The French Art of War

by Alexis Jenni

  Seen from a plane, the jungle is streaked with fleecy clouds; it looks pleasant. It softens the edges of the Haute-Région, tempers the jagged limestone karsts with a carpet of green wool. It unfurls beneath the plane, dense and compact, and from above it looks like a comfortable place to stretch out. But plunge into it, struggle through the dense, unchanging canopy, and you realize with horror that it is made up of crudely stitched rags and tatters.

  No one imagined it was so shoddy, the jungle of Indochine; they knew it was dangerous, that was endurable, but it is a wretched setting in which to die. And this is what most creatures do here: die; the animals that tear each other to pieces with refinements of cruelty, the plants that do not even have time to fall, but are devoured as soon as dead by those that grow around and over them.

  In France we have a mistaken idea of virgin forest, since the forests in novels are modelled on the huge houseplants that stand next to windows in overheated living rooms, and films set in the jungle are filmed in botanic gardens. We imagine the dense dark jungle that appears in books to be staggeringly fertile; we imagine hacking our path through it with a machete, with a joyous hunger in our hearts and the strain of conquest in our bellies, coursing with the wholesome sweat of exertion to be washed away in a nearby stream. It is nothing like that. From within, the jungle of Indochine is ugly, sparse, and it is not even green. From a plane it looks soft; from a distance, compact; but inside, standing at the foot of the trees, it is a shabby mess. It is planted any old how, no two trees side by side are the same; they are all half-choked by vines, propped up by each other, all gnarled, clutching at every branch they can reach, all crudely planted in scrubby ground, in poor soil that is not even carpeted with leaves; things grow every which way at every height, and nothing is green. The grey tree trunks struggle to stand upright, the sickly, yellowish branches twist and twine; it is impossible to tell to which tree they belong; the pockmarked leaves, dusted with grey, struggle towards the light, while liana do their best to strangle everything living, looking more like a rampant disease than harmonious, burgeoning vegetation.

  We imagine a forest to be dense; in fact, it’s a junkyard. The ground on which you walk is not lush and fecund, but strewn with fallen debris. Your feet get snarled in roots growing halfway up the side of a tree; the trunks are covered with hairs that harden into barbs; the barbs cover the edges of the leaves; the leaves are utterly unlike leaves, being either too waxy, too flabby, too large, too swollen or too spiky; excess is their only rule. The muggy heat liquefies comprehension. Insects buzz about in little swarms, tracking the nearest source of hot blood; or chirrup on the leaves, or crawl along disguised as branches. The soil teems with a phenomenal variety of worms that writhe and cause the earth to move. You are imprisoned in the forests of Indochine, as in a locked kitchen with every hob turned up high, while steaming pans without lids boil away. Sweat starts to trickle the moment you take a step, clothing becomes soaked, gestures dissolve into embarrassment; you skid on the slippery ground. In spite of the hygrothermal energy flowing from everything, gushing from bodies, the jungle gives off an overwhelming impression of unwholesome deficiency.

  ‘Walking in the woods’ has a salubrious, joyful sense only in the primeval forests of Europe, where trees grow in serried ranks without crowding out the others; where the supple ground, cool and dry, cracks a little underfoot; where the sky can be glimpsed between the leaves; where it is possible to gaze up while walking without fear of stumbling over some hideous mess. ‘Walking in the woods’ does not have the same sense here; instead it conjures the idea of stepping into a thick layer of mould growing over huge heaps of rotting vegetation. Here, people do not walk, they do a job of work. For some, this entails tapping rubber trees, for others gathering wild honey, still others discover seams of precious stones or cut down tall teaks that have to be dragged to the river to be transported. People get lost here, they die of disease, they slaughter each other. Salagnon’s job of work is to seek out the Viet Minh and get out alive if he can. Escape this mouldering world if he can. If he can, he thinks over and over. Everything here conspires to make life more fragile, more loathsome. He was not sorry to make much of the journey by boat.

  The designation LCT – Landing Craft for Tanks – is hardly appropriate for the boats that transport men along the rivers of Indochine. Most people call them barges. They are diesel-powered metal hulks that glide upstream; the roar of their engines is more a series of feeble farts constantly about to stall, a noise that has trouble moving through air that is too viscous, too humid, too hot. Perhaps the noise of the engines does not even reach the banks, and perhaps the children leading enormous buffalo on leashes did not hear them; they saw these machines gliding up the river silently, laboriously, in a slow churn of liquid mud. The LCTs were not designed for this. Built quickly and crudely, they were used during the war to transport heavy artillery to the Pacific Islands and it made little difference if one should sink. When the war was over, there were still hundreds of them. There is little heavy artillery here; things break down, they roll over landmines, they are useless when dealing with a hidden enemy. And so the LCTs were used to transport troops along the rivers, their kitbags and the ammunition were stowed in the large, uncovered cargo bays, flimsy shelters were built on deck to protect them from the sun, and strung wire netting between poles protected them from grenades lobbed from the banks or from a sampan that sailed too close. With the canvas and bamboo shelters, their cargo bays filled with drowsy men, their hulls eaten away by rust, their sides peppered with dents and bullet holes, these American vessels – simple and serviceable as all things American – took on, in Indochine, a tropical, ramshackle air, a tired, makeshift air that accentuated the damp clanking of the diesel engine; it seemed that at any moment it would cut out and everything would come to a standstill.

  The ordinary seaman skippering the convoy of LCTs, whom Salagnon called captain, being ignorant of naval ranks, came and leaned next to him on the gunwale and they watched the flowing water. It carried clumps of grass, clusters of water hyacinths, dead branches drifting slowly downstream.

  ‘Over here, the only more-or-less clear route is the river,’ he said eventually.

  ‘You call this clear?’

  The word amused Salagnon, because the brownish water slipping past the sides of the boat was so thick with mud that the prow and the propellers produced no froth, no foam; the silt-heavy waters roiled a little as they passed and quickly became a still, untroubled expanse.

  ‘I might be a sailor, Lieutenant, but I’m keen to keep my legs. And the only way to do that in this country is not to walk. I don’t trust the ground. There are very few roads here and most of those are impassable; they barricade them at night by hacking down trees, dig trenches across them, set off landslides to bury them. Even the landscape here has it in for us. When it rains the road turns to mud and when you step on it, it explodes or it caves in and your foot plunges into a hole with sharpened spikes at the bottom. I don’t hang around on what they call terra firma any more, because it’s not. I go everywhere by boat, by river. Since they don’t have floating mines or torpedoes here, it’s clear.’

  The three LCTs chugged slowly up the river. The men slept in the hold beneath the tarpaulin shelters; the canvas quivered; you could feel the thick water scraping against the sides of the hull. Along this route with no shade, the sun was crushing; the heat shrouded them in a mist that dazzled in the light. Clay dykes hid the scenery; here and there a clump of trees or a group of thatched roofs emerged. As they passed, small boats tethered to the banks rocked; in them were women bent over their washing, fishermen dressed in rags, naked children who watched them pass, then leapt into the water, laughing. Everything, from earth to sky, was bathed in greenish yellow, the colour of a worn-out military bedsheet, the colour of a threadbare colonial infantry uniform that might fall apart with a single tug. The suffocating clanking of the engines followed them everywhere.

  ‘The problem with th
ese rivers are the banks. In Europe, they’re always calm, a bit dreary, but restful. Here, the silence is so complete you’re for ever thinking you’re about to be shot at. You don’t see anything, but you are being watched. And don’t ask me by who. I don’t know. No one does. No one knows anything in this fucking country. I can’t stand their silence, though I can’t stand their noise either. As soon as they open their mouths, they’re screaming; and when they shut up, the silence is scary. Have you noticed? The cities here are bedlam, but the countryside is a silent nightmare. Sometimes you slap your ears just to make sure they’re working. Things happen here that can’t be heard. It keeps me awake. I worry I’m deaf. I wake up with a start. The sound of the engine reassures me, but I’m terrified it will stop. I scan the riverbanks, there’s never anything. But I know they’re there. No way of getting to sleep. The banks would have to be really far away for me to get any sleep. In the middle of the ocean, maybe. There I might finally be able to sleep. Finally. Because I’ve been storing up missed sleep for years. You can’t imagine how much I would sleep if I was on the open sea.’

  They heard a dull thud. They saw a human body, face down in the water, arms and legs outstretched, bump gently against the hull; then it slid along the side of the barge, spun slowly and disappeared downstream. Another followed, and another, and still others. Splayed bodies drifted down the river, some floated on their bellies, their faces submerged for so long the watchers felt a rising panic; others floated on their backs, their bloated faces turned towards the sun, their eyes reduced to narrow slits. Whirling slowly, they glided downstream. ‘What’s that?’ ‘People.’ One of the corpses became stuck against the flat bow of the barge and began to emerge from the water, the body arched, then stopped and headed up the river with them. Another glided past, then became caught in the propeller blades and the water turned a reddish brown, crimson blood mingled with mud, and the severed corpse floated on, hit the next LCT and sank. ‘For Christ’s sake, move them away! Move them away!’ Sailors grabbed boathooks, leaned over the side and pushed the corpses away from the hull, hooked them and thrust them into the current, so they would not touch the barge.

  ‘Move them away, for Christ’s sake! Move them away!’

  Dozens of corpses were floating down the river, an inexhaustible supply of bodies streamed down the river; the women haloed by their flowing black hair, the children for once not fidgeting, the men identical in the black pyjamas that serve as a uniform for the whole country. ‘Move them away, for Christ’s sake!’ The captain roared the same order over and over, his voice growing shrill. ‘Move them away, for Christ’s sake!’ The fists gripping the rail were white. Salagnon wiped his lips. He had clearly vomited without even noticing; there was an acrid coating in his mouth, a few drops from his knotted stomach. ‘Who are they?’ ‘Villagers. People murdered by looters, bandits, the fucking bastards who hide out in the jungle. People who were going about their business, assaulted, robbed, tossed into the river. I told you, the roads in the country aren’t safe. Horrifying things happen every day.’

  Bodies continued to drift past the three LCTs and they continued up the river, alone or in dense groups; some seemed to be wearing a brownish uniform, but it was impossible to be certain, since all the clothes here looked alive, and besides everything was wet, bloated, sodden with sallow water; the bodies were too far away and no one went to check. The only sounds were the muted backfire of the diesel engines and the laboured breathing of the sailors wielding boathooks.

  ‘I really need to see the ocean again,’ muttered the captain when finally they had passed the gruesome floe. He let go of the gunwale and, through the parched skin of his cheeks, Salagnon could see his jaw muscles pulse like a heart, his tongue frantically rubbing against his teeth. He turned on his heel, locked himself in the cramped cabin next to the engines and Salagnon did not see him again until the end of the journey. Perhaps he was trying to sleep; and perhaps he succeeded.

  Farther up the river, they passed a burned-out village. It was still smouldering, but everything had already burned: the thatched roofs, the bamboo stockades, the walls of woven wood. All that remained were upright, blackened beams and smoking piles of ash, ringed by headless palm trees and the bodies of dead pigs.

  A four-wheel drive was making its way along the dyke, a black Citroën as in France, but out of place here; it was driving slowly in the same direction as the barges along a track by a bank usually used by buffalos. For a while, they moved in convoy, the Citroën trailing a cloud of dust, then it stopped. Two men in flowery, short-sleeved shirts climbed out, dragging a third man dressed in black, his hands lashed behind his back, a Vietnamese with a thick shock of hair, a heavy fringe falling over his eyes. Hands on his shoulders, they marched him to the river’s edge and made him kneel. One of the men in short-sleeved shirts raised his pistol and shot him in the back of the head. The Vietnamese toppled forwards and fell into the river; from the barge, they belatedly heard the muffled sound of the shot. The body floated on its belly, hugging the shore, then found a current and began to drift, moving away from the bank, heading downstream. The man in the floral shirt stuck his pistol in the waistband of his linen trousers and raised his hand to salute the LCTs. The soldiers returned the salute, some of them with laughs and cheers that perhaps he heard. The men climbed back into the Citroën and disappeared.

  ‘The Surêté,’ whispered Moreau.

  Salagnon could always smell him coming, because every morning Moreau carefully combed his hair into a neat parting and applied a dollop of brilliantine that mantled in the heat. When Moreau approached, it smelled like a barber shop.

  ‘Did you sleep?’

  ‘Dozed a bit against my kitbag between a couple of Thais. They have no problem sleeping, they can kip anywhere; but they sleep like cats. When I got up, as carefully as possible, making not a sound – I was pretty proud of my performance – I noticed that, without even opening their eyes, the Thais had closed their hands around their bayonets. Even when they’re asleep, they know what’s going on. I’ve got a way to go to catch up.’

  ‘How did you know those guys were from the Surêté?’

  ‘The four-wheel drive, the pistols tucked into their belts, the baggy shirts. They’re cocky fuckers. They’re the hot-shots when it comes to crime. They run this place. They arrest guys, interrogate them, shoot them. They don’t even try to be discreet; they’re not afraid of anything, until someone shoots them. And then come the reprisals and the whole thing starts up again.’

  ‘What good does it do?’

  ‘They’re police. They’re looking for information. It’s their job. Because if they can criss-cross this country without spotting a Viet Minh when the whole place is crawling with them, they’re sorely lacking in information. So they do everything they can to get it. They arrest, interrogate, index the information and liquidate, it’s a whole industry. I met one of them in a little village in the delta. He had the same flowery shirt, the same pistol tucked into his shorts. He was wandering around like a lost soul, frantic. He was looking for information, that’s his job description, and nothing… He’d interrogated suspects, the friends of the suspects, the relatives of the friends of the suspects, still nothing.’

  ‘He didn’t come across any Viet Minh?’

  ‘Oh, that… you can never know. He didn’t know. You can interrogate the suspects; they’re bound to tell you something, that leads to other suspects. There’s no shortage of work and you’re guaranteed to get results; it doesn’t matter whether the information is useful. But the reason he was desperate, this guy from the Surêté in the little town on the delta, was because he had liquidated at least a hundred guys and still hadn’t had a mention in dispatches or a promotion. Hanoi was acting like he didn’t exist. He was bitter. He traipsed up and down the only street, going from café to café, depressed, not knowing what to do, and all the people he passed lowered their eyes, turned tail, stepped off the pavement to let him pass; or they smiled at him, asked afte
r his health with a lot of bowing and scraping, because none of them knew what to do any more, whether or not they should talk to him so he would leave them alone, whether to act naturally or act like him. And he didn’t notice. He trudged the streets with his pistol tucked into his shorts, cursing the cumbersome Administration that had failed to acknowledge his hard work. He had never come up with any information, but he was efficient; he had never tracked down the Viet Minh, but he did his job; anyone trying to set up an underground network would have failed for lack of potential revolutionaries that he had pre-emptively liquidated; but no one recognized his true worth. He was mortified.’

  Moreau ended with a little laugh, a particular little laugh he had that was not unpleasant, but not funny either, a laugh like his raw-boned face, a laugh like the pencil moustache that accentuated his thin lips; a frank, joyless laugh that chilled the blood for no apparent reason.

  ‘At the end of the day, we can’t withstand the weather in the colonies. We rot from the inside. Except you, Salagnon. With you it seems like water off a duck’s back.’

  ‘I observe, so I can get used to anything.’

  ‘I adapt to anything, too. I used to be in charge of a group of rowdy little schoolboys. I was a real slave-driver. I made them wear a dunce’s cap, slapped them if necessary, made them stand in the corner, kneel on the floor, sometimes on a ruler. No one played up in my class. They learned things off by heart. They didn’t make mistakes. They raised their hands before they spoke. They didn’t sit down until I gave the word, when everyone was quiet. These were techniques I learned at the École Normale, and from observation. Then the war came along. I took up a new job for a while, but how could I ever go back now? How could I ever stand in front of a group of little boys? How could I put up with the slightest trouble, given what I know? Here, I’m in charge of a whole people. I use the same techniques I learned at the École Normale, and from observation, but since I’m dealing with adults I push them to the limit. I see things on a grand scale. Over here, there are no parents for me to inform about their little brat’s behaviour so they can punish him. I have to do everything myself. How could I ever go back to being in charge of a bunch of schoolboys? What would I do to keep order? Would I kill one of them at the first sign of trouble, out of habit, to make an example? Would I conduct ruthless interrogations to find out who fired a spitball? I’m better off staying here. Here, death is not terribly important. They don’t seem to suffer. Among the dead, among the soon-to-be dead, we understand each other. I could never stand up in front of a class of kids again; it would be inappropriate. I don’t know what do any more. Or rather I do, I know all too well, but I do it on a bigger scale. I’m trapped here. I stay here, hoping that I will never have to go back, for the good of the little boys of France.’