by Norman Lewis
We were shunted off the road by the security guards and directed to take our place in a line of tanks and lorries waiting to move off. As soon as the security officer turned his back Doustin told his driver to pull out of line and go up to the head of the queue, and I noticed that in this environment he had become a little piratical. Waiting until the half-track in front had a lead of a hundred yards, we started after it. This method of moving vehicles singly through a danger zone had replaced the convoy system I had experienced on several occasions. Before reaching Hoa Birth there were a hundred natural death traps. Whenever the Viet-Minh felt like doing so they could pick off an isolated car, but the new arrangement had put an end to the regular massacres that took place when a solid jam of vehicles, immobilised, say, by the blowing of a couple of bridges, was annihilated at the pleasure of the attackers. ‘Until now we have been unable to get at them, and success has gone to their heads,’ Doustin said. ‘Now they want to fight a big battle. We’ve enticed thirty thousand of them out of the holes in the mountains, and we’re waiting for them at Hoa Binh. We can look forward to an exciting day.’
We were in calcaire country again. On all sides these massive limestone ruins soared from the matted jungle, their surfaces seamed and pitted like carious teeth. Whole armies could have played hide-and-seek about their bases, protected from the air in innumerable caverns and from ground attack by impenetrable pallisades of tree-trunks. Heavy artillery had been manhandled into position here. Fisherman naked from the waist down dangled nets hardly larger than handkerchiefs in the streams beneath, and watching them I saw the water’s surface twitch and shiver with the explosions of the heavy guns in the casemates above. Doustin reached for his camera but changed his mind when we passed an abandoned car floundering on flat tyres, and puckered with bullet holes. ‘They’re in the woods all round,’ he said, glancing over his shoulders as we accelerated away. A more compelling opportunity for photography encouraged risks a few moments later when we ran into the aftermath of an ambuscade in which two men had been wounded—one disastrously with the loss of a leg and his genitals. Doustin leaped down to record this atrocity. Rain and plum blossom blew in our faces and the crachin hung like webbing from a tapestry of branches woven overhead into a grey and dripping sky. Doustin composed his picture: the restless bodies, a middle-distance with a roofless pagoda under the jagged mountain background—a click of the shutter, then back into the car and we moved on. This brutal scene alone, with the ambulance men tussling with their gear, and the gulping rhythm of groans, had detached itself from the ordinariness of battles. Peasants passed, threading their way through the jumble of stalled military vehicles going about their business with a terrific indifference, willing themselves, perhaps, to be no part of these happenings, with not so much as a side glance at a drama having less reality probably for them than an episode from a subplot of the Ramayana. Two woodcutters stopped for a moment to shift the positions of their immense loads. At the end of the valley a white flake broke from a cliff struck by a shell and fell, trailing a corner’s tail of chalk, into the woods. What were they firing at? Doustin wondered aloud, and a tank gunner popped his head out of a turret to explain that the howitzers were targeting the mouths of caves, and this was a radar error. Below us in the shallows of the Black River nothing had distracted the fishermen’s gaze into shallow pools, and never for a moment had they ceased to wave their arms as rhythmically as dancers as they guided the tiny fish into the nets.
A mile or two ahead the last of the great limestone peaks closed in on the road to form a miniature Khyber, and as we joined the queue through this we found that the tanks, half-tracks and armoured cars were squeezing cautiously and at a terribly slow pace, overlooked (as was feared) by the advance guards of a tenacious and resourceful enemy. In a mood of gloomy prognostication, Doustin recalled methods adopted in past situations of the kind, when a column had been encouraged to dissipate its strength by allowing half the vehicles through such a bottleneck before the middle sections and both ends were attacked. In the long wait to enter the pass Doustin explained the task faced by this force. For the first time the Viet-Minh had succeeded in putting a real army in the field, which, advancing down the Black River Valley at great speed, threatened to cut off Dien Bien Phu and Hoa Binh, both garrisoned with insufficient French troops. We were now ten miles from Hoa Binh, from which the news was far from good. Up to this point, Doustin said, the Viets had been content to take over villages. Now, such was their confidence and strength, they were ready to attack towns.
There was time to be used up in the delays and confusions of such operations and Doustin was suddenly eager to talk. He had been in this war since the beginning, holding down a comfortable staff job at Army HQ, Saigon, until after a year at a desk, he had suddenly been overtaken by a craving for action. ‘They put me in command of a strong-point overlooking the Ho-Chi-Minh trail,’ he said. ‘Can you imagine what it was like sitting in such a post for a year, two years, even three years, without ever seeing the enemy, waiting to be attacked. Then one night your first action happens, and for many of us it was the last. I don’t mind confessing, I still get the eerie sensation that I had in those days. In the end it may have become noticeable, and they switched me to what I’m doing now.’
‘Is it cowardice?’ he asked. ‘I hope not. It is the feeling I get at this moment that we are at grips with something ant-like rather than human. These unemotional people driven on by some blind instinct. I feel that my intelligence and my endurance are not enough. Take, for instance, those fellows they send up to dig holes close to the wire, before an attack. You’d expect them to show some human reaction when our supporting guns start dropping shells among them, but they don’t. They go on digging until they’re killed, and then some other kind of specialist fellows come crawling up and drag the bits and pieces away. Some time later that night you know the shock-troops are going to come up and get into those holes and then you’re for it. Losses simply don’t bother them. All they’re concerned about is not leaving anything behind. They actually tie a piece of cord to every machine gun, so that as soon as the chap who is using it gets knocked out it can be hauled back to safety.’
I nodded. ‘I had a brief close-up view of them last time I was here,’ I told him. ‘When a man reaches his fortieth birthday his friends club together to buy him a coffin,’ I said. ‘They have a great party. It’s a different attitude to death.’
An hour or so passed before they waved us into the column, and we began the long, slow, suspect grind through the sinister labyrinth which finally opened on to a distant view of the military installations, the earth-works and the lined-up cannonry of Ao-Trac, the principal defence-post of the southern valleys, and the supremely important Route Coloniale No. 6 to the west. A huge effort was being made to strengthen the defences on this side of the small town, and engaged on this were several hundred Vietnamese civilian suspects, kept hard at it by a number of gigantic Senegalese soldiers who rushed among them screaming abuse and lashing out with their switches.
At this point there was a halt while a scout car was sent ahead to report back on the situation, and during this pause I noticed the onset of what might have been a malarial attack of the kind I suffered at irregular intervals when exposed—as I was at this moment—to excessive cold. In Saigon it had been hot and I had mistakenly assumed that Hanoi would be at least warm, too. Instead it was both cold and wet. Fortunately I was prepared. At the Camp de la Presse, Monsieur Jouin had eyed my tropical cotton doubtfully, and said, ‘You should be better protected. I have just the thing for you,’ and he went away and came back with an amazing overcoat discarded by a foreign visitor who had left the country. It was a coat of the kind with a velvet collar worn until a few years previously by men of affairs. Dismissing the pretended enthusiasm with which I took up the offer, Jouin went on to say, ‘The weather here can take you by surprise. It may come in handy.’ He stuffed the coat into a brilliantly patterned ethnic bag made by a tribe called the
Kala Nyangs, and handed it to me. The moment had come, I now decided, when I could no longer put off covering my shivering limbs with this garment, and I was wearing it gratefully an hour later when we arrived in Ao-Trac. Here we followed the road signs to the sand-bagged dug-out where Doustin was informed that the senior officers of this redoubt of the French colonial possessions were at that moment gathered for lunch, and that we were expected to join them.
The officers’ mess was in a dug-out with enormous guns pointing at the sky all round, and each time one of these fired, earth slid down like loose snow from the sloping roof. Within, we sipped Pernod while waiting to be seated, chatting in lowered voices out of respect for the presence of the commanding officer. Around us bottles were ranged with almost mathematical exactitude on the shelves, among photographs of French film actresses on display in unsuitable plush frames. The colonel was exuberant and euphoric, holding forth confidently on the prospect of rapid victory. We clinked glasses. ‘I do apologise for the coat,’ I said, ‘I’m suffering from the shivers.’
‘Of course you are,’ he said. ‘Think nothing of it. Happens to the best of us here all the time.’
He made frequent jokes which the junior officers listened to obediently, ready with their guffaws.
‘I echo’, the colonel said, bursting with optimism, ‘General de Lattre’s words, namely that we are here to stay for ever. To these I add my support—in the humility befitting my lesser rank—if God wills it, plus a single stipulation: that they continue to send us a sufficiency of shells and a half litre of wine per man a day.’ He laughed suddenly: a full-blooded man acting to perfection his part of happy acclimatisation to the proximity of death. The junior officers added their guffaws, and an immaculate Senegalese mess-boy went round to replenish glasses.
Seated at table we enjoyed an excellent wine with the fish and a ’47 Patriarche to accompany the beef. ‘We try to look after ourselves here,’ the colonel said, ‘with particular emphasis on rations.’ He turned to me. ‘The men get the same food as the officers. Might as well be as comfortable as we can?’ The diabolical crash of 155 howitzers drowned the rest of his words, set the burgundy glasses chiming thinly and a bottle fell from a shelf. Shells plunged with harsh sighs into the sky and exploded six seconds later in staccato thunder. The colonel’s easy smile was unchanged. ‘By the way,’ he said to me. ‘I’m afraid Hoa Binh’s out unless you feel like being parachuted in, which could probably be arranged, although I’m afraid you’d have to leave your coat behind. The Viets are shelling the Black River ferry now. Sank the ferry boat yesterday with the second round at 2,000 metres which is something of an achievement. They use those recoilless mountain guns they make up themselves. Very easy to manhandle. Means they can keep shifting them all the time, and all we can do is plaster the whole area and hope for the best.’
Suddenly a dull, grumbling undertone of heavy machine-gun fire filled in the silences between the cannonading, and crashing echoes chased each other across the valley below. ‘It’s unusual for the tanks to be in action this time of the day,’ the colonel said. He pushed his chair and got up. ‘I’m afraid I must leave you. Hope you’ll be staying the night. You’ll find it a bit primitive—and, of course, noisy. We’ve hardly settled in yet, but I’ve great plans for the future. Come back and see me in a year’s time, and I promise you you won’t recognise the place.’
The colonel left us with dignity and no evidence of haste, but as soon as he had gone there was a scramble for the steps to follow him, in which Doustin joined. I was last, suddenly caught up in the huge loss of energy of the second wave of the malaria attack. Reaching the open, I made for a gap in the buildings. There were shouts and twenty yards away a howitzer fired and the concussion was like a heavy blow in my ears. Yellow fields sloped down to the Son Boi River over which the crachin raised and lowered its veils, and I walked towards it until two tanks came into view, moving along the bank like badly adjusted clockwork toys in a series of jerks. Droplets of water blown into my face carried with them the staccato of machine guns, and something I took to be a mortar bomb thumped powerfully between the tanks and myself, opening a ragged fan of blue smoke. In a matter of minutes my ridiculous city overcoat was soaked through and my teeth chattered uncontrollably.
But where were the enemy the French must eventually fight it out with? I was beginning to understand that the battles of the past were no more. The word ‘battle’ once conjured up Lady Butler’s defiant guards in their squares at Waterloo, the orderly advance of cohorts and legions, the bugle-call for the charge, ‘standing fast’ and ‘face to the foe’. Now all was improvisation and chaos, with an invisible enemy in limestone labyrinths, in a pine forest as black as night, or simply wrapped up in mist. There was a rumour that the fishermen I could still see down by the Son Boi hid their guns on the river bank while they scooped up their small fish, and it now occurred to me that I was well within range of them.
I turned back and began to walk uphill towards the Colonel’s dug-out and met Doustin who was out looking for me.
‘We’re leaving immediately,’ he said. ‘The road is under fire. Here, put on this tin hat.’
Back in the Camp de la Presse in Hanoi I went to bed and stayed there for four days, getting up on the fifth to attend a press conference called by the general. The point of his lengthy harangue came after forty minutes, but the assembled correspondents, knowing what to expect, could take only a mild, connoisseur’s interest in the peroration. ‘People put it to me this way,’ said the general, his fine, brooding eyes fixed reproachfully on his audience. ‘“Having achieved your purpose in forcing the enemy to give battle—having destroyed in that battle his two best equipped divisions—why do you retain so many men in a position where from lack of opposition they can no longer be effectively employed?” In deference to this logic, which is unanswerable,’ said the general, ‘I have decided to displace the centre of gravity of our forces, which will henceforward be concentrated in the delta, and Hoa Binh, which is now without value to us, has been evacuated.’
On this occasion I saw Baudouin for the last time. ‘I’ve eaten my last duck’s foot for a year. Off to Paris tomorrow.’
‘But you expect to be coming back again?’
‘There’s no way out of it. I’ll have to be in at the end.’
‘And you put that at a year hence?’
‘More or less,’ he said. ‘They’ll take Dien-Bien-Phu, then the Americans will come in. At least we will be out.’
Chapter Six
IN MARCH 1954, WITH North Vietnam behind me, I telephoned Don Federigo in Farol to receive the expected reply. ‘It has happened,’ he said. ‘They didn’t even knock off for the winter, such is the power of money. Your shack was the first thing to go. Come and see us when you can.’
The ship that carried me some weeks later from Barcelona to Ibiza had also brought the executioner to deal with a youth sentenced for robbery and murder, who would be garrotted in the old style reinstated by the dictator, on open ground in use on normal occasions as a football field. The executioner had occupied the only first-class cabin, remaining invisible to the other passengers until the moment of disembarkation, announced by a blast on the ship’s siren spreading a thousand shrieking echoes through the ancient town. He stood for a moment at the head of the gangway, a small man in a dark Norfolk jacket, with immaculate grey hair under an alpine hat. Then he climbed down slowly, looking straight ahead, followed by two young men with the faces of devotees in a religious procession who were to assist him in the most theatrical of public performances. A horse-faced old Renault had been sent to collect them, into which they clambered and were driven away, and the scramble of the ordinary passengers to disembark began.
People who came to meet the ship had been constrained by new enactments under the heading Public Order to form orderly lines on the quay while they waited, in the manner of soldiers on parade. It was a system that had never really worked, and now with the appearance of disembarking
passengers at the top of the gangway intense and clamorous confusion broke out among the crowd below. There was a rush rather to capture than merely to welcome those arriving. An hysterical outcry went up. People were being pulled out of each other’s embraces, and there were tugs of war for the right to help with the baggage. Part of the ritual of arrival was the food forced into the mouths of the newcomers, the bread—stale at that time of the morning—and the slices of mountain ham. In the background the terrible old taxis, one or two even powered by wood-burning stoves, hooted desperately to attract fares. A policeman who was there to keep the situation under control had given up and was now trying to head off two gypsies who had arrived with a performing bear.
A friend of mine had written to the painter Antonio Ribas on my behalf, and he was there to meet me. He was often referred to as the Goya of Ibiza and enjoyed immense local prestige, easily selling everything he painted. Nevertheless, he gave most of his money away and lived in extreme simplicity in a house of many empty rooms in which it was usual to find that homeless gypsies had taken shelter.
He was a small, cheerful, lively man in his fifties, with a face easily creased by mirth, and wearing a flat and floppy beret of the type that had become extinct elsewhere in Spain between the two wars. He was clearly overbrimming with the desire to be of use. ‘Your friend tells me that you work alone and are looking for a quiet place,’ he said. ‘The question is how quiet? I can show you a house where you would not see another face from one week to the next. This is an island where we offer solitude in all its degrees. In the circumstances I’m taking you to see an empty farmhouse which provides peace in moderation. If you wish to take this, a woman can come in every day to tidy up and there is water in the well to last to the end of the year. If this is too noisy for you, or even too quiet, there are many other places we can look at.’
