binding him to serve for a period of five years in the most famous regiment of any army in the world.
At three o’clock the following day, in company with three Spaniards, a Belgian and eight Germans, he was on his way by train to Marseilles, to Fort Saint Nicholas.
Ten days later, together with a hundred and fifty recruits and a number of other French soldiers then serving in Algiers and Morocco, he left Marseilles on a troopship bound for Oran.
And on 20 March, he arrived at his ultimate destination. Sidi-bel-Abbès, still centre, as it had been for almost a century, of all Legion activity.
The discipline was absolute, the training brutal in its efficiency and designed with only one aim. To produce the finest fighting men in the world. Mikali flung himself into it with a fierce energy that drew him to the attention of his superiors from the beginning.
When he had been at Sidi-bel-Abbès for a few weeks, he was taken to the Deuxième Bureau one day. In the presence of a captain, he was presented with a letter from his grandfather, who had been informed of his whereabouts, asking him to reconsider the decision he had taken.
Mikali assured the captain that he was perfectly happy where he was and was requested to write a letter to his grandfather saying so, which he did in the captain’s presence.
During the six months that followed, he made twenty-four parachute jumps, was trained in the use of every form of modern weaponry, was drilled to a peak of physical fitness he would never have dreamed possible. He proved to be a remarkable shot with both rifle and handgun and his grading in unarmed combat was the highest in his class, a circumstance which caused him to be treated with considerable respect by his comrades.
He drank little and visited the town brothel only occasionally, yet the women there vied for his attention, a circumstance which had long since ceased to intrigue him and still left him supremely indifferent.
He was a junior corporal before he saw his first action in October, 1960 when the regiment moved into the Raki mountains to attack a large force of fellagha which had been controlling the area for some months.
There were some eighty rebels on top of a hill that was virtually impregnable. The regiment made a frontal attack that was only apparently suicidal for at the crucial point in the battle, the 3rd Company, which included Mikali, were dropped in on top of the hill itself by helicopter.
The fight which followed was a bloody, hand-to-hand affair and Mikali distinguished himself by knocking out a machine-gun post which had accounted for more than two dozen légionnaires and looked for a while as if it might ruin everything.
Afterwards, as he was sitting on a rock tying a field service dressing to a flesh wound in his right arm, a Spaniard had stumbled past him laughing insanely, holding two heads in one hand by the hair.
A shot rang out and the Spaniard went forward on to his face, crying out. Mikali was already turning, clutching his submachinegun, firing with one hand at the two fellagha who had risen from a pile of corpses near by, knocking them both down.
He stood there for a while on the hillside waiting, but no one else moved. After a while, he sat down, tightened the bandage on his arm with his teeth and lit a cigarette.
Within the twelve months that followed, he fought in the alleys of Algiers itself, dropped three times by parachute by night into mountainous country to attack rebel forces by surprise and survived ambush on numerous occasions.
He had a wound stripe and the Médaille Militaire, was a senior corporal by March, 1962. He was an ancien, which is to say the kind of légionnaire who could survive for a month on four hours’ sleep a night and force-march thirty miles in a day in full kit if necessary. He had killed men, he had killed women, children even, so that the fact of death meant nothing to him.
After the decoration, he was pulled out of active service for a while and sent to the guerrilla warfare school at Kefi where he learned everything there was to know about explosives. About dynamite and TNT and plastics and how to make an efficient booby trap in dozens of different ways.
On 1 July, he returned to the regiment after finishing the course and hitched a lift in a supply truck. As they passed through the village of Kasfa, a hundred pounds of dynamite, detonated by some form of remote control, blew the truck in half. Mikali found himself on his hands and knees in the village square, miraculously still alive. He tried to get up, there was a rattle of a machine pistol and he was shot twice in the chest.
As he lay there, he could see the driver of the truck twitching feebly on the other side of the burning wreck. Four men came forward carrying assorted weapons. They stood over the driver, laughing. Mikali couldn’t see what they were doing, but the man started to scream. After a while there was a shot.
They turned towards Mikali, who had dragged himself into a sitting position against the village well, his hand inside his camouflage jacket where the blood oozed through.
‘Not too good, eh?’ the leader of the little group said in French. Mikali saw that the knife in the man’s left hand was wet with blood.
Mikali smiled for the first time since Katina’s death. ‘Oh, it could be worse.’
His hand came out of the blouse clutching a Smith and Wesson Magnum, a weapon he had procured on the black market in Algiers months before. His first shot fragmented the top of the man’s skull, his second took the one behind him between the eyes. The third man was still trying to get his rifle up when Mikali shot him twice in the belly. The fourth dropped his weapon in horror and turned to run. Mikali’s final two shots shattered his spine, driving him headlong into the burning wreckage of the truck.
Beyond, through the smoke, villagers moved fearfully from their houses. Mikali emptied the Smith and Wesson, took a handful of rounds from his pocket with difficulty and reloaded very deliberately. The man he hit in the stomach groaned and tried to get up. Mikali shot him in the head.
He took off his beret, held it against his wounds to stem the flow of blood and sat there against the well, the revolver ready, daring the villagers to come near him.
He was still there, conscious, surrounded only by the dead, when a Legion patrol found him an hour later.
Which was all rather ironic for the following day, 2 July, was Independence Day and seven years of fighting was over. Mikali was flown to France to the military hospital in Paris for specialist chest surgery. On 27 July, he was awarded the Croix de la Valeur Militaire. The following day, his grandfather arrived.
He was seventy now, but still looked fit and well. He sat by the bed looking at the medal for quite a while then said gently, ‘I’ve had a word with the Legion Headquarters. As you’re still not twenty-one, it appears that, with the right pressure, I could obtain your discharge.’
‘Yes, I know.’
And his grandfather, using the phrase he had used on that summer evening in Athens nearly three years before, said, ‘You’ve decided to join the living again, it would seem?’
‘Why not?’ John Mikali answered. ‘It beats dying every time, and I should know.’
He received an impressive certificate of good conduct which stated that Senior Corporal John Mikali had served for two years with honneur et fidélité and was discharged before his time for medical reasons.
There was more than a little truth in that. The two bullets in the
