The Centurions

by Jean Larteguy

  “What do you use?” Glatigny asked.

  “Bromide,” Dia calmly replied, shrugging his massive shoulders. “It was a brainwave. There was nothing else available, so I thought of bromide. If I’d had any aspirin, I might have thought of aspirin . . . But above all I believe I inspire those who have thrown in the sponge with a will to live. My dear colleagues have a name for that: psychosomatosis. They give high-falutin names to whatever they don’t understand.

  “Bring the patient to that hut down there.”

  Captain Dia of the Medical Corps disappeared into a canh-na behind a screen.

  “He’s a bit of a crackpot, isn’t he?” Merle asked Marindelle.

  “Most of us owe our lives to his secrets. There are plants that he knows, but above all it’s his love for mankind, for all men, and the life and strength he disseminates all round him. He’s looking after Lescure . . . he may be able to save Esclavier.”

  “He has even made an impression on the Viets,” said Orsini.

  “Haven’t they tried to work on him politically?” Boisfeuras asked.

  “Dia’s not like us,” said Marindelle, “fragile and inconstant, uncertain of everything. He’s a magnificent and generous life-force. I can’t explain it more clearly, but he’s neither white, nor Negro, nor a civilian, nor a soldier; he’s a sort of benign power. What do you think the sterile, sexless Vietminh termites can do to him? Termites only attack dead trees.”

  Dia reappeared; he was sweating freely and scratching his crinkly hair.

  “We might be able to save him,” he said, “if he wants to be saved, but it won’t be easy. Is he a new arrival? What’s his name, Marindelle?”

  “Captain Esclavier.”

  “Lescure has told me a lot about him—Captain Esclavier, the man who led him by the hand like a small child throughout the march.”

  “Lescure talks to you?” Glatigny asked.

  “Certainly. He’s not mad, you know . . . just a little strange. He’s taken refuge in a sort of cocoon where he doesn’t want to be disturbed by anyone. I’m very fond of him. He stays with me, where I can keep an eye on him.”

  “Can we see him?”

  “Not yet. He’s cured all right but he doesn’t know it, he’s got to get used to the idea. Off you go now, chaps. I’ll take good care of Esclavier . . . because I appreciate what he did for Lescure. Marindelle, please tell Evrard that he might have sent him along a little sooner.”

  “It’s Prosper.”

  “Sometimes,” said Dia, “I dream that I’ve got my hands round his throat and that I’m squeezing, squeezing hard. Then I let go and he drops down dead. Prosper . . . and all his dirty politics which poison man’s happiness.”

  He waved goodbye and went off to join Lescure in a small hut where he lived with him on the edge of the forest.

  Lescure was cutting down a tree with a hatchet, humming under his breath as usual.

  Dia came and squatted down beside him.

  “What’s that tune?” he asked.

  “A Mozart concerto.”

  “Go on, I like it . . . Yes, I like it very much, but I couldn’t sing it like that, I’d have to alter the beat. Go on, my lad, sing.”

  He picked up a wooden calabash, turned it upside down and started tapping out a jazz rhythm with the palm of his hand. Lescure sang louder and the marvellous, elegant music seemed to lend itself cheerfully to the big Negro’s fanciful improvisation.

  “There’s something I’d like you to hear,” said Dia. “Every now and then it comes back to me. It’s music from the Sacred Forest, the music of my people, the Guerzés; it’s the Nyomou or fetish song. I couldn’t have been more than twelve when I last heard it, but I haven’t forgotten it.”

  He started whistling through his teeth, beating time on the calabash. The sound he produced was plaintive, like the whimpering of a sick animal or an unhappy child, but accompanied by the deep resounding rhythm of the jungle, the rhythm of nature, overwhelming, savage and inexorable and at the same time serene and beguiling. It spread its arms wide to welcome men, beasts and plants alike in its warm embrace, to reduce them to their essential atoms and bring them back to life in the various forms adopted by the “vital force,” as the Guerzés of the Sacred Forest called it.

  “Your music’s lovely,” said Lescure, “but it lacks tenderness and sweetness, the sort of friendly gentleness of a human smile . . . What about Esclavier? You’ll save him, won’t you? You’ve got no idea how I hated him until I discovered what lay behind those grey eyes of his. Esclavier’s rather like your music, your Nyomou song, the part you accompanied on the calabash. He’s hard, relentless, tireless, completely unbowed, proud in his animal strength . . . but he’s also an utterly pure, subtle and ancient melody . . . friendship and human affection . . . the violins in the ‘Autumn’ part of Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons.’”

  “You express yourself extremely well!”

  “All I can do is talk or make music, but I don’t know how to fight like Esclavier, or how to cure like you . . .”

  “You don’t enjoy fighting?”

  “No, neither the noise of the guns, nor the whistle of the bullets, nor the mangled corpses, nor the waving flags . . .”

  “And you don’t want to remember . . .”

  “But I don’t remember any more.”

  “Let’s have something to eat, then I’ll go and see Esclavier. If I can keep him alive for two more days, he’s saved.”

  “Will you speak to him?”

  “No, he wouldn’t hear me. But I’ll be near him, within arm’s reach. What he really needs is a woman at his bedside all the time. I’m going to ask for a nurse.”

  It was comrade nurse Souen-Cuan of the 22nd First Aid Section at Thanh-Hoa who was detailed by the director of the hospital, as much on account of her knowledge of French as by virtue of her sound political education. She was a pure product of the Vinh training establishments. She wore uniform tunic and trousers, both several sizes too big, and a bo-doi’s fibre helmet from which two long plaits escaped. In spite of this garb and her abrupt and bossy manner she was beautiful, for her beauty lay in the purity and delicacy of her features and the harmony and elegance of her gestures.

  The first task Dia gave her was to cut the patient’s hair, shave him, make him drink a mouthful of tea every half-hour and a spoonful of bromide every two hours. But Souen demanded that the Vietminh doctor should confirm this treatment, for it was scarcely to be believed that a man who was not a Communist should know anything about medicine or even have access to any form of knowledge whatsoever.

  The Vietminh doctor was extremely flattered; he congratulated “his little sister” but nevertheless asked her to obey the medical officer who, in spite of his primitive methods, sometimes obtained excellent results. In any case she would quickly be relieved of her task, since the prisoner had no more than a few hours to live.

  Souen raised Esclavier’s head, opened his chapped lips and poured a little tea between his clenched teeth. His face was covered in a heavy growth of beard. His hollow cheeks threw his jaw and cheek-bones into sharp relief. He could scarcely open his burning, bloodshot eyes; racked with fever, he could no longer articulate, while his body, which day by day lost more and more of its substance, was reduced to a sort of skeleton under a tightly stretched, orange-coloured skin.

  As she touched him, however, Souen felt a faint indefinable tremor, which she attributed to her fatigue or the heat. This was the first time she had been put in charge of a white man, and she had been warned that this particular one had been an extremely dangerous type before his claws had been blunted by disease.

  Esclavier had a sort of spasm which contracted his limbs. With a jerk of his foot he threw back the bedclothes. He was stark naked except for a filthy, stained slip which concealed his private parts. Souen realized how strong and vigorous he must have been. His
chest was hairless, his wrists and ankles slender. As she pulled back the bedclothes, she noticed several scars on his chest and thighs. She could not refrain from touching one of these with her finger.

  Her sister Ngoc at Hanoi had once had a lover who was a white man like this one. She lived with him in a villa with a garden and when he came back from the war they used to give little parties to which they invited Frenchmen and their wives or their Vietnamese girl-friends. Little Japanese lanterns were hung among the trees; there was music; there were sweet things to eat, preserved ginger and papaw salad.

  Ngoc and all her friends were nothing but strumpets. One day the soldiers of the People’s Army had killed the major who lived with her sister. Ngoc had been so besotted with him that she had refused to marry the son of the governor of Tonkin and had gone off to live with another white man. She was nothing but a cat in heat, who had no other thought in her head, who mewed in the dark when making love.

  Perhaps this man who was lying here and whom she was tending had been to her sister’s parties, perhaps he had even held her in his arms . . .

  One night in Hanoi the major had introduced her to a swarthy, bandy-legged little lieutenant with an overpowering smell. When he had tried to lay hands on her, Souen had sent him off with a flea in his ear. Then she had packed her few belongings and gone off to Hai-Duong to stay with a girl-friend who belonged to the Vietminh organization. First of all she had done a spell with the Du-Kits and, since she spoke good French, she had been detailed to pick up drunken legionaries and try to buy their arms or induce them to desert. On two occasions she had narrowly missed being raped and one night it was only by a miracle that she escaped from a police patrol. Her partisan comrades also tried to sleep with her and on three or four occasions she had had to give in to them, because they accused her of being an aristocrat and a reactionary and of reserving herself for the caresses and slender hands of a mandarin’s son.

  She had developed an absolute horror of everything to do with men and sex and it was with profound relief that she had joined the regular army where chastity was the rule.

  Souen tried to imagine how Esclavier must have looked before his illness and what she would have done if the major had introduced her to him instead of to the runtish little lieutenant. She dismissed this absurd thought from her mind. He was an enemy of the Vietnamese people, a colonial mercenary, and it was only because President Ho had advocated a policy of leniency that she was looking after him.

  On the evening of the ninth day of his illness Esclavier had an internal haemorrhage. Souen was wiping the bunk clean with cold water when Dia, accompanied by the doctor in charge of the hospital, looked in. They were both laughing, because the Negro even managed to make the little Asiatic unbend and made him forget his old resentment as a medical student in Saigon who used to fall asleep over his books from sheer fatigue and as an underpaid doctor on a plantation in Cambodia who was only allowed to look after the coolies. Besides, Dia was a Negro, a member of a race that was exploited by the whites, and the instructions about him were explicit: in spite of the failure they had so far encountered, they were to persevere in their attempts to indoctrinate him in the hope of winning him over to the Communist cause.

  Thanks to these many pretexts, Doctor Nguyen-Van-Tach was able to indulge in an occasional display of friendship before resuming the inflexible mask of a Vietminh director.

  Dia looked at the bloodstained rags and drew closer to the patient.

  “How do you feel this evening?”

  In the interval between two bouts of fever it sometimes happened that Esclavier recovered his full lucidity. He would then lie hunched up under the bedclothes, motionless and silent. With an effort the captain would muster all his strength and try to fight the illness. But like those fragile banks of sand that children build on the seashore and which the tide eventually comes and sweeps away, the powerful waves of the fever likewise destroyed his last defences and dragged him back into the furnace in which his memories, his resentments, his hopes and his strength were all consumed in flickering red flames.

  Dia put his hand on his forehead, and at once he felt a sense of relief, as though another child had come to help him build his dam. The Negro repeated his question:

  “How do you feel?”

  What remained of Esclavier made an effort to speak and to smile. He started off by swallowing hard, then managed to utter the words:

  “I’m thirsty, I’m always thirsty, but I keep bringing up whatever I drink.”

  Dia burst into a loud guffaw:

  “You’ll be better tomorrow.”

  Souen left the room with the doctor in charge and Dia. The Negro was scratching his head and had become extremely solemn, which gave an innocent and at the same time sly expression to his face.

  “He’s been passing blood, hasn’t he, Miss Souen?”

  She felt she should defend her patient:

  “This evening was the very first time.”

  “God Almighty, they brought him here too late. Intestinal haemorrhages are the final symptoms of spirochetosis. I’ve never seen anyone survive who’s reached that stage.”

  Dia turned to the doctor in charge:

  “Miss Souen will have to stay with the patient all night to give him something to drink at regular intervals. She’s got a certain way with her.”

  “Comrade Souen,” the Viet replied, “will certainly volunteer for this additional task. She knows her duty as a militant and has pledged herself to our cause body and soul and once and for all.”

  He delivered this little speech with unconcealed self-satisfaction. He looked to see if it had made any impression, but the big Negro remained impervious, his thoughts elsewhere. He was running over in his mind everything he knew about this illness, every treatment that had been discovered. None of them was available here, and in any case it was now too late. He hung his head and felt the sharp pang that occurred every time death got the better of life and snatched one of his patients from him. He was a Christian at heart but he still vaguely believed in the old animist legends and felt that every creature that died diminished the sum total of the “vital force” of the entire universe. Some of his own strength would be taken from him when Esclavier strained for the last time to expel what life he had left. He would also lose a comrade, and he had an extremely profound sense of solidarity. Between themselves Negroes called one another brother, but Dia also called many white men brother.

  In the early hours of the morning Esclavier’s temperature went up again and Souen remembered what the black doctor had said . . . The Frenchman was going to die . . . unless . . . But she hadn’t the right to think of that.

  It was amoebic dysentery the patient had, since he was passing blood; she knew this, she didn’t have to be a doctor for that.

  In the director’s medicine chest there were some of those long brown phials that cure dysentery; they contained emetine. But emetine was in short supply, it was reserved for the soldiers of the People’s Army.

  Esclavier started moaning again. She wiped the sweat off his forehead with a damp cloth. His features were drawn; he was battling with death all by himself, battling with the big black fisherman of legend who haunted the sunny beaches of Annam with the souls of men in his net. She was there to help him, and she was doing nothing. But she had not the right to do anything, not even to believe in the big fisherman.

  Once again she wiped his forehead and tried to force his teeth open to make him swallow a drop of tea.

  The emetine was reserved for the soldiers of the People’s Army; this was as it should be, for they had to fight without aircraft, without medical facilities against the wealthy soldiers defending imperialism. But President Ho had decreed a policy of leniency . . .

  Esclavier gave a sort of violent hiccup; Souen thought he was going to die and she felt overwhelmed with sorrow as though someone very dear to her was about to be
snatched away: her father, her mother . . . No, this was different, it was something even stronger. Then the patient recovered his breath.

  She tried desperately to find a solution:

  “I’ll go and see the director; I have done my duty by him, he has confidence in me; I shall ask him, as an exceptional favour, for a phial of emetine. He won’t be able to deny me this. Yes, but he’s not here; he’s asleep, he’s tired, I can’t wake him up for something so unimportant. I shall report to him tomorrow. Anyway there will soon be peace, and medicines will start arriving from all four corners of the earth.”

  Souen hurried across to the infirmary; she was blinded by the gusts of rain which twice tore the helmet off her head.

  She lit her way by switching her electric torch on and off, as she had been taught, so as not to waste the battery.

  When she got back, she had the precious phial clutched in her damp hand. She took a syringe and a needle out of her first-aid box and by the light of a candle-end heated up some water on the open fire.

  The water took a long time to boil. She felt like screaming with impatience; the patient was liable to die at any moment. She blew frantically on the embers. Outside, the monsoon burst into a steady downpour.

  Eventually she managed to give the injection and Esclavier immediately seemed more comfortable and began to breathe more regularly again.

  The downpour had also abated slightly; it had lost its aspect of violence and fury and the myriad drops of rain tapping on the roof of the hut sounded almost friendly. The fire flickered and slowly died down, still throwing off a gleam or two which flared over the thin partitions and over the patient’s face, that emaciated mask in which the eyes formed two dark cavities.

  Souen felt happy; at the bedside of this man whose very name was unknown to her, this man of an alien race, she experienced a feeling of joy of which she had never before suspected the existence.

  With her little wicker fan she slowly swept the thick air above the prisoner’s face and smiled. He was hers, for she had saved him, of that she was certain, little knowing that emetine had no effect at all on spirochetosis. One day peace would come and they would meet again. He would be strong and upstanding again, the finest, strongest white man in the world. Then she would tell him how for his sake she had stolen the precious phial.