The Centurions (6 page)

“I've all sorts of ideas, but I'm not going to try to escape, at least not yet . . .”

“If I didn't know you, I'd say you were afraid of it. But I've no doubt you're thinking up some wildcat scheme or other in your complicated Chinaman's brain!

“I didn't realize you were at Dien-Bien-Phu. What were you up to there? I thought you would never have anything to do with that sort of pitched battle.”

“I had started something up north, on the border of Yunnan. Something that was liable to annoy the Chinese. It misfired . . . I withdrew to Dien-Bien-Phu on foot.”

“The same sort of hare-brained wheeze as your pirate-junks in the Baie d'Along, in which you planned to go marauding up the coast of Hainan?”

“This time it was something to do with leper-colonies.”

Esclavier burst out laughing. He was glad to have run into Boisfeuras again, barefoot in the mud and surrounded by the
bo-dois
, but as completely at ease as he had been the year before on the rickety bridge of a heavy junk with purple sails, in charge of a band of pirates recruited from the remnants of the armies of Chiang-Kai-Shek.

Another of his “hare-brained schemes” had been to arm the Chin and Naga headhunters of Burma and launch them against the rear of the Japanese Army. Boisfeuras who was then serving in the British Army had been one of the few survivors of this operation and had been awarded the D.S.O.

Boisfeuras was the man he needed to accompany him on his escape. He was full of resource, a good walker, used to the climate, and acquainted with the languages and customs of a good number of the tribes in the Haute Région.

“Come on, let's have a try at it together.”

“No, Esclavier; I'm all for waiting. I'd advise you to as well.”

“I can't. I once spent two years in a concentration camp and in order to survive I was reduced to do certain things which horrify me every time I think of them. I swore I would never allow myself to be in a position where I would have to do them again.”

Esclavier had squatted down at Boisfeuras's feet and with a sliver of bamboo involuntarily began tracing some figures which were the mountains, others which were the rivers, and a long sinuous line running between the rivers and the mountains, which was his proposed escape route.

No, he could not start being a prisoner all over again . . .

 • • • 

The first mission which Esclavier carried out as a cadet had occurred without a hitch. He retained a fond recollection of his parachute jump by night. It was in the month of June and he had had the impression of being buried alive among the tall grass and wild flowers, of sinking deep into the rich scented soil of France.

There were three men waiting for him: Touraine peasants, who conducted him and his wireless operator to a big manor-house. There they settled them into a lumber-room above a barn.

From this hide-out they could keep the main road under observation and instantly report the movements of the German convoys. Runners came in from the neighbourhood of Nantes with messages and information, which had to be encoded and transmitted. Neither Esclavier nor the wireless operator was allowed to leave the house but all the scents of spring were wafted into their attic.

A merry servant girl, a little animal with lively gestures and rosy cheeks, brought them their meals, sometimes a bunch of flowers, and always some delicious fruit.

One afternoon Philippe put his arms round her; she did not struggle but returned his kisses with clumsy ardour. He arranged to meet her in the barn below; they met. In the heady smell of the hay, with their ears pricked for the slightest noise, like animals lying in wait, they clumsily embraced and were suddenly carried off by the raging torrent of their desire.

From time to time a bat on its darting flight would brush against their intertwined bodies. Philippe could feel the girl's loins tremble beneath his hands and a fresh surge of desire overwhelmed him.

When he climbed back to the lumber-room, limp with fatigue and with the smell of the crushed straw and their love-making fresh in his nostrils, the wireless operator handed him a signal: it was an order for him to liquidate an Abwehr agent, a Belgian passing himself off as a refugee, who had been taken on as an agricultural labourer in a number of farms.

The peasants were chatterboxes; they loved to talk about what they were doing and hinted that their barns were not only used for the purpose of storing hay. Three of them had just been arrested and shot. This they owed to the Belgian in the Abwehr.

The wireless operator was also keen on the servant girl and jealous of Philippe's success. He sniggered:

“All on one day—bloodshed, ecstasy and death!”

The wireless operator was an educated man: a lecturer at Edinburgh University.

The Belgian was working on a neighbouring farm; after supper his employer asked him in for a drink, to give the two other farm-hands time to dig a grave behind the dung-heap.

Philippe waited by the door of the living-room, hugging the wall. He had butterflies in the stomach and his dagger felt slippery in his sweaty palm.

He would never be able to kill the Belgian. How had he managed to get mixed up in this damned business? He should have listened to his father and stayed behind with him, sheltered by his books instead of playing at hired assassins.

The man came stumbling out, impelled by a shove from the owner of the farm. He had his back turned to Philippe, who sprang forward and buried the dagger between his shoulder-blades, as he had been taught during his commando training. But the blow lacked sufficient strength. Philippe had to repeat it several times over while the peasant sat astride the man's waist to prevent him from fighting back. A filthy butchery! They emptied the Belgian's pockets. Orders had been given for his papers to be sent back to London. Then they tipped the body into the hole by the dung-heap.

Philippe went and vomited behind a low wall.

Bloodshed, ecstasy and death . . .

When he got back to the farm he caught the wireless operator in the act of fornicating with the servant girl. In the arms of this ginger-headed runt, she was heaving the same sighs of pleasure as she had with him an hour or two before. At first his feelings were hurt but he resolved to be cynical about it and came to an arrangement with the operator whereby they each made use of the girl in turn.

Philippe Esclavier succeeded on his second mission, which he carried out on his own, but was arrested before he could even embark on his third.

He had been dropped in with Staff-Sergeant Beudin. The Germans, who had got wind of the operation, were waiting for them on the ground. Beudin, who landed in a stream, managed to escape, but Philippe had a pair of handcuffs snapped round his wrists before he was even able to unfasten his parachute harness and draw his revolver.

He was conducted forthwith to the Préfecture at Rennes and brought before the Gestapo. After being tortured, he had been deported to Mathausen camp.

In his barrack-room there was a skinny little Jew without family or country who had sided with the Communists for some sort of protection. That was what had saved him from the gas chamber. His name was Michel Weihl. The Communist organization within the camp had entrusted him with the task of obtaining information on the newcomer.

“He's a Free French agent from London who was dropped in by parachute,” Weihl had reported one evening to the man responsible for that particular barrack-room, a certain Fournier.

“Then he may as well be left on the list of the detachment that's leaving for the salt mines.”

Weihl had warned the newcomer. Esclavier had then gone to Fournier and told him that he was the son of the Front Populaire professor.

Fournier had been staggered. The name of Esclavier was still held in great repute among the left and extreme-left wing. But so as not to show his surprise, he had replied:

“The Socialists are a soft
bourgeois
lot. If you want us to help you, you'll have to join our ranks, the Communists.”

Philippe Esclavier had agreed to this and his name had been taken off the list. But during the whole of his captivity he had continued to serve the Communists who constituted the only efficient hierarchy in the camp.

What they demanded of him sometimes defied all the rules of the accepted moral code. As a Communist, he might have considered himself absolved by reason of the higher interests of the cause for which he was fighting. But he had never been a Communist, he had only cheated in order to survive; all he had been was a dirty bastard.

 • • • 

Boisfeuras's harsh grating voice brought him back to the Muong-Phan basin:

“Day-dreaming, Esclavier? It's not good for a prisoner to take refuge in the past. He loses his grip, goes into a decline. Come on, I'll show you where we hang out.”

Esclavier and the new arrivals reached the huts and sank down on to the bamboo bunks. They heaved a sigh of well-being. It was dry, clean and warm.

Glatigny had propped himself up on his elbows as Esclavier came in.

“Hallo,” he said to himself, “here's that proud brute without his dagger or his long-barrelled Colt . . . and without Raspéguy for once.”

Esclavier had recognized Glatigny. He bowed slightly from the waist with the affected elegance of a man of the world.

“Hallo, it's you, my dear fellow. How's the C.-in-C.? And his daughter, that dear girl Martine?”

Glatigny reflected that some day or another he would have to bash Esclavier's face in, but that this was hardly the moment. He had almost done so one evening in Saigon, when he had prevented Martine, the general's daughter, from going out with the captain. Esclavier would have made her drink too much and maybe taken her to an opium den, then he would have slept with her, and next morning he would have laughed in her face like the big hoodlum he was.

Glatigny fell back on his bunk and Esclavier went and lay down close at hand.

“All the same, I was surprised,” the paratrooper went on, “not to say extremely surprised, that you should have come and joined us.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning that you're not just a G.H.Q. puppet or the duenna of that dear Martine, but also . . .”

“Yes?”

“But also perhaps . . . an officer . . .”

Esclavier sprang to his feet and went to fetch Lescure who was standing stock-still with a vacant expression in his eyes and his arms swinging loosely by his side.

With infinite care, not to say gentleness, Esclavier made him lie down and placed a kitbag under his head.

“He's raving,” he said. “He's lucky; he doesn't realize that the French Army has been beaten by a handful of little yellow dwarfs because of the stupidity and inertia of its leaders. And you yourself must have felt this so strongly, Glatigny, that you abandoned them and came and joined us, ready to commit yourself in our company.”

Lescure sat up with a start and, stretching out his hand, began burbling:

“Here they come, here they come, all green like caterpillars! They're swarming all over the place, they're going to eat us up! Quick, for Christ's sake—some chickens, some ducks . . . And while you're about it, why not some partridges, also some thrushes, some pheasants and some hares. We've got to let fly with everything we've got, to crush the caterpillars which are going to devour the whole wide world!”

Immediately afterwards he fell asleep and his face was once more the face of the dreamy, immature adolescent who liked Mozart and the symbolist poets. And from the depths of his madness there came to him the opening bars of
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik
.

 • • • 

Daylight had transformed the absurd, hostile world of the previous night and the smell of hot rice rose in the still morning air. The prisoners, who now numbered thirty or so, were gathered round a basket of woven bamboo full of snow-white rice steaming gently in the sun. Some tea had been poured out for them in empty bully-beef tins, but this was simply an infusion of guava leaves. A few mouthfuls of rice sufficed to appease their hunger now that their stomachs had shrunk so much.

The
bo-dois
ate the same rice and drank the same tea. They appeared to have forgotten their victory in order to commune together in this elementary rite. The sun rose higher and higher in the pewter-coloured sky, the glare became painful, the heat suffocating. Somewhere in the distance an aircraft dropped a stick of bombs.

“The war's still on,” Pinières remarked with satisfaction.

With his large paw he kept squashing the mosquitoes on his red-tufted chest. He looked at a sentry as though he longed to strangle him; that skinny neck was a temptation . . . The war was still on.

Unconsciously, the
bo-dois
stiffened and resumed their surly attitude; the morning's truce had come to an end.

Lacombe had gone off with a big handful of rice wrapped up in a banana leaf, which he tried to hide. With a nudge of his elbow Esclavier made him drop the rice, which fell in the mud.

“It's my rice, after all,” Lacombe began to whine.

“Try and behave yourself in the future.”

A sentry had angrily advanced on the paratroop captain, lifting his rifle butt to strike him, then he had held back; the slogan of the policy of leniency had deterred him just in time. He now drew the other soldiers' attention to the spilled rice and jabbered furiously. Esclavier gathered he was saying something about colonialism and the people's rice.

Glatigny could not help admiring his comrade for having tried to impose a certain standard of behaviour on the group.

Then he relapsed into his day-dream and strove to remember: he had been a prisoner for two days, so it was now the
8
th of May. What would Claude be doing back in Paris? She loved the smells of the markets and the colour of the fruit. He pictured her stopping for a moment in front of a stall in the Rue de Passy. Marie was with her, because, in the eyes of the old cook, she had never grown up and was still incapable of managing her life by herself. Claude thrust her bottom lip out slightly and in her low distinguished voice politely asked the prices. And Marie buzzed about behind her: