The Centurions (14 page)

The Voice abruptly dropped his impersonal tone. He became passionate:

“You're a simpleton. With them racialism always exists. They make a show of being your brothers, those friends of yours, of considering you their equals, but if you really want to mix your blood with theirs, marry one of their women, for instance, then they send you packing as though you had committed some sacrilege. Which comrade was it?”

“No.”

“You needn't feel any solidarity with them; they're the colonialists who are holding your people in subjection, they're the ones who were beaten at Dien-Bien-Phu. Dien-Bien-Phu is the victory of all the Arab nations which are still under the heel of France. It's your duty to tell me which of them insulted you.”

Mahmoudi's lips were dry. He felt a fit of trembling coming on . . .

“Your duty as an Algerian oppressed by French imperialism . . .”

The Voice's finely drawn and handsome features had recovered their hieratic quality and beauty—also their spell, for he was the conqueror of an army which Mahmoudi had always admired.

The eyes in the golden mask opened and closed and the lieutenant felt he was being observed by a creature of infinite patience. To release himself from their spell, he confessed the truth:

“I organized that scuffle, sir, to enable my comrades”—he had stressed this word with a sort of fury which did not escape the Voice—“to steal some molasses from a Chinese merchant.”

“You ought to be punished . . . but I shall let you off. Go away.”

The Voice watched him as he went. He had avoided making the bad mistake of sending him back with his hands tied behind him. Because of this punishment the Arab would have felt an even stronger solidarity with the other prisoners, and party instructions on this score were explicit: use every means to separate the blacks and North Africans from the French.

Lieutenant Mahmoudi did not have the calm strength of Dia, the black medical officer, with the powerful laugh which rose from his belly. He was more apprehensive, more uncertain. But this imbecile had reopened a secret wound in the Voice's heart.

It was in the days of Admiral Decoux. Pham was then a student at Hanoi and belonged to a youth movement founded by Commander Ducoroy. It was the first time in Indo-China that white youths and young Vietnamese were to be found together in the same camps and under the same organization. Stripped to the waist, in khaki shorts, mingling together like brothers, they saluted the striking of the French flag at sunset, while the whole of the White Man's Asia was crumbling under the blows of the Japanese who already held the aerodromes in Tonkin.

It was there Pham had met Jacques Sellier, one of the group leaders, a lad of nineteen with sturdy calves and close-cropped hair, who wore a scout's badge. Sellier made a cult of leadership, tradition, the Church, personal hygiene, physical fitness and frankness which he called loyalty.

A violent admiration had drawn him towards this prince whom the camp had somehow acquired. There was nothing unusual about this devotion, which they all showed towards him, yellow and white alike.

Jacques Sellier, more by instinct than reasoning, knew how to make his friendship valued.

At his table—a few planks on two trestles set under a big Chinese pine—the food consisted of rice and bully-beef and was served in metal mess-tins. But the boy he had selected to sit on his right because he had shown most stamina on a test march, or because he had constructed a raft of creepers and bamboo with his own hands or had killed a snake without even appealing to his comrades for help—that boy, the Prince's guest, felt his endeavour and courage well rewarded by this distinction.

Pham often sat on Jacques's right. Although he hated physical training, he had become supple and strong. Although he enjoyed sophisticated conversation and improving on reality by means of poetic fancy, he had become down-to-earth and even slightly brusque.

When they left camp Jacques Sellier, the son of a colonial administrator, had invited him home. His life as an impoverished student had been transformed. The Selliers were extremely affable; they considered that their religion gave them certain duties towards others and, like Anglo-Saxon parsons, they were inclined to play a role that was something between a director of conscience and a sports trainer. They had seven children; Jacques's younger sister was called Béatrice. She was not very pretty, but had an indefinable adolescent charm. Every morning Pham and his friend went for a run round the Great Lake; they would come home panting and exhausted.

Béatrice used to say:

“You're like a couple of puppies scampering after the wind and coming back with nothing. Tomorrow I want some flowers . . .”

Pham had brought her some flowers. She had smiled and kissed him on the cheek.

The young Vietnamese had fallen in love with Béatrice and did not hide it from her.

One day Jacques had said:

“Let's not go running today. Come for a stroll round the garden.”

Pham still remembered the blaze of the flamboyants, the pale grey colour of the sky and the acid pear-drop flavour of the morning air.

With his hands thrust into the pockets of his shorts, Jacques hung his head and kicked up the sand in the path with the toes of his sandals.

“Pham, my parents have asked me to talk to you about Béatrice. You know, she's only seventeen and nothing but a tomboy . . . and any idea of your marrying her is out of the question.”

“Why?”

“We're Catholics and for us everyone, whatever his race, is equal and alike . . . in principle . . . but . . .”

Pham had felt the sort of ice-cold blast that heralds a bout of fever. Jacques had gone on:

“It will be difficult for me to see you again for some time. Oh, come along now, don't take on so. If you could only see your face! It'll work out all right in the end. You'll forget Béatrice, you'll marry a girl from your own country.”

Pham had left without a word. His friendship for Jacques and what he believed to be his love for Béatrice had turned into a deep-rooted secret hatred for all whites, especially those who tried to bridge the gap between the two races and then fought shy.

At this juncture he was approached by some of his university friends at Hanoi who belonged to the Indo-Chinese Communist Party. After its suppression in
1940
, the Central Committee had been obliged to withdraw to China and the students were getting slightly out of hand. They harboured a sense of injustice and dreamed in a vague way of the independence of their country and of splendid destinies for themselves. Pham had followed them. He had the same feeling of resentment, the same ambition and not a vestige of political education.

But one morning a man had turned up from Tien-Tsin. He had assembled the students and had given them the latest international directives of the Komintern.

“From now on the Communist Party must take the lead in every national liberation movement and unite the maximum number of nationalist and socialist organizations in the struggle against Fascist imperialism.”

And Pham was the one whom the Central Committee's envoy had made responsible for initiating his comrades into the Vietminh programme as it had been worked out in the depths of China by a certain Nguyen-Ai-Quoc who was now known by the name of Ho-Chi-Minh.

He could recite the three points of this programme by heart:

“We must get rid of the French and Japanese Fascists and aim at the independence of Viet-Nam.

“We must establish a democratic republic of Viet-Nam.

“We must form an alliance with the democracies which are opposed to Fascism and aggression.”

To Pham Fascism had assumed the brawny muscular form of Jacques Sellier.

But Jacques Sellier did not die as a Fascist. At the time of the Japanese advance he and two other scouts had joined a guerrilla band organized by a half-caste lieutenant. He had been wounded and the bandy-legged little soldiers of the Mikado had finished him off. Pham had never forgiven him, either, for meeting such a noble end.

He had already become a true Communist and he felt that outside the Party there could be neither hope nor heroism.

 • • • 

The halt lasted until early in the afternoon. Captain de Glatigny, banana thief and former staff officer, lay stretched out in the grass. He was dreaming vaguely of a number of things, of his comrades and of Lescure who had left them.

On the eve of his departure for hospital Glatigny had sat beside the madman who was teasing a cricket with a blade of grass. The captain had suddenly had the impression that Lescure was re-establishing contact with the real world. He called out to him in a parade-ground voice:

“Lescure! Lieutenant Lescure!”

Lescure went on playing with the cricket and, without raising his head, gently answered:

“To hell with you, captain. I don't want to know anything, I don't want to be told anything and I'm perfectly all right, thank you.”

To be like Lescure! To reject all the anxieties, all the problems to which modern life was bound to subject every officer, to adopt the favourite bureaucratic formula: “I don't want to know”—how restful that would be!

The prisoners had to leave the trail to negotiate some slippery little mud embankments which ran between the bright green rectangles of the paddy-fields, past screens of bamboo and clumps of mango, banana and guava trees. Darkness was beginning to fall and lent a limpid crystalline transparency to the atmosphere.

It was then the two men appeared, emerging from behind a screen of trees. They were naked to the waist, clothed only in a cheap
ke-kouan
of uncertain colour and, to prevent themselves from slipping, they walked with their toes spread out like ducks. They were carrying a huge black pig suspended from a bamboo pole and moved extremely fast, trotting along with a loose-limbed gait like all Vietnamese peasants. But they were far taller, and their skin was not the colour of virgin oil but looked greyish and dull. One of them wore a sort of blackish beret on his head, and the other a grotesque hat made of rice straw.

They caught up with the column by a short cut, lowered the pig and the pole to the ground, rounded on a
bo-doi
who tried to make them move on, and watched the pitiful procession of prisoners with profound interest and unmixed pleasure.

“Here, I say, Esclavier,” said the one with the beret. “What are you doing here, sausage-face?”

Esclavier recognized that slightly rasping voice and also the expression “sausage-face,” but not the man with the translucid complexion, whose skinny body could not have weighed more than
130
pounds. Yet it could be none other than Lieutenant Leroy of the
6
th BCP who had been reported missing at Cao-Bang—the athlete who had run away with the army athletics championship in spite of his
200
pounds' weight.

Esclavier ran his tongue over his dry lips.

“Don't tell me it's you, Leroy?”

“It's me all right, and the chap at the other end of the pig is Orsini of the
3
rd BEP. We've been expecting you for several days.”

“Are we still far from the camp?”

“A mile or two. So long, sausage-face, we'll come and see you this evening What the hell does this damned little
bo-doi
think he's doing, pushing me around? And the peace of the people, what about that, you little monkey? It's your duty to re-educate us, all right, but that doesn't mean you can push us around.”

“Im! Im!”

Disconcerted by the assurance of the two old hands and the flood of words they let fly at him, the
bo-doi
calmly allowed them to pick up their pig and bamboo pole and move on. With their fast trotting gait they soon left the column behind them and disappeared behind a screen of trees.

A Tho village appeared with its houses raised on stilts among the trees.

“Halt!”

The column came to a standstill. Each group leader was ordered to count his men and then went and reported to the Voice. He was accompanied by another Viet, as squat and bandy-legged as a Japanese. A sort of map-case hung on his skinny buttocks. His name was Trin; he was the general supervisor; the head warder of Camp One. He was ruthless, brutal and efficient, and the Voice knew he could trust him implicitly.

The Voice was sensitive and certain things repelled him; Trin made himself responsible for these. The Voice was the pure conscience of the Vietminh world, Trin was the material element.

The Voice embarked on a speech:

“You have reached your internment camp. It is useless to try and escape. A certain number of your comrades captured at Cao-Bung have tried more than once. Not one of them succeeded and we had to take severe disciplinary measures. Now they have come to their senses and have mended their ways. You are here in order to be re-educated. You must take advantage of this stay in the Democratic Republic of Viet-Nam to instruct yourselves, discover the evil of your errors, repent and become fighters for peace. From now on you will have some of your former comrades as group leaders. We have selected them from the ablest among them.”

“Dirty rats,” Esclavier muttered through clenched teeth.

“You must obey them, follow their instructions . . . I also have a splendid piece of news to announce. The new French Prime Minister, Mr. Mendès-France, appears to be inspired with the best intentions with a view to signing the armistice.”

“Who's this fellow Mendès?” Pinières asked Glatigny.

“An awkward character, who has always been in favour of the evacuation of Indo-China. I personally regard him as a sort of Kerensky, only less beguiling.”

“I know him,” said Esclavier, “on the strength of having met him once or twice in England, when he was with de Gaulle. He's ugly, brittle and conceited but at least he fought, which is pretty rare for a politician; he's intelligent, which is rarer still, and he's got character, which is exceptional.”