Algeria is where Guido Arrellio’s escape from Naples becomes a new military life, and where his first combat brings him into contact with Creasy. The novel uses the country not just as a point on Guido’s route into the Legion, but as the setting for a force rebuilding after defeat and for the beginning of a friendship that later outlasts their shared service.

Arrival and training

After leaving Naples, Guido is smuggled aboard a freighter and taken to Marseilles. He is twenty, has little money, no prospects, and no papers; Italian is the only language he can speak. The next day, he signs on with the Legion, and within a week he is at its training camp at Sidibel Abbes in Algeria. The swift journey makes the country the first firm destination in a life that has until then been governed by flight and uncertainty.

Guido arrives expecting the romantic desert army of popular stories, but training revises that picture. The Legion is modern, with up-to-date equipment and techniques, well-regarded French officers, and veteran noncommissioned officers drawn from armies across Europe. Its ranks include men from many countries and histories. In that mixture, Guido is the only Italian in his intake; while struggling to learn French, he feels out of place. He is taciturn and self-contained, and the period in Algeria deepens rather than dissolves that reserve.

The training is tough, especially in the first weeks, and discipline is implacable. Guido accepts it partly because he sees no alternative: disobedience can mean the punishment battalion or, for lesser offenses, the stockade. He therefore becomes a model recruit, an outcome that would have surprised many people in Naples. The routine also reveals talents that had been latent. Algeria is where the habits and abilities that made him useful as a Legionnaire take shape under pressure.

The Legion in a country at war

The Legion Guido enters is still reconstituting itself after the devastation of Vietnam and Dien Bien Phu. Several thousand Legionnaires were captured at Dien Bien Phu, and more than fifteen hundred were killed. The novel presents the Legion as a force repeatedly committed to difficult, last-resort battles, and as expendable to a government losing its empire. This history shadows the unit’s presence in Algeria as the war there grows into a major confrontation.

The institution answers its apparent lack of purpose by generating one of its own. Its members are described as mental orphans for whom the Legion itself provides an orphanage: a shared identity built from men who have no common nationality. It does not force its soldiers to retire; those too old to fight may remain in its home or work in its vineyards or handicraft center. Although French people take pride in the Legion and assume it fights for France, the narrative distinguishes that public belief from the Legion’s internal allegiance: it fights for itself, and even French officers may feel more loyalty to the corps than to their country. In Algeria, this self-contained institution is both an instrument in a colonial war and a community whose sense of belonging does not depend on conventional national ties.

Combat near Palestro

After training, Guido volunteers for the elite First Paratroop Regiment, based at Zeralda, twenty miles west of Algiers. The Algerian war is escalating, and the regiment is at the forefront of the fighting. Guido is assigned to B Company, whose sergeant, Creasy, has recently returned to active service after nine months as a prisoner of war at Dien Bien Phu. Algeria brings the two men into the same unit, but it takes several months for them to recognize the empathy between them. At first, the gap between an untried recruit and a decorated veteran keeps them apart; their shared reserve and introspection eventually give them common ground.

Their first meaningful contact follows an action near Palestro. After the Algerian National Liberation Front ambushes a patrol of French conscripts and kills many of them, the Legion pursues the attackers. B Company is dropped to block their escape route, and Guido experiences combat for the first time. At first confused by the noise and movement, he settles quickly and uses his light machine gun effectively. The unit wipes out the opposing force.

That night, while the company camps in the hills above Palestro, Creasy comes to sit beside Guido as he eats his field rations. The sergeant talks with the new Legionnaire to let him know he has done well. The gesture is small and professional, but Guido values it. He already respects Creasy, who is known throughout the Legion as a complete soldier, expert with every weapon and a natural tactician. Algeria is thus not only the setting for Guido’s first action; it is also the place where Creasy’s regard first reaches him through an ordinary act of recognition.

A beginning before the story moves on

The novel’s military episodes in Algeria establish the shared past that later gives weight to Guido and Creasy’s relationship. Their bond begins not with a declaration of friendship but through the conditions of Legion life: isolation, danger, discipline, and the difficulty of finding privacy in a crowded military environment. Palestro makes their differences visible—new recruit and experienced sergeant—while giving them a first point of mutual recognition.

The narrative later follows both men into a very different world. Guido returns to the orbit of Naples and Como, where the Balletto family’s crisis and the mechanics of kidnap insurance replace Algeria’s military setting. There, Vico Mansutti explains that Italian law bars domestic insurance companies from covering ransoms, while Lloyd’s of London offers policies subject to offshore payment and strict secrecy. A nominal premium bodyguard can lower the insurance rate cheaply without offering real protection; the arrangement becomes part of the scheme behind Pinta’s kidnapping. The contrast clarifies Algeria’s place in the novel: it is the formative setting for the Legion and for Guido’s meeting with Creasy, while the later Italian plot turns on financial calculation and organized crime. The country’s narrative importance rests in that beginning, where military experience first joins the two men whose connection will matter beyond the war.