The Centurions (13 page)

The march now appeared to be endless; it went on and on, in the rain and in the mud, among the mosquitoes and the leeches; it looked as if it might continue all the way to China, until all the prisoners died of dysentery by the side of the road.

One night, which was less dark than usual, long after the crossing of the Black River by ferry-boat from Tak-Hoa, they noticed that the wild vegetation all round them was being succeeded by a semblance of cultivation. The trail, which was broad and straight but hemmed in by tall grass, led towards a little hummock. On the summit stood the blackened ruins of a large colonial house with its veranda. There were broad open spaces between the rubber-trees and between each coffee bush, and the undergrowth had not yet encroached on these.

“The pitiful stamp of the white man,” Boisfeuras said to himself.

Some peasant had come all the way out here from the mountains of Auvergne or the banks of the Garonne, some stubborn peasant with fists like hams. He had cleared the soil and built himself a house, recruited coolies, sometimes with a kick in the ass, but he had stuck to this valley, the only one of his species, like a medieval robber-baron. He had struggled against the climate, against fever, against the jungle which he forced back step by step, also against the men whom he induced to work according to his methods and to live according to his pace.

The French colonial had come out to Indo-China at a time when white men still deserved to be masters of the world by virtue of their courage, their stamina, their energy, their pride in their own race, their sense of their own strength, their superiority, their lack of scruples.

Boisfeuras did not belong to this category, he was a marauder. His type had infested China. He looked back on his youth as a series of flickering images, like an old news-reel accompanied by the burning, thudding rhythm of fever.

Shanghai: the gunboats on the Whampoo, the evenings at the Sporting Club, the lovely Russian refugees from Harbin, and the bandy-legged little Japs worming their way into the concessions and disembarking their troops . . .

His father collected old jade and little Chinese prostitutes, and officially acted as political adviser to the Chamber of Commerce; he delighted in playing the part of a man of mystery. Perhaps it was from him that he inherited his taste for clandestine activity, which alone could account for his presence in the army of this “secondary” country, among these wretched prisoners.

Chiang Kai-Shek's forces were hammering at the gates of the City on the Mud Bank. Julien Boisfeuras was ten years old; his father and a few other old sharks of his sort met the Chinese generalissimo in secret. They convinced him that the Communists had decided to kill him to get complete control of the Kuomintang.

Chiang believed them or pretended to. He came to an arrangement: he stuffed his pockets with dollars and his troops wiped out the Communists and dipped the skinny little students of Canton into boiling cauldrons.

Julien Boisfeuras was eighteen; he had gone to bed with girls and found it boring, played poker and felt that it was not worth gambling unless one staked one's whole life and soul. He made friends with some young Communists and with a certain Luang who was operating with his group in the territory of the International Concession. He provided them with information and money, both of which he got hold of at home.

His old man worked under cover and was pleased to instruct his son in the manifold aspects of underground political activity in China. One night Julien asked him:

“Was it true about that plot against Chiang Kai-Shek?”

Armand Boisfeuras simply replied:

“Where there are Communists, there's always a plot. Chiang realized that.”

“That's not the kind of information we want,” Luang told him. “That's all over and done with and we don't give a damn. Has your father met the Japanese consul-general; what did Chiang say to him the day before yesterday? That's the sort of thing we're after.”

On another occasion his father explained:

“The balance of the world depends on the disunity of China. A united China in the hands of a single group, of a single party, is liable to set the world ablaze. Communism is the great danger because only the Communists are capable of uniting China; they have all the necessary qualifications: inhumanity, intolerance, single-mindedness, and they're mad . . .”

“The prattlings of your father?” Luang would say. “Not the slightest interest to us. But we shall be needing arms . . . and through him you could get some for us.”

Julien was nineteen. His father had summoned him to his office in the Chamber of Commerce; he had heard about his connexion with the Communist Party. The old man did not moralize—that wasn't his way—he cut him off without a penny and turned him out of the house.

“You can come back when you've got over this nonsense.”

But Luang dropped Julien. He was no longer living with his father, he was therefore of no further interest. He did not believe in the conversion of the sons of
taipans
. Their fathers had plundered China, their sons thought they could make amends with a show of remorse and a few contributions. That didn't work. Young whites who were well-disposed were to be handled only as long as they were useful, then they were chucked away like a paper napkin. After all, they had much the same colour, consistency and fragility as one.

Julien was twenty. He was reconciled to his father and the old man had sent him to a business college in America. Came the
1940
armistice in France. Julien felt it was unpleasant but was not deeply affected by it. He did not regard himself as a citizen of a small western country but as a white man of the Far East, and to him the internal quarrels of Europe seemed ludicrous.

Came the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, which forced him to come to some decision. He had a French passport, he was living in America, his father was in China. He therefore joined up in the British Army.

At the age of twenty-two he had the D.S.O., amoebic dysentery, an abscess of the liver and malaria. Within six months he was patched up in a hospital in New Delhi. His father was then in Chungking, acting as official adviser to Chiang Kai-Shek. He went and joined him.

The old man was still surrounded by his retinue of policemen, intelligence agents, prostitutes, smugglers, bankers and generals. He was like certain mushrooms, he needed all this dung in order to live. The old man was still pursuing his pet ideas, enjoying his pipe of opium and going to bed with younger and younger girls.

He considered that the real enemies of China were the Communists, not the Japanese whom the Americans would soon bring to heel. He urged Chiang to use the arms and equipment provided by the U.S.A. against the troops of Mao-Tse-Tung and Chu-The while these were still badly organized. But at this American sentiment rebelled. Washington could only deal with one war at a time and the crafty
taipan
Boisfeuras was sent into exile.

Julien joined the French Army and was posted to Mission Five at Kung-Ming. He set off for Yunnan, reached the Haute Région of Tonkin and made contact for the first time with the Vietminh guerrillas.

In fulfilment of his mission, he convinced the Communist leaders that he had come as a defender of democracy and not as the vanguard of a colonial reconquest. He already considered the Vietminh efficient and dangerous. He was frequently sent into China. Each time he came back to Indo-China he noticed the Vietminh were organizing and developing according to the self-same methods as the Chinese Communist Party.

When he went down to Saigon, he stayed with the director of the Bank of Indo-China and established close connexions with the big Chinese bankers of Cholon. The American and Chinese services in Formosa repeatedly invited him to work for them, but he was not interested in money. The French intelligence service was better suited to his temperament and to the aim he had in mind. Its disorganization and complexity allowed him a completely free hand.

He had an old score to settle with Luang; for that purpose it was more convenient to be in uniform . . .

His father stayed on in Shanghai when the Communists entered in order to negotiate some commercial agreements with the new régime. He had plenty of guts, the old bastard! His negotiations met with failure; there was no one left to corrupt except the whole régime, and even that could not be done at once. For four years
taipan
Armand Boisfeuras, deprived of his opium and little girls, had remained as a hostage in the hands of the Communists; then he had gone back to France. The Communists had denied him the dung on which he lived; it was a wonder he did not die.

In China the only form of self-indulgence left was the synthetic breeding of sexless ants in chemically pure surroundings.

 • • • 

In the morning one of the
bo-dois
came to fetch Boisfeuras. The Voice watched the captain approaching. There was a strange smile on his face as he offered him a cigarette.

“You don't seem to have suffered much from this arduous march, Captain.”

Then all of a sudden he broke into Vietnamese.

“I'm told you speak our language extremely well . . . as only those who have got our blood in their veins can do. You're a half-caste, aren't you, at two or three generations' removed perhaps?”

“I was brought up by a Vietnamese nurse and I learnt your language before my own.”

“What were you doing at Dien-Bien-Phu?”

“I was in charge of the Pims because of my knowledge of Vietnamese. I've already told you that.”

At a sign from the Voice two
bo-dois
seized the captain. They tied his hands behind his back with a length of wire, pulling his elbows up with a jerk.

“That was a lie, Captain Boisfeuras. You belonged to the G.C.M.A.
*
organization and you only got to Dien-Bien-Phu during the last few days. Before that you were north of Phong-Tho where you commanded a group of partisans. You were one of those wretches who were trying to raise the mountain minorities against the Vietnamese people.”

Boisfeuras had only passed through Phong-Tho. He had gone farther north to deal with the Thais of Yunnan. The Voice was confusing him with a quadroon officer who belonged to that organization and had tried to form a guerrilla group from the mountain people and some Chinese bandits. The officer had been killed in an ambush laid by his own men: there had been some fuss over a girl or over money or opium. The Vietminh had had nothing to do with the business.

He saw that it was very much in his interests to be confused with this half-caste.

“I admit I lied.”

“I appreciate your frankness, late though it is. It's my duty to punish you. You will be tied up for the rest of the march. You are absolutely forbidden to say a word to the sentries. But if you are so keen on practising Vietnamese, you can always come and see me. We could then discuss what you were doing north of Phong-Tho.”

“My mission there was a failure . . .”

“It was bound to be. We shall hold a court of inquiry to see if you committed any war crimes. Until then you will be under special surveillance.”

Boisfeuras completed the march isolated from his comrades and under the close watch of three sentries who jabbed the barrels of their submachine-guns into his ribs as soon as he opened his mouth. His guards were changed every day.

Tied up between two
bo-dois
, Boisfeuras marched at the end of the column. The wire had bitten into his wrists; his swollen, purple hands were paralysed. He had lost his former agility and stubbed his feet on every obstacle in his path. Sometimes his ears, buzzing with fever, echoed with the din of heavy hobnailed boots tramping over delicate porcelain, with the shrill cries of women being raped and with the noise of tearing canvas. Then in his mind's eye he saw that lovely painting on silk that used to be in his father's house in Shanghai and which came from the plunder of the Summer Palace. It represented three reeds and a corner of a lake by moonlight.

“They smashed everything,” his father told him, “with the toes of their boots or the butts of their rifles, the loveliest and oldest vases in the world. There was a marine lieutenant with them who suddenly found he had a taste for Chinese objects. He only broke what he could not steal; that was your grandfather, my boy.”

As Boisfeuras's exhaustion increased, the sound of breaking porcelain became louder and more ear-shattering until he had to clench his teeth.

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.

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.”