The Centurions (36 page)

“Sit down there in front of me.”

He glared furiously.

“Lieutenant-Colonel Raspéguy, since you came back on leave you've been behaving like an imbecile. No, not a word, you'll listen to me first. You don't seem to realize your position—the youngest colonel in the French army, and soon the youngest general—and what did you get up to the very night you arrived? Smuggling. You helped to get a troop of mules over the border under the nose of the carabineers. The story has now spread as far as Bayonne. Clever, isn't it? In the first place you might have come and reported to me in uniform. After all it's to me you owe your present position, and I'm your senior. I waited for you on Sunday; you preferred to go out boozing with a gang of ruffians in the village inn. If you had been caught by those
coños
of carabineers or by the customs men, you realize what a scandal there would have been. Can you imagine yourself in handcuffs?”

“You know I should never have let myself be caught . . .”

“Of course I know, you bloody fool. No Raspéguy has ever been caught, unless he was dead. Like your father, like your uncle Victor. Proud, hot-headed fools with no respect for laws or frontiers. But you happen to be a French officer. Your rank, the name you bear, your army record oblige you to behave properly. You've been made a colonel—well, then, try and behave like a colonel; and above all I don't want to hear about any woman trouble. If you ever feel that sort of urge, go and work it off in Bayonne. You ought to get married, but we'll think about that later. Concha, you blockhead, bring us some Spanish pernod. By the way, tell your brother to get me five more bottles, I'm running out. Good, now that I've had it out with you, let's get down to some drinking. First of all, let's have a look at you. Holy Virgin! Slim as a young subaltern, yet a grand officer of the Légion d'Honneur. You're only just thirty-nine, aren't you?”

“Thirty-nine last month.”

“In my days it took longer, much longer, and was much harder too: and if one was commissioned from the ranks, the highest one could hope to get was captain or major . . . My God, it seems you led the carabineers a dance almost as far as Ibañeta. Your brother Fernand's lost his hand at the game; every tradition is dying out in the Basque country, even smuggling, on account of all these bloody tourists. Money destroys everything.”

With his hairy fist Colonel Mestreville slowly poured some water over the sugar, which began to drip into the absinthe and turn it cloudy. In the warmth of the room the smell was faint at first, then became more pungent, like a July morning in the Basque mountains.

The two men drank in silence, the veteran of Verdun and the youngster of Dien-Bien-Phu.

“What was it like out there?” Mestreville inquired. “Did you fight as you ought to have done? I don't mean you, but the others, because, damn it all, to take such a drubbing from a handful of Annamites . . . ! I knew them myself during the first world war, they weren't worth a straw. We didn't dare use them in the front line.”

“That's because they weren't fighting on their own ground or for themselves; Communism has brought quite a lot of changes too, and your Annamite quaking with fear has become a damn good soldier, one of the best infantrymen in the world.”

“Look, Pierre, I remember a certain dawn attack near Douaumont, three divisions almost shoulder to shoulder to dislodge the Boches from their front line. Not many of us reached our objective. Their machine-guns mowed us down like scythes, yes, just like scythes, and felled our ranks one after the other . . . They say thirty thousand soldiers were killed or wounded that day. Did you do as much at Dien-Bien-Phu?”

Raspéguy rose to his feet. This sort of talk made him see red.

“Sheer butchery.”

“What did you say?”

“Verdun! Butchery . . . useless, senseless butchery. You should have attacked in small groups, well dispersed—thirty yards between each man, lightly equipped, with hand-grenades. Figures bobbing up here and there so that there's no time to take aim. The other dopes get jumpy and begin to lose their heads . . . At Dien-Bien-Phu we were in much the same position as you were at Verdun, with artillery and trenches. We let ourselves be pinned down whereas we should have kept on the move.”

Mestreville brought his fist down on the table, knocking over the glasses.

“We at least won our battles.”

“When there are over a million dead, you can't call it a victory. Those million men would have sired children and I should have had them to fight with me. War's not like that any more, it's not like that at all. The soldier has become something infinitely valuable; you don't just throw him away. For our sort of war you need shrewd, cunning men who are capable of fighting far from the herd, who are full of initiative too—sort of civilians who can turn their hand to any trade, poachers, and missionaries too, who preach but keep one hand on the butt of their revolvers in case any one interrupts them . . . or happens to disagree.”

“Concha, you idle brute, bring in two more glasses. Try and explain yourself more clearly, Pierre.”

“It's rather difficult, but that's what I feel it should be. And then the soldiers who wage that sort of war, which is a good deal harder than yours, ought to believe in something, something worth dying for, and also in their leaders but not in the same way; they must love them, yes, love them deeply, and their love must be returned.”

“What on earth do you mean, my lad?”

“The men must have their leaders under their skin; no, I don't know how to explain it, but there ought to be a sort of close communion in hardship, danger and death. Each time the least of his soldiers is killed, the leader ought to feel he has lost something of himself; it ought to hurt him until he feels like screaming. I don't believe in human cannon-fodder; I'm even against it, very much against it. A million dead! The bastards! With that lot, we could have conquered the world. I don't know what Verdun was like. But I've read some books, any number of books. I don't say what I read; that's my secret. I read and learn on the sly. A man can't discover everything on his own. Then one fine day the brass goggle with surprise at what I tell them and believe that I've thought it all out myself. It was either in Caesar, or else in Clausewitz.”

“Do you mean to say you read Clausewitz?”

“On the sly, always on the sly. And I've got a captain to explain it to me, a certain Esclavier, who's very gifted at that sort of thing. We team up together. And then there's Boudin, a tubby little major who goes in for what they now call logistics, he's the mother hen of the battalion. But that's not what I wanted to talk about. I once saw a two-battalion Legion attack against a Viet position right up north of the delta, where the limestone country begins. I was to support them from the rear with my paratroops and went to see how to set about it.”

Raspéguy laid the glasses, sugar-bowl and spoons out on the table; a stack of files represented the position to be taken.

“At the given signal the legionaries emerged from their trenches all at once. They began to advance, in line, step by step, as though a drum was beating out the time, a big copper drum beating out a loud death march under the heavy, overcast sky. Their ears did not hear the drum, it was in their guts that it resounded. The legionaries kept advancing at the same pace, bolt upright, without lengthening or shortening their stride. They did not even turn round when a pal fell beside them, his guts spilling out of his stomach or his head mashed to a pulp. With their submachine-guns under their arms, stopping now and then to fire a well-aimed burst, they went on step by step, a blank expression on their faces. There were quite a lot of Germans among them; they were the ones who set the pace. The Viets were firing as hard as they could, like madmen. I tried to put myself in their place; to make war, you always must put yourself in the other man's place . . . eat what they eat, sleep with their women and read their books . . . It was death advancing towards them, the icy death that inhabited the tall desperate white men with the straw-coloured hair and tall, strong, sunburnt bodies. The copper drum sounded ever more loudly in their guts. The legionaries reached their lines, impassive as ever, still moving at the same steady pace, firing their well-aimed bursts and hurling hand-grenades with mechanical precision into the trenches.

“The Viets were seized with panic; they threw down their arms and tried to take flight, but the others bowled them over like rabbits—without hatred, I'm certain; but it was something worse than hatred, this slow, inexorable advance. It was several minutes before the legionaries assumed a human expression, before a little blood came back into their cheeks, before that icy demon left them. Then some of them began to collapse—they had not even realized they had been wounded. It was splendid, that attack, quite overwhelming, but I didn't like it at all. One battalion out of the two had been wiped out. I could have done the job with ten times fewer men.

“I wouldn't have commanded those legionaries for anything in the world. I want men who are full of hope, who want to win because they're more fit, better trained and craftier, and who aren't willing to throw away their lives. Yes, I want soldiers who are frightened and who care about living or dying. Mass hysteria is not my line. Maybe that was what Verdun was like?”

Mestreville lowered his eyes and, from his store of distorted embellished memories as a former fighter, tried to recollect what Verdun had been like.

No, it wasn't even that: a heavy human mass, bogged down in the mud and laden like mules, being driven forward—so resigned, so weary and stupefied that it raised no objection.

“Leave me now,” he said to Raspéguy. “I've got to get through all this stuff. There's a whole mass of forms to fill in. It's no joke being mayor. We'll have lunch together. Help yourself to a paper or a book, or go for a walk.”

Raspéguy got into his car and drove up to the Col d'Ispéguy. Seated on a rock and chewing a blade of grass, he watched the clouds twisting up the valley and being blown away in the wind. A few yards behind him stood the barrier of the Spanish customs post. He had called on the carabineers, doled some cigarettes out to them and invited them to drink from his wine-flask. He felt not the slightest resentment against them for having fired on him the night before. He merely despised them a little for letting themselves be taken in so easily. He was interested in their weapons. The Spaniards were armed with rifles which were not up to much and badly looked after; their equipment was too heavy—he could not imagine them crawling about on all fours with those heavy cartridge belts round their stomachs. Of course, it wasn't their job to make war; they were there to prevent smuggling, but Raspéguy was inclined to believe that every able-bodied man was born to fight, to bear arms and to use them against others who were also armed.

Not too keen on their job, these carabineers—Andalusians with olive complexions who could not stand the cold. They should have posted Basques here, but Franco was wary of them. The dream of a Basque nation flashed through the colonel's mind but, like the clouds in the valley, was soon dispelled.

A distant tinkling came to his ears, wafted on the rain-laden wind. When he was a shepherd, Pierre-Noel Raspéguy had been able to tell from the sound of their bells to which farm the sheep belonged. The Eskualdarry estate had the deepest-sounding bells and the Irrigoyen the shrillest, “shrill as a dried pea flicked against a crystal glass,” as old Inchauspé, who made them, used to say. The secret had been handed down to him from his father who had inherited it from his grandfather, but he had not had time to divulge it to his son who had gone off to America and never come back. With him had died one of the oldest traditions in the valley. Now the bells all had the same note, and the shepherds, instead of clambering over the mountains, dancing up there, Basques of Spain and of France together, on the frontiers which they refused to recognize, to the sound of the
chistou
and the
tountoun
, then soaking themselves in wine, singing and brawling . . . instead of this, the shepherds now came down to Saint-Étienne and went to the cinema. It was even worse with the Spaniards. The Basque nation was being progressively reduced to a vague feeling of nostalgia. Raspéguy had been born on the frontier, of a mother from the Spanish side and a father from the French side. Had it not been for Colonel Mestreville, he would willingly have deserted rather than do his military service.

Each fresh medal, each promotion had bound him closer and closer to France. But he still retained something of the soldier of fortune who fights for pay and booty. He had become completely French, by free choice, when he had joined de Gaulle in England in July
1940
. His country was the Army rather than France; in his mind it was impossible to dissociate the one from the other.

He was already beginning to miss the army after three days' leave. He dreamt of the regiment that he was about to command. He would take Esclavier and Boudin with him, of course, but he would also have liked to have by his side such diverse officers as Glatigny and Pinières, Marindelle and Orsini, such improbable ones as Boisfeuras, such tormented ones as Mahmoudi.

 • • • 

Colonel Mestreville did not work on his papers; he sat pondering on the strange destiny of Pierre Raspéguy. He had imagined him as a leader of men, a brawler, a sort of brute who forged ahead and was always lucky. A splendid thoroughbred warrior animal, who liked flaunting his medals in the midst of admiring women who were ready to give him all, and in front of jealous men.

The colonel was a leading member of the Saint-Cyrienne.
*

During one of their meetings in Paris he had met General Meynier who was just back from Indo-China where he had been second-in-command in Tonkin. General Meynier was not very popular in the army, for he was said to be intelligent and had influential political connexions. He had summed up the war in Indo-China as follows: