by Norman Lewis
‘Any drawbacks at all?’ I asked, and he said that he couldn’t think of any but the diabolical weather. ‘Think to bring a raincoat?’ he asked. I said I hadn’t, and he said, ‘Pity. You’ll need one and they can’t be had for love nor money.’
I looked down through the window at the most brilliant bird’s-eye-view I’d ever seen. A huge swamp, shining green lamp-light up at us, turned away with mechanical smoothness, and was invaded by a purple segment of sea. A chessboard of fields drifted into sight with a minute ivory pagoda like a chess-piece waiting to be moved.
‘Where are we?’ I asked.
‘We just passed Qui Nhon,’ the captain said. ‘That’s the lake. An hour and a half to go.’
‘Do you have any troops down there?’
‘No, it’s all Viet-held territory.’
‘Is there a forecast for Hanoi?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It’s raining, and that’s the way it’s going to be.’
His prediction was correct. It was raining in Hanoi and exceedingly cold. Bao Dai’s girlfriend was whisked away out of sight in an American car while the rest of us waited in the minibus for confirmation that the road into town was safe. This kind of rain, which would go on for a couple of months, was called here le crachin; it was something between mist and drizzle which formed and dissolved shapes with a curious animation. Awaiting permission to leave, I noticed the way the crachin had filtered the colours from this landscape, leaving nothing but greys and a depressed bluish green. There were paddies nearby in which the peasants were transplanting rice-seedlings. They wore over-size conical hats and their enormously long, tapering thighs protruded from straw cloaks of the kind illustrated in Japanese woodcuts. The owner of each paddy was seated in a raised chair under a huge, black umbrella. I tried to photograph this scene, and stood for some minutes inhaling the soft feathers of rain and trying to clear the lens before giving it up. At one moment the hammering of distant machine-gun fire was to be heard. I drew the driver’s attention to it. He said, ‘It’s nothing. It happens all the time. You get used to it.’
The two soldiers who were to escort us now emerged from the airport building, climbed aboard, and we took off and were shortly on the outskirts of Hanoi, appearing largely as an assortment of palm-thatched shacks among boulders and pines. Closer to the centre the fussy, over-elaborate houses of the rich began to appear with pillars decorated with auspicious lettering and flattened dragons on the rooftops. Next came the commercial centre plastered with advertisements for cough-mixture and Coca-Cola. There was a last stop for checking of passes, then I was dropped off at the Camp de la Presse. This was a back-street mansion in French, end-of-century style, bulky and a little severe, with an unnecessarily wide flight of steps up to an entrance imposingly guarded by a pair of gryphons, both seriously vandalised.
A Monsieur Jouin, head of the local information service, awaited me under a portrait of General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny who had recently announced that France would be in Vietnam for a thousand years. He had been at the London embassy, spoke English excellently and took a pride, as I was to learn, in a habit of understatement he claimed to have picked up from the English. Welcoming me to Hanoi he described it as a nice little provincial capital where you could put your feet up and relax, although I could not help noticing the workmen engaged in fitting wire-mesh screens to the windows to keep out the bombs.
Jouin hoped I’d join him for lunch and, remembering the chef from Perigord, I willingly accepted. There was a strong smell of cooking about the place, of a kind I could not associate with French cuisine. This was soon explained when Jouin asked me if I had any likes or dislikes in the matter of food. ‘I ask’, he said, ‘because buffalo tends to feature on the menu up here. It’s an exotic experience for people straight out from Paris, but as it’s the only meat it can get monotonous. We’re lucky in having a cook who’s full of ideas.’
‘I hear he’s from Perigord.’
Jouin spread his hands in sorrow. ‘Ah, that one has left us. This man’s Chinese but he was quite a find. The last chap left his cookbook behind and he’s working his way through it. Today it’s tripes à la mode de Caen, except that buffalo will stand in for cow. If you’re feeling adventurous the alternative is duck’s feet cured in fragrant pine-smoke with sour sauce. Well anyway, see you in a half hour.’
Jean-Paul Baudouin was present at the lunch. He was a journalist on the staff of Le Monde, a man in his fifties, doyen of the French press corps in Indo-China, whose fame had reached my ears, although we had never met. At this moment Baudouin struck me as not entirely happy with his lot. Having allowed himself to be served sparingly with the main course, he carefully pushed the buffalo tripe aside with his fork and took a cautious mouthful of the riz Tonkinois, which from his expression failed also to awaken enthusiasm. Ill-advisedly, Jouin now began a fulsome account of his journalistic achievements and consequent fame both in Hanoi and Paris, to which Baudouin listened gloomily, eyes averted. Until now our conversations had been conducted in English, but as soon as Jouin came to the end of his speech Baudouin dismissed it with a flip of his hand, adding in French, ‘Ne dites pas des bêtises’. He then turned to me. ‘I’ve been sent here at great cost to my newspaper’, he said, ‘and inconvenience to myself. But what am I doing? The answer is, nothing whatever. This is the Siberia of Indo-China to which unsatisfactory war correspondents, or those raising their voices against the absurd policies of our government, can expect to be banished.’
Jouin seemed to enjoy the outburst. ‘Pay no attention to him,’ he said to me. ‘He’s upset because we refuse to allow him to get himself killed by taking part in an operation. Isn’t that so, Baudouin?’ The correspondent of Le Monde, who had lifted his glass, sniffed it and put it down again. ‘Where does this wine come from?’ he asked.
‘The forces’ usual suppliers in Saigon. Why?’
‘Tell them to go somewhere else,’ Baudouin said.
‘Well, as it happens, I’ve good news for you,’ Jouin told him. ‘After all these unfortunate delays, permission has come through for a little excursion tomorrow. The army will be taking you both to Can Son.’
‘And what does Can Son have to offer?’
‘An outstanding achievement. Something that’s been kept under wraps until now. You two gentlemen are going to be the first to have the honour of being taken up there. We’ve built a new-style voluntary co-operation village where our friends among the tribal peoples will live in peace and security. The name it’s been given is Vietnamese for Harmonious Presence. It’s all part of General de Lattre’s “Operation Turning the Tide”.’
‘You are victims of your own propaganda,’ Baudouin said. ‘As for the tide turning, what you don’t understand is that it’s already done that, but you can’t see it.’
A Captain Doustin picked us up in a command car next morning at dawn and we drove through streets where the Tet lamps of the night were still burning feebly behind window panes blurred with rain. ‘My problem’, said Doustin, ‘was that after three months of the jungle all that interested me was to find a quiet place. You’re up against people who never let up. You can’t imagine the luxury of sleeping in a bed with a mattress once more.’
‘Let’s hope you don’t find this too quiet,’ Baudouin said. ‘It’s been too quiet for me. I need a battle with plenty of blood for the customers, V.M. atrocities and a story about one of our heroic generals.’ He switched on a light to study a map. ‘Any idea where we’re going?’
‘No more than that it’s up in the mountains. There should be a guide waiting for us at Thai Nguyen. Four hours, more or less, from here. Great scenery, they say. Harmonious Presence is quite a name for a village. I can quite understand you’ve seen enough of harmonious presences, but it might amuse the readers.’
‘And what do we do when we get there?’ Baudouin asked.
‘Sorry to spring this one on you, but there’s a little ceremony to perform. A loyalty and medals, as they say in the trade. Th
e Chef de Canton reads out an address, we pin medals on the notables, they sacrifice a cockerel or two, then we eat.’
‘Oh God,’ Baudouin said.
‘Sorry, the General absolutely insists we eat whatever they offer us. It could be absolutely anything from a length of snake’s gut to a bat, but whatever it is, down it goes. These people are important to us and we can’t risk offending them.’
‘I offend the bastards all the time and shall continue to do so,’ Baudouin said.
We bumped along over the rutted track leading to Thai Nguyen and the mountains and the dawn opened a pallid fan behind the crachin, and played tricks with snatches of landscape seen through the rain. Clear vignettes came and went in the watery opacity, peasants in their straw capes, yoked buffaloes, the ruin of a pagoda, a weeping tree. ‘Why aren’t they observing the Tet here?’ Doustin wanted to know, and Baudouin told him, ‘They’re tribals. They don’t come into it.’
We came over a low hill and Thai Nguyen grew suddenly out of the earth like a grey mass of toadstools, and when we went down into the town the people, men, women and children, were out in the streets gambling under umbrellas of all sizes and shapes on the third day of the Tet. The guide had not shown up at the checkpoint, and as the rain had slackened off we found our way down to the market place to drink tea, and in doing so discovered a most extraordinary collection of painted clay figurines specially made for the Tet, and displayed on a large number of stalls. These depicted in charming and vivacious forms every aspect of village life in Vietnam. A man scraped the mud off a buffalo, boys flew kites, families picnicked, watched acrobats or went for rides in boats, a doctor looked into a woman’s eyes, an old man led a duck on a lead, a little girl held up a bird, lovers admired a flowering tree. These scenes, so lovingly recreated, were the enjoyments of an ancient civilisation that has hardly been bettered. We collected as many as we could carry, exchanged greetings with a group of smiling patriarchs who had staged a chrysanthemum show, then went back to the checkpoint, where there was still no sign of the guide, so we set off again.
Twenty miles north of Thai Nguyen the calcaires began—a sudden visual impact that took me by surprise. We are accustomed to a gradual approach to mountains through foothills, a cooling in the climate, and vegetation of a less restrained kind. Here it was a confrontation without warning. Starting from a base well below Thai Nguyen, the Vietnamese had pushed their light orderly tessellation of fields for fifty miles up a wide valley, then abruptly the advance came to an end against a great blue-grey limestone wall topped by pinnacles like gnarled old fingers scratching at the sky. With this every aspect of the plains was instantly cancelled. Gone were the buffalo and the peasants groping in mud under their big coolie hats. Mountain people lived hard, frugal lives among these peaks that continued for a thousand square miles across southern China as far as Kunming. One of the Chinese emperors, carried here some centuries back in search of exotic adventures, fell in love with the exaggerated landscape and ordered court painters to get more crags and mist into their work. This they did, inventing a classical style which has become so familiar. Here, an hour by slow road from Thai Nguyen, where a two-thousand-foot cliff with great trees growing from the cracks in the sheer face appeared to bar the way, we were seeing China (as this had once been) as the emperor had seen it.
It was slow going from now on along the track avoiding colossal limestone obstacles, and the Vietnamese who persisted in pushing on with their buffaloes to the north did so by circuitous routes and by eventually isolating themselves from the main body of their countrymen behind the towering ramparts of the calcaires. The mountains themselves had always been in the possession of Thai and Mon tribes, both closely related to the Siamese. At the Camp de la Presse I had spent an interesting hour with two cartographers from Paris who presented me with a magnificent ethnological map they had made of the area. It showed Thais and Mons dotted through the mountains, and most numerous at Can Son. Here we were to see the recent Vietnamese immigrants installed under the army’s surveillance in their voluntary co-operation village of Harmonious Presence.
It was approaching midday by the time we were through the last of the calcaires, with a view over a wide plateau and the swamp to be converted by the Vietnamese settlers into paddy-fields. All these pockets of humanity scattered through the mountains had always managed to get along with each other well enough in the past. One of the cartographers told me, ‘Somehow or other we managed to shake things up so things aren’t so good as they were.’ The first evidence that all was not well was the appearance suddenly by the roadside of a buffalo lying in a pool of fresh blood.
Round the bend the Harmonious Presence came into view built on high ground over the swamp. A fenced enclosure of densely packed roofs and narrow lanes was allied at a lower level with an assembly ground for markets and the occasional ceremony of the kind we had come to take part in. It was here that the notables of the village should have awaited us, flying kites painted with messages of welcome. Not a villager was to be seen, instead several French soldiers came through the fence and scrambled down the slope.
Doustin pulled up. We got down from the car and went to meet them. More soldiers appeared from the wings of this scene; parachutists who carried themselves with a certain weariness, slouching almost under the weight of their equipment. Without a word being exchanged between us I knew that something was wrong. A sergeant-chef detached himself from the rest, and there was something in his posture and that of his parachutists and also in their silence that reminded me of the strange sequel of calm, the aftermath of near-sleep, I had known to follow violent events. The sergeant-chef and Doustin drew aside, they talked together without emphasis, shrugged shoulders, shook heads. Doustin came back. ‘There was an infiltration and an attack,’ he said, in a resigned and lifeless fashion. ‘It was quite a battle.’
Baudouin gestured to the sergeant-chef. ‘What happened to all the people? The villagers?’ he asked. ‘Where are they?’
I could see that the sergeant-chef resented the bitter, ironical manner, and he chose his words as if addressing an officer. ‘They’ve been conducted to safety,’ he said. ‘The Viets have sustained heavy casualties.’ He led the way to a shallow moat separating the assembly ground from the village itself. This was still dry, and lying at the bottom we saw a long row of bodies, some showing dreadful injuries. They exhibited a good deal of physical similarity of the kind often imposed by violent death. Most of the victims lay on their backs, eyes open and lips drawn back in a contorted half-smile through gritted teeth. One man had lost the top of his skull, and his brains lay nearby in an intact membranous sac, varnished smoothly with blood.
‘Why are they not in uniform?’ Baudouin asked.
‘With respect, half of them never are,’ the sergeant-chef said. ‘Prisoners tell us there aren’t uniforms to go round.’
Baudouin bent down and with some effort rolled a dead man over on his back. ‘The hands are tied,’ he said.
‘We carried out executions as ordered.’
‘With hand-grenades. You threw grenades at them?’
‘We completed the orders given. I refer to Major Leblanc who was in command of the operation.’
Baudouin turned to me. ‘As an unprejudiced observer,’ he said, ‘I am asking your opinion. Are you ready to swallow any of this? Do you believe these stories of infiltrations? Why have all the people of this village been suddenly spirited away? Who are these people with their hands tied before they are killed?’
‘Could it have been the Viet-Minh’s punishment of collaborators?’ I suggested.
‘Then what were the paras doing here?’ He rounded on Doustin. ‘I demand to see the commanding officer.’
Doustin shook his head. ‘I suspect you will be unable to do so.’
‘At any rate I can count on your backing?’
‘To a limited extent,’ Doustin told him. ‘I was sent here to conduct a ceremony which turned out to be impossible. I shall report the facts
as you and I saw them, but I am absolutely debarred from comment. Nor could I allow myself to be involved in an on-the-spot investigation. This would be seen as a breach of discipline.’
‘Of course,’ Baudouin said. ‘I understand you cannot compromise yourself.’ He turned his head away, ‘In that case may we return?’
Doustin went ahead to the car and climbed in without looking back. Baudouin and I followed. ‘These things are always fixed up for their New Year,’ he said. ‘The hope is to hit them while they’re playing cards. Sometimes it still works, but not so often these days. They’re learning fast.’ He sighed. ‘Well so much for the third day of the Tet with one more to go. Let’s see what tomorrow brings forth.’ There had been some talk on the previous day of a visit to the ‘front, and when Captain Doustin picked me up at the Camp de la Presse he was wearing a Colt automatic, as was the driver who came along on this occasion The front was thirty kilometres along the road to Hoa Binh on which we should be travelling, and the order was that all troops would be armed. Exactly as promised, at the thirty-kilometre milestone war awaited us. Suddenly faces were harder, and all the military personnel in sight were moving in a brisker and more resolute fashion. Orders were given in resounding tones. Foreign Legionnaires in white kepis and bearded like fierce Santa Clauses advertised the proximity of real combat, and somewhere far away bombs were thumping down with the sound of prize potatoes being emptied out of a sack on to a solid floor. ‘Sadly the requested extension for Monsieur Baudouin’s permit did not come through in time,’ Doustin said, although there was little evidence of sorrow in his voice. ‘He would have much enjoyed a visit to Hoa Binh, although they are saying now that the chances of getting through are no better than fifty-fifty.’
