by Alexis Jenni
‘Do we just let them carry on?’
‘Have you seen how many of us there are? The artillery is too far away, planes are completely useless at night. If they intercept a call from us, they’ll annihilate us. We’re not in a position of strength, so the best thing is to pretend to be asleep. They’ll go through the village. The elders won’t be happy about it. The chief is risking his neck.’
‘So we do nothing.’
‘Nothing.’
They fell silent. A luminescent line wound its way across the landscape, visible only to the two of them.
‘We’re going to die here, my friend, we’re going to die. Some day or other.’
By morning a plume of smoke was rising from the village. In the dawn light a line of aeroplanes appeared, coming from the delta. They advanced with a soft purring, round-nosed DC3s scattering a series of parachutes. The canopies drifted down the pink sky like shy daisies and one by one vanished into the valley as though sucked in by shadows. A boom of artillery fire rang out across the slopes; a section of the forest began to burn. The noise subsided and, sometime in mid-afternoon, they had a call, loud and clear, on the radio.
‘Are you still there? The mobile unit has recaptured the village. Make contact with them.’
‘Recaptured the village? Did we miss something?’ grunted Moreau.
They went down to the village. A whole army was stretched along the route coloniale. Trucks full of soldiers were chugging slowly up the hill; tanks were parked along the verge, turrets firing at the smouldering hills. The paratroopers stayed off to one side, lying on the grass, swapping cigarettes, staring at the profusion of equipment. The longhouse was burning, the roof of the school gaped, a huge crater in the floor was edged with splintered wood.
In the middle of the village a tent had been set up with tables for maps and field radios; flexible antennas swayed above them. Inside the shelter officers bustled, whispering into machines, addressing their orderlies only in curt phrases, peremptory orders quickly followed by action. Salagnon introduced himself to a colonel wearing a radio headset, who barely listened to him. ‘So you’re the guys from the post? The whole area is as leaky as a sieve, the village is overrun. What the fuck have you been playing at? Blind man’s buff? I hate to be the one to tell you, but the Viets always win at that game.’ And he went back to giving firing coordinates over his headset, a list of numbers he was reading from one of the maps. Salagnon shrugged and left the tent. He went and sat next to Moreau; they leaned against a bamboo hut, the Thais crouched in a line next to them, and they watched the trucks file past, the field guns, the tanks that made the ground shake as they passed.
The German appeared in front of them. As elegant as always, although a little thinner, he was wearing a legionnaire’s uniform with sergeant’s stripes.
‘Salagnon? You were the one up at the post? You had a narrow escape. A whole Viet division marched through last night. They must have forgotten you.’
He was followed by two legionnaires as blond as caricatures. They held their machine guns at their hips, straps slung over their shoulders, fingers on the triggers. He spoke to them in German and they took up positions behind him, feet well apart, as though on sentry duty, scanning the surrounding area with chilling attentiveness. Salagnon got to his feet. Had he imagined such an unlikely situation, he would have felt awkward. But to his surprise it was very simple and he had no hesitation in shaking the German’s hand.
‘Europe is getting bigger, wouldn’t you say? Its borders are constantly shifting: yesterday the Volga, today the Black River. We’re farther and farther from home.’
‘Europe is an idea, not a continent. I guard it, even if people back there do not realize it.’
‘Well, I have to admit you certainly do a lot of damage wherever you go,’ said Salagnon, nodding to the burning longhouse and the ruined school.
‘Oh, the longhouse wasn’t us. The Viet division did that last night. When they arrived they rounded up the villagers. They do that when they pass through villages: a big torchlit show trial, the political commissars sitting at a table, the suspects dragged in one by one. They are forced to confess their faults before the people and the Party, counter the slightest suspicion, prove their political purity. They convened a revolutionary tribunal and condemned this guy for collaborating with the French. He was shot and his house was burned. Did you notice anything? You were up the hill at the post. Could you have protected him? As for the school – if you can call it a school – it was hit by a stray shell. Our artillery are twenty kilometres away, so shells sometimes go a little wide of the mark. We were aiming for the revolutionary tribunal, which was set up where our tent is now. The aerial photos pinpointed the spot. By the time we got here, everything was burning, everyone had fled. We spent the whole morning catching them.’
‘I’m sorry about the school.’
‘Oh, so am I. Schools are a good thing. But over here, nothing is innocent; the teacher was a Viet Minh.’
‘You can tell that from aerial photos?’
‘Intelligence, my friend. It’s a lot more effective than playing hide-and-seek with your mates up in your little castle. Come take a look.’
Salagnon and Moreau followed him, with the Thais several paces behind. They moved between the shacks, where the villagers were crouched, guarded by legionnaires.
‘My platoon,’ said the German. ‘We specialize in search and destroy. We find out what we need to know, track down the enemy and liquidate them. This morning we rounded everyone up. We quickly identified the suspects: those who seem intelligent, those who look like they’ve got something to hide, those who are scared. It’s a technique, something you learn; with a little practice it becomes instinctive and you can get quick results. We haven’t tracked down the teacher yet, but it shouldn’t take long.’
A kneeling Vietnamese man looked up, his face bruised and swollen. The German stood in front of him, flanked by his blond henchmen, guns at their hips, fingers still on the triggers, patrolling the empty space around him with their glacial stare; it was like a stage, everyone could see what was happening. The German recommenced the interrogation. The Vietnamese bowed their heads, huddled together, crouching together in a quivering mass. The legionnaires standing around did not give a damn. The German bellowed questions, without ever losing control, in a French that was elegantly twisted by his accent. The kneeling Vietnamese man, his face streaming blood, answered in plaintive, monosyllabic French that was almost unintelligible; he did not speak in complete sentences and spat bloody mucus. One of the henchmen lashed out, knocking down the Viet and kicking him repeatedly, his face remaining utterly calm; the thick tread of his boots crushed the face of the man sprawled on the ground, while the other bodyguard glanced around, his weapon cocked and ready. With every kick, the body of the Vietnamese man juddered, blood spurted from his mouth, from his nose. The German went on shouting questions, still calm, this was work. Moreau watched the scene scornfully, but he said nothing. The crouching Thais waited, indifferent, they did not care what happened to the Vietnamese. The women clutched their children, hid their faces, whimpered in a pitch so shrill it was impossible to tell whether they were talking or wailing; the few Vietnamese men did not move, they knew their turn would come. Salagnon listened. The German interrogated in French and the Vietnamese man answered in French. It was not the mother tongue of either man, but in the jungles of Tonkin French was the international language of intensive interrogation. This troubled Salagnon much more than the physical violence to which he was by now inured. He was indifferent to blood and death, but not the use of his mother tongue to express such violence. This too would pass, and the words to express this violence would disappear. He longed for it, that day when words would not be used, when silence would finally come.
The German barked a curt order, pointed to a woman; two soldiers waded into the crowd of Vietnamese and dragged her to her feet. She was sobbing, hiding her face behind her tangled hair. He went back to spe
aking French: ‘Is this your wife? You know what will happen to her?’ One of the bodyguards was holding her. The other ripped off her tunic, revealing her small, pointed breasts, two small swellings of pale skin. ‘You know what we can do to her? Oh, not kill her, not hurt her, just mess around a little. So…?’
‘Under school,’ said the other man in a whisper.
The German signalled, two soldiers ran off and quickly returned, dragging the teacher.
‘A hiding place, under the school.’
‘See? That wasn’t so hard.’
The German gave a sweeping backhanded gesture and his bodyguards lifted up the interrogated Vietnamese, supporting him almost gently; they led him away with the schoolteacher towards the edge of the jungle. The German lit a cigarette and walked over to Salagnon.
‘What will you do with them?’
‘Oh, we’ll liquidate them.’
‘You’re not going to interrogate the teacher?’
‘Why? He’s already been identified and tracked down. He was the problem. Him and the village chief who was playing both sides against the middle, but the Viets got to him before we could. So there you go, a clean village. Vietfrei.’
‘You’re sure the teacher was the chief Viet Minh?’
‘The other guy informed on him, didn’t he? And the situation he was in, you don’t lie, take my word for it.’
‘If you’d liquidated two guys at random it would have had the same effect.’
‘It doesn’t matter, young Salagnon. Personal guilt doesn’t matter. Terror is a broad-brush measure. When properly deployed, implacably, ruthlessly, without a hint of weakness, resistance collapses. You have to make it clear that anything can happen to anyone, that way no one will do anything at all. Take it from one who knows.’
The trucks continued to struggle up the route coloniale, to disappear into the jungle with their cargo of soldiers. Others were heading down, taking the paratroopers back to Hanoi and new missions. Two fighter planes came in, flying low, with the shrill buzz of angry mosquitoes. They grazed the treetops, banked in formation and dropped canisters that spiralled down. The planes wheeled and disappeared again, while behind them the jungle flared and quickly burned in a vast circular flame tinged with black.
‘They’re dumping napalm on the forest to burn out anyone still there,’ the German smiled. ‘Some of the division that walked right past you last night are probably still hiding out there. The mission isn’t over.’
‘Come on,’ said Moreau.
He took Salagnon by the arm and led him back to the post, followed by the silent Thais.
‘You think they really don’t give a shit?’ asked Salagnon.
‘They’re Thais, the villagers were Vietnamese, they couldn’t give a damn. Besides, Asians see violence differently than we do, they have a higher threshold.’
‘You think?’
‘Haven’t you seen the way they put up with all this?’
‘They’ve got no choice.’
‘The problem is our fucking conscience. That guy you were talking to, the German, he has no scruples about what he’s doing. We need a little less conscience if we’re to do what they do. That’s how the Viet Minh work and that’s why they’re winning. But it’s all right, they’re only a couple of years ahead of us, maybe only a couple of months. With what we’ve done today, we’ll soon be like the German, like the Viets. And then we’ll see.’
‘But we didn’t do anything.’
‘You saw the whole thing, Victorien. When it comes to these things, there’s not much difference between seeing and doing. It’s just a matter of time. I know about this shit. Everything I’ve learned, I’ve learned on the job, by watching. And I can’t imagine myself going back to France now.’
In the hazy darkness it was impossible to see much. The attack on the post was brutal. Shadows slipped through the tall grasses, their rubber-tyre sandals made not a sound. A bugle blast woke everyone. The enemy screamed and ran forwards, the first were grilled on the electric wires twined around the sharpened bamboo stakes. The current spluttered, sending out blue sparks; they could be seen screaming, their mouths open, their teeth glittering, their eyes wide. Salagnon had been sleeping in shorts. He pulled on his boots without lacing them, fell out of bed, grabbed the gun under the bed and ran out of the blockhouse. In the ditch the shadows of Viet soldiers were piled on the razor wire. Gascard’s traps were working: bodies reduced to black outlines toppled and suddenly fell, shrieking as their feet plunged into craters filled with sharpened spikes. From the corner towers, machine guns raked the base of the walls continuously, the flickering light of the gunfire and the grenades gave a face to those who feel the moment that they died. Salagnon had nothing to say, no order to give, nothing that was said could be heard. Each man, on his own, knew what to do, did everything he could. Later they would see. He joined two Thais on top of the mud rampart. They were leaning against the parapet, their backs to the attackers, hunkered beside a crate of munitions. They were taking grenades, pulling the pins and tossing them over their shoulders without looking, as though shelling sunflower seeds. The grenade would explode at the foot of the wall in a bright glare that shook the rammed-earth walls. Still they kept throwing. Salagnon risked a quick look. A carpet of bodies spilled out of the ditch filled with bamboo spikes. The electric fence had eventually stopped working; the first wave had melted the wires, a second wave attacked, using the bodies of the first as stepping stones. Salagnon heard bullets whistle past his ear. He crouched down next to the Thais in front of the open crate and, like them, began to prime the grenades and toss them over his shoulder, unseeing. A streak of flame ripped the darkness; a hollow-charge shell pierced the concrete cube they had built and exploded inside. The black of charred concrete split and toppled over, the rammed-earth tower half crumbled. Two Thais scrabbled up the ruins carrying a machine gun and lay flat. One of them fired, precise, tenacious, the other kept a hand on his shoulder and pointed out the targets and passed him magazine clips from a huge haversack. The bugle sounded, high and clear, and the shadows retreated, leaving dark stains on the ground. ‘Cease fire!’ yelled Moreau from somewhere on the wall. In the silence Salagnon felt a pain deep inside his ears. He got to his feet, found Moreau, barefoot, wearing boxer shorts, his face black with gunpowder, his eyes shining. A few Thais here and there did not get up. He did not know their names; he realized that despite spending so much time living alongside them, he did not recognize them. The only way he could know if some were missing was to count.
‘They’re leaving.’
‘They’ll be back.’
‘They nearly had us.’
‘But not quite. So now, they’ll talk. It’s a commie thing. They analyse the first offensive, they talk it over and then they attack from a better angle, and this time it will work. It’s slow but it’s effective. We won’t hold out, but we have a little time. We run for it.’
‘We run for it?’
‘We slip into the darkness, into the jungle. We meet up with the mobile unit down by the river.’
‘We’ll never make it.’
‘Right now they’re talking. The next attack, we’re all dead. No one will come looking for us.’
‘Let’s try the radio.’
They ran into the blockhouse and called. Through the crackle and static, the radio finally responded. ‘The mobile unit is hanging in there. We’re focused on the river. Evacuate the post. We’re evacuating the region.’
They gathered together. Mariani woke Gascard, who was sleeping off another hangover and had not realized what all the noise was about. A couple of slaps, his head ducked in a bucket of water and an explanation of what was to happen next sobered him up. Making a run for it got his attention. He stood up straight, offered to carry the backpacks of grenades. Rufin combed his hair before they left. The Thais crouched in silence, carrying only their weapons.
‘Let’s go.’
They ran silently through the jungle, spaced two metres apart. Th
ey ran, carrying only a bag, their gun and some ammunition. The Viets were regrouping next to the collapsed tower, but they did not know this; by chance they passed the position the Viets had just left. A small squad was guarding the path. They dispatched them with machetes, silently, left the bloody, gaping bodies by the track, hurtled down the hill and raced soundlessly into the jungle, seeing only the man in front of them, hearing only the man behind them. They ran, carrying only their weapons.
Behind them, they heard the bugle again, and then gunfire, a silence, then a huge explosion and a bright flare in the distance. The arsenal at the post was exploding. Moreau had booby-trapped the blockhouse.
Along the path, at kilometre intervals, they strung grenades along the ground so that they would explode when someone touched the tripwire. When they heard the first grenade, they knew they were being followed. They avoided the village, avoided the main road, zigzagged between the trees, heading for the river. The muffled explosions from behind indicated the Viets were tracking them methodically on their trail; after each explosion, the political commissar reorganized his platoon, appointed a new leader and they set off again.
They fled as fast as they could, running between the trees, hacking at any branches in their way, marking their path, trampling leaves into the mud, plunging down steep hills, sometimes slipping, grabbing at a tree trunk to steady themselves or at someone racing past, bringing both of them crashing down. By dawn they were exhausted and lost. Patches of mist trailed from the branches. Their clothes were stiff with mud, saturated with freezing water, but all the while they dripped with sweat. They went on running, hindered by the untamed plants, some drooping, some prickly, some solid and as fibrous as ropes; hindered by the broken ground that gave way underfoot, hampered by the rucksacks biting into their shoulders, crushing their chests, by the painful pounding in their necks. They stopped. Being spaced out, it took some time for everyone to gather. They sat down, leaning against the trees, against the rocks that jutted from the ground. They ate cold rice balls, not stopping to think. The rain started up again. They could do nothing to protect themselves, so they did nothing. The thick hair of the Thais stuck to their faces like rivulets of tar.