Logic v. Scruples

For weeks Algeria's Minister Resident Robert Lacoste had been insisting he needed at least 100,000 more troops to restore order in Algeria. For weeks schoolmasterly Socialist Premier Guy Mollet put off the decision. He knew that France's military barrel was empty, and that reinforcements could be found only through the politically unpopular method of recalling reservists. And as a Socialist, he had campaigned on a liberal program of "peace in Algeria," based on concessions and negotiations. Last week Lacoste flew back to Paris and threatened to resign unless the troops were forthcoming. Faced with the hard logic of rebellion, Mollet sadly took leave of his Socialist scruples and agreed that 30,000 reservists would be called to the colors at once, another 70,000 in the next few months.

Six months ago, Mollet might have sympathized with the words written by the left-wing editor Claude Bourdet in his weekly L'Observateur: "One hundred thousand young Frenchmen are threatened with being thrown into the 'dirty war' of Algeria, with losing the best years of their lives, perhaps with being wounded, indeed killed, for a cause few among them approve." But now, in a panicky gesture that reflects the government's skittishness, Editor Bourdet was unceremoniously arrested by Mollet's government, accused of spreading "demoralization."

In Algeria, where the new troops will bring France's total to over 330,000, the French found hopeful signs in the fact that the fellaghas were fighting among themselves. The Algerian National Movement, directed by bearded Messali Hadj from his enforced exile on an island off the Brittany coast, has been making a major effort to recapture the influence it lost to the more militant National Liberation Front, whose forces are commanded by Mohammed ben Bella and supported from Cairo by Egypt's ambitious Premier Nasser. Twice French troops have come across troops of Arabs with their throats slit, apparently killed by rival fellaghas. Last week Liberation agents obligingly tipped off French police to a dynamite plot planned by Messali Hadj adherents in Orleansville. The French surprised the plotters, arrested 23.

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