On Green Dolphin Street (24 page)

“You are the last group of journalists we shall be entertaining. Consider yourselves fortunate, gentlemen.” He spoke in English, with a light Franco-American accent.

He described for them how French paratroopers had taken the area the previous fall and how the engineers had demolished the housing that existed in Dien Bien Phu, previously some sort of administrative outpost, then built a system of strongpoints protecting the center, which consisted of the depot where they were sitting, the airstrip, the hospital and the headquarters of the camp commander, Colonel de Castries. Each strongpoint had a woman’s name—Béatrice, Eliane, Gabrielle, Huguette and so on.

“The locations have been carefully chosen and each has been designed and reinforced by the engineers.” The major paused and gave a small cough. “There is no truth in the rumor that they are named after Colonel de Castries’s mistresses.”

Some of the American newspapermen laughed obligingly.

“The strategy of General Navarre remains the same: to entice the Vietminh out of the jungle into a place where the superior weaponry, training and manpower of the French army can be decisive. Dien Bien Phu is the
ideal battleground for us since they must place their artillery on the reverse side of the hills where our planes can destroy it. We will run offensive actions from inside the camp to drive their infantry into the open.”

One of the American reporters, a paunchy gray-haired veteran with a cigar, had a question. “Couldn’t help noticing the fire from the high ground as we came in. Looks like they have some pieces on this side of the hill.”

“We are mounting regular air strikes,” said the major. “If you look out of the window you can see another flight about to take off.”

“Yeah, but suppose they put the airstrip out of action. How are you going to get out?”

The major smiled. “They will not, my friend.”

“But suppose they did.” The newsman removed the cigar from his mouth and examined its sodden end.

“The only way out of the camp is to march out victorious. Now then, you will be divided into smaller groups and each will be taken to see one of the strongpoints. You will be billeted there tonight and a flight will take you back to Hanoi tomorrow. Enjoy yourselves, gentlemen.”

Charlie was driven in a jeep with four other reporters over a trembling Bailey bridge that spanned the narrow Nam Yum River, already beginning to swell with early showers, up a rough road that, at least until the downpours came, was still passable to a sturdy military vehicle.

“C’est la route Quarante-et-Un. On va à Béatrice,” said the Algerian corporal who was driving. “La plus belle des maîtresses du colonel.” He showed a gold tooth as he laughed.

Charlie found himself smiling a little as they jolted up the road; there was something profoundly strange about this clearing in the jungle where the flower of St. Cyr officers, their heads full of European gunnery tactics, had brought a collection of troops to provoke a people they hardly knew in a colony that had been returned to them after the disgrace of Vichy only because the Americans and British had no use for it. This giant folly of pride, greed and quixotic ambition was about to receive, as far as Charlie could see, a cataclysmic judgment.

Béatrice turned out to be on top of a hill, where it could control Road
41. If any Vietminh artillery was placed on the hills opposite, the corporal explained, the French fighter-bombers and heavy howitzers would silence them at once. Once the jeep had deposited them, however, it was clear that well-placed enemy artillery was already hitting a strongpoint on a hill to the west.

The corporal laughed. “ça, ce n’est rien. Ce n’est que Gabrielle qu’ils essaient de réveiller.” There was another flash of gold.

In a temporary building in the main complex of Béatrice they were left for half an hour until a press liaison officer could be found. Two other American reporters who had been at Dien Bien Phu for almost a week came in to join them. One was a loud, florid man, complaining about military censorship; the other was lean and quiet with a distracted look in his eye.

Their new guide was a man with considerably less joie de vivre than the major or the corporal before him. A pale, bespectacled Parisian captain called Rigaud, he took them to inspect the trench system that his men had dug forward to repel any infantry attacks; it had communication trenches leading to the rear area and a system of reinforced dugouts where radio, first-aid posts and some of the officers were housed.

Charlie turned to the quieter of the two new reporters. “Christ,” he said. “It’s Verdun.”

The man smiled faintly and looked at the press tag Charlie was wearing round his neck. He held out his hand. “Frank Renzo,” he said.

“Charlie van der Linden.”

“You Dutch?”

“No, English. I had a Dutch grandfather who came to London on business and married a local girl. Otherwise I’m all English. Have you been here for a while?”

“A few days.”

“Were you in the army during the war?”

“Sure was.”

“So was I. Tell me, am I missing something or are the French about to be buried?”

Frank said, “See that jungle there? For five months tens of thousands of
men and women have been bringing supplies up here. Coolies paid in opium, trucks, mules, reinforced bicycles—they’ve brought thousands of tons through hundreds of miles of jungle and the French can’t see a goddamn thing. They’ve bombed some of the routes, but they haven’t found most of them. The Vietminh tie the branches of the trees together overhead to make a tunnel. They have guns all over the hillside—this side, not the other side, where the book says they’re supposed to be. The Americans have shot infrared film to try and find them and it’s come back blank.”

Charlie looked at Frank and smiled. “Is your paper interested in this?”

“Not really. They’re more interested in Senator McCarthy. I can’t get that son of a bitch off the front page. But
The Washington Post
said that if the French are defeated then Paris’ll feel the same as London did after your English general surrendered to Washington at Yorktown.”

Captain Rigaud’s answers to the reporters’ questions were brief and ill-tempered until they returned to the main building at dinnertime. As the mess corporal brought in more bottles of Gevrey-Chambertin with which to quell the taste of the chicken curry, Charlie and Frank managed to maneuver Rigaud to one side, where he became mournfully confidential. He told them in English that hardly any of the buildings in the camp were properly reinforced. There was a drastic shortage of timber, and when engineers were sent out to cut trees they were attacked by Vietminh patrols. When they destroyed the local houses to find more materials they succeeded in making all their inhabitants into Communists. The enemy outnumbered them by five to one, Rigaud had been dependably informed. Although his men had started a number of brush fires, there had not been enough time or manpower to burn back the surrounding jungle, with the result that the enemy had laid a trench system that finished, in some places, only fifty meters from the French lines. Sapping out from the front, the Vietminh had then dug mines and filled them with explosives, which they were waiting only for the word from General Giap to detonate.

Rigaud held his scholarly head in his hands. “I just keep thinking of Paris. The shame of this. I think of how the radio stations will play
solemn music and the traffic will stop along the Seine. The rue de Rivoli, the quai des Grands Augustins.”

The other journalists had left to play cards at the far end of the tin-roofed mess, and the hurricane lamps shed a harsh glow along the empty table. Frank poured more wine into Rigaud’s glass.

“You married?” said Charlie.

“Yes,” said Rigaud. “Since two years. I have one son, who is with my wife actually in Paris. She’s expecting another baby. If it’s a girl she will not be called Béatrice.”

“What’s going to happen?” said Frank.

Rigaud sighed. “The rain, that’s what will happen. In three months there will fall one and a half meters of it. And we’ll fight. The Foreign Legion is here after all. The Algerians are good if their officers are good. We have also Tai tribesmen, but you have to place them between paratroopers and Moroccans, otherwise they run away.”

Charlie said, “How did you get into this position?”

“A complete failure of Intelligence,” said Rigaud, lighting a French cigarette. “We were misinformed about their numbers, their weapons and their supplies. Also, their general is better than ours.”

“Where do you suggest we go tomorrow?” said Frank.

“Hanoi. The Hotel Métropole. Have a pastis for me.”

At midnight the other journalists were taken back to the depot at the camp center for the morning flight, but Charlie decided he would like to see some more. He said good night to Rigaud, who made off for his quarters, unsteadily, taking a candle and a copy of Montaigne’s
Essais
. Frank had disappeared.

Charlie slept well on an army cot in a storeroom. He was not frightened of the crunching mortars or the occasional thump and screech of artillery. He had been an infantryman himself for two years from 1942; he had commanded a company in Tunisia and Italy before being transferred to Intelligence. The situation in Dien Bien Phu was bizarre, but it was not boring, and it appealed to his sardonic sense of history; at this stage of his life his nerves were still well sheathed.

There was nothing to eat for breakfast, though there was the sound of
mortar fire directed at Road 41. Béatrice was surrounded, and it took a battalion guarded by two tank platoons to get drinking water up from the river.

Charlie saw Rigaud at the end of a corridor, running to a communication room. “You’d better get out,” said Rigaud, who looked pale and hungover. “We’re clearing the road now. The corporal will take you back to the airfield.”

Charlie walked to the edge of the position, where thick barbed wire was mined with antipersonnel charges. In the valley below he could see French fighter-bombers coming in from the southwest, over strongpoint Dominique, and setting fire to the road, the adjacent trees and any enemy soldiers in the way with napalm bombs. Toward eleven it was considered quiet enough for vehicles to move off, and the jeep went back along the blackened road, where a platoon of Tai tribesmen were bayoneting the burned Vietminh survivors. Charlie had never seen the effects of napalm before, nor smelled its fierce odor.

In the main depot area, he made contact with the urbane major of the previous day, who seemed pleased with the way things were going and happy to accommodate Charlie’s desire to stay a little longer.

“Nation shall speak unto nation,” he said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“The BBC. Is that not your corporation’s motto?”

“Yes, of course.”

In mid-afternoon, two French reporters landed in a Dakota, and that evening Charlie dined with them and the major in the officers’ mess. The cheese course was interrupted by the sound of shells landing on the airfield outside the window, and the Frenchmen, who knew the situation well, went to investigate this unsuspected enemy firepower. Twenty minutes later they were brought back into the mess by stretcher-bearers. One was dead and one was missing his right foot. Charlie asked the major if he had seen Frank, but apparently he had made off somewhere in Huguette with an Algerian driver he had befriended.

The next day Dien Bien Phu came under attack on all sides, and in the evening came the news that Béatrice was already on the point of falling.
The reinforced bunkers, the trenches, the dugouts and the little tin-roofed buildings had collapsed one after another beneath a bombardment that exceeded the direst intelligence estimates. The Vietminh infantry had poured through the rudimentary trench defense system, up the hill and onto the heights. The French commander was dead; almost all the senior officers were dead; it was believed that the handful of men left were commanded by master sergeants.

Charlie was denied his request to be shown another defensive strongpoint; the major, whose joie de vivre was evaporating, told him to stay in the depot, where he sat up during the night, thinking of Rigaud and wondering how the news would be broken to his young wife in her modest apartment. He pictured her as a thin, severe woman with dark hair dragged back into a bun; he imagined her living in a modest flat in Neuilly, bare apart from a few colored toys for the baby boy.

The duty Charlie had least enjoyed during his own war was writing to the families of men who had been killed. It was necessary to be straight and simple, to talk of country and duty, then briefly to conjure some individual detail, if he could, about the dead man. It was the replies that he dreaded. They varied in their degree of literacy and their length, but almost all had the same modesty: a submissive stoicism that placed the will of a formless providence above the most fiercely valued, deeply loved possession that they had ever had. “We would have kept him,” one had said, “but God knew best.”

The letters made it impossible for him to waver; as his battalion worked its way up Italy, he thought of the addresses from which the letters had come—the houses, lanes, the terraced streets of industrial towns—and pushed himself through the swirling blood of the River Rapido and on through the early rains of winter up into the hills, where his company was supplied by sodden mules. After four months of shell-fire, some close at hand yet making little noise, some distant but making him leap in fear, he had eventually come to think himself immune. He did not hear the one that hit him, though he was aware some time later of gentle hands removing his helmet and of shocked voices commenting on what they saw within.

He was nursed in a hospital in Florence. The shell fragment had pierced his helmet and his skull, but as far as the doctors could see it had caused no damage to the brain itself. The condition of his twenty-four-year-old body, fatless, undamaged by alcohol, conditioned by continuous physical endeavor, had enabled him to survive. When he was able to know what was going on, he was told that his company had been cut off in heavy fighting: some had been killed, some taken prisoner, and the survivors were being reassigned to other units. His own company had ceased to exist.