Lieutenant in Algeria

Olivier Dubos was no more eager than any other young French reservist to be called back to the service and sent to Algeria. A towering, 35-year-old reserve lieutenant who held the Croix de guerre for World War II gallantry, Lieut. Dubos was bitterly resentful a year and a half ago when his call-up separated him from his wife, his three children, and a well-paid bank job in Paris. But the massacre of 302 Moslem villagers by the rebel Front de Liberation Nationale in the isolated hamlet of Kasba Mechta (TIME, June 10, 1957) changed his mind. As the first French officer to arrive at Kasba Mechta after the massacre, Olivier Dubos was so deeply shocked by what he saw that he wrote his family: "I must stick it out here. We have to set up a post here if we want the surviving women and children to stay. Otherwise they will starve."

Before long, among the Moslems of Kasba Mechta who had paid for their failure to help the rebels, Olivier Dubos was a familiar figure. He acted as welfare officer, schoolteacher and doctor rolled into one. made a point of showing up in remote villages on market days, alone and unarmed. "In the cause of pacification we have got to take risks." he said.

When things calmed down at Kasba Mechta, Dubos sought new risks. Signing up for an additional year's service, he voluntarily took command of a small forest encampment at El Hourane, a job that no one else wanted because the duty was both dull and dangerous. Early in February this year, the risks caught up with him. Algerian rebels, disguised in the Spahi uniform of Dubos' troopers, overran the El Hourane post, carried Olivier Dubos and 17 of his men into captivity in the Kabylia mountains.

At first the letters that Dubos wrote his family--which rebel agents smuggled into the French mails--were cheerful, and expressed the hope that the F.L.N. would ultimately exchange him for one of its own men held by the French. But then came a letter that hinted at something else. "As a Christian," wrote Dubos. "I am ready for anything fate may bring."

Last week, French army headquarters in Algiers belatedly announced that six weeks ago one of its patrols had stumbled upon the bullet-ridden body of Olivier Dubos. In Paris bitter newspaper articles charged that Dubos had been killed because he was "too much loved in Moslem homes." But in a final, smuggled letter to Dubos' parents. "Colonel" Amirouche, commander of the F.L.N.'s Third Military District, offered a rationalization as old, and as barren, as the hills. Wrote Amirouche: "Please believe that the execution is not a gesture of vengeance or of sterile rage, but has been forced on us by the inhuman treatment meted out by your army toward our men captured on the field of battle."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.