The Centurions (3 page)

That was how Glatigny made the acquaintance of Boisfeuras who now lay a few feet away from him, a prisoner like himself.

 • • • 

During the night Boisfeuras shifted closer to Glatigny.

“The age of heroics is over,” he said, “at least the age of cinema heroics. The new armies will have neither regimental standards nor military bands. They will have to be first and foremost efficient. That's what we're going to learn and that's the reason I didn't try and escape.”

He held his two hands out to Glatigny, and the latter saw that he had slipped out of his fetters. But he had no reaction; he was even rather bored by Boisfeuras. Everything came to him from a great distance, like an echo.

Glatigny was lying like a gun dog, his jutting shoulder bearing the weight of his body.

The crests of the mountains surrounding the basin stood out clearly against the dark background of the night. Clouds drifted across the sky and from time to time the close or distant sound of an aircraft could be heard in the silence.

He felt no particular urge other than a very remote and very vague desire for warmth. His physical exhaustion was such that he had the impression of being withdrawn from the world, pushed beyond his limits and enabled to contemplate himself from outside. Perhaps this was what Le-Thuong meant by Nirvana.

At Saigon the Buddhist monk Le-Thuong had tried to initiate him into the mysteries of fasting.

“The first few days,” he had told him, “you think of nothing but food. However fervent your prayers and your longing for union with God, all your spiritual exercises, all your meditations are tainted by material desires. The liberation of the mind occurs between the eighth and the tenth day. In a few hours it detaches itself from the body. Independent of it, it appears in a startling purity which is made up of lucidity, objectivity and penetrating understanding. Between the thirty-fifth and fortieth day, in the midst of this purity, the urge for food occurs again: this is the final alarm signal given by the organism on the point of exhaustion. Beyond this biological limit, metaphysics cease to exist.”

Since dawn on
7
May Glatigny had been in this condition. He had the strange feeling of having two separate states of consciousness, one of which was weakening more and more at every moment but still impelled him to give certain orders, make certain gestures, such as tearing off his badges of rank when he had been captured, while the other took refuge in a sort of dull, morose form of contemplation. Until then he had always lived in a world which was concrete, active, friendly or hostile, but logical even in absurdity.

 • • • 

On
6
May, at eleven o'clock at night, the Viets had blown up the summit of the peak with a mine and forthwith thrown in two battalions which had seized almost the whole of the strong-point and, which was worse, the most commanding positions.

The French counter-attack by the forty survivors had thus started from the foot of the slope.

Glatigny recalled the remark Boisfeuras had made: “This is all completely idiotic!” and Pinières's sharp retort:

“If you're nervous about it, sir, there's no need for you to come with us.”

But Boisfeuras was without nerves; he had proved this. He simply seemed indifferent to what was happening, as though he was reserving himself entirely for the second part of the drama.

The counter-attack had been feeble and difficult to get under way. Nevertheless, the men had managed to regain the position, dug-out after dug-out, by means of hand-grenades. At four in the morning the last Viet pinned down on the edge of the crater of the mine had been wiped out; but half the men of the small garrison had lost their lives.

A sudden silence ensued, isolating Marianne II like an island in the midst of a sea on fire. To the west of the Song Ma, the Vietminh artillery was pounding away at General de Castries' H.Q. and for a few seconds the glow of the firing alternately spread and faded in the darkness. To the north, Marianne IV, assailed on all sides, was still holding out.

Cergona, the wireless operator, had been killed at Captain Glatigny's side. But his set, a PCR
10
, which he carried strapped to his back, was still working and crackled gently in the silence. Suddenly the crackling gave way to the voice of Portes, who was in command of the last reserve company centred on Marianne IV. This unit had been made up of the survivors of the three parachute battalions to come to the assistance of Marianne II:

“Double Blue, I repeat. I am still at the foot of Marianne II. Impossible to break out. The Viets hold the trenches above me and are chucking grenades right on top of us. I've only got nine men left. Over.”

“Blue Three, I've told you to counter-attack. Get a move on, for Christ's sake; we're also getting grenades tossed at us. You should have reached the summit by now.”

“Double Blue Three, message received. I'll try and advance. Out.”

Silence, followed by another voice insistently repeating:

“Double Blue Four, reply. Double Blue Four?”

But Blue could not reply any longer; old Portes had been shot to pieces attempting to gain the summit. His huge frame lay stretched out on a slope and a tiny Viet was going through his pockets.

Glatigny had listened to this strange wireless conversation with the indifference of a sports professional who has gone into retirement and tunes in to the broadcasts of the matches by sheer force of habit. But this meant that no one now could come to the aid of Marianne II since Marianne III was lost.

Glatigny could not even summon up enough strength to switch off the PCR
10
which went on crackling until its batteries ran out. Cergona lay with his head in the mud, and the set with its aerial looked like some monstrous beetle which was devouring his body.

A recognition light floating slowly down on the end of its parachute cast a livid gleam over the peak. On the reverse slope, Glatigny could make out the Vietminh trenches which stood out as a series of unbroken black lines. They looked calm and utterly inoffensive.

His platoon officers and company commanders began to trickle back one by one to make their report. Ten yards farther off, Boisfeuras sat with his knees drawn up to his chin, looking up into the sky as though seeking a sign from heaven.

Merle was the first to arrive. He looked lankier than ever and kept picking his nose.

“I've only seven men left in the company, sir, and two magazines of ammo. Not a word from Lacade's platoon which has disappeared completely.”

The next to turn up was Sergeant-Major Pontin. The stubble on his cheeks was white; he appeared to be on the point of collapse and on the verge of tears.

“So long as he breaks down alone in his dug-out,” Glatigny said to himself.

“Five men left, four magazines,” said the sergeant-major.

Then he went off to have his break-down.

Pinières was the last to arrive. He was a senior lieutenant and came and sat down next to Glatigny.

“Only eight men left, and nothing to put in the rifles.”

The Viets were now broadcasting the Partisan Song on Marianne II's frequency:

Friend, do you hear the black flight of the ravens in the plains

Friend, do you hear the dull cry of your country in chains . . .

“That's funny,” Pinières remarked bitterly, “it really is funny, sir. They've even gone and stolen that from me.”

Pinières had undergone his baptism of fire in an F.T.P. maquis group and had been assimilated into the army: he was one of the rare successes to emerge from this operation.

Merle reappeared.

“Better come, sir. They've found the kid and he's dying.”

“The kid” was Second-Lieutenant Lacade, who had been posted to the parachute battalion three months before, straight from Saint-Cyr and after only a few weeks in a training school.

Glatigny got up and Boisfeuras followed him, barefoot and with his trousers rolled up to his knees.

Lacade had received some fragments of grenade in the stomach. His fingers dug into the warm, muddy ground. In the half light Glatigny could hardly distinguish his face, but by the sound of his voice he realized he was done for.

Lacade was twenty-one years old. To give himself an air of authority, he had grown a whisp of blond moustache and made his voice sound gruff. It had now become adolescent once more, a hesitant voice in which the high tones alternated with the low. The kid was no longer putting on an act.

“I'm thirsty,” he kept saying, “I'm terribly thirsty, sir.”

The only answer Glatigny could give was a lie:

“We'll have you taken down to Marianne III; there's an M.O. there.”

It was silly to believe that anyone, hampered with a casualty, could get through the Viet position between the two strong-points. Even the kid knew this; but now he was willing to believe in the impossible. He pinned his faith on his captain's promises.

“I'm thirsty,” he repeated, “but I can certainly hang on until it's light. You remember, sir, in Hanoi, at the Normandie, those bottles of beer so cold that they were all misted up? It was like touching a piece of ice.”

Glatigny had taken his hand. He slid his fingers up his wrist to feel his pulse which was weakening. The kid would not be suffering much longer.

Lacade cried out once or twice again for some beer and muttered a girl's name, Aline, the name of his little fiancée who was waiting for him in her home in the country, the little fiancée of a Saint-Cyr cadet, bright and gay and not at all well off, who had worn the same dress on Sundays for the last two years.

His fingers dug still deeper into the mud.

Boisfeuras sidled up to Glatigny who was still crouching over the body.

“Seven drafts of Saint-Cyr cadets wiped out in Indo-China. It's too much, Glatigny, when the result is a defeat. It will be difficult to recover from this drain on our manpower.”

“A boy of twenty,” said Glatigny, “twenty years of hope and enthusiasm dead. That's a hell of a capital to throw away, and can't be easily recovered. I wonder what they think about it in Paris.”

“They're just coming out of the theatres about now.”

At first light the Viets attacked again. The remaining survivors of Marianne II saw them emerging one by one from the openings in their covered trenches. Then the silhouettes started appearing and disappearing, moving swiftly, bounding and rebounding like india-rubber balls. Not a single shot was fired. Glatigny had given orders to reserve what was left of the ammunition for the final assault.

The captain had a Mills bomb in his hand. He plucked out the pin, keeping his palm pressed down on the spring.

“All I need do,” he reflected, “is drop it at my feet just as the Viets are on top of me and count up to five; then we'll all leave this world together, them at the same time as me. I shall have died in the true tradition, like Uncle Joseph in
1940
, like my father in Morocco, and my grandfather at Chemin des Dames. Claude will go and join the black battalion of officers' widows. She'll be welcome there, she'll be in good company. My sons will go to La Flèche, my daughters to the Légion d'Honneur.”

The joints of his fingers clenching the grenade began to ache.

Less than ten yards off, three Viets in single file had just slipped into a dug-out. He could hear them urging each other on before taking the next bound that would bring them right up to him.

“One, two, three . . .”

He hurled the grenade into the dug-out. But he had raised his head and shoulders above the sky-line and drawn several bursts of machine-gun fire. The grenade exploded and lumps of earth and shreds of clothing and flesh came flying through the air.

He lay flat in the mud. Close by, to his right, he heard the suburban accent of Mansard, a sergeant:

“They've got us now, the bastards; there's nothing left to fire back at them.”

Glatigny tore off his badges of rank; he could at least try to pass himself off as an O.R. It would be easier to escape . . . when the time came. Then he stretched out on his side in the hole; all he could do now was wait for the experience that Boisfeuras claimed to be so interesting.

The explosion of a grenade in his dug-out made him take leave of the Greco-Latin-Christian civilized world. When he regained consciousness he was on the other side . . . among the Communists.

A voice was shouting out in the darkness:

“You are completely surrounded. Do not fire. We shall do you no harm. Stand up and keep your hands in the air.”

This voice uttered each syllable separately, like the sound-track of a badly dubbed cowboy film.

The voice drew closer; it now addressed itself to Glatigny:

“Are you alive? Wounded? We shall take care of you, we have medical supplies. Where are your weapons?”

“I haven't any. I'm not wounded, only stunned.”

Glatigny had to make a great effort to speak and was surprised to hear his own voice; he could hardly recognize it, like that time he had listened to the play-back of a talk he had given on Radio Saigon.

“Don't move,” the voice went on, “the medical orderly will be coming up soon.”

Glatigny came to his senses in a long narrow shelter shaped like a tunnel. He was sitting on the ground, his bare back resting against the earth wall. Facing him, a
nha-que
squatting on his haunches was smoking some foul tobacco rolled up in a piece of old newspaper.

The tunnel was lit by two candles, but every
nha-que
who went past kept flashing his electric torch on and off. In the same position as himself, leaning against the earth wall, the captain recognized three Vietnamese paratroopers who were at Marianne II. They glanced across at him, then turned away.

The
nha-que
was bare-headed, his upper lip flanked by two symmetrical tufts of two or three long straggly whiskers. He was wearing a khaki uniform without any distinguishing marks and, unlike the other Viets, had no canvas shoes on his feet and his toes wriggled voluptuously in the warm mud of the shelter.