by Norman Lewis
By the time I arrived in Saigon no-one had much idea of what was happening. The situation was ‘fluid’. The French were in control again of the principal towns, but it was anyone’s guess as to what was going on outside their defence posts and stockades. I had the good fortune to be introduced to a young Vietnamese girl, Chu Ti, who had fought in the rebel forces, been wounded in action against the French Foreign Legion and smuggled into Saigon to convalesce. Through her I obtained a better understanding of the political and military situation, as well as a more intimate picture of the life and the ancient culture of the Vietnamese people themselves.
The French expeditionary force was weak in terms of men and matériel but it was led by young officers who volunteered for overseas service out of a sense of adventure. These were inclined to view the whole thing, rather as I did, as a kind of camping holiday on a magnificent scale plus a few moments of excitement which hardly added up to a war. Not the slightest objection was raised to including me in forays into the countryside, and in the military convoys by which communications were maintained between the towns. So far, this was an old-fashioned, easy-going kind of campaign with little resemblance to what was to follow with the arrival of Richard Nixon on the scene and the promise of bombing the country back into the Stone Age.
Where I was concerned, very little danger was involved. Convoys were shot up, but not when I was on them. All these expeditions took place through landscapes of unimaginable beauty, through ranges of unsealed mountains and forests full of splendid animals. The enemy, who in a loose and sporadic fashion held nine-tenths of the country, came and went in the night and was rarely seen. As a result we became blasé, and although it was strictly forbidden to slip away from a convoy and travel on one’s own, I was twice with officers who did this, dashing through enemy villages in mid afternoon under the correct assumption that the Viet-Minh would be taking a nap at this hour.
These were experiences that no-one would ever repeat, for what was about to happen would strip Indo-China of every aspect of the beauty that then entranced its beholders. A police lieutenant gave me a lift to Ban Méthuot, a small town hardly any distance north of Saigon yet separated from the capital by a thousand square miles of unexplored territory, and marked on the latest map issued by the Information Office Région Inconnue. How truly extraordinary it was that in our modern world, a French resident of ‘The Paris of the East’ could get into his car and at the end of less than an hour’s drive find his further passage barred by a forest containing no-one knew what.
The Japanese invaders were the first to penetrate this great arboreal wilderness, through which, ten years before, they had cut a track wide enough to take a single car. In this interval seedling trees, some ten feet tall, had sprung up, spacing themselves with mathematical regularity, the problem now being to avoid them or to hack them down. Over the millennia the jungle had established its patterns and its order. Seen first at a distance, the tall, slender trees with their quite smooth trunks appeared as a plantation, seeming even to have provided themselves with some device eliminating the presence of weeds. They shot up to the roof of the jungle where they put out a parasol of branches trailing ropes of immaculate orchids. At the apex of the parasol it was normal for an enormous hornbill to perch. Hawks, all of the same breed, swayed on the tops of the bamboos growing at the edge of the forest. Once in a while a boar came trotting down the track, kicking up deep purple butterflies as it went. Everything in the jungle had submitted to a discipline. It was our good fortune here to see the world as it would have been tens of thousands of years ago, and our contact with it was all the closer and more intimate after a car-crash forced us to walk a number of miles before reaching an army outpost, where we picked up a lift to our destination.
Our experience of the vanishing tribes inhabiting this region was even more memorable than that of the unspoiled rain forest. Besides buffalo-worshippers there were twenty or thirty versions of the supposedly Malayo-Polynesian people known as the Mois in the mountains and forest of central Vietnam, and Dr Juin, the expert on the subject with whom I spent several days, believed that they had been there almost as long as the trees themselves. There were a number of unusual features in their culture, one being that they succeeded in fitting the population of a substantial village, comfortably and hygienically, into a single long-house, which might be up to 150 yards in length. Juin, who had studied the Mois for thirty years and written a number of learned books on their life-style, claimed that they possessed an unequalled racial memory, recorded in sagas, a study of which he said threw a unique light on man’s existence in pre-historic times. Although such information must have been fascinating, I was more impressed by Juin’s investigations relating to our day, and above all by his contention that although, as in most primitive societies, crimes as we understand them were few, in this case not only did the Mois not commit crimes but conceptions of right and wrong seemed quite incomprehensible to them. In their place—and incidentally governing conduct by the most rigid standards—were the notions of what was expedient and what was inexpedient. The Mois, he said, were concerned with policy rather than justice. Piety had no place in their ritual observations. Contrition was meaningless, and there was no moral condemnation in Moi folklore of those who committed anti-social acts. Who knows how many of them survived Nixon and the saturation bombing of the forests in which they had believed themselves to be safely hidden.
Laos, the little kingdom tucked away in the north, was the goal and ultima Thule of all the escapists of France-Asie, and colonial service Frenchmen, office-bound in Paris, volunteered for overseas duties and pulled all the strings to get themselves posted there. It was supremely famous for the charm and the compliance of its womenfolk, and young civil servants who came out as bachelors frequently found themselves happily married within days of their arrival. The unflinching polygamy of the royal family had filled the streets of the capital, Luana Prabang with princesses, all of them accorded a variety of honours, of which the principal was the right to carry a parasol of five tiers. A Frenchman in the postal service, newly arrived, had married one of these, and a Captain Dupont with whom I travelled through the country and who also possessed a Laotian wife described the circumstances of this wedding. ‘At six o’clock on the day of his arrival’, Dupont said, ‘the postal employee expressed the wish to get married. My wife went out to look for a suitable girl, and was back with one by six-thirty. At seven the bonzes came and performed a marriage ceremony which took half an hour. At seven-thirty we opened a bottle of champagne and drank the health of the bride and bridegroom, and by eight they were already in bed.’ The man in the Postes et Telegraphes took his wife’s rank very seriously, Dupont said, and he had had the army engineers fix up a bulky contraption to hold her parasol when they went out in his jeep which, with the parasol in position, could not exceed ten miles per hour.
Such were the adventures and transformations within reach of those whose good fortune it had been to know, or even settle in, Indo-China before war in the Western style had taken it in its grip. Yet, despite the changes, I, too, was the spectator of an infinitely variable pageant, amazed that so many people anywhere could be so happy, and at the subtlety and refinement of their many pleasures.
Cape did better out of A Dragon Apparent, the book about Indo-China, than expected, and although enthusiasm in my presence was kept under control, Michael Howard’s history of the firm which appeared some years later spoke of it as the ‘highlight of Cape’s spring season’ in 1951 and of ‘tens of thousands of books’ being sold ‘to an eager public’. It was at a time when publishing was going through a bad patch, and Jonathan, obviously eager to repeat the success, subjected me to a stream of propaganda—to which I eventually succumbed—on the necessity of subjecting Burma to the same treatment. And so, pocketing—as before—my £200 travelling expenses, I took the plane to Rangoon.
Travelling in Burma proved to be a much more arduous affair than in Vietnam, where even after the years of
the Japanese occupation and the war with the French, much of the ordinary routine of life had survived. Burma by comparison had remained isolated and mysterious.
U Thant, the great Burmese statesman who eventually became the head of the United Nations, was chief of the Ministry of Information in Rangoon, but with the best possible will in the world there was little information he could provide. I showed him my letter from the Burmese Embassy in London, and he told me that this was the first request he had received for permission to travel in the country, and was not quite sure of the official procedure to be followed. Thereafter I was passed from office to office, handled always with exquisite courtesy, encouraged in my hope and commiserated with upon my many frustrations. Finally, I went to the English Consul who told me that as far as he knew he was the only Englishman to travel up-country since the war, and he made a wry face at the memory of the experience. He believed that this was a case when only a certain exceedingly powerful general could say yes or no.
U Thant gave me his name and the general agreed to see me. He was even more engaging than the many charming people through whose hands I had already passed; an Anglo-Burmese who was remarkably English both in appearance and manner, whom I suspected of having been revamped at Sandhurst where he would have been an outstanding student. In the short time I had been in Burma I had come to see it as a simple country, peopled by men and women with a taste for the simple things of life. Whatever this powerful, two-star general had picked up in England was simple, too; the plain watch, the silver ring, the single campaign ribbon, the grey-greenish kerchief that was not silk. When I was shown in he was in the midst of translating a British military manual into Burmese, and I was directed to a seat with a genial flip of the hand. ‘Hang on, dear boy. Be with you in a sec,’ he said. Then he explained the difficulty he was in. The British manual was far from being the latest and many of the terms had changed. ‘Happen to know anything about this kind of thing? I’m absolutely flummoxed,’ he said. He passed over the manual with passages underlined on the open page. It was an occasion when the endless hours of basic army training spent on the parade ground at Winchester bore modest fruit, and seated at the desk at his side I sorted out some of the difficulties. ‘Wizard,’ he said, when at last it was plain sailing. ‘Damn lucky you happened on the scene. Oh yes—you wanted to see me about something, didn’t you?’
‘I came here to write about the country, and was hoping I could travel round a bit.’
‘And aren’t whoever they are doing the necessary?’
‘They say they can’t. I’ve been in Rangoon for a week and got nowhere. Now they tell me you’re the only one who can say yes.’
He laughed. ‘Well, I suppose I’d better do something about it.’ He rang a bell and an N.C.O. came in.
‘Where would you like to go?’
‘Anywhere I can,’ I said.
‘This man will write out a pass for you and I’ll sign it,’ he said. ‘Damn interesting trip, I imagine. Won’t find it too comfortable, but have a great time. Come and see me when you get back.’
In the war in Vietnam, and consequently in travelling through that country, a certain degree of order had developed by the time of my arrival. Stability and routine of a kind had taken shape. It was possible, for example, to travel by jeep without undue peril between Saigon and Pnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, to put up there in an excellent hotel, and eat an acceptable hybrid form of Frenchified oriental food. Similarly, by travelling in a military convoy, Vientiane, the principal town of Laos, could be reached, and there, too, comfortable lodgings found. Fighting went on in many areas, but conveniently for a visitor like myself, this was usually called off at sundown, and on more than one occasion I travelled at night through zones accepted as in Viet-Minh control, without ever being troubled by warlike incidents.
Burma was different. In Vietnam the established authority was challenged by a united opposition with a single ideology. In Burma the government was opposed by two separate bands of communists, two versions of a heterogeneous organisation called the PVO (People’s Voluntary Organisation) in which many bandits had enrolled, 10,000 or so Seventh Day Adventist Karens, and a small army of mutinous military police. National Security was therefore perfunctory. In Indo-China the social life of a small town remained remarkably untroubled. The Chinese always ran a gambling saloon. It was quite normal for friends to finish a convivial evening in a fumerie where they might smoke two or three pipes of opium together. The town could well also possess a cinema—even a little theatre staging oriental ballets of great charm and interest. Burma had nothing to offer of this kind. There were no hotels outside Rangoon, no restaurants, no places of entertainment. In Mandalay, the old capital, I slept in the projection room over the cinema, my slumber occasionally disturbed by the sounds of fighting at the end of the main street a mile away.
Travelling itself provided occasional hazards, and in all I covered by one or another means of transport nearly two thousand miles of the country. The lorry, for example, preceding mine up the Lashio road in the northern Shan States, was held up, sacked and burnt. This had taken place several hours before we passed through the area, nevertheless we felt it reasonable to congratulate ourselves on a lucky escape. Such was the atmosphere of intimidation in the small town of Mu-Sé, where I found myself a few days later, that the police there decided to take me into protective custody. The language problem made it hard for me to understand what was happening but a heavily armed policeman followed me wherever I went and took me back at night to sleep in the police station. Compassion came into this. My exceedingly tough-looking policeman was sorry for my predicament, and tried continually to force food upon me, some of which, including a mess of mashed-up lizards, I found alarming. A merchant with a few words of English explained what this was about. ‘You very weak man. He say you must eat,’ he told me. I got out of this by explaining through the merchant that I was engaged in a religious fast. This was accepted unquestioningly by my solicitous captor, but as I could not eat I must drink more, he said, compelling me at frequent intervals thereafter to drink camomile tea, glasses of it being repeatedly thrust into my hands accompanied by remarkably sweet smiles.
Even on the river trip down the Irrawaddy that followed, still regarded by some of my Burmese fellow travellers as a ‘pleasure-making excursion’, the sounds of conflict were not far away, once forcing me to take refuge from ineffective rifle-fire behind a stockade of bales of malodorous fish. Such inconveniences were minor indeed compared to my journey in the 6.15 am train from Mandalay to Rangoon, celebrated in Burma as the only train which never arrived at its destination. By the time I took my seat in a remodelled cattle-truck and our odyssey began, forty-five bridges had been blown up in this section of line—five in a single night. During my own journey the train was put out of action by simultaneous explosions set off both in front of it, and in its rear. At Yamethin, where we were taken to spend an uncomfortable night, White Flag Communists were besieging the outskirts of the town. Tatkon, next stop, was threatened by a bandit, famous throughout the country as a reincarnation of a cow, subsisting largely on grass.
Apart from the matter of security, the more I saw of Burma the greater even its physical difference from its neighbour Indo-China appeared to be. Indo-China remained quilted by millions of trees. This affected every aspect of life there. The lush, green estuarial lowlands were veined with a network of small rivers. Everywhere there were sparkling lakes with their lively population of birds. Indo-China drew the stranger on continually to new pastoral delights revealed behind forest screens, to views of mountains the mapmakers had overlooked, to ravines and cascades advertised suddenly by the thunder of concealed water, to vast deserted caves with old Buddha images left in corners and recesses by people who had long-since vanished from the earth.
The Burmese scene everywhere could be taken in at a glance: a burnished plain without atmosphere or mystery or surprise: everlasting sunshine in a cloudless sky, temple bells tinkling i
n a hot wind and with it the grunting of crows in search of carrion. The religious philosophy of the country proclaimed the refinement of humanity through successive reincarnations into a kind of celestial non-existence, and the belief had grown that the building of pagodas was part of the means by which the desired conclusion could be brought to pass. Thus over the centuries, pagodas went up by the million, and all the trees went into the making of bricks. For the outsider the means had become detached from the end, and he was hard put to understand what the building of religious edifices had to do with the evolution of the soul. Unlike the Vietnamese, the Burmese have never freed their religion from the magical procedures of the past, and one of the results is an apparent indifference to social betterment. In 1952 there were forty-two thousand registered lepers in Burma. Nothing was done for them, probably because at the bottom of the Burmese mind the conviction still lay that in this cruel state they were righting an adverse balance of merit accumulated in previous existences.
A British takeover of the country in the last century did nothing to help. A belief in the superiority of their own culture enabled the Vietnamese to remain relatively aloof from their French masters. The Burmese snuggled up to the English and aped their ways, sometimes with considerable success, as in the case of the general who made my travels possible. There were many more like him in the middle class. Under a misapprehension regarding my marital status, a leading citizen of Mandalay suggested that I might consider marrying his exceedingly beautiful sister, but only on condition that I became a Baptist. Christian nonconformism was as fashionable at that time as were Christian names: my friend’s name was Henry and his sister’s Isobel.
