Chapter 2
MAN WITH A FLAG
After D’Arlan had finished transmitting the message to Lieutenant Juin, he first went to his quarters, but he was barely there before he was summoned by the colonel. The orderly said it was urgent. D’Arlan clapped his kepi onto his head and hurried back to Colonel Le Clerq’s office. When he entered, the old man was pacing up and down in his small office like a brooding ostrich. His head was thrust far forward, his hands clasped behind his back.
“Just as I expected!” bellowed Le Clerq as D’Arlan appeared in the doorway. “Exactly as I expected! I think that lot in Algiers are becoming childish, or else they’re going stark raving mad. General Renaud,” he said with the utmost contempt. “He couldn’t command a team of road workers, let alone be head of the high command for a region like this!”
“What is the trouble, mon Colonel?” asked D’Arlan cautiously. “Serious trouble?” “Can’t you guess? They’ve landed the whole problem in our lap again. We just have to manage again. We just have to fend for ourselves again. Cannot provide assistance. We must try to negotiate with the Arabs. We must try to get hold of the Sabre of Doetra…”
“When did you hear this?”
“Just now. There lies the message. Read it yourself.”
Le Clerq went to stand wide-legged before the window and looked outside, as he always did when he was at his wits’ end in a crisis.
D’Arlan stood reading the message, and then he slowly looked up at the colonel.
“An interesting order you’ve received here,” D’Arlan said lightly, for it felt to him that Le Clerq hadn’t grasped this part of the message at all.
The colonel swung around from the window. “What do you mean? An order?”
“Apparently, you were so angry you didn’t notice it, mon Colonel.”
“That wouldn’t surprise me,” the old man snorted.
“General Renaud orders here that Madame Bonnet be delivered to Algiers for execution as soon as possible.” It looked as if Le Clerq would explode. He walked around the desk, swinging his arms like windmill sails. When he finally calmed down, he glared at D’Arlan as if the captain were responsible for this impossible order from the high command in Algiers.
“Is this Renaud completely out of his mind? How does he think I am supposed to extract that witch from among tens of thousands of Arabs? Should I ask them for a ceasefire so I can quickly go and arrest the madame? I have never seen such insanity in my life! To listen to them, you’d swear every last Arab was hobbled. Send a message through immediately and tell Renaud to go jump in the lake. Tell him I am not one of those superhuman beings one sees in picture books. Tell him if he wants the madame, he must come and fetch her himself.”
D’Arlan smiled inwardly at this slender, short Frenchman. In his day, he had been one of the most brilliant commanders in the entire French army, but nowadays somewhat dulled by the constant service in this hot hell of the Sahara.
D’Arlan knew him so well that he knew exactly what to do when Colonel Le Clerq’s storm had broken. Therefore, he went to the drawer, poured a glass of cognac, and gave it to Le Clerq. He swallowed it in one gulp.
“What should I tell Algiers?” asked D’Arlan very softly, almost intimately, as if speaking not to his colonel, but rather to a friend.
Le Clerq threw his hands up helplessly. It seemed as if all the fury
