The Centurions (15 page)

“But a man like that won't ever sign the armistice,” said Lacombe dejectedly.

“He's a Jew,” said Mahmoudi contemptuously, “and a Jew might do anything. There are no Jews here with us.”

“You're wrong,” said Esclavier, “as a matter of fact there are two: a captain who fought extremely well and who's no different from any of us, and a crackpot lieutenant who dreams of stuffing himself with cakes and being made a librarian at the Nationale so as to be able to spend the rest of his life reading.”

Each team was quartered in a hut on stilts. On the far side of a tributary of the Bright River which the last storm had swollen and filled with mud, the prisoners could see the neat lines of huts of Camp One.

The officers taken prisoner at Cao-Bang had been living there for the last four years; ninety of them had survived.

Lacombe lowered himself on to his bunk with a deep sigh:

“Well, we've got here at last: we may as well make the best of it. I really thought I was done for and I'm sure if it hadn't been for Pinières and you others . . .”

“Balls to that,” the lieutenant muttered. “Whatever you say, you're part of the army and a comrade and that's why we helped you.”

“What's happened to Boisfeuras, I wonder?” Glatigny asked.

“Boisfeuras has got out of tighter spots than this,” Esclavier replied. “He was once in the hands of the Japs for three weeks . . . and he came through all right. I once had a brush with the Gestapo, we compared our experience. His was . . . slightly more refined, shall we say?”

Lieutenants Leroy and Orsini turned up shortly afterwards, still as unconcerned as ever. Out of their pockets tumbled some bananas and tobacco and an old copy of
l'Humanité
.

“
L'Humanité
's not for reading,” said Orsini, who was short, thickset and swarthy, “it's for rolling cigarettes.”

“How did you come by all this stuff?” Merle asked.

“How do you think? We pinched it, of course!”

“In the interest of reciprocal rights,” Orsini explained.

“Now here's the dope,” said Leroy. “Your team seems to have a pretty bad reputation, since the group leader they've chosen for you is little Marindelle, who couldn't be better at the job.”

“Marindelle!” Orsini said delightedly. “That's someone to conjure with.”

“A bastard, is he?” said Glatigny. “That name seems to ring a bell.”

“A stool-pigeon?” Pinières asked.

“Our best friend,” said Leroy. “Officially the number one collaborator of the camp, but actually he could be called the head of the Resistance.”

“He's got the right idea,”—Orsini scratched round his armpit and brought out a louse which he crushed between his thumbnails—“to get the best of the Viets you've got to humour them and give them confidence in you. He's a double, a triple, a quadruple agent. He has got the best of everyone, the Viets, the Camp Commander, the Meteor, us and perhaps himself as well.”

“You'd better spread it around,” Leroy went on. “Potin, another group leader, is a Communist. He turned Communist here. He believes in it quite sincerely, but he makes a point of behaving decently and setting a good example. Ménard, on the other hand, is an absolute bastard, an out-and-out swine.”

“This is the difference we draw between them,” said Orsini. “Potin we'll bump off but we'll shake his hand first, and afterwards we'll see to his wife and kids. Ménard we'll do to death by slow degrees and then dump him in a shit-house.

“Fabert's a chap who doesn't give a damn so long as he's left in peace and there's no trouble. Trézec's a bible-thumper and a dreary bore: always preaching, but for his own church, not the Viets.” Geniez is the only pederast in the camp and it's not his fault. So he's a progressive. Most people can't stand him, but I've seen him fight and I know that he's then a lion.

“Ah, here comes that dear little bastard, Marindelle.”

They made a face at the new arrival, got up and disappeared.

“My name's Marindelle,” he said, “Yves Marindelle, a lieutenant in the
3
rd Foreign Parachute Battalion . . .”

He was naked to the waist and every rib showed in his skinny chest. He had a tuft of fair hair on the top of his head, which made him look like one of those comic music-hall characters: Tufted Riquet or Cadet Rousselle . . . His beedy little eyes sparkled with intelligence. He squatted down on his haunches in front of the team:

“I've been detailed as your group leader and as such I'm responsible for initiating you into camp regulations and supervising your re-education.”

“To hell with you,” said Esclavier in measured tones.

In spite of all he had heard about him, he did not take to the lieutenant at all.

“You must never say that to the Vietminh. What you must say is: ‘I don't understand and I'd like you to explain.' They love explaining. Your team has made a bit of a name for itself. The Meteor . . .”

“We call him the Voice,” said Pinières.

“Well then, the Voice accuses your little group of three attempts to escape, constantly failing to comply with orders, theft and even a racial squabble.”

“That was in order to pinch some molasses,” said Mahmoudi, “I told him that.”

“What's more, you've got a war criminal and a madman with you. The war criminal will be back with you tomorrow after he has made his public self-examination and cleansed himself of his sins by Marxist confession. But where's the madman?”

“In hospital already.”

Marindelle scratched his throat:

“He'll be better off there; Dia will look after him. He's a very good doctor and has worked miracles. I've been through his hands myself and his herb soups put me back on my feet. Tomorrow there's an instruction period for the whole camp. You'll meet your old friends from Cao-Bang and be initiated into camp routine. I was given to understand that Captain de Glatigny was with you.”

“Yes, I'm Captain de Glatigny.”

Marindelle's voice underwent a sudden change; it became apprehensive. He was no longer Cadet Rousselle, but a crumpled adolescent.

“May I have a word with you in private, sir? It's something personal.”

Glatigny got up. Pinières noticed that in spite of his rags and exhaustion he still looked as elegant as ever. He wished he could have looked like that himself.

The two officers climbed down the ladder from the hut and went and sat down in the shade of the big banana trees.

“We're vaguely related,” said Marindelle, “. . . through your wife. I married Jeanine de Hellian, whose father . . .”

“Now I remember . . . I thought your name sounded familiar.”

“I've been without news of my wife for four years. I left for Indo-China three months after we married and then came Cao-Bang.”

“I imagine she's waiting for you just as all our wives are waiting for us, bringing up their children, helping one another and visiting the wounded in hospital.”

“No. Jeanine isn't waiting for me and I haven't any children.”

“It's just come back to me . . . I believe I met her in Paris about a year ago, at my place.”

“Is she as lovely as ever?”

“I remember a slender girl with long hair which she twisted into a plait and wore on one side of her head.”

“You see, she's gone back to the way she wore her hair before she was married, and yet she knows that I'm alive and a prisoner. She never writes to me.”

“My dear chap, you've got no proof and it's simply for the pleasure of torturing yourself that you're letting your imagination run away with you. When you get back to her, all your doubts will seem ridiculous.”

“How can you be sure . . .”

“My wife wouldn't have anything to do with a fellow-officer's wife who didn't behave correctly.”

“Thank you.”

He had recovered his spirits.

“By the way, you'll have a good laugh tomorrow. We're putting on a really splendid knockabout-Marxist turn. A first-class show.”

 • • • 

When Jeanine Marindelle entered the drawing-room of the Glatignys' house in the Avenue de Saxe, that little museum dedicated to a whole race of soldiers with its standards, its flags and its arms, Claude had clutched her husband's arm.

“How dare she come here!”

Glatigny could not bear rivalry between women and thought it was an absurd and childish game in which a man was well advised not to meddle. He merely said:

“Oh, well . . .”

He started towards Jeanine, for she had that provocative child-wife beauty that had always attracted him. But Claude held him back:

“Her husband . . . Perhaps you knew him, Lieutenant Marindelle . . . He's a prisoner of the Vietminh . . . She hasn't been faithful to him.”

“How long has he been a prisoner?”

“Three years.”

“And she's twenty-one at the most.”

“I know, Jacques. I wouldn't do it myself, but I'm not so stupid . . . or unfeeling . . . that I don't understand certain . . . shortcomings. But she's living openly with another man, in his house, and he's a contemptible creature . . . a journalist called Pasfeuro.”

“That's her business.”

“I don't agree. We women derive our strength, our fidelity, largely from our cohesion. We're a clan on our own with its own unwritten but nevertheless strict laws. We try and help one another . . . we criticize one another too, and Jeanine Marindelle is my cousin.”

Glatigny looked at his wife with her pale shapely face, her large doe eyes which now revealed no tenderness, her set jaw, her nostrils quivering with anger.

He gently freed his arm and went across and kissed Jeanine Marindelle's hand. She said to him:

“Claude isn't very fond of me, Captain.”

“I don't know what she's got against you.”

“Yes, you do, you know perfectly well.”

She had the astonished voice of a hurt child; she played this up perhaps.

“Claude thinks it's a scandal that I'm not making a mystery of it but living quite openly with Pierre Pasfeuro. If we met now and then in some sordid hotel bedroom or between five and seven in his chambers, no one would say a word and I would then be in a position to criticize the other officers' wives.”

“You don't love your husband any more?”

“How extraordinary you are, you men! Of course I love him. We were brought up together, we played games together and as children we even shared the same bed. He was the first boy I ever kissed. We married like a brother and sister, so as to go on playing our games. We lived in our own little world with its legends and its taboos. Only a few people were admitted: Judith the old maid, Uncle Joseph who is deaf, and my cousin Pierre Pasfeuro who used to bring us gramophone records.

“When I knew there was very little chance of my ever seeing Yves again, I left his family, whom I didn't like and who were prepared to have me locked up, to kill me like a widow in India. I went and stayed with Pierre. In him I found the man, the stranger in my life. I could hurt him, I'm jealous—which would never even occur to me with Yves. Do you see what I mean, Captain?”

“I think so.”

“Then why are they all against me? I used to be very fond of Claude. She can't understand me, she didn't marry her own brother and then afterwards meet the only man in her life.”

“What did she say in her defence?” Claude subsequently asked her husband.

“But she has no defence at all. You don't know how defenceless she is; she's just a poor young girl into whom you're trying to get your cattish old claws. I'd be grateful if you asked her here as often as possible.”

A few days later Glatigny had flown out to Saigon.

The instruction and self-examination period took place next day after the afternoon rest. All the officer prisoners were assembled near the river in a large open space that had been cleared on the edge of the forest and was shaded by the big mango trees. In front of them stood a bamboo platform surmounted by the photograph of Ho-Chi-Minh with his straggly beard and the red flag adorned with a yellow star. Some rudimentary benches had been made by the prisoners out of bamboo poles and creepers.

The veterans of Cao-Bang met their comrades from Dien-Bien-Phu again for the first time and some of them recognized one another. They thumped one another on the shoulder, uttered loud exclamations of surprise and delight, but in the end had nothing to say. They belonged to two separate worlds which so far had nothing in common. They stuck to their own respective groups. Marindelle, Orsini and Leroy were about the only ones who sat with the newcomers.

The old hands appeared to look forward to the spectacle with a certain interest and even pleasure. The star performer that day was Lieutenant Millet and they admired his qualities as an actor, his subtle and at the same direct manner, the brutal frankness which enabled him to put over his wopping great lies.

The programme also included the first performance of a newcomer, a certain Boisfeuras whom none of the veterans knew, who was kept isolated in a
canh-na
guarded by three sentries just outside the village. So he could not yet have learnt the rules of the game: an amateur, in other words, but whose story might be interesting all the same.

The appearance of the Voice caused a stir among the prisoners. The show was about to begin. The curtain went up on the big lie of “democracy based on the peace of the masses and reciprocal understanding.”

The Voice started off, as usual, by giving a summary of the news, which everyone looked forward to. They knew it was out of date, partly falsified, distorted for the sake of propaganda, and incomplete; but it was the only source of news they had. One day perhaps he would at last announce that the armistice had been signed at Geneva.

But in sorrowful tones the Voice informed them that the Geneva negotiations were dragging on interminably in spite of the good will and efforts of the Vietnamese delegation. After raising everyone's hopes, Mendès-France was revealing his true face, the face of a colonialist more crafty than the others. If he was intent on bringing the war in Indo-China to an end, it was only to repatriate the expeditionary force and send it out again to defend the vast estates that his wife owned in Tunisia.

“I'm beginning to like this Mendès,” said Pinières, “only I hope he won't leave us in the lurch.”

“His wife's estates are in Egypt,” said Esclavier.

The Voice went on:

“Your role later on, as fighters for peace, will be to keep a close watch on those false liberals in the service of the banks, who, while appearing to defend peace, will in fact ally themselves to the warmongers, since they are only prompted by their selfish class interests. Your comrade Millet has prepared a little lecture on the colonial movement in what you used to call Indo-China. It's your duty to listen to him with the utmost attention, for it's a thoroughly objective study.”

Lieutenant Millet appeared on the platform. He was all skin and bone, with long cowboy legs. A bullet in the knee made him limp. In his hand he held a piece of paper, bamboo paper of such poor quality that one could only write on it in pencil. His expression was solemn and self-important.

He began by stating some grotesque perversions of the truth, which made no impression on the old hands but dumbfounded the new arrivals.

“Statistics show that the government of Indo-China made a point of lowering the birth-rate . . . Certain districts of North Viet-Nam were systematically starved so that the population might be transported as labourers to swell the slave-camps of the big plantations in Cochin-China. Wives were separated from their husbands to increase their output. In order to restrict the transport of rice to the North, thousands of women, children and old people were exterminated. The coolies were never known to come back from the plantations . . .”

The clan of old hands was well organized—in the first row, the two officers who were Communists or who thought they were; then the progressive group leaders, listening attentively, nodding assent, taking notes; behind them, the “mob” chatting together under their breath, applauding every so often and endlessly discussing what they were going to do with their four years' back-pay which was automatically piling up in their bank accounts. For all these tattered officers were millionaires and kept dreaming, though without much hope, of the cars they would buy and the gargantuan meals they would eat in the big three-star restaurants.

Captain Verdier leaned over towards his neighbour:

“A newcomer told me that Lapérouse is not what it was, that the Tour d'Argent now leads the field. I was planning to take my wife there. Most annoying.”

“And what about the Vedette, the new Vedette?” his comrade replied. “Pretty cheesy, it seems, and eats up gas.”

“I'll treat myself to wine,” said Pestagas in his Bordeaux accent, “nothing but wine seeing as how I haven't had any for four years. I'll have a barrel hung over my bed with a pipe attached to it, and when I can't take any more through my mouth, I'll stuff it up my nostrils and after that damned if I don't take it like an enema!”

There was complete silence as Lieutenant Millet embarked on the interesting part: his own self-examination.

“Comrades,” he declared, “the best illustration of the horrors of colonialism in Indo-China is myself. During my first tour of duty, from
1947
to
1949
, I held the Minh-Thanh post in the Mekong delta. With my platoon of mercenaries, who hated the workers and the people, for they all came from the wealthy districts of Boulogne-Billancourt and La Villette, we led a life of idleness and, since idleness breeds vice, we were all vicious.”

“But Boulogne isn't a wealthy district!” Pinières protested.