Now it seemed that he would not have the responsibility of dealing with the nationalist uprising that he was certain would explode within the next year or two. That would fall to Indochina’s new proprietors, who would soon discover that they had stolen a hornet’s nest. It was no less than they deserved.
He was brought back from his musings to the present by the almost apologetic sound of his visitor clearing his throat. Here in the office of the Governor General of Indochina was a representative of one of the yellow races who emphatically did not accept the idea of white superiority.
Vollenhoven turned away from the window to look down at the bespectacled little Oriental man in a cream suit standing on the other side of his desk, dabbing at beads of sweat on his forehead with a white handkerchief.
“I’m terribly sorry about turning you out of your residence, but it should only be for a short time, Governor Vollenhoven,” said Mr. Irakawa, the newly appointed Administrator for the Imperial Japanese Protectorate of Indochina. “As you know, the Protectorate is a temporary measure, and I can assure you that once the present crisis has ended…”
“The temporary Protectorate of Indochina will be dissolved, to be immediately replaced by the Imperial Japanese Colony of Indochina,” the Governor-General interrupted. “I am not a potted plant, Mr. Irakawa. You should give me a little credit for being able to see what your government is doing, especially since it is making almost no effort to clothe its naked aggression with even the tiniest fig-leaf of legality.”
A pained expression spread over the face of the Japanese bureaucrat. “Please, Mr. Governor-General, I understand your strong feelings under the circumstances, but I must ask you not to make the situation out to be worse than it actually is. There is no cause to employ intemperate language like ‘naked aggression’, or to make hasty, unwarranted assumptions regarding the future of the colony,” he protested. “The Emperor is reluctantly taking this step to safeguard the interests of both ourselves and France by ensuring that Indochina does not fall into the hands of a hostile power during the current crisis…”
Vollenhoven cut in sharply. “If you are suggesting that it would be more advantageous for France if the Emperor of Japan snatches Indochina away from us rather than Kaiser Wilhelm, I remain unable to see the difference. Your Emperor is taking advantage of France’s current…” he almost said, ‘helplessness’ then substituted another, less humiliating word, “…difficulties to annex this colony when my government is not in a position to do anything about it.”
He paused, suddenly aware that his hands were clenched in fists and his pulse was racing. He took several deep breaths before he allowed himself to continue. There was really no point in being angry with Mr. Irakawa. He was after all, a mere civil functionary who was only doing what his superiors had ordered. In any event, the deed was done; the Japanese were taking over Indochina and there was nothing he or France could do about it.
A month earlier, the Japanese Consul had handed him a Note containing an ultimatum. It demanded that the French government voluntarily hand over the administration of Indochina to the representatives of the Empire of Japan, temporarily and for its own protection, naturally. Vollenhoven had immediately sent the Japanese Note on to his superiors in Paris. He had hoped that the Minister for the Colonies would tell him that a fleet of battleships and several divisions of troops were on their way to him, order him to reject the Japanese demands without qualification, and prepare to go to war in defence of France’s interests. He had hoped for such a response, but he did not really expect it.
His lack of expectations was amply fulfilled in the end. Under the signature of the Minister for Overseas France and its Colonies, the Honourable Albert LeBrun, came instructions which, with equivocations, reservations and meaningless bureaucratic gibberish removed, boiled down to the following:
He was ordered to defy the Japanese, to agree to nothing, and concede nothing to them. He was to do and say nothing that would tend to impair France’s claim of sovereignty over Indochina. On the other hand, he was strictly enjoined from saying anything or taking any action that might tend to provoke a military response from Japan, as the government was unable to offer him any military support in addition to the forces he presently had under his command. Within the guidelines set forth in these instructions he was to use his own best judgment. In short, he was ordered not to fight, and also not to surrender to the Japanese.
Certainly, fighting would be suicidal. The few thousand local soldiers led by a handful of French officers that constituted the Colonial Army were scattered all over the colony in little outposts. Even if they could be pulled together in one place, they would be utterly lacking in artillery and equipment, and without naval support. They would, moreover, be overwhelmingly outnumbered by forces that the Japanese could easily bring to bear. Under the circumstances, he had taken the only course open to him.
He waited until his pulse was steady and his voice was calm before he spoke again. He picked a sheet of paper from his desk and read from it. “Mr. Irakawa, I am authorised by my Government to state that France does not concede the legitimacy of the forcible seizure of this colony by the Empire of Japan, that it protests this act as being contrary to both custom and international law, and states without any equivocation that, despite whatever illegal action is taken here by Japan, Indochina is, and shall remain, French.” He handed the official Note to the new Administrator, picked a folded newspaper from his desk with one hand, clapped his Panama hat on his head with the other, and strode briskly out of his office without a backwards glance or word of farewell.
Having been ejected from his office and his post by the Japanese, he was free from official duties for the moment. He was not sure exactly what he should do next. He wandered away from the Governor’s Palace, his mind blank, with no particular destination in mind. An hour later found him seated in the shade of a green-striped awning at a café on the Rue Paul Bert.
His stomach reminded him that he had not yet had breakfast, and he decided that giving away a large section of the French Empire in a morning was hungry work. He ordered a café complet, selected a croissant from the plate of pastries brought out by the waiter, unfolded the newspaper and began to read.
The paper was the Thursday morning edition of the Hong Kong Daily Mail, now two days old. As Vollenhoven had discovered, since the war began the French papers had proved to be unreliable as sources of information about the war. It was obvious that all of the war news in the French papers was heavily censored, and since no reporters were allowed near the front, the papers were forced to rely on whatever the government gave out in their official communiqués. This meant that the French newspapers had the choice of either not writing about the war at all or reprinting the official releases, which largely consisted of descriptions of sweeping victories by France and her Russian ally that had little connection with reality.
Anyone who wanted actual information on the course of the war read the neutral papers, with the English ones generally having the best coverage. The front page headline in the Daily Mail was, as usual, about the war:
“Sea Battle off Cape Cepet” ran the banner in thick, black letters. In smaller type below was “Germany Claims Great Victory.”
The displaced Governor General grimaced as he read the account of the battle that had taken place a week earlier. A squadron of Royal Navy cruisers, which had been shadowing the German fleet, was able to provide eyewitness accounts of the action. The French fleet under Admiral Lapayrere had sortied out from Toulon in an attempt to break through the blockade (to go where exactly? Vollenhoven wondered), and was met by the superior German fleet 25 kilometres southeast of Toulon (the article gave the figure in miles, and it took him a moment to convert it), commanded by Admiral Reinhard Scheer. The ensuing naval battle had raged for four hours before the French fleet, or what was left of it, withdrew back into Toulon.
The article confirmed claims out of Berlin that Scheer’s fleet had sent three of the four Fre
nch dreadnoughts to the bottom: Jean Bart, France and the fleet’s flagship, Courbet. Based on accounts from French sailors fished from the sea by the British ships after the battle, it was estimated that over 3,000 French sailors had lost their lives as a result of the sinkings of the three dreadnoughts alone. The German communiqué claimed that in addition to the above sinkings, Scheer’s ships had destroyed three older French battleships and numerous smaller vessels, and had badly damaged the remaining French dreadnought, the Paris. If the information in the Daily Mail article was accurate, the battle had been nothing short of a catastrophe for France. The fleet had lost upwards of 5,000 sailors and the three most modern and powerful ships in the service. For the next several years at least, French naval power was crippled.
The official government version from Paris was that the Cape Cepet had been a French victory and that the Germans had suffered far greater losses in both ships and men than France. No details were provided. If Vollenhoven had any doubts about which account of the sea battle was more trustworthy, this communiqué, empty of facts as it was, removed them.
He dropped the newspaper to the table and stared off into the distance. Until now, the neutral Powers had shown some restraint in not taking advantage of the war to snap up the essentially defenceless French possessions. But, if Japan was going to start to gobble up French colonies in the Pacific, he thought gloomily, it seemed likely enough that other countries might start doing so too, if only to keep them out of the hands of the sticky-fingered Japanese or the voracious Germans.
Were the Americans possessively eyeing New Caledonia at this very minute? Was a Japanese fleet on its way to Tahiti as he sat here in this cafe eating pastry? He realised with a start that the entire Empire, in Asia, South America and even Africa was in danger of being lost, whether to the boches or others hardly mattered. The longer the war went on, the more likely it was that by its end the French Empire would have disappeared. He wondered if it was already too late to save it.
Chapter Thirteen: PRZEMYSL, GALICIA, MARCH 17, 1915
Albert Dawson believed that he and his American Correspondent Film Company had already earned a place in the history of film (if such a history was ever written). He had taken his cameras closer to actual combat than anyone before had dared, to the point of being knocked over and splattered with mud by a shell blast while shooting footage of a French assault from a front-line German machine-gun nest in the Vosges Mountains. He was sure that no one had ever captured the reality of war in pictures more graphically than he.
But even if his work was somehow overlooked or forgotten, his current project, a four-reel feature depicting the Austrian Army’s attempt to recapture the fortress of Przemysl, would surely establish his place in the film industry. After his film was shown in the big theatres and new “movie palaces” and created the sensation he expected it to, he would be able to write his own ticket with the movie companies back home.
Dawson had been fascinated by photography since his senior year of high school, and had quickly discovered that he could make money shooting various outdoors scenes. Soon after graduation he began to take photographs for publication. His first assignments were for the local press in Vincennes and nearby towns in southwest Indiana and southeast Illinois. Soon, his work came to the attention of the pioneering distributors of news photographs, Underwood and Underwood in New York. The pictures he sold to them were being printed all over the country.
By 1913 he had moved to Connecticut and opened his own studio. He specialised in aerial photography for real estate developers on Long Island and advertising pictures for the travel industry. In May 1913 he was hired by Matthew Clausen, publicity director of the Hamburg-America Line to photograph the maiden voyage of the SS Vaterland, the largest passenger liner in the world. When the war began in 1914, Claussen was hired by the German government to provide pro-German war news to American press outlets to counteract pro-Entente releases. The German government further authorised Clausen to hire American correspondents to cover the war with stories and film for release in the United States. Clausen remembered favourably the work Dawson had done for the Hamburg America Line, and offered him the assignment of photographing the war from the German side.
In Berlin, he was joined by correspondent Edward Lyell Fox and a cameraman named Theyer (the man appeared to only have the one name, and Dawson was not quite sure if it was first or last). It was from the taciturn Theyer that Dawson learned the rudiments of motion photography. He found that he had an affinity for this kind of filmmaking, and quickly became as proficient as his teacher.
By December, the threesome were at the front in Alsace, enduring the cold rain and mud, drinking vile Alsatian beer and dodging shrapnel from 75mm shells fired at the German trenches by French artillery. In the months that followed, Dawson had learned the trade of combat photographer under fire.
On a brief stop in Berlin before the team moved to Galicia on the Eastern Front, Dawson had been able to buy a new camera, a lightweight 35 mm Akeley “pancake”, the state of the art for rugged, outdoor filmmaking. With this camera’s ability to capture images in light that would be too dim for other makes, and his experiences in war photography, Dawson was prepared for the project ahead.
His new assignment was to make a feature-length “actuality film” of the forthcoming Battle of Przemysl. This fortress on the heights of the San River covered the northern approaches to the passes in the Carpathian Mountains, which sheltered the fertile Hungarian plain. Przemysl had been surrounded when the Russian offensive out of Poland in August drove Franz-Joseph’s armies from Galicia. The garrison held out heroically during an epic siege that lasted for six months. They had finally been forced to surrender in February. Now, the Russians were in retreat, and the Austrians were eager to recapture the lost fortress.
In spite of the limitations inherent in filming something so sprawling and unpredictable as a major battle, they already had been able to capture some fantastic battle scenes. From no more than a half-mile away, he and his new cameraman Carl Everets (Theyer had disappeared one day, without so much as a goodbye handshake) had taken dramatic shots of the fortifications as they were being blasted by the heavy Austrian artillery. Their cameras recorded the effects of shells from the huge 30.5 centimetre Skoda mortars and the monstrous Krupp 420mm Big Berthas as they tore great fragments of stone, concrete and metal from the walls. A few “shorts” from the big guns scattered sharp splinters of rock close enough to them to make Dawson wonder, not for the first time, why he had left peaceful Connecticut to take up such a dangerous line of work.
With correspondent Edward Fox at his side, Dawson was presently filming a scene of the preparations for the assault at an Austrian brigade headquarters when the H.Q. tent took a direct hit from a Russian shell, which ripped it open and sent bodies and equipment flying in all directions.
Dawson had found an aerodrome in the rear areas and made the acquaintance of a pilot, Captain Stefan Fejes. The amiable Fejes agreed to take the American and his Akeley aloft with him in the observer’s seat of his Lohner scout to record the mission, locating a Russian artillery battery. After they returned to the aerodrome, Fejes marked the battery’s location on a map for the artillery. They went aloft again, this time filming the destruction of the battery by the Austrian big guns from 3,000 metres above the battlefield.
Today, he expected to film the climax of the battle and (he hoped) the most exciting action of all. This was the day scheduled for the infantry assault on the fortress, which the Austrian siege mortars had largely reduced to rubble after battering it for three days.
Dawson stationed himself atop a slight rise where he had a panoramic view of both the shell-torn ground in front of the Russian forts and the forts themselves. The fact that his position also exposed him to Russian fire did not cross his mind at first. He was concentrating on capturing the images of thousands of Austrian soldiers climbing from their slit trenches and storming across the fields in great, grey-blue masses. Fox, who wa
s accompanying him on the battlefield, taking notes, had prudently stayed back in a somewhat less exposed place.
“Albert, I strongly suggest that you find some decent cover before a Russian sniper finds you,” Fox said.
Dawson began to automatically retort that he was perfectly safe, when he heard the angry whine of a rifle slug pass close by his left ear. Looking all around the area for the first time, he realised how dangerous his position really was. A few yards to his left was the crater left by an errant 30.5 centimetre or 440 millimetre shell. He pointed to the shell hole, called to Fox, “Over there!” and scuttled quickly into its shelter. The men cautiously peeked over the lip of the crater to assure themselves that no one was shooting at them, before Dawson resumed filming from this new, comparatively safe location.
Grey Tide In The East Page 11