Ordeal by Torture

THE QUESTION (123 pp.)--Henri Alleg --Braziller ($2.95).

"J.--, smiling all the time, dangled the clasps at the end of the electrodes before my eyes. These were little shining steel clips, elongated and toothed, what telephone engineers call 'crocodile' clips. He attached one of them to the lobe of my right ear and the other to a finger on the same side. Suddenly, I leapt in my bonds and shouted with all my might. C-- had just sent the first electric charge through my body. A flash of lightning exploded next to my ear and I felt my heart racing. I struggled, screaming, and stiffened myself until the straps cut into my flesh . . . Rhythmically, C-- repeated a single question, hammering out the syllables: 'Where have you been hiding?' "

Though it summons up the fictional nightmares of a Kafka or a Koestler, this episode is a matter of cold-sweat fact. It was the first session in an ordeal by torture undergone by French Communist Journalist Henri Alleg, 37, at an "interrogation" center at El Biar, in suburban Algiers, during June and July 1957. His torturers: paratroopers of the French army's 10th Division--later rebels against the Republic--to whom the use of torture has apparently come to be regarded as a "necessary" weapon against the Algerian nationalists.

"Shame to the Cause." Before his arrest, without a warrant, Alleg had been hiding out for months to escape internment after the banning of Alger Republicain, the Communist daily that he edited 1950-55. He wrote The Question four months after he was tortured, managed to smuggle it out of the civil prison in Algiers where he is still held on the charge of "endangering the safety of the State."

When it appeared in France early this year, the book was a runaway bestseller (65,000 copies sold), generating shock waves of conscience. It was banned within weeks. Four leading men of letters--Andre Malraux, Roger Martin du Gard, Franc,ois Mauriac, Jean-Paul Sartre--buried their political differences to dispatch a "solemn petition" to France's President Rene Coty asking the government to lift the ban on The Question and "condemn unequivocally the use of torture, which brings shame to the cause that it supposedly serves." Still illegal, sales of The Question have since soared over the 100,000 mark.

Written with spare and simple candor, the book is much more than a scalding footnote to fever-hot headlines. The Question does not stop with the Algerian question but goes on to ask: What does it mean to be a human being? It tells of the shame and glory of man. At the outset, "Alleg's inquisitors were as cocksure in their cynicism as in their brutality. They believed that just as every man is said to have his price, so every man has his breaking point. "You're going to talk! Everybody talks here!" they told him. With obscene thoroughness, they used not only electric shocks but the torturer's ancient weapons of fire and water, fists and boots, terror and thirst. As the first day of torment faded into night, Alleg crawled onto the mattress on the stone floor of his cell, only to find that it was filled with barbed wire.

One Man's Will. As his tortures grew more fierce, his courage and will to stay silent grew fiercer still. He was helped by the growing numbness to pain of a body already half dead. Eventually, the torturers flagged, and Alleg knew that he was winning: "I suddenly felt proud and happy not to have given way. I was convinced that I could still hold out . . . that I would not help them in their job of killing me."

The painful identification that the reader feels with Alleg cannot blot out the nagging realization that, as a Communist, Alleg himself has been a consenting party to the same tortures and to a degradation of man that, for its wholesale scale, dwarfs the war-begotten atrocities of El Biar. But nothing can justify the use of torture by any nation passing as civilized. Henri Alleg's ordeal is a parable that mirrors the failure of France's Algerian policy. Just as Whitman found a blade of grass sufficient to stagger an army of atheists, so one man's will to be fully and freely a man has, through the ages, risen to rout the massed legions of tyranny.

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