by Alexis Jenni
The horizon rose like a folded sheet of paper; triangular hills appeared as though the flat earth had been folded; the river snaked in wide meanders. They sailed deeper into the unremitting jungle. The current grew stronger; the propellers of the LCTs beat the water more forcefully. More than ever there was the worrying prospect that they might fail; a lush green velvet fringed the riverbanks; the hills grew higher and more vertiginous and merged with the low clouds.
‘The jungle is no better,’ grumbled the captain, emerging from his cabin. ‘You think it will be uninhabited, unsullied. You think you’ll finally get a bit of peace… The hell you will! The place is teeming. A quick machine-gun burst and you’ll kill a dozen. Hey, you back there! Spray the bank!’
The gunner in the stern whirled his machine gun and fired a long burst into the trees lining the bank. The soldiers gave a start, then cheered. The huge bullets exploded against the branches; monkeys howled, the birds took flight. Fragments of leaves and splintered wood fell into the water.
‘There you go,’ said the captain. ‘Not too many today, but the sector has been cleared. I’ll be glad when we get there. I’ll be glad when this is over.’
He dropped them off at a ruined village on a bank pitted with craters. The crates of ammunition were transported by prisoners with ‘PIM’ in big letters on their backs, guarded by legionnaires who paid them no heed. Sandbags piled as neatly as bricks encircled the remains of the shacks, cut off the surrounding routes, surrounded the field guns, whose long barrels were trained on the lush, green hills draped with tendrils of mist. The villagers had disappeared, leaving only broken remnants of everyday life: wicker baskets, a sandal, a few broken pots. Legionnaires in helmets stood guard behind parapets of sandbags, while others with shovels dug trenches to further secure the village. They worked in silence, with the implacable seriousness of the Legion. They found the command post in a church whose roof had collapsed. The rubble and the broken pews in the nave had been cleared away and the altar repurposed as a dining table, where the officers were now sitting; the altar was laid out perfectly: white tablecloth, bone china edged with blue; candles set all around cast a flickering glow that was reflected in the gleaming glasses and the cutlery. In dusty uniforms, their white kepis set next to their plates, the officers were being served by an orderly in a morning coat, whose every gesture exuded expertise.
‘Trucks? To transport your troops? Are you joking?’ muttered a colonel with his mouth full.
Salagnon insisted.
‘But I don’t have any trucks. All my trucks drive over landmines and explode. You’ll have to wait for the infantry convoy. It’s bound to get here some day.’
‘I need to get to the post.’
‘Well then go on foot. It’s that way,’ he said, jerking his fork towards the gothic window. ‘Now leave us to finish. Last night’s dinner had to be postponed because of an attack. Thankfully it has survived unscathed. The orderly here worked as a maître d’hôtel in some of the finest establishments in Berlin before Stalin’s rocket launchers turned them into piles of rubble. He serves perfectly, even in ruins; bringing him with us was a fine decision. Bring the next course.’
The imperturbable orderly brought meat that smelled wonderfully of meat, something rare in Indochine. So Moreau stepped forwards.
‘Colonel, I’m afraid I must insist.’
His fork, having already speared a juicy hunk, hovered halfway between his plate and his mouth; he looked up irritably. But there was something about Moreau, this scrawny, vulgar little man, which ensured that when he asked for something, never raising his thin-lipped voice, people gave it to him as though it were a matter of life and death. The colonel had seen his type before. He did not give a damn about his trucks and he very much wanted to finish his meal.
‘Very well. I’ll lend you a truck for the munitions, but that’s all I have. The men will have to go on foot. The track is more or less safe. But the Colonial Army needs to stop relying on us.’
Moreau turned to Salagnon, who nodded; he was conciliatory by nature, although this was not something he was proud of. Leaving the orderly to serve dinner, they walked out of the church.
‘Trambassac wasn’t wrong. Out here, it really is the lord, his vassals and their valiant knights; they’ve all got their gang.’
‘Well, this is your gang.’
Mariani and Gascard were sitting on crates, waiting for them; and the forty Thai soldiers were hunkered down, leaning on rifles, which they held like spears. Mariani got up as they approached, smiling when he heard the news; he addressed himself to Moreau.
The trek took three days on foot. They marched in single file, rifles slung over their shoulders. Before long they were streaming with sweat from climbing the steep slopes in the blazing sun. They did not go near the shady edge. This was the jungle and therefore there were an infinite number of traps and hiding places, wires strung between trees connected to mines, patient snipers lurking in the branches. The lush green that flanked the path was dangerous, so they marched down the middle of the track in the blazing sun. Now and then a clearing with scorched edges showed the effects of long-range artillery or air raids; a charred truck lay toppled in the ditch, riddled with bullets, evidence of some skirmish whose witnesses were all dead. Thankfully, the dead were not left to rot, since otherwise the track would have been littered with bodies. Bodies are not left behind, they are recovered, except for those in the river. Except those in the river, thought Salagnon, struggling with his kitbag. What did they signify, the bodies in the river? People are reluctant to touch dead bodies, so sometimes they are left behind, but why throw them in the river? Every step on this steep, rutted track was heavy-going, and with exhaustion came unpleasant thoughts and the despondency that comes from aching muscles. At night they slept in the trees, in rope hammocks, half of them awake, guarding the half that were asleep.
In the morning they set off again on the track through the jungle. He had never imagined it could be so difficult to put one foot in front of the other. His knapsack full of metal objects dragged him backwards; his weapons felt heavier and heavier. His thigh muscles were as taut as the cables of a suspension bridge; he felt them creak with every movement. The sun parched him; water leached from his body; heavy with salt, he was covered in white blotches.
On the evening of the third day they came to a ridge and a rolling landscape of hills suddenly opened below them like a fan. They were surrounded by yellowed grass that glittered with shards of gold in the late afternoon sun, while the trail wound through the tall grass like a dark, gaping trench. From the ridge they could see for miles. The hills stretched out to the horizon. The closest to them were the dewy green of precious stones; beyond them were hills tinged with turquoise, a blueness that gradually faded, diluted by distance, until they became weightless and melted into the white sky. The long line of hunched men, bowed beneath the burden of their knapsacks, stopped to catch their breath, and were infused by this sweeping, strangely weightless landscape, sated with pale blue and green; and with a spring in their step, they set off again for the post perched on the ridge.
A native sergeant opened the door and welcomed them. He was responsible for everything. The infantrymen were crouched in the yard, at the thatched corner towers. Salagnon looked around for a European face.
‘Your officers?’
‘Adjudant Morcel is buried over there,’ he said. ‘Sous-lieutenant Rufin is on manoeuvres. He’ll be back soon. And Lieutenant Gasquier doesn’t leave his room any more. He’s expecting you.’
‘So you don’t have any managerial staff?’
‘But we do, Lieutenant. Here, the Franco-Vietnamese forces have become de facto Vietnamese. But isn’t it only natural that things should eventually correspond to words?’ he said with a smile.
He spoke a fastidious French learned at school with barely the trace of a lilt, the same language Salagnon had learned 10,000 kilometres from here.
The senior officer was sitting at a tab
le waiting for them, his shirt open over his well-padded belly; he seemed to be reading an old newspaper. His red-rimmed eyes flickered this way and that, not focusing on anything in particular, and he did not turn the pages. When Salagnon introduced himself, he did not look up; his eyes remained fixed on the paper, as though he had trouble raising them.
‘Have you seen this?’ he spluttered. ‘Have you see it? Communists! They cut the throats of a whole village again. Because they refused to supply them with rice. And they’re trying to cover up their crime, claiming it was the army, the police, the Surêté, France! But they’re confusing us, they’re tricking us, they use stolen uniforms. And everyone knows the Surêté has been infiltrated. Totally. By French communists who take their orders from Moscow. Who kill people on orders from Peking. You, you’re new here, Lieutenant, so don’t be fooled. Be careful.’ Finally he looked up, his eyes rolling in their sockets. ‘Isn’t that right, Lieutenant? You won’t let them fool you?’
His eyes glazed over and he toppled forwards, hitting his head against the table, and stopped moving.
‘Give me a hand, Lieutenant,’ muttered the native sergeant. They grabbed his legs and shoulders and laid him on the camp bed in the corner of the room. The newspaper had been hiding a bowl of choum, and he had a whole bottle under the chair. ‘He usually has a sleep around this time of day,’ the sergeant said in the whispered tone of someone in a nursery when a baby finally nods off. ‘Mostly he sleeps straight through until morning but sometimes he wakes in the night and tries to persuade us to grab our kit and our weapons and set off into the jungle to hunt the Viet Minh by night, when they’re least expecting it. It can be tough to calm him down and put him back to bed. The only way is to get him to drink more. Luckily, he’s about to head back to Hanoi or to France. Otherwise, he’d get us all killed. You’re his replacement. Try to hold out a bit longer.’
The cases of ammunition and the provisions arrived the following day; the truck did hang around, but set off down to the river again, and with it went the sleeping Gasquier and his company of infantrymen. They wedged Gasquier between crates, so that he wouldn’t fall off the truck, and the infantrymen followed behind on foot. The dust settled and Salagnon became chef de poste, replacing the previous senior officer, who was burnt-out but still alive, saved in spite of himself by the sensible decisions of an indigenous non-commissioned officer.
* * *
Rufin reappeared in the late afternoon, leading a column of men in tatters. They had spent several days marching through the jungle, fording streams, hiding in sticky bushes, sleeping in the mud. Lying in the undergrowth, they had waited; dripping with salt sweat they had marched. They were all utterly filthy; their clothes were stiff with grime, sweat, blood and pus, spattered with mud; morale, too, was in tatters, drained by a mixture of fatigue, abject fear and the fierce courage verging on madness which is the only thing that makes it possible to march, to run, to slaughter in the jungle for days at a time.
‘Four days and, more importantly, four nights,’ Rufin pointed out as he saluted Salagnon. His beautiful, blond, childlike face was now gaunt, but the fringe that swept over his eyes still shimmered and a smile still hovered on his lips. ‘Thank God, years in the scouts prepared me for long marches.’
The stooped men coming back could have collapsed by the side of the track, and in a few hours would have melted and disappeared; it would have been impossible to distinguish them from the humus. But although as filthy and unkempt as tramps, the rifles they carried were pristine. They kept their rifles as good as new, perfectly aligned, well oiled, gleaming; their bodies might be exhausted, their clothes like something from a rag-and-bone shop, but their weapons were indefatigable, chubby and well fed no matter the hour, no matter the effort. The metal fixings glinted like the eyes of a wildcat; they were untarnished by fatigue. In minds dulled by exhaustion there still glimmered a lone, last thought transmitted by the brute matter of their weapons, the thought of murder, cold and cruel. All the rest was flesh, tissue, and had rotted; they had left it by the wayside. Nothing remained of them but their skeleton: the weapon and the will, murder on the alert. Much more than an extension of hand or eye, the rifle is an extension of bone, and bone gives form to the body, which would otherwise be limp. Fastened to the bone is the muscle that makes it possible to exert force. Utter exhaustion has this effect: it strips away flesh and reveals bone. It is a state that can be reached by working to the point of collapse, by marching in the blazing sun, by digging holes with a pick. In each case one will be reduced to what remains, and what remains may be considered what is best in man: and that is obstinacy. War can achieve this, too.
The men went and lay down and fell asleep. After the commotion of their arrival, a great silence descended over the outpost, the sun began to sink.
‘The Viets?’ said Rufin. ‘They’re all around. The jungle is crawling with them. They move about at will. They come from the Haute-Région, where we don’t go any more. But we can do what they do: hide in the undergrowth so they can’t see us.’
He fell asleep on his back, his head tilted slightly, his beautiful, angelic face, so pale, so downy, was that of a child.
In Indochine night is not long in coming. For a few minutes after the sun had set, they were surrounded by a landscape vaporized by porcelain mountains that were utterly weightless, the blue-tinged peaks floated without touching the ground; they ebbed, dissipated, dissolved and it was night. Darkness is the diminution of the visible, the gradual obliteration of distance, a torrent of dark liquid that wells up from the earth. Perched on their ridge, they lost their footing. They hung suspended in the landscape with the floating mountains. Night arrived like a pack of black dogs running up from the valleys, snuffling at the edges of the forest, scrambling up the slopes, covering everything and, finally, devouring the sky itself. Night came from below with a fierce panting, with an urge to bite, with the frenzied restlessness of a pack of baying mastiffs.
When night had come down, they knew they would be alone until daybreak, in a walled room whose doors did not close, encircled by the breath of the black dogs seeking them out, whimpering in the darkness. No one would come to their aid. They closed the door to their little tower, but it was only bamboo. Their flag hung, listless, at the end of a long pole and it quickly disappeared, they could see no stars because the sky was overcast. They were alone in the night. They fired up the generator, carefully counting the remaining cans of petrol; they fed a high-voltage charge through the network of wires woven through bamboo stakes in the ditches; they switched on the spotlights in corner towers made of tree trunks and packed earth, and the single ceiling light in the blockhouse. Any other light came from paraffin lamps and from oil lamps belonging to the native soldiers huddled in small groups.
What falls at evening is not night – night rises from the teeming valleys that surround the post, from the foot of the steep slopes carpeted with yellow grass – what falls at evening is their faith in themselves, their courage, their hope that they might go one day and live elsewhere. When night comes, they see themselves waiting here for ever; they picture themselves on the last evening, at that last moment heading nowhere, and see themselves dissolve into the acidic soil of the forests of Indochine, their bones carried away by the rains, their flesh transformed into leaves to become food for the monkeys.
Rufin was sleeping. Mariani was tinkering with the radio in the blockhouse, scanning through the static for snatches of French words, checking for the thousandth time that it was working. Sitting next to him, Gascard had begun drinking as soon as day began to wane, casually, without too much attention, as though taking an aperitif on a balmy summer evening; it was impossible to tell when he had drunk too much: he never fell, never stumbled, and the tremulous lamplight concealed his trembling fingers. Moreau and Salagnon, still outside, were leaning on the earthen rampart, staring into the darkness; they could see nothing and they spoke in hushed voices, as though the black dogs encircling the world might he
ar them, might sense their presence and come.
‘You realize we’re stuck here?’ Moreau whispered. ‘We have only two choices: either we hang around here waiting to be attacked, to have our throats cut in our sleep, to be relieved; or we do what they do, we hide in the bushes and we harry them at night.’
He said nothing more. The darkness moved like water, heavy, scented, bottomless. The jungle rang with creaks and cries, producing a steady drone that could be anything, animals, rustling leaves or the shadows of soldiers marching in Paris through the trees. Salagnon reflexively adopted an uneasy silence, a watchful silence that was futile in this dark confusion where it would have been better to speak, to speak French endlessly beneath the lone electric light in the blockhouse to remind oneself, to remember oneself, to exist, however dimly, to oneself, such was the threat that this sense of self might dissolve in the darkness. Salagnon suspected that in the weeks to come his mental health and his survival might depend on the number of cans of diesel that remained. Here, in the darkness, he would lose himself.