Saigon (18 page)

In the same instant Dong lunged fromhihinipfe1sjdc the door and struck at the Frenchman’s arm with his saber, shearing away part of his sleeve and knocking the- revolver from his hand. His young brother, Hoc, appeared simultaneously from the other side of the door, swinging his coupe-coupe, and although the French officer twisted and ducked away from the blow aimed at his head, the coupe-coupe bit into the hump of his shoulder muscle and he staggered backwards into the room. He started to draw his sword but the two young Annamese pressed towards him, knocking it from his grasp, and together they forced him down onto his bed. They were lifting their weapons again, preparing to strike at his defenseless head, when Ngo Van Loc pushed between them, his features contorted with hate. 

“Wait! Hold him for me. I will kill the son of Jacques Devraux myself!” 

The two boys fell on the French officer and pinioned his arms. Paul’s face was white with shock and blood from the wounds in his wrist and shoulder was already soaking through his uniform tunic. “Why, Loc, why?” he whispered, staring at them in horror. “Why kill someone who has been your friend?” 

The Annamese lifted his saber and pressed its point against the base of the officer’s throat. “Your father killed my wife!” 

“Killed your wife?” Paul echoed the words of the Annamese in a horrified whisper. “That’s not true!” 

“He had her taken to jail in Saigon — his torturers murdered her.” The Annamese drew the point of his saber sharply across the Frenchman’s exposed chest, and a thin weal of new blood appeared. 

“Loc, listen to me,” said Paul desperately, trying to rise. “My father told me he found missing papers in your wife’s quarters. The gendarmes had to question her. He left for a new post in Hanoi the next day. We had no idea Mai had died 

“Lies will not save your life!” Loc jabbed him viciously once more with the point of his saber. “Mai is dead murdered by France and you’re going to die for this crime! A revolution of blood and iron has begun!” 

Paul turned from the hate-filled face of the father to look at Loc’s two sons, who were pressing his shoulders against the bed. The blood of their earlier victims was drying on their clothing and the eyes that he remembered sparkling mischievously as he taught them to imitate the calls of jungle birds with blades of grass gazed back at him from their gaunt faces with the same expression of ferocious loathing. 

“Hoc, Dong, please listen to me,” Paul began, speaking quietly in Annamese, “you don’t understand 

“Hold your tongue!” Loc’s voice rose in a shout, and his features twisted into a snarl. Standing up to his full height he lifted his saber to swing it at the French officer’s head. 

Paul struggled frantically in the grip of the two young Annamese but his wounds were sapping his strength and he could only watch helplessly as Loc’s saber began to descend. Because his eyes were fixed on the blade, he didn’t see the French sergeant from the fort appear in the doorway leading two loyal tirailleurs of his Eighth Company; he only heard the flurry of shots from a revolver and at his side he felt Hoc shudder as a bullet struck him. 

Then the tiny room was filled suddenly with stumbling, frantic bodies; the two tirailleurs lunged at Loc and Dong with their bayonets while the sergeant reloaded his revolver, but the two Annames fought with great ferocity and succeeded in breaking out into the corridor. The sergeant fired after them as the’ fled, but both father and son made their escape from the building through a shattered window and disappeared into the confused melee on the darkened hill outside. Young Hoc struggled to his feet and tried to follow, but the wound in his shoulder had left him dazed with shock, and the French sergeant, on his return to the room, took one look at the bloodied uniform of his now unconscious lieutenant then knocked the Annamese boy to the floor. Although Hoc was already moaning with pain, the sergeant’s face showed no sign of pity, and after staring down at him for a moment or two with hate-filled eyes, he began kicking him savagely about the head and body. 

Rivulets of sweat trickled slowly down the face of Ngo Van Hoc as he crouched on the floor of his unlit cell in the Garde Indigene jail at Yen Bay with his hands covering his ears. it was four o’clock in the morning of June 57, 1930, and the fetid, stagnant air was heavy with the reek of putrefying foliage. It had been one of the hottest, most humid nights of the year in the Tongkingese fort town, but it was not just the suffocating heat that was making Hoc sweat; the agony of an uncontrollable fear was bathing the whole of his seventeen-year-old body in perspiration. 

He pressed his hands more tightly against his ears in an effort to blot out completely the ringing knock of hammers coming from the field outside; he had hauled himself up to the barred window to peer out into the darkness when the noise first began, and it was the sight of the gang of coolies working in the center of the field by the light of the hurricane lamps that had filled him with dread. The tall, twin-pillared structure of wood and steel they were erecting was only partly visible in the light of the lamps, but it confirmed beyond any doubt the apprehension that had first seized him the previous evening when he and twelve other Quoc Dan Dang prisoners were taken from the Hanoi cells where they had spent the past four months and put on a heavily guarded train. 

They were not told their destination, but when the clanking, five-hour journey up the Red River valley ended just after midnight on the platform at Yen Bay, the silent prisoners had begun to suspect the truth. 

When the hammering finally stopped, Hoc uncovered his ears and stood up. For a minute or two he paced back and forth across the cell, massaging the spot just below his right shoulder where the bullet had struck home on the night of the mutiny; the wound had healed satisfactorily but it still ached if he allowed himself to get into a cramped position. From time to time he stopped moving to listen, but only the incessant shrill of cicadas in the trees bordering the field and the occasional croak of a toad broke the silence of the night. 

He lay down on the plank bed and tried to sleep, but soon another commotion made him spring up to the window again. By the light of their torches he watched more coolies maneuver a heavily laden ox cart into the prison courtyard; they made no attempt to unload it quietly but flung what looked like long packing cases carelessly onto the flagstones. He didn’t realize that they were cheap wooden coffins until they were all laid side by side in a neat row with their lids open. Then he counted them slowly and his heart lurched sickeningly in his chest — there were thirteen! 

He released his grip on the bars of the window with a little moan of anguish and sank hack into a crouch on the stone floor. He remained there for the rest of the night, hugging his frail body with his own thin arms, and just before dawn a fitful sleep brought his exhausted mind and body a few moments of ease. In dream he imagined himself back in the cold dark isolation cell at An Dap, condemned again to solitary confinement for trying to escape from the plantation. But despite the heavy leg-irons and the fever which shook his body, he felt exhilarated. He wasn’t going to die after all! Soon he and Dong would be together again in the leaking hut, pressed close in the darkness, helping one another to endure the daily hardship of plantation life. Even the rough stone walls of the An Dap cell, which he could feel but not see, seemed friendly and familiar, and although his feet were swollen from the beating he had received, he had no bullet wound. He pressed his shoulder hard with one hand; see, there was no pain! All that had been a terrible nightmare. Only one thing was not familiar in the blackness of the An Dap cell — the muffled, rhythmic whisper of noise coming from outside. It seemed to be growing louder, drawing closer to him in the darkness, and his fear returned with a rush; he didn’t know what the new sound was, but he was certain it was menacing to him. 

He awoke trembling, to find the intensity of the darkness in his cell lessening. Then he noticed the new sound hadn’t ceased with his dream. Wide-eyed with terror he listened to the muffled beat of a thousand bare feet scuffing through the damp grass outside the jail. Two companies of the Second Battalion of the Fourth Regiment of the Tirailleurs Tonkinois were marching down from the fort —— the very men that Limpid Stream and the other Quoc Dan Dang rebels had hoped would help them begin a nationwide rebellion were marching and assembling obediently under their French officers to stand guard around the execution ground! He lifted himself to the window again and in the half-light caught a glimpse of them; with their rifles on their shoulders, their cone- shaped hats squarely on their heads, their legs wrapped from knee to ankle with blue puttees, they were taking their places in silence, staring mutely towards the center of the field. 

As the scuff of the tirailleurs’ marching feet quietened, from along the prison corridor Hoc heard the sudden crisp echo of soled shoes and the clank of keys. A cell door creaked open and the murmur of formal, dispassionate French voices reached his ears. After a minute or two the feet moved on, another door was opened and the voices murmured again. As the footsteps drew slowly 

-nearer to him, Hoc rose from his bed and stood rigid with anxiety in the middle of his cell. 

When the door finally opened it admitted the French Resident of Yen Bay, a thin bespectacled man with a straggling mustache. Without looking at Hoc, he raised a sheet ‘f paper in front of his face and read from it in a dry, emotionless voice. “A presidential decree of June tenth has rejected all appeals for clemency. The sentence of the Criminal Commission of Inquiry will therefore now be carried out.” The Resident waited impatiently while the Annamese interpreter translated the announcement, then turned quickly on his heel and left the cell. As Hoc stared after him the black-frocked figure of the Hanoi prison chaplain stepped smoothly forward to take the Resident’s place. He murmured something that. Hoc did not hear, raising his eyebrows at the same time in an expression of inquiry. When the Annamese interpreter offered a translation in his own language, Hoc still did not understand what was being asked of him, but he nodded his head numbly, hoping by his compliance to win a reprieve or at least a few minutes’ respite. After motioning him to kneel before him, the priest sprinkled holy water on the trembling boy’s forehead and deposited a few grains of salt on his tongue while murmuring the incantations of baptism into the Holy Roman Catholic Church. Hoc continued to nod uncomprehendingly during the perfunctory absolution that followed, and when he’d finished the priest asked quietly if he had any last wish to be made known to his family. “If you wish to write a letter, I will try to see that it is delivered,” he added gently. 

Hoc had heard nothing of his father and brother since the moment he was taken captive. In Hanoi he had been tortured with electricity until he revealed the address of the tiny room where they had all lived together above a carpenter’s workshop in the city’s old craft quarter. But other prisoners had told him later that Dong and his father had avoided returning to that address and were still at liberty. He was deeply ashamed of his betrayal and, suspecting this was some new trick to trap him into helping capture them, he shook his head fiercely. 

As the priest left a barber entered, and warders held Hoc in a seated position while the barber lathered and shaved the nape of his neck. Tears of hopelessness welled in Hoc’s eyes as the barber finished his work, and if he saw the traditional glass of cognac offered to him, he gave no sign. Other men came to dress him in a loose white smock and afterwards manacled his wrists behind his back. With a length of rope they hobbled his ankles so that he could take only short steps, then they left him alone again. By a quarter to five all the preparations for the mass execution had been completed, and an unnatural hush descended over the jail. 

Outside a small crowd of Tongkingese had gathered on rising ground overlooking the field of execution, and in their midst Hoc’s father and his brother, Dong, stood watching, gray-faced with anxiety. Stripped to the waist and wearing the dark turban of the upper Tongking peasant as disguise, they carried hoes like many of the other men around them. From where they stood they had a clear view over the heads of two companies of native tirailleurs, and the sight of the tall, mainly African troops of the French Colonial Infantry and the kepis of the Foreign Legionnaires, drawn up in a tight ring of security around the guillotine itself, were a disquieting reminder of their own frantic dash for freedom after the failure of the Yen Bay revolt. 

The French officers with their loyal Eighth Company had routed the rebels with ease when they emerged from the fort at dawn, and the Colonial Infantry and men of the Legion came swiftly up the Red River valley by train to cut off their retreat. Limpid Stream himself had been captured, and Ngo Van Loc and his son were among the few who escaped downriver to the crowded safety of Hanoi’s old quarter. There they learned for the first time that the Quoc Dan Dang’s national leader, Nguyen Thai Hoc, code-named “the Great Professor,” had tried to postpone the uprising at the last moment but his messenger had failed to reach the Yen Bay rebels in time. Other halfhearted raids launched that night in the upper delta had fizzled, and scattered grenade attacks against public buildings in Hanoi the day after had also failed to make any impact. The wave of revulsion that swept through Indochina and France in the wake of the bloody massacre of the fort’s officers, however, had brought down a terrible retribution on the Quoc Dan Dang. The National Assembly in Paris rang daily with the name of Yen Bay, and many stern demands for retribution were made; the governor general of Indochina traveled to the fort for the funeral of the victims and made a ringing pledge of vengeance to their black-garbed widows at the graveside. 

A few days later when “the Great Professor” launched a despairing attack against a post of the Garde Indigêne in the lower delta, his own force of rebels became the victims of the first air attack to be launched in Indochina. Five wood and fabric Potez 35 biplanes of the French Armée de l’Air swooped on the village of Co Am, where they were hiding, and devastated the thatched houses with sixty twenty-two-pound bombs; when the rebels and the terrified peasants of the village lied from their burning houses, the pilots had strafed them indiscriminately with Lewis guns swivel- mounted on their cockpits. Some two hundred men, women and children were killed, and the French Resident Supérieur announced publicly next day in the newspapers: “We will bomb all villages like this without pity if they give shelter to the rebels.” 

“The Great Professor” himself was captured while fleeing towards the Chinese border, and after interrogating him and other party leaders, the Süreté Gënérale arrested many hundreds of rank-and-file members. Eighty of them were condemned to death, and five hundred others were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment and forced labor. It was to put an emphatic and symbolic end to the Viet Nam Nationalist Party and its rebellion that the French colonists had decided to execute its top leaders and the Yen Bay rebels at the fort where their bloodiest revolt had failed. 

The first prisoner to emerge into the pale light of that June dawn was a diminutive Annamese, and Ngo Van Loc and Dong craned their necks to catch a glimpse of his face as he reached the top of the long slope leading up from the jail. Handcuffed and dressed in a snowy-white smock, he was escorted by four tall black Madagascans of the Infanterie Coloniale who towered above him. 

“It is ‘Bui the Messenger,’ “breathed Dong in a hoarse whisper, and beside him his father nodded grimly. 

In total silence the little group moved across the field, led by the quick-stepping figure of the French Resident. Beside the macabre scaffold a squat, broad-shouldered Annamite bourreau waited with folded arms. In front of him the giant African infantrymen halted and stepped smartly aside, isolating the prisoner for the first time. The bourreau, who had been carefully trained by a French executioner, immediately grasped his shoulder and pushed him violently against the bascule; the hinged plank tipped forward with a crash under the impact of the prisoner’s body and he fell face-downward into the lunette. The bourreau quickly slammed the upper half of this wooden collar into place and positioned his three-sided shield carefully so that it would protect him from any blood that spurted from the trunk of his victim’s body. 

In the deep silence that had fallen over the field the click of the sprung jaws in the crossbeam opening to release the blade was heard clearly by everyone watching on the hillside. The razor- sharp steel mounted in a wheeled, eighty-pound weight rushed noisily down its metal-lined channels and shuddered to rest at ground level, decapitating Bui the Messenger instantly without breaking its momentum. His severed head dropped neatly into the waiting bucket behind the scaffold, and two of the executioner’s Annamese assistants hastily tipped the bleeding trunk of his body into the first of the waiting coffins. 

Bui the Messenger died without a sound, without betraying any signs of fear, and on the hillside, women among the crowd began sobbing quietly. Ngo Van Loc closed his eyes for an instant to blot out the image of the grisly apparatus in the center of the field and put a trembling arm around Doug’s shoulders; he knew that like himself his elder son must already be imagining how they would endure the sight of Hoc’s neck trapped in the lunette. 

Before the lid of Bui’s coffin was secured the French Resident and his military escort were hastening toward the jail again, and as the sun brightened behind the eastern hills he scurried back and forth to the cells shepherding each successive prisoner to the scaffold with the brisk efficiency which he knew the French officials and journalists from Hanoi expected from a colonial administrator of his rank. Jacques Devraux was among the group watching from the balcony of the Garde Indigene barracks; one of three Süreté inspectors who had volunteered to accompany the