The Centurions (12 page)

During the night of
27
–
28
May they passed through the old entrenched camp of Na-San.

The Voice ordered a halt, which lasted several hours. It had stopped raining; the sky had cleared; it was now luminous and the colour of milk. They were at the foot of a tooth-shaped peak which was still crowned with a few strands of rusty barbed wire and stacks of punctured sandbags.

“I held this strong-point for three months,” Esclavier told Glatigny. “It was full of Viet corpses; they reached right up to my dug-out. I thought Na-San was impregnable. I also thought Dien-Bien-Phu was impregnable . . .”

“Everyone thought Dien-Bien-Phu was impregnable,” Glatigny replied in a flat voice, “the captains, the colonels, the generals, the ministers, the Americans, the pilots and even the sailors who knew nothing about it. Everyone, do you realize? No one doubted it for a moment. I was in a particularly good position to know.”

The calm of the night, the milky night, the memory of the battles at Na-San, which for him had been victories, made Esclavier tolerant for a certain length of time and he forgot his harsh conception of war and his favourite axiom; “the man who loses is guilty and must be executed.”

“Why did we foul it up so badly?” he asked dispassionately.

At this point Glatigny felt that by explaining Dien-Bien-Phu he could exorcize his remorse.

Boisfeuras came up and without a word sat down beside them.

“We had to protect Laos,” Glatigny explained, “to which France had just committed herself by signing a treaty of defence. Laos was the first country to join the French Union.

“We had to stem the main Vietminh advance on the Tonkinese delta, on Hanoi and Haiphong. So as to gain time we chose Dien-Bien-Phu in order to engage them.”

“Five hundred miles from our bases?” Esclavier interjected.

“The Viets were also five hundred miles from theirs and they had no air force. Their only supply line was this secondary road, R.P.
41
, this umbilical cord which our pilots claimed they could put out of service at a moment's notice. That's what they never stopped saying, anyway.”

“Only it wasn't true and Dien-Bien-Phu was a basin.”

“Certainly, but the largest one in South-East Asia—ten miles by five. We could lay down several landing strips for our modern aircraft. The ridges commanding it were farther away than the range of the Vietminh guns. To shell the entrenched camp, the Viets therefore had to site their artillery either on the forward slope or else in the plain. There, we could fight back, destroy it with our superior guns, our planes and our armour . . . But the Viets dug their guns in, they came down to engage us in the plain and in the plain we held the heights. So the Viets then stormed the heights and overran us.”

Boisfeuras broke in:

“We were wrong from start to finish because we tried to see the war from the point of view of Saigon, or, at the most, of Paris, by forcing ourselves to believe that it was possible to isolate the Vietnamese peninsula from the rest of the Asiatic and Communist world and that we could calmly embark on our little operation of colonial reconquest. Sheer stupidity! We should have regarded this war through the eyes of Moscow or Peking. Now, Moscow and Peking did not give a damn about Viet-Nam, this cul-de-sac which led nowhere, but they did care about Dien-Bien-Phu, and very much so.

“I know South-East Asia pretty well. It's more or less my country; I've been around here for years; I've fought here against the Japs and the Chinese. I've also read quite a lot of Communist literature. What does Lenin say? ‘The future of world revolution lies with the great masses of Asia.' China is Communist, but there still remains India which is closed to China by the Himalayas, to Russia by the Pamirs and the ranges of Afghanistan. The only point of entry is through Bengal and South-East Asia.

“Among the seething races of the Far East which can hardly be numbered, there's only one ethnic group of any historical or political interest: the Thais. They've got a history, they've built an empire. They're called Chans and Karens in Burma; they're also to be found in Thailand and Laos. In the Haute Région they represent three-fifths of the population and they're also established in Yunnan. The capital of this Thai empire is Dien-Bien-Phu.

“The Communists decided to work on the Thais so as to force an entry into India. They set up the Thai majority in Yunnan as an autonomous people's republic and, I can tell you now, it was on that business that I was engaged. The Chinese want to group all the other Thais round their people's republic. Once that is done, all that's needed is a slight nudge for the whole of South-East Asia to collapse. Then every gateway into India will be open to them. They therefore could not allow the historical and geographical capital of the Thais to be held by western anti-Communists. Mao-Tse-Tung ordered the capture of Dien-Bien-Phu while Giap was dreaming about the delta.”

“Dien-Bien-Phu was the only basin where the big modern bombers could take off,” Glatigny observed, “and the Americans had thought of it with a view to . . .”

“With a view to what?” Boisfeuras inquired.

“With a view to attacking China, perhaps.”

“No one ever mentioned that possibility,” said Esclavier.

Glatigny was afraid he had spoken too freely: he tried to correct himself.

“There was a rumour to that effect; I wasn't in the know about anything connected with secret international negotiations . . .”

But all of a sudden his regard for security seemed absurd.

“Nevertheless,” he went on, “the Americans were most insistent that we should choose Dien-Bien-Phu. And Giap had thirty thousand of his
bo-dois
slaughtered to please the Chinese. But in return he received from them twenty-four
105
mm. guns, eighteen
75
mm., a hundred
12
.
7
A.A. guns, eighty
37
mm. and all the ammunition he could possibly want.”

“And also the promise of volunteers, if necessary,” Boisfeuras chipped in. “The Communists are perfectly logical. Dien-Bien-Phu was something on which their very life depended. That's what the Americans failed to see.

“It's true that American opinion, which is anti-colonialist by tradition, would have found it difficult to support a conflict, which the whole of their press condemned as colonial, to the extent of going to war. And yet Dien-Bien-Phu was one of those battles which set the two blocs by the ears. Only the French found themselves facing the whole Communist machine on their own.”

Glatigny lay back in the damp grass and gazed up at the sky; in the moonlight the clouds sparkled like strings of artificial jewels.

He had flown over this valley in the comfort of the general's aircraft and attended the briefings at which clever staff officers had dissected the war in detail but without grasping it as a whole. In the same aircraft he had accompanied those wretched little ministers who came out from time to time on a tour of inspection. They were ten thousand miles away from hearth and home and could only regard this conflict from the narrow viewpoint of little town councillors. How could they imagine another world in which vast swarms of men were famished, longing for the smallest morsel of food, and crazed with hope?

After this halt and this respite, the Voice subjected the prisoners to a forced march, as though he wanted to make them atone for their victory at Na-San, and many of them, dazed with fatigue, lay down and died by the side of the road.

Merle was getting worse and worse. As a result of some subtle and secret bargaining, Boisfeuras managed to obtain a few tablets of stovarsol from one of the
bo-dois
. He made the lieutenant take them and Merle began to feel better almost immediately.

Later on he asked Boisfeuras:

“It couldn't have been an easy job getting those tablets?”

“No.”

“You wouldn't be able to get any more, I suppose?”

“They're finished.”

“And what if you or Glatigny or someone else suddenly needs some?”

“We'll have to do without.”

The prisoners were now all living in a secondary state of consciousness; they hovered on the brink between nightmare and reality; their will and courage fell apart while their personal characteristics and everything that contributed to their individualities melted away into the uniform grey mass slogging along through the mud.

The Voice behaved like a scientific chemist; he regulated their hunger, their fatigue and their despair so as to reduce them to the exact point at which, broken and deranged, he could at last work on them and drill them against their past by concentrating on what still remained: the elementary reflexes of fear, fatigue and hunger.

He kept assembling them incessantly for “instruction periods.” One day he started inveighing against the French command which had just refused to take over the wounded of Dien-Bien-Phu.

As though to confirm his words, the French Air Force came and bombed the road.

After a night march which was even more exhausting than usual, he kept telling them in that smooth, impersonal, relentless voice of his:

“We are obliged to make you march by night to protect you from being bombed by your own aircraft. That is what Capitalism, with its internal contradictions, leads to.”

This was more than Pinières could stomach. He turned to Boisfeuras and asked:

“What the hell does he mean by ‘the internal contradictions of Capitalism'?”

“Not daring to wage the sort of war that's necessary to defend oneself. Not reorganizing and remodelling oneself so as to carry the war into the enemy camp, shutting oneself up in ivory towers, not fighting by night, employing mercenaries—like us, for instance—instead of hurling into the fray everyone who is anxious for the Capitalist system to survive, using money and technology as a substitute for faith, forgetting that the masses are the mainspring of all endeavour, corrupting them with modern amenities instead of keeping them wiry and alert with the offer of some valid purpose in life . . .

Pale and emaciated, Merle angrily retorted:

“The masses enjoy modern amenities as much as we do. In Europe they discover the refrigerator and television. The Arabs also take to modern amenities, so do the Hindus, the Chinese and the Patagonians. When I get back to France I shall lie back and wallow in all those amenities. I shan't drink anything unless it's iced and I'll only go to bed with nice clean little girls who wash between the legs with disinfectants.”

“The civilization of the frigidaire and the bidet,” Esclavier sneered.

 • • • 

On the
7
th of June Esclavier stole a fork from one of the
bo-dois
and on the
8
th they forded a river in spate. There were several hundred coolies at work in the dark, repairing a bridge by the light of bamboo torches, and each gang, by means of slogans and songs, maintained an illusion of feverish activity.

The sound of an aircraft overhead brought them to a standstill; all the torches were instantly extinguished. Complete silence ensued among coolies and prisoners alike.

All of a sudden Lescure burst out into his mad guffaw.

Two officers from the adjacent group tried to make a break for it, but they were brought back a few hours later, knocked senseless with rifle-butts and dragged before their comrades.

The days of leniency appeared to be over and Lacombe, who had stepped aside into the undergrowth in order to relieve himself, was trussed up as though he too had been trying to escape.

He protested his innocence in a sorrowful voice and was beaten up for his pains.

Boisfeuras, who suddenly felt anxious, eavesdropped on the sentries' conversation: the Geneva conference had fallen through. The number of prisoners who were tied up increased every day.

The Haute Région had now given place to the Moyenne. The mosquitoes were voracious and countless; leeches had appeared on the scene; it began to be extremely hot.

The days and nights never varied in their routine. Daylight meant the rice chore and a period of rest in the midst of a cloud of mosquitoes; as soon as night fell the
bo-dois
lit their torches and resumed their march through the forest and paddy-fields.

Lacombe, who had his hands tied behind him, kept stumbling, a grotesque Christ with pendulous cheeks like an old hag's bottom. He did not even beg Pinières to help him along any more. The injustice of which he was the victim struck him as being so enormous that he could not bring himself to protest. Something must have gone seriously wrong with the workings of the Almighty if they believed him to be capable of such incorrect behaviour as escaping! Yet he was prepared to like the Vietminh and believe in all their nonsense. In the first place he had always been in favour of universal peace. The commissariat had nothing to do with war; a supplies officer was simply a grocer at the disposal of the army, and he fully intended, when he retired, to start a shop at Bergerac where his wife's family lived.

He felt a hand behind him unfastening his bonds. It was Mahmoudi taking pity on him.

“They'll see,” protested Lacombe, who insisted on enduring his punishment even though it was unjust, to show he was well disposed.

“Leave him alone,” said Pinières. “Can't you see he's enjoying it? He's loving every moment.”

A
bo-doi
walked down the column and Lacombe wriggled away from Mahmoudi's hands, heaving deep sighs so that the sentry should hear him and see for himself how much he was suffering. He kept going, tittupping along the track.

Many of them were worn out by dysentery and were passing blood. The Voice gave orders for them to be left behind in the villages through which they passed.

“Our medical service will take care of them,” he promised.

Not one of those prisoners was ever seen again. They died secretly in the corner of some thatch hut, wasted away by dysentery, festering from their wounds.