiting. In righteous indignation General Salan sent an aide to demand that Bigeard apologize and issue a retraction. Bigeard refused, and Salan promptly sent him off on two months' compulsory leave, "pending reassignment in Metropolitan France."

Last week, leaving Algeria, Bigeard sang Auld Lang Syne with the officers and men of his old regiment, who had come down to see him off, then read a final statement: "Bigeard does not wish his departure to be exploited by political parties. He is neither of the right nor of the left. His expulsion from North Africa distresses him considerably, but he does not hate anyone for it. As a soldier he had only one desire—and that was to help rebuild a young, well-equipped, sportsmanlike army with a great ideal." To the swarms of reporters who greeted him in Paris, the exiled colonel simply reread the same statement. "Don't make me say anything else," he begged with a grin, "or you'll have me in the cooler."