Three of these Pims had been awarded the Military Medal for their heroic conduct at Dien-Bien-Phu, but they had disappeared.
The Voice gave the bo-dois orders to keep the Pims and the prisoners apart. For the first time the Viets began striking the officers with their rifle butts.
The column of Pims faded out of the nightmare, the Voice floated in. He addressed the Frenchmen:
“I told you to show respect towards your victims, not to provoke them. You refused to listen and we were obliged to save you from their righteous anger.”
“The damned bastard,” Pinières murmured, clenching his fist.
“Not at all,” Boisfeuras replied, “he’s being logical. According to Marxist theory, the colonized cannot fraternize with the colonizer. It’s dogmatically impossible. But since this fraternization has just taken place, he simply denies the fact.”
The tepid downpour continued without a break. One night the prisoners passed a convoy of trucks bogged down in the mud. The coolies swarming round them, while their engines raced and roared, could not manage to shift them from the pot-holes. The R.P. 41 was out of service at last, the monsoon had proved more effective than the French pilots . . . but too late.
As though in the throes of fever, Glatigny kept wrestling with his phantoms which took the form of staff plans marked in red and blue, reports, confidential signals, urgent, secret, top secret . . .
He had a vision of the large-scale map at Air Force Headquarters, Hanoi, with its red crosses indicating where the road had been cut. Effective for thirty-six hours, effective for forty-eight hours, of no effect at all. This was two months earlier.
The road had never been cut, the termites worked faster than the bombs and Dien-Bien-Phu had fallen. The big black artery swollen with coolies brought the life-blood to Giap’s divisions every night.
The road had to be put out of service and, if bombs proved ineffective, rain had to be made to fall instead. But the carbonic ice they had scattered by the plane-load on the heavy ink-black clouds had done nothing. The metereologist who had been sent out from Paris had gone back after making this sibylline report: “The monsoon cycle is so disturbed in the north-east of Indo-China that any forecast of rain must be regarded as contingent.”
The metereologist was now safely ensconced in his cosy little flat in Paris, well protected from hunger and fatigue and from the despair and malediction of defeat. Meanwhile the rain poured down every day on the vanquished struggling along in the mud.
“Christ Almighty,” Merle swore, stumbling against Glatigny, “if the general had the runs as I have . . . I’ve got to go again, though I’m absolutely drained. Here, take my bag.”
Between one spasm and the next his thoughts flew to the lovely Micheline, with her beauty-spot and eighteenth-century hairstyle. “If you could only see your paratrooper now, my beauty!” Then: “All the same, I’m not going to die by the side of a road like a destitute beggar simply because I wanted to prolong my holiday. It can’t happen!”
Olivier Merle had been brought up in Tours among a lot of old people. Everyone in his background was old: his father, his mother, his aunts, his cousins and even his skinny young sister. Olivier had gone off to do his military service. In the army he had discovered youth and gaiety, but he had failed to distinguish between the regular army and the one in which the young civilians served—the last long holiday before life begins in earnest.
In order to prolong his own holiday, little Merle, after finishing his time, had signed on for two years in Indo-China. In Tours this had been considered rather frivolous of him.
Olivier often recalled the secret joy he had felt that time he went home on leave after passing out of Saint-Maixent. Without his parents’ knowledge he had been through a parachute course at the school and had then been posted to a south-western battalion. For the first time his red beret made a bright splash of colour in the old house on the bank of the Loire.
“What does it mean?” his father had asked him.
“It means I’ve jumped from an aircraft seven times with a parachute strapped to my back and that each time it opened.”
“Eccentrics are frowned upon in our profession. A parachuting notary! What will they think in Tours? It won’t do us any good.”
“If your practice consisted exclusively of labourers, Father, that might well be so, but most of your clients are from the upper-middle and merchant classes.”
“Exactly; the working class doesn’t mind that sort of nonsense, but the middle does.”
“But surely the army, and the paratroops in particular, are the great defenders of the privileges of the middle class?”
“They distrust defenders of that sort even more than their enemies; they could well do without them. You could be a radical or a Communist and all they would say is, ‘He’ll get over it, it’s just a youthful phase.’ But a paratrooper . . . ! Let’s hope we can keep it dark.”
But his sister had fondled his beret with its winged dagger badge. Never before had Olivier seen such a gleam in her eyes.
“I’m glad you joined,” she had told him. “You’re the first to escape from this rat-hole of ours. One day you must come back and fetch me away.”
Olivier Merle had remained in uniform, partly in defiance of his father, partly to please his sister, but most of all to scandalize the bourgeoisie of Tours, and in the evening he had gone out with a party of friends to a night-club.
“Is his lordship trying to compete with me?” young Bezegue of the Magasins Réunis had asked him with a sneer.
Bezegue felt slightly put out. He was regarded as the “Bolshy” of the group. One day he had “borrowed” a motor-car for several hours and his lack of moral sense was a byword. But in one fell swoop Olivier had surpassed him and gone infinitely farther.
Olivier was vaguely in love with all the girls he knew, but up till then they had merely used him to make their boy-friends jealous and only went out with him when they had no one else on hand.
During his fortnight’s leave Olivier was in great demand. Everyone referred to him as the “Red Devil” and the girls regarded him with secret yearning and fascinated awe, as though he had already assassinated two or three wealthy widows.
He spent a few nights with Micheline, the prettiest of them all, the one who lent a certain tone to the group, for she spoke of life, love and death with the utmost cynicism. She was nineteen and had had a miscarriage in Switzerland, which added somewhat to her aura.
One day Micheline asked him, as though it was the most commonplace thing in the world:
“Have you ever killed anyone?”
She was obviously disappointed by his answer.
Before he left for Indo-China, Micheline had come and spent a week with him at Vannes. She had dyed her hair dead-white and wore a beauty-spot on the corner of her chin, which made her look like an eighteenth-century marquise.
Micheline had notified him, as though it was a matter of no consequence, of her marriage to Bezegue, and Olivier had realized he was no longer in the running as a prospective husband. It was flattering and at the same time disheartening.
Micheline had made a habit of writing to him regularly in Indo-China; she told him about her love-affairs, her little infidelities here and there, her trips to Paris. One day he replied: “I’ve killed someone and from now on things are different.” Then he had stopped writing to her for good.
To his own amazement, Second-Lieutenant (later Lieutenant) Merle, who had no particular bent for a military career, did extremely well and was highly esteemed for his courage and endurance. Among the decorations that had been handed out wholesale to the defenders of Dien-Bien-Phu when it was known that the garrison was done for, he was awarded the Légion d’Honneur and everyone felt it was well deserved.
Pinières had told him:
“Now you can stay on in the army and become a regular.”
But young Merle had not the slightest wish to become a regular and at the moment he was passing blood.
At one of the halts he dragged himself along to the M.O.
“I’m completely drained,” he said, “I’m dying of thirst. I can’t go on.”
“I’ve also got dysentery,” the M.O. told him, “and I’ve nothing to take for it. Emetine’s what we need but the Viets haven’t even got any for themselves, so they say.”
“Well, what’s the answer?”
“There’s no answer . . . just carry on. It might cure itself, you can never tell. Try and drink some of the water in which the rice is cooked, that’s an old wives’ remedy. It hasn’t done me any good . . . possibly because, as a medical man, I don’t believe in remedies of that sort.”
Merle was getting weaker and weaker and his comrades had to help him along. He kept saying over and over again: “It’s no joke, it’s no joke . . .”
Lacombe swam in his own fat which was becoming as fluid as oil. He kept dreaming of vast platefuls of boiled beef, stewed mutton and roast veal, and his hunger was sometimes so obsessive that he fancied he was inhaling the savoury smells of rich cooking.
Lescure, isolated in his madness, ambled along between Glatigny and Esclavier, a disjointed sightless puppet attached to life by a few slender threads.
But when they came to Son-La, where they had to ford a small stream, he refused to step into the water and began struggling.
“I know this place. It’s sown with mines and the Viets are in position on the far bank. We’ll have to go round by the mountains.”
He grabbed at a terrified bo-doi:
“Go and tell the major, mau-len. I’ve some information for him. The Viets . . .”
“You’re mistaken,” Esclavier gently corrected him. “It’s our partisans who are holding the far bank.”
Instantly pacified, Lescure followed his captain into the water.
During the night of 27–28 May they passed through the old entrenched camp of Na-San.
The Voice ordered a halt, which lasted several hours. It had stopped raining; the sky had cleared; it was now luminous and the colour of milk. They were at the foot of a tooth-shaped peak which was still crowned with a few strands of rusty barbed wire and stacks of punctured sandbags.
“I held this strong-point for three months,” Esclavier told Glatigny. “It was full of Viet corpses; they reached right up to my dug-out. I thought Na-San was impregnable. I also thought Dien-Bien-Phu was impregnable . . .”
“Everyone thought Dien-Bien-Phu was impregnable,” Glatigny replied in a flat voice, “the captains, the colonels, the generals, the ministers, the Americans, the pilots and even the sailors who knew nothing about it. Everyone, do you realize? No one doubted it for a moment. I was in a particularly good position to know.”
The calm of the night, the milky night, the memory of the battles at Na-San, which for him had been victories, made Esclavier tolerant for a certain length of time and he forgot his harsh conception of war and his favourite axiom; “the man who loses is guilty and must be executed.”
“Why did we foul it up so badly?” he asked dispassionately.
At this point Glatigny felt that by explaining Dien-Bien-Phu he could exorcize his remorse.
Boisfeuras came up and without a word sat down beside them.
“We had to protect Laos,” Glatigny explained, “to which France had just committed herself by signing a treaty of defence. Laos was the first country to join the French Union.
“We had to stem the main Vietminh advance on the Tonkinese delta, on Hanoi and Haiphong. So as to gain time we chose Dien-Bien-Phu in order to engage them.”
“Five hundred miles from our bases?” Esclavier interjected.
“The Viets were also five hundred miles from theirs and they had no air force. Their only supply line was this secondary road, R.P. 41, this umbilical cord which our pilots claimed they could put out of service at a moment’s notice. That’s what they never stopped saying, anyway.”
“Only it wasn’t true and Dien-Bien-Phu was a basin.”
“Certainly, but the largest one in South-East Asia—ten miles by five. We could lay down several landing strips for our modern aircraft. The ridges commanding it were farther away than the range of the Vietminh guns. To shell the entrenched camp, the Viets therefore had to site their artillery either on the forward slope or else in the plain. There, we could fight back, destroy it with our superior guns, our planes and our armour . . . But the Viets dug their guns in, they came down to engage us in the plain and in the plain we held the heights. So the Viets then stormed the heights and overran us.”
Boisfeuras broke in:
“We were wrong from start to finish because we tried to see the war from the point of view of Saigon, or, at the most, of Paris, by forcing ourselves to believe that it was possible to isolate the Vietnamese peninsula from the rest of the Asiatic and Communist world and that we could calmly embark on our little operation of colonial reconquest. Sheer stupidity! We should have regarded this war through the eyes of Moscow or Peking. Now, Moscow and Peking did not give a damn about Viet-Nam, this cul-de-sac which led nowhere, but they did care about Dien-Bien-Phu, and very much so.
“I know South-East Asia pretty well. It’s more or less my country; I’ve been around here for years; I’ve fought here against the Japs and the Chinese. I’ve also read quite a lot of Communist literature. What does Lenin say? ‘The future of world revolution lies with the great masses of Asia.’ China is Communist, but there still remains India which is closed to China by the Himalayas, to Russia by the Pamirs and the ranges of Afghanistan. The only point of entry is through Bengal and South-East Asia.
“Among the seething races of the Far East which can hardly be numbered, there’s only one ethnic group of any historical or political interest: the Thais. They’ve got a history, they’ve built an empire. They’re called Chans and Karens in Burma; they’re also to be found in Thailand and Laos. In the Haute Région they represent three-fifths of the population and they’re also established in Yunnan. The capital of this Thai empire is Dien-Bien-Phu.
“The Communists decided to work on the Thais so as to force an entry into India. They set up the Thai majority in Yunnan as an autonomous people’s republic and, I can tell you now, it was on that business that I was engaged. The Chinese want to group all the other Thais round their people’s republic. Once that is done, all that’s needed is a slight nudge for the whole of South-East Asia to collapse. Then every gateway into India will be open to them. They therefore could not allow the historical and geographical capital of the Thais to be held by western anti-Communists. Mao-Tse-Tung ordered the capture of Dien-Bien-Phu while Giap was dreaming about the delta.”
“Dien-Bien-Phu was the only basin where the big modern bombers could take off,” Glatigny observed, “and the Americans had thought of it with a view to . . .”
“With a view to what?” Boisfeuras inquired.
“With a view to attacking China, perhaps.”
“No one ever mentioned that possibility,” said Esclavier.
Glatigny was afraid he had spoken too freely: he tried to correct himself.
“There was a rumour to that effect; I wasn’t in the know about anything connected with secret international negotiations . . .”
But all of a sudden his regard for security seemed absurd.
“Nevertheless,” he went on, “the Americans were most insistent that we should choose Dien-Bien-Phu. And Giap had thirty thousand of his bo-dois slaughtered to please the Chinese. But in return he received from them twenty-four 105 mm. guns, eighteen 75 mm., a hundred 12.7 A.A. guns, eighty 37 mm. and all the ammunition he could possibly want.”
“And also the promise of volunteers, if necessary,” Boisfeuras chipped in. “The Communists are perfectly logical. Dien-Bien-Phu was something on
which their very life depended. That’s what the Americans failed to see.
“It’s true that American opinion, which is anti-colonialist by tradition, would have found it difficult to support a conflict, which the whole of their press condemned as colonial, to the extent of going to war. And yet Dien-Bien-Phu was one of those battles which set the two blocs by the ears. Only the French found themselves facing the whole Communist machine on their own.”
Glatigny lay back in the damp grass and gazed up at the sky; in the moonlight the clouds sparkled like strings of artificial jewels.
He had flown over this valley in the comfort of the general’s aircraft and attended the briefings at which clever staff officers had dissected the war in detail but without grasping it as a whole. In the same aircraft he had accompanied those wretched little ministers who came out from time to time on a tour of inspection. They were ten thousand miles away from hearth and home and could only regard this conflict from the narrow viewpoint of little town councillors. How could they imagine another world in which vast swarms of men were famished, longing for the smallest morsel of food, and crazed with hope?
After this halt and this respite, the Voice subjected the prisoners to a forced march, as though he wanted to make them atone for their victory at Na-San, and many of them, dazed with fatigue, lay down and died by the side of the road.
Merle was getting worse and worse. As a result of some subtle and secret bargaining, Boisfeuras managed to obtain a few tablets of stovarsol from one of the bo-dois. He made the lieutenant take them and Merle began to feel better almost immediately.
Later on he asked Boisfeuras:
“It couldn’t have been an easy job getting those tablets?”
“No.”
“You wouldn’t be able to get any more, I suppose?”
“They’re finished.”
“And what if you or Glatigny or someone else suddenly needs some?”
“We’ll have to do without.”
The prisoners were now all living in a secondary state of consciousness; they hovered on the brink between nightmare and reality; their will and courage fell apart while their personal characteristics and everything that contributed to their individualities melted away into the uniform grey mass slogging along through the mud.
The Centurions Page 11