He had a vague notion that he was being made to suffer to atone for his grandfather’s looting. When he realized this, he felt furious at the thought of being so deeply affected by the Christian or Communist sense of sin—an original sin with the Christians, a class sin with the Communists.
He then applied himself to freeing his hands. After a long and patient endeavour which took him three days, he managed to slip the wire off his wrists. During the few hours they halted he was able to move his cramped fingers and revive the circulation.
When the sentry came to check his bonds in the evening, he had refastened them and they appeared to be as tight as ever.
From then on he no longer heard the sound of smashing porcelain in the Summer Palace.
5
LIEUTENANT MAHMOUDI’S THEFT
After crossing the Red River at Yen-Bay, the prisoners headed in a northerly direction across the Moyenne Région. One night, during a longer lap than usual, they emerged on to the R.C. 2. In the moonlight they could see a signpost: Hanoi 161 kilometres, then another: Hanoi 160 kilometres.
These signposts with their French measures of distance, the good old kilometres of the Ile-de-France, of Normandy, Gascony and Provence, were like lifebuoys to which they could cling for a few precious seconds before being swept back into their nightmare.
Hanoi 157 kilometres. They left the Hanoi road and turned down a side-trail leading towards the Bright River. The surface was corrugated with six-year-old furrows over which ran a winding path for pedestrians and cyclists.
The following night they crossed the Bright River in canoes. The village of Bac-Nhang on the far bank was intact.
The Voice gave orders for the sick to be evacuated to the hospital and Lescure was taken from his comrades; then, as a “measure of leniency” he had the bonds removed from all the officers who had been tied up, with the exception of Boisfeuras.
At daybreak the column did not make its customary halt. By tortuous paths it kept going until it reached a vast open space flanked by a pebbly stream. Several columns of prisoners were drawn up at the edge of the forest, divided according to race: French, North Africans, Blacks. A little to one side stood the group of senior officers from Dien-Bien-Phu who had left Muong-Phan by truck a month earlier.
A small detachment of bo-dois had been detailed to keep watch over General de Castries.
The heat was suffocating.
There was a watch-tower near the river. A camera and tripod had been set up on its platform which was shaded by a strip of matting. Beside it stood a white man in a fibre helmet, surrounded by a group of can-bos. He was tall and fair, dressed in a bush-shirt, khaki slacks and light jungle boots.
“They’re going to film us for the news-reels,” said Pinières.
“They just want to kill us off,” said Merle, who was dying of fatigue, heat and thirst.
None of them had anything to drink and they were not allowed to draw any water from the river.
“Im . . . Im . . .”
The bo-dois were getting touchier and nastier. They had smartened themselves up and cleaned their weapons. The Voice was strutting about among the group of can-bos surrounding the film-director, while the prisoners stood pressed together, marking time in the full blaze of the sun.
Eventually the can-bos returned to their respective groups. They paraded the prisoners on the open ground formed by the deposit of the river and drew them up in one solid column twelve deep, the officers at the head, with General de Castries alone in front.
To give the impression of an endless mass, to create the illusion that the number of prisoners was infinitely greater, the last ranks were tucked away behind a bend in the river, and it looked as though these thousands of men were merely the advance guard of the huge captive armies of the West.
The white man directed the scene, giving his orders in a French which was barely distorted by his Russian accent, and his voice was solemn and melodious:
“Forward . . . slowly.”
The massive column staggered forward as he focused his camera.
“Back a few paces . . .”
It was essential not to show the rear ranks.
“Move the head of the column a few paces to the left . . . Forward . . . As you were . . . We’ll start again . . .”
This sinister ballet of the vanquished lasted until midday. Esclavier and Glatigny were marching side by side in the centre of one rank, their heads hung in shame, both of them overwhelmed by the same feeling of humiliation.
“The camera to which the vanquished are subjected,” said Glatigny. “The modern yoke, but more degrading. We’ll be seen under this yoke thousands and thousands of times in every cinema in the world.”
“Damned bastards,” Esclavier muttered, wild with rage.
The Soviet film-director Karmen, a familiar figure at the Cannes festival and in the bars of Paris, relaxed, professional and smiling, was trifling with the ultimate physical resources of his racial brothers for the sake of political propaganda.
“A dirty traitor,” Esclavier hissed. “If I could only get my hands round his neck and slowly choke the life out of him . . .”
He was identifying the Soviet film-director with his brother-in-law, little Weihl-Esclavier with his damp hands, who had robbed him of everything, even his name; it was Weihl he was dreaming of strangling.
“As you were . . . We’ll begin again . . . Forward . . .”
That evening three officers died of exhaustion.
• • •
One day the limestone formations came into sight and Glatigny knew that he had not been mistaken. They were being taken to join the prisoners of Cao-Bang in the Na-Hang-Na-Koc quadrilateral in which the French Air Force had been ordered not to operate. So as not to land fully laden, a pilot returning from a mission had once jettisoned his bombs on to some huts where he saw some men moving, and without knowing it had killed some of his own comrades. The commanders-in-chief were now on their guard against the trigger-happiness of the air force pilots.
The night marches came to an end.
On 21 June the prisoners were given their rice ration at dawn. The column then set off along a broad, “easy” trail, which climbed a gentle slope in a dead straight line. The rumour spread throughout the column that they were about to arrive and the men derived fresh strength to push on, though they had been ready to drop a few moments before.
The trail now ran past neat little villages with squat Vietnamese hutments. Red flags and banners everywhere lent a gay carnival note to the scene.
A few Chinese merchants, whose wares overflowed into the road, had adorned their shop-fronts with the Chinese Communist flag and a photograph of Mao-Tse-Tung looking fat and self-satisfied.
“Civilians at last,” Merle observed gleefully. “We’re back in civilization. Where there’s a Chinaman, there’s hope.”
Still tied up, Boisfeuras in his turn filed past the shops. The smell of Cantonese spices, the sight of pig’s bladders, the sound of a language which was even more familiar to him than Vietnamese, put new life into him. Boisfeuras loved China and was rather scornful of Viet-Nam.
Greater China was in a period of flux and her flag already floated over Tonkin, the Haute and Moyenne Régions. She would overrun Malaya, Burma, India and the East Indies and one day the tide would turn, perhaps under atomic bombardment. But the flow would gather fresh impetus. China was an ocean bound by cosmic influences and, in spite of their pertinacity, their diligence and cruelty, the contemptible and pretentious masters who thought they could direct her would suffer the same fate as the other invaders before them: the Huns, the Mongols, the Manchus. Because their junks had for a moment or two sailed over this ocean which was the Chinese people, they fondly believed themselves to be the masters of it.
And as he stumbled along between his three sentries, Boisfeuras used the pure Mandarin language of
Mao-Tse-Tung to recite this poem by the new master of China:
Standing on the highest summit of the Six Mountains
Beneath the red flag waving in the westerly breeze
With a long rope in my hand, I dream of the day
When we shall be able to bind the Monster fast . . .
Mao was mistaken. China was not the monster, the dragon “with a hundred thousand mouths and a hundred thousand talons,” but this ocean which could not be bound fast with a rope or dominated by force of arms.
The column came to a halt by a thicket where there were some banana trees. Esclavier had got rid of his depression after the crossing of the Bright River at Bac-Nhang and was now seething with energy and revolt.
“We’re not dead yet,” he said. “I think we’ve got away with it this time. Now we’ll show these dirty little bastards what we’re made of. There are some bananas on those trees. Let’s have them. Come on, Pinières, Merle, Glatigny.”
The officers went and asked a sentry for permission to relieve themselves. The bo-doi accompanied them as far as the banana trees but, since he belonged to the puritan republic of Viet-Nam, he turned away as the four men squatted down on their haunches.
“Go!” Esclavier shouted, as though on a parachute jump, and they snaffled the bananas and crammed them into their pockets. But the sentry had turned round and caught Pinières who was slower than the others. Beside himself with rage, the little green dwarf started hammering his fists into the ginger-haired giant, the odious imperialist who had stolen the property of the people.
“For Christ’s sake don’t hit back,” Esclavier shouted out to warn him. “He’s only doing his job.”
Pinières was quivering with anger; to master his feelings, he stood stiffly to attention while the bo-doi went on hammering him with his puny little fists.
“You’ve still got the bananas?” Esclavier asked him.
“Yes.”
“That’s the main thing.”
Merle gave a couple of small bananas to Lieutenant Mahmoudi who was down in the dumps and racked with fever. But Mahmoudi took umbrage:
“Why are you giving me these bananas?”
Merle shrugged his shoulders:
“You’re not in very good shape, you know. Lack of vitamins, that’s the reason for your fever. You’re afraid to eat wild herbs as we do, so keep up your strength on bananas. It looks as though we’re over the worst and we don’t want to see you die.”
“Why?”
“Now listen. You’re an Algerian and a Moslem; I’m on the reserve and, if anything, anti-militarist. Army people bore me to tears. They’re not adult, not properly mature. But that’s a minor detail for you and me, as it is for Glatigny and Boisfeuras, for Pinières and Esclavier, and even for Lacombe. We’re prisoners, so we’re all in the same boat; we’ve got to survive, our bodies have got to hold out, but our characters have got to survive as well. We must safeguard whatever it is that makes us different individuals, each with his own particular quirk, his spirit of rebellion, his indolence, his taste for alcohol or girls. We’ve got to protect all this against these insects who are trying to grind it out of us. Esclavier’s right, we’ve got to show them what we’re made of.
“When that’s done we can settle our own accounts, between us, as people of the same universe.”
“There are only two universes,” Mahmoudi replied darkly, “that of the oppressors and that of the oppressed, of the colonizers and of the colonized—in Algeria, that of the Arabs and that of the French.”
“You’re wrong,” said little Merle, lifting his finger in a falsely sententious manner. “There are those who believe in mankind and can tear out their own guts without any danger, and those who defy the human species in order to deny the individual. The latter give you leprosy as soon as you touch them.”
They went through another village where they had to pass in front of a Chinese shop outside which there was a sort of large jar filled with molasses.
“Mahmoudi, how would you go about it to steal some molasses?”
“Me steal molasses?”
He seemed surprised. This chap Merle was really rather disconcerting with the way he had of jumping abruptly from one subject to the next, of showing after a whole month of cohabitation that he was capable of personal ideas and reflection in spite of his spoilt child manners. Stealing molasses . . . stealing . . . The word stirred his memory. It was at Laghouat, a market day in spring, when the grey and blue-throated doves coo in the palm trees and the streams run clear and swift like young colts. They were coming down from the mountains, a band of barefoot urchins, and in the hoods of their threadbare jellabas they were carrying a few handfuls of dates for the road. On the square, where the camels of the Black Tent nomads had their pitch, they gathered round the doughnut merchant. Two of them made a pretence of fighting and the others knocked over the stall and made off, their hands sticky with the sugared cakes.
“Merle,” said Mahmoudi, “I think I know a way. Let’s organize a fight in front of the Chinaman’s stall—between you and me, for instance. You call me a thief, I’ll go for you, and meanwhile the other chaps can pinch the molasses.”
“Why should I call you a thief?”
Mahmoudi gave a smile which lent his drawn features a certain mystery and beauty.
“It will remind me . . . of a doughnut merchant!”
They enacted the scene to perfection.
“Dirty thief!” Merle yelled.
Mahmoudi sprang at the lieutenant and both of them tussled together on the ground in front of the shop. The prisoners had gathered round the two men whom the sentries were trying to separate. The Chinese was jumping up and down, his arms outstretched, as fat and furious as a turkey.
“Di-di, mau-len!”
“Go!” Esclavier shouted.
Empty tins were whipped out of pockets and each member of the team plunged his into the pot of molasses. At the next halt Lacombe was elected to distribute the stuff between the members of the group. He was well qualified for the task.
Notified of the incident, the Voice sent for Mahmoudi.
“I hear,” he said, “that one of your comrades insulted you outrageously and that all the other prisoners, out of racial spite, took his side. If you will tell me who this comrade was, he will be severely punished.”
Mahmoudi gently shook his head.
“It was a purely personal misunderstanding and racialism did not come into it.”
The Voice abruptly dropped his impersonal tone. He became passionate:
“You’re a simpleton. With them racialism always exists. They make a show of being your brothers, those friends of yours, of considering you their equals, but if you really want to mix your blood with theirs, marry one of their women, for instance, then they send you packing as though you had committed some sacrilege. Which comrade was it?”
“No.”
“You needn’t feel any solidarity with them; they’re the colonialists who are holding your people in subjection, they’re the ones who were beaten at Dien-Bien-Phu. Dien-Bien-Phu is the victory of all the Arab nations which are still under the heel of France. It’s your duty to tell me which of them insulted you.”
Mahmoudi’s lips were dry. He felt a fit of trembling coming on . . .
“Your duty as an Algerian oppressed by French imperialism . . .”
The Voice’s finely drawn and handsome features had recovered their hieratic quality and beauty—also their spell, for he was the conqueror of an army which Mahmoudi had always admired.
The eyes in the golden mask opened and closed and the lieutenant felt he was being observed by a creature of infinite patience. To release himself from their spell, he confessed the truth:
“I organized that scuffle, sir, to enable my comrades”—he had stressed this word with a sort of fury which did not escape the Voice—�
�to steal some molasses from a Chinese merchant.”
“You ought to be punished . . . but I shall let you off. Go away.”
The Voice watched him as he went. He had avoided making the bad mistake of sending him back with his hands tied behind him. Because of this punishment the Arab would have felt an even stronger solidarity with the other prisoners, and party instructions on this score were explicit: use every means to separate the blacks and North Africans from the French.
Lieutenant Mahmoudi did not have the calm strength of Dia, the black medical officer, with the powerful laugh which rose from his belly. He was more apprehensive, more uncertain. But this imbecile had reopened a secret wound in the Voice’s heart.
It was in the days of Admiral Decoux. Pham was then a student at Hanoi and belonged to a youth movement founded by Commander Ducoroy. It was the first time in Indo-China that white youths and young Vietnamese were to be found together in the same camps and under the same organization. Stripped to the waist, in khaki shorts, mingling together like brothers, they saluted the striking of the French flag at sunset, while the whole of the White Man’s Asia was crumbling under the blows of the Japanese who already held the aerodromes in Tonkin.
It was there Pham had met Jacques Sellier, one of the group leaders, a lad of nineteen with sturdy calves and close-cropped hair, who wore a scout’s badge. Sellier made a cult of leadership, tradition, the Church, personal hygiene, physical fitness and frankness which he called loyalty.
A violent admiration had drawn him towards this prince whom the camp had somehow acquired. There was nothing unusual about this devotion, which they all showed towards him, yellow and white alike.
Jacques Sellier, more by instinct than reasoning, knew how to make his friendship valued.
At his table—a few planks on two trestles set under a big Chinese pine—the food consisted of rice and bully-beef and was served in metal mess-tins. But the boy he had selected to sit on his right because he had shown most stamina on a test march, or because he had constructed a raft of creepers and bamboo with his own hands or had killed a snake without even appealing to his comrades for help—that boy, the Prince’s guest, felt his endeavour and courage well rewarded by this distinction.
The Centurions Page 13