The Centurions

by Jean Larteguy

  To all the prisoners Camp One appeared as a sort of promised land where, in the shade of giant mango trees, they would spend a few days waiting for their release, smoking treacly tobacco, eating rice and dried fish, and dozing through some vague lectures given by “The Voice.”

  The sky had filled with the heavy black clouds which herald the monsoon. They concealed the mountain peaks behind a dark green blanket which stretched right across the horizon.

  One day, towards the end of the afternoon, they heard the drone of aircraft: a large formation of bombers. They dropped their bombs over the mountains and the explosion echoed round the valleys like distant thunder.

  The Voice drove up in his Jeep and immediately assembled the prisoners to inform them of the treachery of the French high command:

  “Before the fall of Dien-Bien-Phu the Vietnamese delegation to the armistice commission had suggested an aerial truce to the French command to facilitate the evacuation of the wounded and the transport of the prisoners. The French command had agreed to this. But yesterday, without any warning, it broke this truce. The French commander-in-chief, in his palace in Saigon, does not give a damn for the wounded or the prisoners among his troops. All he wants is to prolong the war in the interest of the bloated colonialists and the bankers. Yesterday a column of French prisoners consisting of your N.C.O.s and other ranks was bombed by your aircraft. Several were killed. To avoid this danger we are going to march you across the Méo highlands by night. We shall be leaving at sunset.”

  “It’s a bit thick, I must say,” Lacombe declared. “After all we’ve been through, to go and unload their bombs on us!”

  “What have you been through?” Esclavier demanded. “You spent the whole time back at headquarters, stuffing yourself with the rations you were supposed to send up to us.”

  Glatigny, rather white in the face, broke into the conversation:

  “I know the general extremely well. If he saw fit to break this truce and resume aerial bombardments, it could only have been for a very good reason.”

  But he felt that no one agreed with him and he heard Lieutenant Merle sneer:

  “The general’s sitting pretty back in Saigon. This evening, more than likely, he’ll be having a romp with his ‘boy’ or his congai while we’re struggling across the Méo highlands.”

  Merle was being deliberately offensive and his vulgarity did not ring true.

  Pinières then gave his opinion:

  “If he’d had the slightest decency, the general would have come along with us or else put a bullet through his brains.”

  Glatigny felt like shouting out loud:

  “But I’m here with you, aren’t I? Can’t you understand that I’m here because the general couldn’t be, just like Lescure who came in the place of his brother?”

  Boisfeuras merely observed:

  “That’s not the point; anyway it’s utterly unimportant.”

  • • •

  From their quarters the prisoners had a view of the valley and the road which wound through the paddy-fields and the tall grass circling the edge of the forest.

  An hour before sunset the dead valley began to come to life. The battalions poured out of the forest and, like tributary rivers, added their volume to the main green stream. Some trucks moved slowly down the middle of this flow, jolting over the pot-holes with engines racing.

  A column of black coolies, the Pims of Dien-Bien-Phu, were drawn up by the side of the road. They marched off and were presently swallowed up in the oncoming traffic. The Voice issued his last orders to the assembled prisoners:

  “Tonight’s march will be fairly strenuous. You must keep going without complaint and promptly obey every word of command. You will be coming across Vietnamese soldiers, your victors at Dien-Bien-Phu. You are not allowed to speak to them and must show them every sign of respect. We may possibly run into a column of those men whom you call Pims, those civilian deportees whom you snatched away from their families and peaceful peasant labours to transform into coolies. They are now free men who are returning to their hearths and homes. The suffering you have inflicted on them is such that they are filled with resentment against you. I advise you to be particularly respectful towards them. We are here to protect you from their righteous indignation, but do not provoke them, for otherwise we cannot hold ourselves responsible.”

  The sun was setting as the prisoners began to climb the first slope up the pass. The forest covered the flanks of the mountains like mildew and spread right along the ravines. But higher up, well above them, the peaks were bare except for a uniform blanket of tran, a tall razor-edged grass as pale as the ears of corn and, like them, swept by the wind into gentle waves.

  They came to a halt in the ditch to make way for a double column of bo-dois who set off up the slope with the rhythmic trotting gait of the riflemen, only their pace was even faster and more jerky. They were weighed down under their haversacks, their bundles of rice slung over one shoulder, and their weapons. Panting, sweating, suffocating, they somehow managed to emit what passed for a marching song. There was no joy in their drawn features. Many of them carried two weapons: Russian submachine-guns or Skoda automatic rifles, which had belonged to their comrades killed in the battle of the Haute Région. These weapons would come in useful in the delta to arm the waiting recruits.

  “There’s no point in killing them,” Esclavier despondently observed. “They’re like worms; you cut them in two and think that’s the end of them, but all you’ve done is double their number, each separate half assuming a life of its own. They are going to multiply in the delta and finish off what’s left of the corpse of our Expeditionary Corps.”

  A long column of Thais followed behind them. The Thais wore their traditional dress. The women, slender as reeds in their long narrow skirts and short bodices, seemed to have lost their indolent charm and sensual gait. Split up into small groups behind the can-bos, who looked like ghosts in their outsize greenish uniforms, they joined in the slogans, taking their cue from the can-bos; each of them had the blank and riveted gaze of a fanatic.

  Glatigny gave Boisfeuras a nudge:

  “Look, the termites have swallowed up the carefree people of the valleys and river-land; they have reduced them to slavery; they’ve conscripted my Thais, of all people!”

  “So what?”

  “I lived at Lai-Chau for six months when I first came out here. I thought I had found paradise on earth among these friendly, idle, cheerful men and these lovely, gentle women, always ready for pleasure or for love. These women made me appreciate the joys of the body; I’ve made love to them on little strips of sand by the banks of the Black River, in their houses on stilts . . . and not once, me a Catholic and a bit of a puritan, not once did I have the slightest feeling of sin, because, you see, the Thais, unlike every other race on earth, have no conception of original sin. And now these chaps have infected them with all their filthy claptrap!”

  Night fell all at once like a safety curtain. Some bamboo torches were lit which marked out the twists in the road on the black flank of the mountain. Thereupon Lescure burst into a loud guffaw and they all listened to him in holy terror. It was as though some devil, exploiting his madness, had taken possession of him and was speaking through his mouth. The disjointed flow of words gave birth to extravagant visions.

  It was the great procession of the damned who were making their way to the seat of the Last Judgement; angels had lit their torches so that no one should escape in the dark. Enthroned high above them sat the god with the huge belly and eyes as round as millstones. In his claw-like hands he grabbed the humans up by the fistful and tore them apart in his teeth, the just and the unjust, the pure and impure, the believers and unbelievers alike. All were acceptable to him, for he hungered after flesh and blood. Every now and then he gave a solemn belch and the angels applauded with a shout: “Long live President Ho!” But he was still ravenous an
d so he also devoured them; and even as he snapped their bones between his teeth, they kept on shouting: “Long may he live!”

  An explosion very close at hand, a sudden blaze of red and the noise of the repercussion, was amplified in echoes right across the mountain.

  “Christ Almighty,” said Glatigny, “the aircraft have dropped some delayed-action bombs and we’ve got to go in that direction.”

  Delayed-action bombs was one of his ideas. In the course of several aerial reconnaissances he had noticed that as soon as the Viets heard the sound of an aircraft they immediately disappeared, abandoning their work on the trail they were building. They did not come back again until it was dark. He had mentioned this to the general, who had given him a free hand. And now fifty per cent of the bombs were equipped with delay fuses of anything between two and ten hours.

  The raid had taken place about eleven o’clock in the morning. Most of the bombs would therefore explode, between ten and twelve that night. He looked for his watch on his wrist, forgetting it had been taken from him. All he had now was his wedding-ring. The Viets had also confiscated all wedding-rings, but the prisoners had told them these were religious objects and so they had handed them back. In his case this was true.

  He had placed the whole of his life under the sign of Christ who had preached peace, charity, brotherhood . . . and at the same time he had arranged for the delayed-action bombs at the Cat-Bi airfield at Haiphong.

  “Something on your mind?” Esclavier asked him kindly. “Are you married?”

  “Yes, I’ve a wife and five children.”

  “A paragon of a wife and five children at a Jesuit college?”

  “No, only three are with the Jesuits, the others are girls.”

  “That’s perfect, your wife will wait patiently for you to come back and make it a round half-dozen.”

  “Did you hear the bombs?”

  “What of it? There’s a war on and we can’t allow Hanoi to be captured.”

  The column set off again. Through a gap in the clouds the moon shone down for several minutes on the long file of prisoners straining up hill, their bodies bent forward. Motionless and silent in the middle of the road stood the trucks towing the 105 calibre guns “Made in U.S.A.” Glatigny counted them as he went past. There were exactly twenty-four of them; once again the intelligence reports were correct. There they stood in their original covers, towed by short-framed G.M.C.s or Molotovas which were better suited to the mud. The Americans had given these guns to Chiang Kai-Shek; the Communists had either bought them from his generals or else taken them during the big Kuomintang defeat, then sent them to the Vietminh to carry on the same war.

  At the head of the convoy a detachment of soldiers illuminated by their smoky bamboo torches were apparently directing the traffic. Farther on the road had been cut.

  “Mau-len, mau-len!” The cry passed from mouth to mouth, and all the way back again.

  The road, which was carved out of the side of the mountain, had caved in over a distance of fifty yards. Some thousand-pound bombs had been responsible for this damage and the Vietminh ant-hill seethed as though it had been stirred up with a stick. The Thai men, women and children with their picks, their baskets and even their bare hands were busily transporting earth to fill in the craters and placing rocks along the outer edge to keep this earth in position. There were about a thousand of them who had come from villages several days’ march away. Some can-bos were in charge of them; they kept singing patriotic songs and chanting slogans first in Thai and afterwards in Vietnamese. The leader would give them a cue, then they all joined in while carrying on with their work.

  “Long live President Ho!”

  “Long live General Giap who has led us to victory!”

  “Long live the glorious soldiers of the People’s Army!”

  Lower down, on the edge of a freshly disturbed crater, lay five mangled bodies: victims of a delayed-action bomb. But Glatigny was the only one who saw them; for the coolies, under the spell of the incantations, had forgotten all about them; and the other prisoners, insensible to anything but their own exhaustion, did not bother to look; it was no concern of theirs.

  “Dear God . . .”

  Glatigny did not know what he wanted God to do; his prayer was vague and confused. He would have liked to be with the coolies, to share their danger. Another bomb exploded in the middle of a mass of women, men and children and the blast bowled the prisoners over. A Thai with a shattered leg started shrieking in the darkness like a wild beast; several bloodstained bodies coated with earth were no longer moving. The chanting had stopped. But all at once it started up again, faintly at first, then louder and louder: “Ho Chi Tich, Muon Nam . . . Giap, Muon Nam.”

  “Mau-len, mau-len!”

  By the light of the torches the prisoners filed past the corpses and the wounded who were being tended by medical orderlies with a band of white gauze stretched over their nose and mouth. The chanting pursued them and drove them on.

  Glatigny made the sign of the cross and felt the friendly pressure of Esclavier’s hand on his shoulder:

  “We all suffer from conscience and remorse; that’s why we’re losing.”

  ln the course of the night there were three further explosions. Each time Glatigny gave a start; each time he felt his friend’s hand on his shoulder.

  The noise of motor traffic could be heard again below them. The trucks were now able to get through and their roar grew louder at each bend as the convoy gradually gained on the column of prisoners. The Frenchmen were ordered to the side of the road and the black vehicles, like huge clumsy beetles, rattled slowly past them.

  The slopes began to get steeper than ever; the men slithered and staggered up the trail, sweat dripping into their eyes. Some of them fell down altogether and their comrades had to help them to their feet again. Mahmoudi, with an arm under Lescure’s shoulder, was helping him along as though in a daze. Pinières, with an ugly expression on his face, took over a kit-bag from Lacombe, who was whimpering shamelessly:

  “I was never cut out to be a soldier; I wasn’t trained for this sort of thing.”

  “Then what the hell made you go and join the army?” Pinières demanded, pushing him forward.

  “I’ve got two children . . .”

  Carrying the rice urn on its bamboo pole, Boisfeuras trudged along with an easy swing of his shoulders, moving like a Vietnamese so as to absorb the jolt at every step. Esclavier, who was on the other end, kept stumbling and cursing; the skin had been rubbed off his shoulder which was bruised and bleeding. Every ten paces or so he shifted the pole from one side to the other and his arms ached right down to his finger-tips.

  Glatigny took over from him. Boisfeuras indicated with a gesture that he could carry on. He knew the value of silence during any prolonged effort and sucked a blade of grass to ward off thirst.

  Before their departure the Voice had advised the prisoners to fill whatever water containers they had, but these had long ago been drained. Their tongues were parched, their breathing laboured. Word had gone round that anyone falling out by the side of the road would be finished off as a reprisal against the air raids . . . Even the weakest strained to keep going.

  The rasping, urgent voice of Boisfeuras came to their ears:

  “Pluck some grass and suck it, for Christ’s sake, but only the short, thick blades containing moisture: the others will upset your stomach.”

  At every halt the wind off the summit froze their sweating bodies, and when they started off again their muscles felt so stiff that they could hardly move.

  The crest of the mountain seemed a little closer at every turn. Eventually it was reached, but behind it rose a second peak more lofty and more distant than the sky, then some bare, contorted ridges extending without a break to the farthest horizon. Beyond lay Son-La, Na-San, Hoa-Binh and Hanoi with its cafés stocked with ice-cold drink
s—the Ritz, the Club, the Normandie—its fast-living, devil-may-care air pilots, its reserved and evasive staff officers making announcements to the hordes of journalists and being stood round after round of drinks. Back there the Chinese taxi dancers would be dancing together in the middle of the floor, waiting for their clients. It was said that most of them were lesbians and lived together as married couples. On the civilian airport at Gia-Lam the D.C.4 for Paris would be warming up its engines.

  Merle, who was at his last gasp and felt he could not take another step, suddenly yelled:

  “To hell with them all, the bastards!”

  His resentment against those who were not suffering with him gave him strength to carry on a little longer.

  The prisoners were anxious to survive, and for that they had to have something to think about, something to believe in. But all they could find in their vacant minds was of no avail. These were peaceful visions: lying in the grass on the bank of a river, with dragon-flies skimming over the water; reading a detective novel by the gentle light of a lamp, with one’s wife in the bath-room next door getting ready for bed and the radio playing some insipid little tune dripping with nostalgia . . .

  But gradually each one of them was assailed by a more forceful recollection than any other, one which they tried desperately to suppress: this was their secret and grievous sin. It was to remain with them for the rest of their arduous march, and for the best of them it would give some meaning to their suffering and atonement. The others, those who had nothing, were destined to leave their bones on the roadside.

  Pinières was still just behind Lacombe, whom he kept helping to his feet, and cursing. He could not forget what the “victualler” had said: “I’ve got two children.”

  Pinières’s child was dead before it was born; its mother had also died; she had kept the appointment by the Cascade at Dalat; she knew what was in store for her and they had strangled her. That was how the Vietminh punished those who betrayed them. It was shortly after he first arrived in Indo-China, some three years ago. Pinières had joined up as a paratrooper and volunteered for Indo-China in order to break away completely from a past that was political rather than military. That day he had opted for the army against politics. Since then he had had nothing more to do with his former maquis comrades.