The Centurions (11 page)

One morning, as he was driving back from Saigon to Lai-Thieu, in the civilian bus, an old rattletrap consisting of separate parts from a dozen different vehicles, tied together with string and fitted with threadbare tires, the lieutenant had noticed a young Vietnamese girl sitting quietly beside a crate of chickens. Dressed in black trousers, a loose tunic of white silk, with long hair gathered together at the nape of her neck by a clasp like any other female student or schoolgirl in Cochin-China, she had the pensive and at the same time merry face of a Greco-Buddhist virgin. A mysterious charm compounded of purity and reflectiveness emanated from her finely drawn features; her waist was so slender that Pinières could have encircled it in his powerful hands.

Pinières was fed up with the girls in the brothels and in order to endure them he had had a great deal to drink. With one blow of his huge paw he sent the crate of chickens flying; a peasant woman promptly started screaming. Then he sat down beside the young girl. All he wanted from her was a smile to blot out the memory of the whores he had just been paying.

But the girl recoiled from him with a gesture of disgust and shrank back against the battered side of the bus.

Pinières was no beauty with his ruddy, freckled complexion, his over-pronounced features and musky smell—but he gave an impression of elemental power and his eyes were the deep blue of those of a new-born child.

His personal reports invariably described him as “the sort of man who was equally capable of the utmost good and the utmost harm.” He had rarely done harm, he had often done good.

“Don't be frightened,” Pinières told her.

But he had never been able to control his voice.

“Leave me alone,” she cried, “go away!”

Everyone in the bus had turned round to watch, including the driver who, in the process, very nearly drove into the ditch.

“I'll tell my father.”

Pinières, who was beginning to get annoyed and felt he was making a fool of himself, rudely retorted:

“To hell with your father.”

“My father is Doctor Phu-Tinh, he's a friend of the High Commissioner, who often asks him in for consultations . . .”

He noticed she had a small diamond fixed into the lobe of each ear.

The girl's voice had become breathless. She fumbled in her bag.

“I've got an up-to-date permit—look, you can see for yourself—signed by the High Commissioner. And if it's of any interest to you, I'm actually a French citizen . . .”

“I only wanted to speak to you . . .”

She looked him up and down:

“Your sort only know how to speak with their hands; go and find another seat.”

“I'm sorry.”

He had complied with her wish, while everyone round him sniggered.

At Lai-Thieu the girl had got off the bus after him. An old
assam
dressed in black was waiting there to carry her books for her.

The lieutenant made inquiries: the girl, whom everyone called “My-Oi,”
*
was the only daughter of Doctor Phu-Tinh, an officer of the Légion d'Honneur who was said to be a decent chap, very influential and whole-heartedly in favour of the French.

My-Oi had been brought up at Dalat by the nuns of the Couvent des Oiseaux and was now a first-year student at the University of Saigon; as far as it was known, there was no man in her life.

Pinières forgot all about the girl. Terrorist activity was reaching its peak and, while interrogating a prisoner, the sector commander had discovered that most of the arms and explosives found their way to Lai-Thieu by way of the forest, and from there were sent on to Saigon.

Pinières had practised terrorism in France. He only had to draw on his own memories, the methods which he himself used to employ for delivering arms, and on four separate occasions he intercepted supplies being carried by plantation truck-drivers or by coolies trotting along on foot. Hand-grenades were concealed among piles of rice or even in the insides of fish.

It was then he saw My-Oi again. She went past the section post one morning, dressed in white and followed by her black
assam
. He gave her a brisk salute, to which she replied with a mocking smile. That evening he went and had a word with her. Next day he waited for her at the bus stop. The
assam
had not turned up; he saw her home, carrying her books for her.

She asked him about his life; he told her about his schooldays. They both discovered they preferred Lamartine to Victor Hugo. He ventured to ask her out to dinner with him in Saigon; he would drive her home afterwards in his Jeep. She accepted without any fuss. Her father, it seemed, allowed her a great deal of freedom, which was most unusual. But perhaps his French nationality had inclined him towards liberalism.

At the Vieux Moulin, near the Dakao bridge, she was alternately mocking, affectionate, flirtatious, and, on the terrace of the Kim-Long where they went to dance, her slender body clung to his. There were whispers at every table at the sight of the slim Vietnamese girl almost totally engulfed in the arms of the big red-headed barbarian.

On the way back, in the Jeep, she allowed him to kiss her. She pecked him on the lips like a bird eating grain. My-Oi raised no objection to going back with him to his room. Their first embrace was a disappointment. Passive and detached, she lay there without the slightest reaction, giving only a little cry when he was rough with her. He himself felt clumsy and ill at ease; up till then he had associated exclusively with
congais
and had only thought of his own pleasure.

But under the mosquito-net, after she had fallen alseep, he lay musing for a long time over her naked body, as naked as only an Asiatic's can be, and to him this golden girl was like one of those gifts which the Gold Kings in olden times used to offer the barbarian invaders in homage of their power.

My-Oi fell into the habit of meeting the lieutenant in his room every evening and staying there until the morning.

A week later the rainy season began with a violent storm. He caressed her insensible body and his desire was mingled with rage at being so close to this smooth young flesh which never gave so much as a tremor. The cloudburst developed into an absolute downpour, a puff of wind lifted the mosquito-net and all of a sudden he felt My-Oi come to life. Her sharp nails dug into his shoulder; the slender reed of her body tried to escape him, then clung to him all the more closely and she gave a gentle whimper. When it was all over, she still clung to him and for the first time it was she who provoked his desire. In a completely changed voice, in which surprise was mingled with tenderness and timidity, she asked:

“What's your Christian name?”

“Serge.”

Up till then she had not bothered to find out.

My-Oi gave up the university and came to live with him. The black-garbed
assam
moved into a house near by and from then on Pinières ceased to have his meals in the mess with his comrades.

During this period, while the number of terrorist outrages increased still further in Saigon, Pinières's section had a run of bad luck and failed to intercept a single convoy of arms. Yet all the intelligence reports agreed: the Vietminh were still using the Lai-Thieu road.

One evening, after dinner, My-Oi said to the lieutenant:

“Serge, I've been given orders to kill you tonight. Don't worry: you know I could never do it now. At one o'clock the post is going to be attacked to enable a truck to get through loaded with explosives, arms and leaflets. Before the attack is launched, I am supposed to eliminate you. For the last two years I've belonged to a Vietminh organization, the Nam-Bo. It's they who gave me the order to go to bed with you; you were too successful at unearthing our arms. I did so and to begin with I hated it. Then there was that night when the rains started . . . Go and warn your men.”

The attack took place at exactly one o'clock in the morning. The Vietminh were repulsed with heavy losses and their truck was blown up.

During the whole battle, My-Oi had sat quietly on the edge of the camp-bed without moving, and when her lover came back, drenched with sweat and spattered with her countrymen's blood, the pleasure she indulged in with him was followed by a sense of appeasement more profound than death itself.

Next day Pinières had brought her before the intelligence officer of the zone. She had followed him without a word.

“Now talk,” he had told her.

She had told them all she knew without batting an eyelid and had given away the whole terrorist network in Saigon, its leaders, its arms dumps and meeting places. When the captain misspelled a name, she had corrected it in her own hand.

“Good show, Pinières,” the intelligence officer had said. “It's the best thing we've pulled off since we came here. I'm being posted back to France, wouldn't you like to take over from me?”

“No, thanks.”

To safeguard My-Oi from the vengeance of the Vietminh, Pinières and the captain had decided to send her to Dalat. They found a room for her in the Couvent des Oiseaux where she had been brought up. Once again she had raised no objection.

Every month Pinières used to go up to Dalat with the convoy and My-Oi would come and join him for three days in a tumbledown Chinese hotel where mah-jong players sat up all night over their little pieces of bamboo and ivory.

One day he received a very brief letter from My-Oi:

I didn't dare tell you before, but I'm expecting a baby by you. What do you intend to do about it? We Vietnamese do not attach as much importance as you do to a child that has not yet been born. Afterwards we deal with it better. Whatever you decide will be all right because I love you.

Ever since My-Oi had betrayed the Vietminh terrorist organization, Pinières had often remembered this incident: at the liberation of France he had ordered his men to shave the scalp of a beautiful, rather silly girl who had openly flaunted her liaison with a German officer. While the operation was being performed, she had looked him straight in the eye:

“I loved my German, I'd got him under my skin. I'm only a woman. I don't give a damn about war and politics. He might have been a Negro, an American or a Russian, it would have been all the same to me, and to protect him I would have sold the lot of you, just as I would have fought at your side if I'd happened to fall for one of you. But with mugs like yours, there wasn't much danger of that . . .”

Pinières had slapped her across the face until she sank to her knees and his men had then made free of her. Later on he had looked for the woman to give her back the jewels they had confiscated from her, but she had already left for Germany.

For a whole week he thought the matter over, then he made up his mind. The child would be born. If it was a girl, he would send her to the convent; if a boy, to a forces' school. He would let My-Oi know his decision himself. As for her . . . he would give her some money for her to go away.

What had that German done with his shaven-pated French girl? Had he married her?

The day the convoy he was due to take left for Dalat, Pinières was out on operations. For four days and nights he had been tracking down a band of guerrillas and had set fire to the village which they used as a hide-out. The stench of burning flesh was still in his nostrils. When he came back, not very proud of this enforced task, he made up his mind to marry My-Oi, the “collaborator.” It would be too horrible for her to have betrayed her own people only to lose him in the end; besides, he loved her and also the child which was about to be born and which was not going to go either to the convent or to a forces' school.

He took the following convoy and, since he had not been able to notify My-Oi of his arrival in Dalat, he went straight to the Couvent des Oiseaux. Her room was empty, the girl had vanished. On the table he found a letter in Vietnamese, which he asked someone to translate for him.

The Administrative Committee of the Nam-Bo asked “the little sister” to report to the Cascade at Dalat in order to furnish one of their representatives with a few particulars. She was to be there after dark and alone.

Her body was found next morning, she had been strangled with a silk parachute cord.

 • • • 

Lacombe stumbled again and asked Pinières to help him up.

“You can get up by yourself.”

“I've got two children.”

The bastard had discovered his weak point; he was going to exploit it, take advantage of it. like a whining beggar.

Pinières bent over him, helped him to his feet, and when it came to the captain's turn to carry the rice urn, he took his place.

Dawn broke as the column was struggling across the pass. The R.P.
41
was deserted and the prisoners were once more on their own after the chaos and tumult of the night. The roar of the trucks had died away in the whistling of the wind off the summit, and daylight seemed to have sent the Vietminh termites scuttling back into their holes.

The Voice kept walking up and down the column and his smooth cheeks bore hardly a sign of fatigue. Several times over he gave the
bo-dois
orders to quicken the pace, but without success.

At the end of the morning the prisoners, footsore, exhausted and dying of thirst, were halted in a narrow little valley which threaded its way through the middle of the mountains.

In small groups they flopped down in the mud under cover of the brushwood. They spent the rest of the day there, prostrated in their solitude, without being able to go to sleep or enjoy a moment's oblivion and without finding relief for their cramped limbs.

They had reached that stage of utter weariness beyond which there exists only total collapse and death. During all the remainder of the march they were to carry the weight of this immense lassitude.

Night after night the calvary of the lamentable herd, driven on by its grim
bo-dois
, continued in the heavy rain of the monsoon. The prisoners would take a step forward, stumble, take another step without being certain they would have enough strength to take a third, having long since forgotten why they were on the move or where they were going in this stifling stormy darkness through which monstrous visions floated like giant jelly-fish.

It was during one of these nightmares that they came across the Pims of Dien-Bien-Phu.

The column of prisoners had halted by the side of the road to let them come past. The Pims moved up slowly, a pathetic Miracle procession with its cripples whose questionable bandages showed faintly white in the darkness, and its lame dragging themselves along on crutches. Their wounds were rotten with gangrene, their rags were coated in pus and they gave off a sugary smell of carrion and sour rice. The Viets had treated them even worse than the French, even though they had “the same political value” as the soldiers of the People's Army. The Voice had said so.

The officers gazed in silence at this procession of ghosts. There were four or five hundred survivors out of the four thousand coolies who had been flown in to Dien-Bien-Phu six months earlier.

“The Voice wasn't so far wrong,” Pinières reflected. “No doubt they would be only too pleased to rip our guts out if they had the chance.”

Many others had the same thought in mind.

Suddenly one of the Pims recognized Boisfeuras and rushed up to him:

“Captain, Captain! Me Pim of Fourth Company . . .”

He seized the captain by the hand, taking this opportunity to slip him a packet of tobacco. He rubbed up against him like a domestic pet. As they went by, other Pims recognized their officers in spite of the darkness. They broke ranks, darted across the road behind a
bo-doi'
s back, and without a word shook hands with the Frenchmen, slipping them a shapeless little packet of tobacco or some food from their own meagre rations or from what they had managed to “scrounge.”

Glatigny was given a little molasses wrapped up in a piece of newspaper, and Pinières a bit of stale vitamin chocolate from a box of combat rations.

“What a damned waste!” Pinières exclaimed. “All those men might have been with us. Even without weapons we could have pushed all these Vietminh bastards over the border into China, just with a few good kicks in the ass.”

Boisfeuras questioned his Pim in Vietnamese and learned that they were being taken off to a hard labour re-education camp. They were going to have it forcibly driven into their heads that friendship was forbidden between men of a different race, that a prisoner could not love his master unless that master was a Communist, otherwise it was treason.

Three of these Pims had been awarded the Military Medal for their heroic conduct at Dien-Bien-Phu, but they had disappeared.

The Voice gave the
bo-dois
orders to keep the Pims and the prisoners apart. For the first time the Viets began striking the officers with their rifle butts.

The column of Pims faded out of the nightmare, the Voice floated in. He addressed the Frenchmen:

“I told you to show respect towards your victims, not to provoke them. You refused to listen and we were obliged to save you from their righteous anger.”

“The damned bastard,” Pinières murmured, clenching his fist.

“Not at all,” Boisfeuras replied, “he's being logical. According to Marxist theory, the colonized cannot fraternize with the colonizer. It's dogmatically impossible. But since this fraternization has just taken place, he simply denies the fact.”

The tepid downpour continued without a break. One night the prisoners passed a convoy of trucks bogged down in the mud. The coolies swarming round them, while their engines raced and roared, could not manage to shift them from the pot-holes. The R.P.
41
was out of service at last, the monsoon had proved more effective than the French pilots . . . but too late.

As though in the throes of fever, Glatigny kept wrestling with his phantoms which took the form of staff plans marked in red and blue, reports, confidential signals, urgent, secret, top secret . . .

He had a vision of the large-scale map at Air Force Headquarters, Hanoi, with its red crosses indicating where the road had been cut. Effective for thirty-six hours, effective for forty-eight hours, of no effect at all. This was two months earlier.

The road had never been cut, the termites worked faster than the bombs and Dien-Bien-Phu had fallen. The big black artery swollen with coolies brought the life-blood to Giap's divisions every night.

The road had to be put out of service and, if bombs proved ineffective, rain had to be made to fall instead. But the carbonic ice they had scattered by the plane-load on the heavy ink-black clouds had done nothing. The metereologist who had been sent out from Paris had gone back after making this sibylline report: “The monsoon cycle is so disturbed in the north-east of Indo-China that any forecast of rain must be regarded as contingent.”

The metereologist was now safely ensconced in his cosy little flat in Paris, well protected from hunger and fatigue and from the despair and malediction of defeat. Meanwhile the rain poured down every day on the vanquished struggling along in the mud.

“Christ Almighty,” Merle swore, stumbling against Glatigny, “if the general had the runs as I have . . . I've got to go again, though I'm absolutely drained. Here, take my bag.”

Between one spasm and the next his thoughts flew to the lovely Micheline, with her beauty-spot and eighteenth-century hairstyle. “If you could only see your paratrooper now, my beauty!” Then: “All the same, I'm not going to die by the side of a road like a destitute beggar simply because I wanted to prolong my holiday. It can't happen!”

Olivier Merle had been brought up in Tours among a lot of old people. Everyone in his background was old: his father, his mother, his aunts, his cousins and even his skinny young sister. Olivier had gone off to do his military service. In the army he had discovered youth and gaiety, but he had failed to distinguish between the regular army and the one in which the young civilians served—the last long holiday before life begins in earnest.

In order to prolong his own holiday, little Merle, after finishing his time, had signed on for two years in Indo-China. In Tours this had been considered rather frivolous of him.

Olivier often recalled the secret joy he had felt that time he went home on leave after passing out of Saint-Maixent. Without his parents' knowledge he had been through a parachute course at the school and had then been posted to a south-western battalion. For the first time his red beret made a bright splash of colour in the old house on the bank of the Loire.

“What does it mean?” his father had asked him.

“It means I've jumped from an aircraft seven times with a parachute strapped to my back and that each time it opened.”

“Eccentrics are frowned upon in our profession. A parachuting notary! What will they think in Tours? It won't do us any good.”

“If your practice consisted exclusively of labourers, Father, that might well be so, but most of your clients are from the upper-middle and merchant classes.”

“Exactly; the working class doesn't mind that sort of nonsense, but the middle does.”

“But surely the army, and the paratroops in particular, are the great defenders of the privileges of the middle class?”

“They distrust defenders of that sort even more than their enemies; they could well do without them. You could be a radical or a Communist and all they would say is, ‘He'll get over it, it's just a youthful phase.' But a paratrooper . . . ! Let's hope we can keep it dark.”

But his sister had fondled his beret with its winged dagger badge. Never before had Olivier seen such a gleam in her eyes.

“I'm glad you joined,” she had told him. “You're the first to escape from this rat-hole of ours. One day you must come back and fetch me away.”

Olivier Merle had remained in uniform, partly in defiance of his father, partly to please his sister, but most of all to scandalize the
bourgeoisie
of Tours, and in the evening he had gone out with a party of friends to a night-club.

“Is his lordship trying to compete with me?” young Bezegue of the Magasins Réunis had asked him with a sneer.

Bezegue felt slightly put out. He was regarded as the “Bolshy” of the group. One day he had “borrowed” a motor-car for several hours and his lack of moral sense was a byword. But in one fell swoop Olivier had surpassed him and gone infinitely farther.

Olivier was vaguely in love with all the girls he knew, but up till then they had merely used him to make their boy-friends jealous and only went out with him when they had no one else on hand.

During his fortnight's leave Olivier was in great demand. Everyone referred to him as the “Red Devil” and the girls regarded him with secret yearning and fascinated awe, as though he had already assassinated two or three wealthy widows.

He spent a few nights with Micheline, the prettiest of them all, the one who lent a certain tone to the group, for she spoke of life, love and death with the utmost cynicism. She was nineteen and had had a miscarriage in Switzerland, which added somewhat to her aura.

One day Micheline asked him, as though it was the most commonplace thing in the world:

“Have you ever killed anyone?”

She was obviously disappointed by his answer.

Before he left for Indo-China, Micheline had come and spent a week with him at Vannes. She had dyed her hair dead-white and wore a beauty-spot on the corner of her chin, which made her look like an eighteenth-century marquise.

Micheline had notified him, as though it was a matter of no consequence, of her marriage to Bezegue, and Olivier had realized he was no longer in the running as a prospective husband. It was flattering and at the same time disheartening.

Micheline had made a habit of writing to him regularly in Indo-China; she told him about her love-affairs, her little infidelities here and there, her trips to Paris. One day he replied: “I've killed someone and from now on things are different.” Then he had stopped writing to her for good.

To his own amazement, Second-Lieutenant (later Lieutenant) Merle, who had no particular bent for a military career, did extremely well and was highly esteemed for his courage and endurance. Among the decorations that had been handed out wholesale to the defenders of Dien-Bien-Phu when it was known that the garrison was done for, he was awarded the Légion d'Honneur and everyone felt it was well deserved.

Pinières had told him:

“Now you can stay on in the army and become a regular.”

But young Merle had not the slightest wish to become a regular and at the moment he was passing blood.

At one of the halts he dragged himself along to the M.O.

“I'm completely drained,” he said, “I'm dying of thirst. I can't go on.”

“I've also got dysentery,” the M.O. told him, “and I've nothing to take for it. Emetine's what we need but the Viets haven't even got any for themselves, so they say.”

“Well, what's the answer?”

“There's no answer . . . just carry on. It might cure itself, you can never tell. Try and drink some of the water in which the rice is cooked, that's an old wives' remedy. It hasn't done me any good . . . possibly because, as a medical man, I don't believe in remedies of that sort.”

Merle was getting weaker and weaker and his comrades had to help him along. He kept saying over and over again: “It's no joke, it's no joke . . .”

Lacombe swam in his own fat which was becoming as fluid as oil. He kept dreaming of vast platefuls of boiled beef, stewed mutton and roast veal, and his hunger was sometimes so obsessive that he fancied he was inhaling the savoury smells of rich cooking.

Lescure, isolated in his madness, ambled along between Glatigny and Esclavier, a disjointed sightless puppet attached to life by a few slender threads.

But when they came to Son-La, where they had to ford a small stream, he refused to step into the water and began struggling.

“I know this place. It's sown with mines and the Viets are in position on the far bank. We'll have to go round by the mountains.”

He grabbed at a terrified
bo-doi
:

“Go and tell the major,
mau-len
. I've some information for him. The Viets . . .”

“You're mistaken,” Esclavier gently corrected him. “It's our partisans who are holding the far bank.”

Instantly pacified, Lescure followed his captain into the water.