The Centurions (18 page)

Allow me, sir, to thank you for having made a new man of me. Thanks to your instruction and your example, I shall in my turn be able to conquer and to triumph.

YVES MARINDELLE,

FIGHTER FOR PEACE

In groups of three they made their way to the river through the undergrowth, took the rice out of its hiding place, and distributed the prepared packets. Some of them dived in and pulled up the rafts. The river was in full spate and flooding the jungle.

“See you in Paris,” said Orsini.

“Or in hell,” said Juves.

They climbed on to their rafts and with great difficulty reached mid-stream. The current swept them down one after another.

All of a sudden it stopped raining. The darkness cleared, like ink being diluted by water, and the evening star appeared in the sky. They were soaked to the skin and began to shudder with cold.

“Have you got a wife?” Marindelle asked Orsini.

“No, but I'm going to find one, and not only one, a whole mass.”

“What about you, Leroy?”

“An old girl-friend down at Béziers.”

“My wife's name is Jeanine,” Marindelle solemnly announced. “She's very young, very beautiful and it's been a long time for her to wait.”

The first night they covered forty miles, but one of the rafts, the one carrying Captain Juves, overturned. The three men managed to swim back to the bank, but at dawn they ran across a Vietminh patrol. They made a dash for it and the
bo-dois
opened fire. One prisoner was killed, another was wounded, and Juves gave himself up. The Viets finished off the wounded man and made Juves kneel down on the muddy bank. The corporal leading the patrol put a bullet through his head and with his foot toppled the body over into the stream which promptly carried it off.

In the Song-Gam rapids the second raft came to grief against a rock. The creepers holding the bamboos together broke. Two prisoners were drowned and the third, Lieutenant Millet, was saved by some fishermen and handed over to the Vietminh. To punish him while waiting for instructions, the local commander had him tied naked to an ant-heap. All night long Millet begged them to put him out of his misery. The following morning he was taken back to camp where a people's tribunal condemned him to nine months' solitary confinement for having betrayed the trust of the Vietnamese people.

The third raft capsized several times. The rice fell into the water. Dying of hunger, the three prisoners gave themselves up to the Communists. They were brought back to camp, tried and condemned to six months' solitary confinement.

The cells were rather like bamboo cages with a trapdoor opening. They were too small for the solitary prisoner to stretch his legs. Once a day a
bo-doi
brought him a minimum amount of food and for the rest of the time he stewed and rotted in the damp heat and solitude, haunted by his memories.

The three lieutenants on the fourth raft held out for a fortnight. They had forgotten the number of times their vessel had turned turtle. Eaten alive by the mosquitoes, obliged to feed on raw rice, shivering with cold and fever, their limbs cramped and aching, they were frequently pushed to the limits of human endurance. But each time, at the last moment, they clung to life, Orsini and Leroy through hatred, Marindelle through love.

Later on Orsini and Leroy were astonished to realize that in this pitiful and admirable endeavour they had still been able, after three years' captivity, to summon sufficient strength and courage to perform one of those impossible deeds that gives man his grandeur, and that at the same time they had been delivered of their hatred.

Marindelle's love for Jeanine had, on the contrary, gathered fresh strength, for he now identified his wife with everything that was best in him: his endurance, his courage, his refusal to give up and die.

It was on the morning of the fifteenth day, as they were floating down the Bright River, that they caught sight of the Duong-Tho post, its square crenellated tower and forecourt of earth and planks.

“We've made it, we're on French-held territory,” said Leroy, who had once been garrisoned there for six months.

“It's Duong-Tho,” said Marindelle. “We've come down much lower than we thought. Three more days and we should have reached Hanoi. We should merely have had to jump off the raft to go straight to the Normandie for a drink. It's one of those strokes of luck you read about in the papers.”

They summoned up enough strength to land, but had to lie stretched out in the grass for over half an hour before being able to move their cramped limbs.

“Where's the French flag?” Marindelle asked with sudden anxiety.

In the grey light, under the leaden sky, he could see nothing unfurled on the tower.

“They haven't raised the colours yet,” said Orsini. “The garrison troops are colonials and you know what they're like, not exactly gluttons for work. They're sitting pretty down here, so close to Hanoi; there are no Viets around.”

“Let's go,” said Leroy. “There's a path leading up to the post round at the back. We'd better take it, they might have laid some mines.”

Duong-Tho had just been evacuated and the three prisoners were greeted at the entrance to the post by some
bo-dois
. There were a dozen of them picking through the rubbish left behind by the French, turning over the empty tins and wooden and cardboard cases with their bayonets.

The officers had not enough strength left to double back on their tracks. They sank down against the walls of the forecourt and fell fast asleep. They were much too tired to feel either anger or disappointment.

Some time later, as the sun was beginning to sink behind the river, an officer came and woke them up. He made a note of their names and rank and had them tied up to one another without brutality.

In the morning they were released from their fetters. Orders had arrived during the night to treat them well. They were given the same rations as the soldiers, were allowed to rest, and on the following day they set off under escort on their way back to Camp One.

They ambled along for three weeks; the Viets were soon on good terms with them and seemed to be in no hurry to get back to the camp. They turned a blind eye on the
tou-bis
' pilfering and shared the fruits of their plunder with them.

The prisoners reached Camp One after dark and were promptly locked up in the cells. Next morning Marindelle was sent for. The Voice wanted to have a word with him before taking disciplinary action.

In spite of his cynicism, Marindelle came away from the interview somewhat chastened. The Voice with his fine mask of gold had gently reprimanded him, as a scoutmaster might his favourite cub. He had spoken with disarming naïveté:

“Why didn't you come and see me before trying to escape, Marindelle? I shouldn't have dissuaded you. You haven't grasped the point of our tuition. Before attempting anything, you should first approach your superiors, for what may strike you as a happy decision may in fact have an adverse effect on the Party of Peace. Furthermore, you have set your comrades a bad example, even though you acted in good faith.

“I shall therefore ask you and your two comrades to make a thorough self-examination, and I think I shall then be able to adopt a lenient attitude. You've still got a lot to learn, Marindelle, but the sincerity of your feelings has always given me grounds for hope.”

The three lieutenants had made their self-examination. Even so Orsini and Leroy were confined to the cells for a week before being pardoned, whereas Marindelle, after a few days, was restored to his position of group leader.

For a long time no one in the camp could talk of anything else but this extraordinary act of mercy, which could not be completely accounted for by Marindelle's letter. There was even a suggestion that the Voice harboured an unnatural passion for the lieutenant, and Ménard insinuated that Marindelle had denounced his comrades. This hypothesis was absurd and without foundation but nevertheless gained a certain credence.

Boisfeuras asked Marindelle what had prompted the Voice to act as he had done.

Marindelle gave several reasons: first of all his boy-scout naïveté. Secondly, his incredible vanity as a Communist intellectual convinced of being in possession of the one and only Truth; finally, a certain nostalgic friendliness towards Westerners among whom he had been brought up and whose culture he had assimilated.

Marindelle knew nothing about Commander Ducoroy's youth camps or the boy with the sturdy calves and close-cropped hair who had been the Prince of one of those camps.

 • • • 

For a week Lacombe was a lifeless mass who had to be fed by his comrades. He showed no more interest in life and refused to move from his bunk and go down to the river to wash.

He became mildly delirious. He imagined he was living in a huge grocery, filled with tins of every shape and size, barrels of oil, sacks of rice and flour, cases of biscuits, macaroni and sugar.

He went over his stock again and again, for people kept stealing from it. Sometimes it was Glatigny or Boisfeuras, at other times Esclavier, Merle or Pinières.

The Voice gently pointed out that his accounts did not balance. He would then start all over again:

Three thousand tins of peas; two thousand of string beans; two hundred boned hams, ten barrels of oil . . . there was a barrel of oil missing.

Esclavier came and leant on the counter and sniggered stupidly.

Then everything started to swim before his eyes. The doctor who was sent for shrugged his shoulders. There was nothing to be done. There was no physical ailment he could diagnose, but something had gone wrong. He advised the services of a priest.

One morning Lacombe stopped counting his tins. He was buried in a little clearing on the side of the mountain above Camp One. For a few weeks his grave was marked with a bamboo cross, then it was swallowed up in the jungle.

There were several other officers in the camp who gave up the ghost like this—mostly those who had shown the greatest endurance during the march and had afterwards heaved a profound sigh of relief as they dropped on to their bunks in Camp One.

Esclavier and Glatigny had one mosquito net between them and shared the same blanket which they spread out at night on the bamboo slats of the floor. One night Esclavier, who normally slept like a top, twisted and turned in a fever. After the evening downpour the temperature had dropped abruptly; he started shivering. Glatigny wrapped him up in the blanket with all the tenderness and affection he now felt for this hardened condottiere.

Reveille sounded shortly before dawn. A Viet would hammer on a large bamboo hanging from a branch, slowly at first, then with progressively increasing speed as the sound gradually diminished. This was the great rhythm of Asia, the rhythm of feasts and pagodas, of funerals and births, of the chase and of war. From the distant monasteries of Tibet to vermilion-hued Peking, from the narrow valleys of the Thai countryside to the kampongs of Malaya, all life was geared to the clash of gong and wooden rattle.

The prisoners assembled in teams outside their huts to draw their “breakfast soup,” a meagre ration of rice recooked in slightly salted water. They gobbled it up, standing in the fresh invigorating light of dawn before reporting on the parade ground for the daily fatigues.

“Shall I bring up your soup?” asked Glatigny who was worried by his comrade's immobility.

Esclavier lay hunched up under the blanket, bathed in sweat. He muttered weakly:

“No, you can have my share.”

This looked serious. No one could afford to miss a meal. Refusing rice was the first symptom of the capitulation which in a few days had brought Lacombe to the little clearing tucked away in the jungle.

“None of that now; you're going to eat up like the rest of us.”

Glatigny unhooked the two wooden ladles hanging on the partition above their bed-space and held them for a few seconds over the flames in the hearth to sterilize them. In addition to the bugs and the mosquitoes, rats swarmed through the huts all night in search of the smallest grain of rice. Famished and mangy, they were carriers of a deadly germ, the spirochete; in humans this germ caused a burning fever which reduced the body to a state of mummification. French hospitals had perfected a rigorous and costly treatment and this alone was capable of saving the patients. They were kept alive by intravenous injections of a serum in all four limbs, which enabled them to survive during the ten days it took for the spirochete to develop and die.

In Camp One this treatment was not available and disinfection by fire was the only form of prevention against this illness which was almost always lethal.

Holding a
cai-bat
heaped with rice in one hand, Glatigny knelt down beside his companion and raised his head with the other:

“Come on, eat up.”

Esclavier opened his feverish, bloodshot eyes.

“I can't swallow.”

“Eat up, I tell you.”

“Give me something to drink.”

“Get this down first, then I'll make you some tea. There's nothing left to drink at the moment.”

In “the country of water that kills” they first had to boil the liquid to which they added a few leaves of wild tea, guava or bitter orange.

In spite of his reluctance, Glatigny forced his comrade to swallow his “breakfast soup.” Esclavier sank back exhausted and brought it all up in a series of shuddering retches.

The others, having folded their blankets and mosquito nets and equipped themselves for the morning fatigues, climbed down the ladder and went off to the parade ground.

“Marindelle,” Glatingy called out, “Esclavier's ill. Tell the Voice I'm staying behind to look after him.”

He cleaned the soiled blanket, washed the captain's face and chest in cold water, then boiled some tea.

Esclavier seemed a little easier now; his face betrayed enormous strain and in one night had assumed the translucid grey-brown complexion of “the veterans of Cao-Bang.” The fever appeared to have abated. He had managed to keep down two large bowls of tea.