The Centurions (16 page)

“Pipe down,” Marindelle replied, giving him a nudge. “The Voice is now convinced that Neuilly and the Seizième are the slums where the workers wallow in misery and that La Villette is next door to the Champs-Élysées.”

“Yes, comrades, we oppressed the Vietnamese people and forced them to satisfy our gluttony with ducks, chickens and the young buffaloes they badly needed to cultivate their paddy-fields. We went even further in our misdeeds. To offend the susceptibilities of the Vietnamese people, we bathed stark naked in the middle of the village, while our concubines, whom we scornfully referred to as ‘
congais
,' virtuous young women snatched by force from their families, were made to pour the water over us.”

“He's doing well,” Orsini exclaimed in admiration.

“Tch . . . tch . . .” Leroy shook his head. “Février was much better.”

“One night,” Millet went on, “a unit of the People's Army of Viet-Nam, anxious to avenge the oppressed population of Minh-Tanh, attacked our post which would have fallen but for the air support provided by the American imperialists. It was horrible: the bombs wiped out those valiant patriots and fire swept through the hutments.

“I was so misguided that I wanted to avenge the assistance which the patriotic population had given to the People's Army. A parachute battalion came to clear up the district and I myself told them which men to execute. They behaved with their customary brutality and I would rather not tell you all the atrocities they committed.

“It has taken four years of re-education, four years of this policy of leniency which is the Republic of Viet-Nam's reply to our imperialist barbarism, to open my eyes and fill my soul with remorse.

“I ask the Vietnamese people and the soldiers of the People's Army for forgiveness, and I declare that the rest of my life will be devoted to fighting for peace and the brotherhood of the masses.”

There was a round of applause. The newcomers were completely at sea.

“The damned swine,” Pinières muttered, “I'll break his jaw for him . . .”

“Go on, clap,” Marindelle told him, “clap hard. At that date Millet was in Germany, and anyway he has never set foot in southern Viet-Nam.”

“The bastard,” Pinières raged.

Lieutenant Millet left the platform, wearing an expression of triumph and remorse. He had high hopes of winning the chicken his comrades had promised for the best self-examination of the month.

After congratulating the lieutenant on his frankness, the Voice remarked that a full assessment of his crimes was an indispensable condition for a prisoner's moral recovery.

He then announced Boisfeuras, one of the most dangerous war criminals captured at Dien-Bien-Phu, who had himself requested this opportunity to explain himself to his comrades.

The sun was shining straight into Boisfeuras's face and he shut his eyes like a nocturnal bird which had suddenly been taken from its lair. He was filthy dirty and caked in dry mud. His voice was more grating than ever:

“Gentlemen,” he said, “my misdeeds are infinitely greater than those of my comrade Millet, for they are political. I was born in this part of the world, for over a century my family has exploited the impoverished masses. I learnt the language and customs of Viet-Nam so as to be able to exploit the people all the more. I was one of those who benefited from the war. North of Phon-Tho, among the mountain people, I tried to create a movement of separatism from the people of Viet-Nam. I took advantage of those peasants' credulity; I corrupted them with money; I furnished them with arms. I made them fight against their brothers. But those primitive men, enlightened by an envoy of the Democratic Republic, recovered their patriotism and class consciousness; they kicked me out.

“I refused to see the Truth, and my mercenary's pride impelled me to make for Dien-Bien-Phu in order to continue the fight against the people and defend the selfish interests of my family.

“Today I am beginning to see the light. I repent, and all I ask is to atone for my faults by exemplary conduct in future. I do not deserve the leniency”—he laid his swollen, paralysed hands on the little bamboo lectern in front of him—“which the soldiers of the People's Army have shown towards me.”

He climbed down from the platform and the Voice declared that Boisfeuras could go and join his comrades now that he had recognized the error of his ways.

“A serious rival to Millet,” Orsini said in admiration.

As a reward for this particularly successful session, the camp commandant, the bandy-legged man who looked like a Japanese and who bore the title of general supervisor as in a college, increased the rations. In addition to their usual ball of rice, the prisoners were given two spoonfuls of molasses—which contributed to the atmosphere of euphoria. Many of them saw in this issue of molasses the hope of a speedy release.

 • • • 

Darkness fell in a few minutes. A fire, which was never allowed to go out, glowed on a patch of bare earth in the centre of the hut. Every so often a hand would rekindle it with a few slivers of dry bamboo. Then it would burst into flame and in the shadows could be seen the faces of Esclavier and Glatigny. Merle was reminded of a scout camp he had once attended in the mountains of Auvergne, Pinières of the long nights he had spent in a farm in Corrèze during the Resistance. Mahmoudi pondered on the affable girls from the Ouled-Nail mountains with their heavy silver jewelry.

Lacombe lay fast asleep on the bare floor under his mosquito net. Mosquito nets had been issued with great ceremony, one for every two prisoners. Since then he never stopped sleeping and from time to time he whimpered in his sleep.

Boisfeuras was sitting next to the fire engaged in an endless conversation with the owner of the house, an old Tho with a wrinkled weather-beaten face. The Tho was optimistic about the future, for his son was head of the village militia which consisted of three men armed with a single shot-gun. He drew the
tou-bi'
s attention to his feet, pitted and deformed by “Hong-Kong foot” or “buffalo's disease,” of which he seemed almost proud.

The river babbled gently outside, mingling its noise with the distant echoes of a storm. The air, saturated with heat and humidity, felt as heavy as wool; it seemed to contain no oxygen at all and everyone was suffocating.

Above the grunting of the black pigs that lived under the piles, they heard the sound of voices, then the noise of water dripping on to a flat stone.

Below the hut, at the foot of the ladder, stood a jar of water with a ladle: a wooden
ke-bat
; this water was used to wash the mud off one's feet before coming into the house.

Orsini and Leroy appeared on the threshold. They had come from the veterans' camp and had brought with them a roll of tobacco, tied up like a sausage—a product of their plantation or the result of some mysterious bartering with the Mans of the neighbouring foothills.

They squatted down among the other prisoners, took some home-made pipes out of their pockets and some letters from home which they used as cigarette paper.

Marindelle came and sat down next to Boisfeuras and put a hand on his shoulder.

“They've come to congratulate you. You've got away with it this time. We were rather worried about you. We learnt from one of the
bo-dois
that some chaps who were doing the same job as you—two warrant officers of the Colibri guerrilla gang, a lieutenant of the Tabac gang and Captain Hillarin—had been tried by a people's tribunal and executed a few days after their capture.”

“They chopped off Hillarin's head with a hatchet,” said Orsini. “He was my instructor at Saint Cyr.”

“If they had found out who I was and what I was doing,” Boisfeuras calmly replied, “I wouldn't have had a chance of getting away with it. But they would have waited a long time before trying me and perhaps they would have handed me over to my old friends the Chinese. For I was never at Phong-Tho, and I wasn't born in Viet-Nam but in China.”

“You took the only course that could save you . . . as though you knew the Viets extremely well.”

“I once lived among them—it was in
1945
—but they're no longer the same as they were then. You who've been with them for the last four years, could you tell us what the Vietminh is really like?”

Merle clapped his hands:

“Take your seats for another instruction period, only this time everyone will tell the truth.”

Imitating the Voice, his impersonal and self-satisfied tone, he began:

“Our veteran comrades, re-educated by four years of a policy of leniency, having reverted, now that night has fallen, to what they have never ceased to be, that's to say vile colonial mercenaries, will now give an objective account of what they think of the psychology and behaviour of that strange, repellant beast, the Vietminh.”

“So as to be able,” Esclavier interjected, “to show him what we're made of, to pinch his crops and even rape his woman if possible . . .”

“It's not possible,” Orsini regretfully observed.

“To beat him in the end,” Glatigny concluded with a certain solemnity.

“You kick off, Marindelle,” said Leroy.

Marindelle promptly entered into the spirit of the game:

“Comrades, contrary to what you may believe, we are no longer absolutely vile colonial mercenaries, for these repellant people have forced us to learn certain things. The Voice is perhaps not completely wrong when he tells us we must recognize our faults, or rather our ‘errors.'”

“Our tactical errors?” Glatigny asked.

“No, our political errors. In the strategy of modern warfare military tactics are a matter of secondary importance, politics will always take precedence.”

“Let's discuss the enemy,” exclaimed Esclavier, who was irritated by this preamble.

“They're of adverse will, as Clausewitz would say. The Vietminh have been hardened, changed by seven years of fighting. You're right, Boisfeuras, they're no longer the same as they were in
1945
. They have created a human type which is repeated indefinitely and cast in the same mould. For example, every year, in every Vietminh division, at the end of the rainy season a recollection is held.”

“What's that?” Pinières asked.

“It's a favourite term of the Jesuits. Nothing resembles the Vietminh world as closely as the Jesuits. I know, I was brought up by them. A recollection means a retreat, communal withdrawal, the examination of one's conscience over the period of a year.”

“Go on.”

“With the Viets it lasts a fortnight and in some units up to ten per cent of the personnel are sometimes shot because they no longer conform to the model laid down. In this process the guilty are their own public prosecutors and demand their punishment themselves.”

“Nevertheless,” said Glatigny, “in spite of our strokes of audacity and strokes of luck, in spite of our fits of laziness and energy, there was always Vietminh organization, Vietminh pertinacity: an ant-heap for ever active and in the process of reconstruction.”

“That's true,” said Marindelle. “The Vietminh coolie, soldier, officer and propagandist have always worked relentlessly and with a sense of purpose that is scarcely human. They have built dug-outs, trenches, underground villages . . .”

This reminded them all of the operations in the Delta, of the whole of that landscape remodelled and camouflaged by the human termites.

“We should have dragged them out of their holes one by one,” said Esclavier, “like snails out of their shells.”

Marindelle went on with undisguised admiration:

“During the day they cultivated their paddy-fields and made war; by night they organized committees, sub-committees and associations of old dodderers and lads of ten. They hardly ever slept; they were under-nourished, they always seemed to be on their last legs, but they still had the strength to carry on. Weren't you struck, as I was, by their physical appearance—their ascetic faces, their feverish eyes, their silent, gliding gait? In their outsize Chinese-style clothes they looked like ghosts . . .”

“I thrashed it all out,” said Orsini, “with a Viet from the
304
th who spoke French fairly well. He told me something about his life. ‘We only moved at night,' he told me, ‘in single file and in complete silence. We each used to carry a firefly in a little cage of transparent paper attached to our haversacks. So as not to lose our way, we simply followed these little lights. Some of my comrades made the same firefly last three nights running. So as to avoid being encircled, we often used to march for twenty-five nights at a stretch and our only food was a bowl of rice, a few wild herbs and, occasionally, a little dried fish. In the end I felt my body was a machine which moved, stopped, started up again of its own accord and I myself was outside it, half dreaming, half asleep . . . '”

“We've all been able to see how the Viets work,” Glatigny went on. “All the way along the roads and trails which their convoys used, they had rigged up military shelters under the thick foliage of the jungle. At the mere sound of an aircraft everything, trucks and men, disappeared in a matter of minutes, and there was nothing left but an empty trail. That was all our pilots could see on each of their sorties—empty trails. Just think of the work involved! And it was carried out over hundreds, over thousands of miles, and only by coolies who had nothing but picks, shovels and hatchets and who could only work by night. Meanwhile we were idling away in the brothels and opium dens . . .”

“It's through the coolies they got the better of us,” said Boisfeuras, “by means of that vast horde swarming through the elephant grass with their baskets balanced on their shoulders. They used to start off from the Delta with a hundred pounds of rice slung on their poles. They would march three hundred miles over the twisting trails of the Haute Région in order to deliver ten pounds of rice to the
bo-dois
. They had to feed themselves on the way and still keep a pound or two back for the return journey. These thousands and thousands of coolies trotting along the trails were invisible to our aircraft . . . It wasn't only terror that kept them going.”