by Alexis Jenni
The muted blast of the grenades boomed far away; the echoes rolled around the hills, reaching them from all directions. It was impossible to gauge the distance.
‘We need a stopping point,’ said Moreau. ‘A rearguard to slow them down. One of us and four men.’
‘I’ll stay,’ said Rufin.
‘OK.’
Leaning on his backpack, Rufin had had enough. He closed his eyes, he was exhausted. Staying here meant he could stop running. Exhaustion reduces the time horizon to almost nothing. Staying here meant not running. There would be time to think later. They were left with all the grenades, the explosives, the radio. They set up a machine gun behind a rock and a second on the other side, where the Viets would try to shelter when the first gunner fired.
‘Let’s go.’
They continued to run, taking a path downhill towards the route coloniale and the river. The rain stopped, but the trees still dripped at the slightest contact. Behind them, the Viets continued to gain ground, the man in front gritting his teeth until he eventually stumbled on a tripwire and the ground beneath him exploded. The front runner sacrificed himself for Độc Lập, for independence, the only words that Salagnon could read in the slogans daubed on the walls. Sacrifice was a weapon of war; it was wielded by the political commissar, while the sacrificed cut the barbed wire beneath machine guns, hurled themselves against walls, blew themselves up to open doors, used their own flesh to absorb a volley of bullets. Salagnon did not really understand this obedience pushed to the limits; intellectually, he did not understand it; but as he ran through the jungle, hampered by his gun, his arms and legs throbbing with scratches and bruises, exhausted, numb with tiredness, he knew that he would have done whatever he was ordered to do; against others or against himself. This he knew without a shadow of a doubt.
In a single night every outpost in the Haute-Région was wiped out. A breach opened up on the map and General Giáp’s troops spilled into the delta. They kept running. When they reached the route coloniale they found a burned-out tank, its hatchway open. The carcasses of blackened trucks lay abandoned, the ground was strewn with bits of kit, but no corpses. They hid themselves in the tall grass by the verge, wary, lying on their bellies, utterly still, panicked at the thought that they might fall asleep.
‘Shall we go?’ whispered Salagnon. ‘The Viets are bound to get here soon.’
‘Wait.’
Moreau hesitated. A whistle blast split the waterlogged air. Silence descended over the jungle. The animals were quiet. There were no cries, no cracking branches, no rustle of leaves, no chirping birds, no whisper of insects, all those sounds that, over time, you cease to hear but are still there: when they stop, it is terrifying, you expect the worst. On the road a man appeared, pushing a bicycle. Behind him came other men, all of them pushing bicycles. The bicycles looked like Asian ponies, tubby and short-legged. Huge panniers hung from the frames, hiding the wheels. Balanced on the seats were green munitions crates stencilled with Chinese characters. Mortar shells held together with straw rope were strung alongside. The bicycles tilted, each was steered by a man in black pyjamas with the aid of a length of bamboo attached to the handlebars. They moved slowly, silently, flanked by soldiers in brown uniforms and palm-frond helmets with rifles slung across their chests who stared up at the sky. ‘Bicycles,’ whispered Moreau. He had heard of the intelligence report detailing the transport capabilities of the Viet Minh. They use no trucks, no roads, there are few draught animals, elephants are confined to the jungles of Cambodia; consequently, everything is carried manually. A coolie carries eighteen kilos through the jungle. He must carry his own rations, he can carry no more. The Intelligence Service calculated the range of enemy troops based on indisputable facts. No trucks, no roads, no more than eighteen kilos per man, including his rations. There is nothing to be found in the jungle, nothing more than you bring. As a result, the Viet Minh could not spend more than three or four days there before running out of food. Because they had no trucks, no roads, nothing but scrawny men who carried little weight. The statistics proved that we could hold out longer than they could, thanks to the trucks ferrying endless tins of sardines along jungle tracks. But now they could see that, for the price of a Manufrance bicycle bought in Hanoi or stolen from a warehouse in Haiphong, every man could easily carry 300 kilos into the jungle. The soldiers forming the escort scanned the skies, the road, the verges. ‘They’re going to spot us.’ Still Moreau hesitated. Exhaustion had made him slack. Surviving means making the right decision, with a little luck, and that means being as tense as a length of rope. Without that tension, luck is less favourable. A hum of planes filled the sky. It came from no particular direction. It was no louder than the buzzing of a fly in a room. The leader of the escort brought a whistle dangling around his neck to his lips. The shrill signal slashed the air. The bicycles turned as one and disappeared into the trees. The hum grew louder. The road was completely deserted now. The silence of the animals would not be noticed from the air. The two planes passed, flying low, the special drums fixed to their wings. They flew off. ‘Let’s go.’ Keeping their heads low, they plunged into the jungle again. They ran through the trees, far from the route coloniale, towards the river, where perhaps someone was still waiting for them. Behind them they heard another whistle blast, muted by the distance and the foliage. They ran through the forest, heading downhill, sprinting towards the river. As they grew breathless, they slowed to a brisk walk. Marching in single file, they produced a drumming sound, a constant cacophony of panting breaths, the thud of thick soles on damp earth, the rustle of soft leaves, the metallic clatter of rifles. They were streaming with sweat. The flesh of their faces melted into exhaustion. All that was visible were bones, lines of exertion like thick cables, the mouths that would not close, the wide eyes of the straining Europeans and the narrow slits of the Thais scurrying behind. They could hear a continual rumbling, deadened by the distance and the vegetation, by the tangle of trees. Bombs and mortar shells were exploding somewhere farther off, in the direction they were headed.
They stumbled on the Viets by accident, but it was bound to happen. There were so many of them secretly criss-crossing the desolate jungles. The Viet Minh were sitting on the ground, leaning against trees. They had stacked their Chinese rifles in a pile and were talking and laughing; some were smoking, some were drinking from straw-covered flasks, some were shirtless and stretching; they were all very young, they were taking a break, they were chatting. In the middle of the circle a hulking Manufrance bicycle lying on its panniers looked like an injured donkey.
The moment they glimpsed them did not last long, but thought works quickly; and in those few seconds Salagnon was struck by their youth, their gentleness, their elegance, and that joyous air they had when they gathered together informally. These young boys had come here to escape the many burdens – village, feudal, colonial – weighing upon the people of Vietnam. Out in the jungle, when they had set down their weapons, they could feel free, they could smile. These thoughts came to Salagnon as they raced down the hill, rifles in hand; they came to him in a crumpled ball, without unfurling, but they had the power of truth: the young Vietnamese boys at war were younger and more at ease, they took more pleasure in being together than the soldiers of the French Far East Expeditionary Corps, worn down by worry and exhaustion, supporting each other as things fell apart, clinging to each other as the ship sank. But perhaps it was simply the difference between their faces that he was misinterpreting.
A coolie was repairing the back wheel of the bicycle. He was reinflating the tyre with a hand pump, while the others, making no effort to help, made the most of their break, urging him on and laughing. The two groups did not see each other until the last moment. The armed French detachment was running down the hill, staring at their feet; the Vietnamese were watching the coolie as he worked the bicycle pump. They saw each other at the last moment and no one knew what they were doing, everyone acted instinctively. Moreau was wearing a mach
ine gun slung across his shoulder; he had his hand on the grip to stop it from jolting, he fired as he ran and several of the sitting Vietnamese boys crumpled. The others tried to stand up and were killed, tried to grab their guns and were killed, tried to run away and were killed; the stack of rifles toppled, the coolie kneeling in front of the bicycle sat up, still holding the pump attached to the tyre, then he crumpled, his chest pierced by a single bullet. A Viet who had managed to get away, who had unbuckled his belt behind a bush, removed one of the grenades attached to it. He was shot by one of the Thais; he dropped the grenade, which rolled down the slope. Salagnon felt a heavy blow to his thigh, a blow to his hip that cut his legs from under him, he fell. Silence descended. It had happened in a matter of seconds, in the time it took to run down a hill. The act of describing it takes longer. Salagnon tried to get to his feet; his leg felt like a girder attached to his hip. His trousers were hot and damp. He could see nothing but the leaves above him blotting out the sky. Mariani bent over him. ‘You’ve taken a bit of a hit,’ he muttered. ‘Can you walk?’ ‘No.’ He patched the leg, sliced through the trousers with his knife, bandaged the thigh tightly, helped Salagnon to sit up. Moreau was lying on his belly; around him, the Thais crouched in a circle, motionless. ‘Killed instantly,’ whispered Mariani. ‘Him?’ ‘A piece of shrapnel, it can cut like a razor. You got one in the leg. You were lucky. He got it in the throat. Kkkk!’ He drew his thumb across his throat. Moreau’s blood had spilled out, forming a ragged circle of dark ground around his neck. They cut long poles, lopped the branches off with their machetes and made stretchers using the shirts of the dead. ‘The bicycle,’ said Salagnon. ‘What about the bicycle?’ ‘Let’s take it.’ ‘Are you crazy? We don’t want to be lugging around a bike!’ ‘We’re taking it. Otherwise no one will believe us if we say we saw bikes in the jungle.’ ‘That’s true, but we don’t give a shit, do we?’ ‘A single guy with a bicycle can carry three hundred kilos in the jungle. We take it. We bring it back. We show them.’ ‘OK, OK.’
Salagnon was carried by Mariani and Gascard while the Thais transported the body of Moreau. The Vietnamese were left where they had fallen. The Thais saluted the dead, touching their joined hands to their foreheads. They continued down the slope. A little more slowly now. Two men lugged the dismantled bicycle, now stripped of its panniers, one took the wheels, the other the frame. The Thais carrying Moreau moved with the measured tread of men shouldering a bier and the barely jolted corpse did not protest. Meanwhile, Gascard and Mariani held the stretcher like a wheelbarrow, their arms extended, causing it to jerk and judder. The constant shaking caused Salagnon’s wound to open and bleed, soaking the canvas and dripping on to the ground. Every footstep reverberated in his bones, which felt as though they were swelling, threatening to pierce his skin, to break out into the open air; he stifled his screams, clamped his lips tight shut as his teeth chattered, his every breath a plaintive whimper.
With their hands occupied, the two porters became clumsy. They stumbled over the debris littering the ground, clipped their shoulders against tree trunks; they faltered as they walked and the jolts to his leg became unbearable. He swore at Mariani, the only one he could see when he managed to lift his head. Hurled vile abuse at him every time he slipped or stumbled, and his insults trailed off in gurgles, in muffled groans as he clenched his jaws so as not to scream too loudly, in deep sighs that emanated from his nose, his throat, from the vibrations of his chest. Mariani panted, gasped, but he stumbled on, hating him as much as any man has ever hated another and longs to kill him on the spot, to strangle him slowly, staring him in the face, out of long-awaited vengeance. Salagnon kept his eyes open; he could see the treetops swaying as though in a heavy wind, although no breeze stirred the hot, heavy air that was stifling them with sweat. He felt a twinge in his leg at every step of the stretcher-bearers, every stone they kicked, every root they stumbled on, every shrivelled leaf they slipped on; all these things quivered through his bones, through his spine, through his skull; this painful journey through Tonkin would be for ever etched on his brain; he would remember every step, remember every detail of the landscape of the Haute-Région. They were fleeing, pursued by an implacable brigade of Viet Minh, who would have trapped them like the rising tide if they paused to catch their breath. They ran on. Eventually, Salagnon blacked out.
The village was a little more ruined, a little better defended. The brick buildings had been reduced to ragged sections of wall. Only the church, solidly built, still stood, with half its roof still intact above the altar. Piles of sandbags concealed the foxholes, the trenches, the emplacements of the mortars, whose barrels were angled low to fire at close range.
Salagnon came to, lying in the church. Stray beams of light passed through the holes in the walls, accentuating the murky darkness where he lay. He had been left on the blood-soaked stretcher. A little sap still trickled from the green branches hacked with machetes to use as poles. His trousers had been neatly cut away; his leg had been cleaned and bandaged; he had not been aware of anything. The pain had faded; his thigh simply throbbed like a heart. Someone had probably given him morphine. Other wounded men were lying next to him in the semi-darkness, breathing regularly. In the undamaged apse he saw there were corpses. Many of them crammed into a small space. In the half-light, he could not make sense of how they were arranged. As his eyes became accustomed to the darkness, he realized that the dead had been stacked like firewood. On the top layer, lying on his back, he recognized Moreau. His throat was black, his thin-lipped mouth finally relaxed, almost smiling. The Thais had obviously combed his hair before handing over the body, because his side parting was neat and his moustache glistening.
‘Impressive, isn’t it?’
The German was crouching next to him. He had not heard him arrive. He might have been there for some time, watching him sleep. He nodded to the apse. ‘That’s how we did it at Stalingrad. There were too many dead to bury and we didn’t have the strength or the time to hack at the frozen ground, it was hard as glass. But we couldn’t just leave them where they fell, at least not in the beginning, so we collected the bodies and stacked them. Just like here. But frozen bodies are easier to deal with. They waited patiently until we finished fighting. This lot are starting to droop a little.’
Salagnon could not count the bodies lying next to him. They gradually merged into each other. Sometimes they emitted little whimpers and sagged a little more. It did not smell good. But the ground did not smell good, or the stretcher, or the air itself, which reeked of gunpowder, burning, rubber and petrol.
‘We never did bury them, spring never came, and I don’t know what the Russians did with them. But this lot, we’ll try to take home,’ said the German. ‘And you, too. Don’t worry, in your case, we’ll get you back alive if we can.’
‘When?’
‘When we can. It’s difficult to get out. They don’t want to let us go. They launch attacks every day and we stand our ground. If we were to leave, they would shoot us in the back. It would be a massacre. So we stay. They’ll attack again today, and tonight, and tomorrow; they don’t care about their own losses. They want to prove they’re beating us. We want to prove we know how to organize an evacuation. This is Dunkirk, my friend, but a Dunkirk that needs to be seen as a victory. That should ring a bell.’
‘I was a bit young.’
‘Someone must have told you. Here, in the situation we’re in, a well-managed retreat is as good as a victory. The survivors of a rout can be decorated as victors.’
‘What about you? What are you doing here?’
‘With you? I just came to see how you’re getting on. I quite like you, young Salagnon.’
‘I mean in Indochine.’
‘Fighting, just like you.’
‘But you’re German.’
‘So? You’re no more Indo-Chinese than I am, as far as I know. You’re fighting a war. I’m fighting a war. What else can you do once you’ve learned? How could I live in peace now, and
with whom? Back in Germany, everyone I know was killed in a single night. What is left of the Germany I knew? Why would I go back? To rebuild, work in manufacturing, in trade? Become an office worker with a briefcase and a little hat? Go to the office every morning, having travelled the four corners of Europe as a victor? That would be a horrible way to end my life. I have no one to tell about what I lived through. So I want to die the way I lived, as a victor.’
‘If you die here, you’ll be buried in the jungle or left lying on the ground in a place no one knows.’
‘So? Who knows me any more, other than the men who are fighting alongside me? All those who might have remembered my name died in a single night, like I told you, they were consumed by the flames of a phosphorus bomb. Nothing human was left of their bodies, nothing but ashes, bones held together by a desiccated casing and pools of fat that were washed away the morning after. Did you know that every man contains fifteen kilos of fat? It’s not something you’re aware of when you’re alive. It’s only when it melts, when it liquefies, that you realize. What remains, that desiccated husk floating in a pool of grease, is much smaller, much lighter than the body. It’s unrecognizable. You wouldn’t even know that it was once human. So I’m staying here.’
‘You’re hardly going to try and play the victim. The worst atrocities were committed by your side.’
‘I’m no victim, Monsieur Salagnon. And that’s why I’m here in Indochine, and not working as an accountant in some reconstructed office in Frankfurt. I’ve come to end my life a victor. Now, get some sleep.’