Ways of Escape

by Graham Greene

  This was the work of the Chinese commandos, but you could not measure the enemy’s strength only by the fighters who emerged from the jungle to shoot up a car or a patrol, to murder a planter, to derail a train. Their strength was estimated at between three and five thousand. In this dense country one numbered casualties on the fingers of the hand – the death of ten Communists was a major victory – and they had no difficulty in acquiring new members. Their real strength lay in the unarmed combatants of the ground organisation known as the Min Yuen. Here we are on speculative ground, but it is unlikely that this organisation ran into less than six figures. Its main responsibility was supply, but it was employed also for intelligence, propaganda and liaison work, and it was responsible – perhaps that was its chief success – for the suspicion which rose everywhere like the mist from the saturated Malayan soil. Don’t mention on the telephone what time you are leaving – the operator may be a member of the Min Yuen. Don’t talk about your movements in front of your waiter or your room boy. Do you remember that young resettlement officer they killed last month? He told his Chinese taxi girl where he was going next day.

  In Malaya the real successes might never be recognised, and defeat was in the minds of men. You could not win the Malayan war by military force: with the jungle against you, you could only contain the enemy until other measures succeeded.

  The most important weapon was starvation. No one could subsist on the jungle, and any large cultivated area would be spotted sooner or later by air reconnaissance. The main sources of the terrorists’ food supply were the Chinese squatter areas – patches of unauthorised cultivation on the edge of the jungle. The squatters were not necessarily Communist sympathisers, though it was hard to see what they could possibly lose by a Communist victory. But who of us would refuse food to a terrorist at the point of a bayonet? These squatters were being brought together into new villages which could be surrounded with wire and properly policed. The old huts were burned. The squatters were provided with building materials or houses, a small sum of money and a legal tenure of their new land.

  It was a formidable task. There were about four hundred thousand squatters to settle; there was a shortage of wire and transport; there was a shortage of police for guarding the settlement and of proper arms for the police. There was sometimes a defeatism on the part of European officers. A Communist military patrol on one occasion passed unchallenged through a wired-in village, both gates wide open, at two in the morning. The European officer, when this was reported to him, shrugged the affair off. What difference did it make? You couldn’t keep the Communists out with a bit of wire. This was defeat in the mind.

  None the less the resettlement was a turn of the screw of discomfort. I sometimes felt a measure of compassion for these men, struck from the air, hunted however ineffectively by patrols, bled by the leeches, with insufficient food and medicines, their success measured in a resettlement officer or a planter killed, a bus burned, a patrol ambushed and a Sten gun captured. The nights are very long in the jungle. By six it is dark except for the shine of phosphorescent leaves: by midnight the rain will be falling down on yesterday’s soaked leaves, and long after the storm is over the rain will continue to drip from the reservoirs of foliage. There will be nearly twelve hours of virtual darkness, and even Marx must have palled.

  2

  It was quite by chance that I fell in love with Indo-China; nothing was further from my thoughts on my first visit than that I would one day set a novel there. An old friend of the war years, Trevor Wilson, was then our Consul in Hanoi, where another war had long been in progress almost ignored by the British Press, which took their reports from Reuter’s, or in the case of The Times from Paris. So after Malaya I stopped off in Vietnam to see my friend, without any idea that all my winters would be spent there for several years to come. I had found Malaya, apart from the Emergency, as dull as a beautiful woman can sometimes be. People used to say to me, ‘You should have seen this country in peace-time,’ and I wanted to reply, ‘But all that interests me here is your war.’ Peace-time Malaya would surely have been no more interesting than a round of British clubs, of pink gins, of little scandals waiting for a Maugham to record them.

  But in Indo-China I drained a magic potion, a loving-cup which I have shared since with many retired colons and officers of the Foreign Legion whose eyes light up at the mention of Saigon and Hanoi.

  The spell was first cast, I think, by the tall elegant girls in white silk trousers, by the pewter evening light on flat paddy fields, where the water-buffaloes trudged fetlock-deep with a slow primeval gait, by the French perfumeries in the rue Catina, the Chinese gambling houses in Cholon, above all by that feeling of exhilaration which a measure of danger brings to the visitor with a return ticket: the restaurants wired against grenades, the watch-towers striding along the roads of the southern delta with their odd reminders of insecurity: ‘Si vous êtes arrêtés ou attaqués en cours de route, prévenez le chef du premier poste important.’ (This brought to mind the notice in the cool style typical of British Railways hung in the compartments of the little train that ambled along the track from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur.)

  I stayed little more than a fortnight on that occasion, and I crammed to the limit ‘the unforgiving minute’. Hanoi is as far from Saigon as London is from Rome, but I succeeded, besides staying in those cities, in paying the first of many visits in the southern delta to the strange religious sect, the Caodaists, whose saints include Victor Hugo, Christ, Buddha and Sun Yat-sen, and to the little medieval state established in the marshes of Bentre by the young half-caste, Colonel Leroy, who read de Tocqueville and struck, with the suddenness and cruelty of a tiger, at the Communists in his region. Not so many years ago he had been a small child riding a water-buffalo in the rice fields – now he was all but a king. I was glad years later to write a preface to his autobiography in which he did not attempt to hide the tiger’s face behind the smile – a rather small return since he had probably saved my life. It was in 1955, when the French were evacuating the north and I was waiting in Saigon for permission to enter Hanoi, now in the hands of the Viet Minh. To pass the time I thought I would call on the ‘general’ of one of the original sects who fought their private wars in the south. I received a telephone call from Leroy asking me to come to him at his Saigon office. A Frenchman was there whom he introduced as the public relations officer of ‘the general’. The general, he told me, had received my message and would be glad to see me at his headquarters for lunch. However it would be better if I did not accept. The general had called for his files and he had found that three years before I had described him in Paris-Match as a former trishaw driver. This was libellous. He had never been a trishaw driver. He had been a bus conductor. Knowing that I was a friend of Leroy, the Frenchman had come to warn me that the general, though he would show me every courtesy at lunch, would make sure that an accident happened to me on the road back to Saigon.

  I was anxious on this first visit in 1951 to pay a visit to Phat Diem, one of the two Prince Bishoprics of the north (the other, Bui-Chu, I knew some years later, and there I would have reached the end of my road if a mine had not been detected buried in the track at a point my jeep was about to pass). The two bishops, like the Caodaist Pope, were allies rather than subjects of the French, and maintained small private armies. On this first occasion I was still basking in the favour of General de Lattre and he had put a little Morane plane at my disposal. He had expected me to fly round in it to his own outposts on what were mistakenly called the lines of Hanoi: instead I went with Trevor Wilson to look at the little army of Phat Diem’s bishop. On the way back the plane was shot at well within the fictional lines and I made the mistake of mentioning the incident to the general at dinner that night. He was not amused. That evening our relations began to cool – an inconvenience to me, but a disaster to my friend.

  The change was not immediately noticeable. I was the general’s honoured guest in Hanoi; he presented me with a shou
lder-flash of the First French Army, which he commanded at the fall of Strasbourg, and he brought me with him to a reunion of his old comrades. A few months before, all French families had been evacuated from Hanoi, the fall of the city was regarded as imminent, there was the demoralisation of defeat. De Lattre had changed all that. In those days the general was able to cast a spell; I heard him tell his old comrades, ‘I am returning now to Saigon, but I am leaving with you my wife as a symbol that France will never, never leave Hanoi.’ It was the high summer of his success. It was impossible to imagine then that in little more than a year he would be dying of cancer in Paris, in the sadness of defeat, and that in less than four years I would be taking tea with President Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi.

  I went back to England determined to return, but still unaware that I would find the subject for a novel in Vietnam. Life had been satisfied with my article on Malaya, so they agreed to send me to Vietnam the next autumn (they did not like the article I wrote there, but they generously allowed me to publish it in Paris-Match: I suspect my ambivalent attitude to the war was already perceptible – my admiration for the French army, my admiration for their enemies, and my doubt of any final value in the war).

  When I returned some eight months later in October 1951, the changes were startling. De Lattre had lost his only son, ambushed with a Vietnamese battalion in the region of Phat Diem, and he was an altered man. His rhetoric of hope was wearing painfully thin; his colonels were openly critical of him, even to a foreigner. They were tired of his continual references to his own sacrifice – others had sacrificed their sons too and had not been able to fly the bodies home for a Paris funeral. The general had always suffered from a certain anglophobia and, in spite of the deep piety of his wife, he was highly suspicious of Catholicism. Now in a strange sick manner he linked the death of his son with my visit to Phat Diem and the fact that both Trevor Wilson and I were Catholics. He had shifted on to us, in his poor guilt-ridden mind, the responsibility for his son’s death (he had sent his son to join a Vietnamese battalion to break up his relationship with a Vietnamese girl who was a former mistress of the Emperor). He reported to the Foreign Office that Trevor Wilson, who had been decorated for his services to France during the war, was no longer persona grata. Trevor was thrown out of Indo-China, and the Foreign Office lost a remarkable Consul and the French a great friend of their country. He was already gone when I returned to Hanoi, but he was allowed to come back for two weeks to pack up his effects.

  In the meanwhile I found myself under the supervision of the Sûreté, in the person of a gentleman whom I used to call Monsieur Dupont. Alas, poor Monsieur Dupont, what anxieties the two of us caused him when we were again temporarily together. We used to meet him at night in the Café de la Paix in Hanoi and tell him our movements and plans for the morrow and drink vermouth-cassis and play quatre cent vingt-et-un at which Trevor Wilson consistently threw the winning dice.

  Monsieur Dupont had a rather weak head. He would return home to his wife always a little the worse for wear, so that domestic trouble was added to his official trouble, for his wife refused to believe that his light and innocent tippling was all in the cause of duty. On one sad occasion he accompanied Trevor Wilson to Haiphong where Trevor wanted to say goodbye to his friends. Trevor had a passion for unfamiliar bath-houses and he stopped Monsieur Dupont’s official car at the beginning of town, attracted by a board advertising a Chinese bath. Monsieur Dupont took the cubicle next to his, as he was bound in duty to do, but a Chinese bath includes an intimate Chinese massage and Monsieur Dupont’s heart was too weak to stand it. He passed out and had to be revived by a lot of whisky to which he was equally unaccustomed. The next morning his gueule de bois had to be cured with a dose of Fernet Branca, which he had never drunk before. (I am sure he considered that infernal spirit was part of the spy’s plot.) To add to all these worries he had lost track of me. I was in forbidden Phat Diem with the martial bishop.

  I spread the story that I was writing a roman policier about Indo-China and the title I had chosen in French was Violà, Monsieur Dupont, and so of an evening, sitting on the pavement, outside the Café de la Paix, while the troops passed, and the lovely drifting Tonkinoises, I would watch the approach of nervous dutiful Monsieur Dupont, his eyes lifted towards mine like a dog’s, waiting for the next ‘tease’.

  The surveillance had started before Trevor’s arrival. A few days after I reached Hanoi, Monsieur Dupont came to call. He brought with him two of my books in French editions, and I signed them and drank a glass of lemonade with him. The next day Monsieur Dupont arrived with another book—a dédicace to his wife was required—and the next day he brought yet others, for his friends. He had cleared every bookshop in Hanoi, as I found when I tried to get a few copies to give away myself. After that we dropped the pretence and arranged the evening meetings, but it was odd how often in my daily strolls Monsieur Dupont would crop up: in a café where I was drinking, in a shop where I was buying some soap, in a long dull street along which I was walking only for the sake of exercise. We became genuinely fond of each other, and after Trevor’s departure he began to feel for me a paternal responsibility. I was smoking then a little opium two or three times a week, and he would plead with me earnestly that this night at least I would go home quietly to bed after the game of quatre cent vingt-et-un.

  The crisis of suspicion had come when an unsigned telegram was delivered to me in which Trevor announced his imminent arrival from Paris. It was his eccentric economy never unnecessarily to sign a telegram, but obviously to the censorship this was a deliberate attempt to deceive. I guessed matters were coming to a head when I received, through the head of the Sûreté in Vietnam, a command to have lunch with the general. De Lattre was leaving for Paris the next day.

  At lunch nothing was said. The guest of honour was a Swiss representative of the Red Cross who was trying to arrange an exchange of prisoners; I sat next to Mr Tam, the head of the Vietnamese police, a man with a reputation for savagery since he had lost a wife, a son and a finger by enemy action. When lunch was over (it was the first occasion when I had seen de Lattre quiet at his own table) the general came to me, ‘Ah, le pauvre Graham Greene,’ he had been unable to speak to me, I must come to his cocktail party that evening, and stay on to dinner. So back I went.

  The cocktail party went on and on – it was de Lattre’s farewell to Hanoi: there were rumours he would not return, and that the recent empty victory of Hoa Binh was the fairing he had expensively bought to take back with him to Paris. At last everybody left except the generals and colonels who were staying for dinner. There was some singing by a soldiers’ choir, and General de Lattre sat on the sofa holding his wife’s hand. If I had known he was a dying man perhaps I would have perceived in him again the hero I had met a year before. Now he seemed only the general whose speeches were too long, whose magic had faded, whom his colonels criticised – a dying flame looks as if it had never been anything but smoke.

  At ten o’clock the singing stopped and the general turned to me. ‘And now, Graham Greene, why are you here?’ His broken English had an abrupt boastful quality he did not intend. I said, ‘I have told you already. I am writing an article for Life.’

  ‘I understand,’ he said, while the two-starred generals, Linarés and Salan and Cogny, sat on the edges of their chairs pretending not to listen, ‘that you are a member of the British Secret Service.’

  I laughed.

  ‘I understand you were in the Intelligence Service in the war. For three years.’

  I explained to the general that under National Service we did not pick our job – nor continue it when the war was over.

  ‘I understand that no one ever leaves the British Secret Service.’

  ‘That may be true of the Deuxième Bureau,’ I said, ‘it is not true with us.’ A servant announced dinner.

  I sat next to the general and we talked polite small talk. Madame de Lattre eyed me sternly – I had disturbed the peace of a sick man whom she
loved, on his last night in Hanoi, the scene of his triumph and his failure. Even though I was unaware how sick he was, I felt a meanness in myself. He deserved better company.

  When we rose from the table I asked if I might see him alone. He told me to stay till the others had gone and at half past one in the morning he sent for me to his study. Madame de Lattre bade me a cold goodnight. Hadn’t her husband enough to worry about?

  I had prepared in my mind what I thought was a clear narration, which included even the amount I was being paid by Life for my article. He heard me out and then expressed his satisfaction with some grandiloquence (but that was his way). ‘I have told the Sûreté, Graham Greene is my friend. I do not believe what you say about him. Then they come again and tell me you have been here or there and I say, I do not believe. Graham Greene is my friend. And then again they come …’ He shook hands warmly, saying how glad he was to know that all was a mistake, but next day, before he left for Paris, his misgivings returned. I had received yet another dubious telegram, again unsigned – this time from my literary agent in Paris. ‘Your friend will arrive on Thursday. Dorothy under instruction from Philip.’

  The last sentence referred to my friend, Dorothy Glover, the illustrator of my children’s books, who had decided to become a Catholic, and Philip was Father Philip Caraman, the well-known London Jesuit, but it was obvious what the Sûreté made of it. ‘I knew he was a spy,’ de Lattre told one of his staff, before boarding his plane. ‘Why should anyone come to this war for four hundred dollars?’ I had forgotten how uncertain his English was – he had mislaid a zero.

  I never wrote Voilà, Monsieur Dupont; instead the moment for The Quiet American struck as I was driving back to Saigon after spending the night with Colonel Leroy. Less than a year ago, when we had toured together his watery kingdom, it was in an armoured boat with guns trained on the bank, but now as night fell we moved gently along the rivers in an unarmed barge furnished, not with guns, but with gramophones and dancing girls. He had built at Bentre a lake with a pagoda in imitation of the one at Hanoi, the night was full of strange cries from the zoo he had started for his people, and we dined on the island in the lake and the colonel poured brandy down the throats of the girls to make the party go and played the Harry Lime theme of The Third Man on a gramophone in my honour.