The Centurions

by Jean Larteguy

  He could hardly keep his balance in the mud. The sentry escorting him kept repeating: “Mau-len, mau-len, di-di, di-di.”

  He was brought to a halt at an intersection between two communication trenches. The bo-doi had a word with the post commander, a young Vietnamese who wore an American webbing belt and carried a Colt.

  He looked at the Frenchman with a smile that was almost friendly and asked:

  “Do you know Paris?”

  Glatigny began to see the end of his nightmare.

  “Of course.”

  “And the Quartier Latin? I was a law student. I used to feed at Père Louis’s in the Rue Descartes and often went to the Capoulade for a drink.”

  Glatigny heaved a sigh. The time machine had brought him back to the world of today, next to this young Vietnamese who, at a few years’ interval, had haunted the same streets and frequented the same cafés as himself.

  “Did Gipsy’s in the Rue Cujas exist in your day?” the Vietnamese asked him. “I had some wonderful times there. There was a girl who used to dance there . . . and I felt she was dancing for no one but me.”

  The bo-doi, who did not understand a word of this conversation, was getting impatient. The student with the Colt lowered his eyes, then in a different, curt and unpleasant tone said to the Frenchman:

  “You’ve got to move on now.”

  “Where are they taking me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Couldn’t you tell the bo-doi to loosen my fetters; my fingers are all numb.”

  “No, that can’t be done.”

  Thereupon he turned his back on Glatigny. He had changed back into a termite and went off slithering in the deep mud.

  He would never escape from this ant-hill, never again see the Luxembourg Gardens in springtime or the girls with their skirts swirling round their thighs and a handful of books clutched under their arm.

  The prisoner and his escort moved on behind Béatrice, the Legion strong-point commanding the north-eastern exit from the Dien-Bien-Phu basin. Béatrice had fallen during the night of 13–14 March and the jungle was already beginning to invade the barbed-wire entanglements and shattered shelters.

  As they emerged from the trench, a shell burst behind them. A solitary gun was still in action at General de Castries’ H.Q. and it was now trained on them.

  Without a pause they entered the dense forest covering the mountains. The path climbed in a straight line up the narrow ravine over which the tops of the giant silk-cotton trees formed a thick canopy.

  Shelters had been cut out of the slope on either side of the path. Glatigny caught a glimpse of some 120-calibre mortars drawn up in a neat row. They glistened faintly in the shadows; they were well oiled and, as a technician, he could not help admiring their maintenance. There were some men lounging about in undress uniform at the entrance to the shelters. They looked far taller than the average Vietnamese and each of them wore a medallion of Mao-Tse-Tung on his breast. This was 350 Division, the heavy division which had been trained in China. The Intelligence Department at Saigon had reported its arrival.

  There were smiles from the men as the captain went past. Perhaps they were hardly aware of him since he did not belong to their world.

  With his hands tied behind his back, Glatigny could not walk properly and waddled from side to side like a penguin. He felt utterly exhausted and sank to the ground.

  The bo-doi leant over him:

  “Di-di, mau-len, keep going, titi.”

  His tone of voice was patient, almost encouraging, but he did not lift a finger to help him.

  The soldiers outside the shelters were now succeeded by nha-ques dressed in black. In a patch of sunlight just above the path sat an old man eating his morning rice. Glatigny had no sense of hunger, thirst, shame or anger; he was not even conscious of his weariness; he felt at the same time extremely old and as though he had just been born. But the heady smell of the rice unleashed an animal reaction in him. He had not eaten for five days and suddenly felt ravenous and cast a greedy eye on the mess-tin.

  “Any to spare?” he asked the old man.

  The nha-que bared his black teeth in a sort of smile and gave a nod. Glatigny turned round to show him his fetters, whereupon the man rolled some rice up into a ball between his earth-stained fingers, carefully detached a sliver of dried fish and popped the lot into his mouth.

  But the soldier gave the captain a push and he had to set off again up the increasingly steep path.

  The sun emerged out of the morning mist; the forest was silent, dense and dark, like one of those dead calm lakes in the crater of a volcano.

  Glatigny now began to understand why Boisfeuras had not tried to escape, why he wanted the “experience.” In his present plight Boisfeuras was the one who kept crossing his mind and not his superiors or his comrades. Like him he wanted to be able to speak Vietnamese, to lean across towards these soldiers and these coolies and ask them various questions:

  “Why do you belong to the Vietminh? Are you married? Do you know who the prophet Marx is? Are you happy? What do you hope to get out of it?”

  He had recovered his curiosity, he was no longer a prisoner.

  Glatigny had reached the top of the hill. Through the trees he could now see the Dien-Bien-Phu basin and, a little to one side, under the eye of a sentry, a small group of figures: the survivors of the strong-point. Boisfeuras was asleep in the ferns; Merle and Pinières were arguing together somewhat heatedly. Pinières was always inclined to be quick-tempered. They called out to him. Boisfeuras woke up and squatted down on his haunches like a nha-que.

  But the bo-doi urged Glatigny on with the butt of his rifle. A short youngish man in a clean uniform stood in front of one of the shelters. He motioned him to come inside. The shelter was comfortable for a change; there was no mud. In the cool shadows, at a child-size table, the officer caught sight of another short young man exactly like the first. He was smoking a cigarette; the packet on the table was almost full. Glatigny longed for a smoke.

  “Sit down,” said the young man, speaking in the accent of the French Lycée at Hanoi.

  But there was no chair. With his foot Glatigny turned over a heavy American steel helmet which happened to be lying there and sat down on it, making himself as comfortable as he could.

  “Your name?”

  “Glatigny.”

  The young man entered this in a sort of account book.

  “Christian name?”

  “Jacques.”

  “Rank?”

  “Captain.”

  “Unit?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The Viet laid his ball-point pen down on the table, and took a deep puff at his cigarette. He looked ever so slightly disconcerted.

  “President Ho-Chi-Minh” (he pronounced the “ch” soft, as the French do) “has given orders that all combatants and the civilian population should be lenient” (he laid great stress on this word) “towards prisoners of war. Have you been badly treated?”

  Glatigny got up and showed him his fettered wrists. The young man raised his eyebrows in surprise and gave a discreet order. The first little man appeared from behind a bivouac of brightly coloured parachute material. He knelt down behind the captain and his nimble fingers undid the complicated knots. All at once the blood rushed back into his paralysed forearms. The pain was unbearable: Glatigny felt like swearing out loud, but the people in front of him were so well behaved that he controlled himself.

  The interrogation went on:

  “You were captured at Marianne II. You were in command of the strong-point. How many men did you have with you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are you thirsty?”

  “No.”

  “Then you must be hungry. You’ll be given something to eat presently.”

  “I don’t feel hung
ry either.”

  “Is there anything you need?”

  If he had been offered a cigarette, Glatigny would not have been able to refuse, but the Vietminh did not do so.

  “I feel sleepy,” the captain suddenly said.

  “I can understand that. It was a tough fight. Our soldiers are smaller and less strong than yours, but they fought with more spirit than you did because they’re willing to lay down their lives for their country.

  “You’re now a prisoner of war and it’s your duty to answer my questions. What was the strength of Marianne II?”

  “I’ve already given you my name, my Christian name, my rank, everything that belongs to me. The rest isn’t mine to give and I know of no international convention that obliges officer prisoners to provide the enemy with information while their comrades are still fighting.”

  Another heavy sigh from the Vietminh. Another deep puff at his cigarette.

  “Why do you refuse to answer?”

  Why? Glatigny was beginning to wonder himself. There must be some ruling on this matter in military regulations. Every eventuality is provided for in regulations, even what never comes to pass.

  “Military regulations forbid a prisoner to give you information.”

  “So you only fought because military regulations obliged you to do so?”

  “Not only for that reason.”

  “In refusing to talk, then, perhaps you’re abiding by your sense of military honour?”

  “You can call it that if you like.”

  “You have an extremely bourgeois conception of military honour. This honour of yours allows you to fight for the interests of the bloated colonials and bankers of Saigon, to massacre people whose only desire is peace and independence. You are prepared to wage war in a country which doesn’t belong to you, an unjust war, a war of imperialist conquest. Your honour as an officer adjusts itself to this but forbids you to contribute to the cause of peace and progress by giving the information I request.”

  Glatigny’s immediate reaction was typical of his class; he assumed an air of haughtiness. He was remote and disinterested, as though he was not personally involved at all, and slightly disdainful. The Vietminh noticed this; his eyes glinted, his nostrils dilated and his lips curled over his teeth.

  “His French education,” Glatigny reflected, “must have weakened his perfect control over his facial expression.”

  The Vietminh had half risen from his seat:

  “Answer! Didn’t your sense of honour oblige you to defend the position you held to the last man? Why didn’t you die defending the ‘peak of your fathers’?”

  For the first time in the conversation the Vietminh had used an expression translated directly from Vietnamese into French: the “peak of your fathers” for “your ancestral land.” This minor linguistic problem took Glatigny’s mind off the question of military honour. But the little man in green persisted:

  “Answer! Why didn’t you die defending your position?”

  Glatigny also wondered why. He could have done, but he had thrown the grenade at the Viets.

  “I can tell you,” the Vietminh went on. “You saw our soldiers who looked puny and undersized advancing to attack your trenches, in spite of your artillery, your mines, your barbed-wire entanglements and all the arms the Americans had given you. Our men fought to the death because they were serving a just and popular cause, because they knew, as we all know, that we have the Truth, the only Truth, on our side. That is what made our soldiers invincible. And because you didn’t have these reasons, here you are alive, standing in front of me, a prisoner and vanquished.

  “You bourgeois officers belong to a society which is out of date and polluted by the selfish interests of class. You have helped to keep humanity in the dark. You’re nothing but obscurantists, mercenaries incapable of explaining what they are fighting for.

  “Go on, then, try and explain! You can’t, eh?”

  “We’re fighting, my dear sir, to protect the people of Viet-Nam from Communist slavery.”

  Later on, when discussing this reply with Esclavier, Boisfeuras, Merle and Pinières, Glatigny was forced to admit that he was not quite sure how it had occurred to him. In actual fact Glatigny was only fighting for France, because the legal government had ordered him to do so. He had never felt he was there to defend the Terres Rouges plantations or the Bank of Indo-China. He obeyed orders, and that was that. But he had suddenly realized that this reason alone could not possibly seem valid to a Communist. A few fleeting thoughts had flashed through his mind, some notions as yet undefined: Europe, the West, Christian civilization. These had occurred to him all at once and then he had had this idea of a crusade.

  Glatigny had scored a direct hit. The narrowed eyes, the dilated nostrils, every feature of the funny little man now expressed nothing but pure, relentless hatred, and he had difficulty in speaking:

  “I’m not a Communist, but I believe that Communism promises freedom, progress and peace for the masses.”

  When he had recovered his self-control, he lit another cigarette. It was Chinese tobacco and had a pleasant smell of new-mown hay. The Viet went on in the declamatory tone to which he seemed to be partial:

  “Officer in the pay of the colonialists, you are for that very reason a criminal. You deserve to be tried for your crime against humanity and to be given the usual sentence: death.”

  It was fascinating. Boisfeuras was absolutely right. A new world was being revealed, one of the principles of which was: “Whoever opposes Communism is ipso facto a war criminal beyond the pale of humanity: he must be hanged like those who were tried at Nuremberg.”

  “Are you married?” the Vietminh asked. “Are your parents alive? Any children? A mother?

  “Think of their grief when they learn that you have been executed. Because they can’t imagine, can they, that the martyred people of Viet-Nam will pardon their torturers? They will mourn their dead husband, their son, their father.”

  The act was becoming tiresome and in poor taste.

  The Vietminh fell silent for a moment to fill his soul with compassion for this poor French family in mourning, then went on:

  “But President Ho knows that you are sons of the French people who have been led astray by the American colonialists and imperialists. The French people is our friend and fights by our side in the camp of Peace. President Ho who knows this has asked the civilian population and combatants of Viet-Nam to stifle their righteous anger towards the prisoners and to apply a policy of leniency.”

  “In the Middle Ages,” Glatigny reflected, “they used this same word ‘apply,’ but in a different context.”

  “We shall take good care of you; you’ll get the same rations as our soldiers. You’ll also be taught the Truth. We shall re-educate you by means of manual labour, which will enable you to emend your bourgeois education and redeem your life of idleness.

  “That is what the people of Viet-Nam will give you as a punishment for your crimes—the Truth. But you must repay this generosity by complying with all our orders.”

  Glatigny liked the commissar better when he was carried away by his hatred, for by restoring his normal reactions this hatred at least made him human. When he became smarmy and sanctimonious like this, he frightened and at the same time fascinated him. This sad little man, who hovered about like a ghost in clothes several sizes too large for him and who spoke about Truth with the vacant gaze of a prophet, plunged him back into the termite nightmare. He was one of the antennae of the monstrous brain which wanted to reduce the world to a civilization of insects rooted in their certainty and efficiency.

  The voice went on:

  “Captain Glatigny, how many men did you have with you in your position?”

  “I feel sleepy.”

  “We could easily find out simply by counting the dead and the prisoners, but I would rather you told me.�
�

  “I feel sleepy.”

  Two soldiers came in and one again tied up the captain’s arms, elbows, wrists and fingers. They did not forget the running noose round his neck. The political commissar looked at the bourgeois officer with disdain. Glatigny—the name reminded him of something. He was suddenly brought back to the Hanoi Lycée. He had read the name somewhere in the history of France. There was a famous war leader called Glatigny, a man of murder, rape and passion, who had been made a constable by the king and who had died for his royal master. The sad young man was not only part of the Vietminh, a cog in an immense machine. All his recollections as a little yellow boy bullied by his white school-fellows flooded back into his mind and brought him out in a sweat. He could now humiliate France right back to her remote past and he was so afraid that this Glatigny might not be a descendant of the constable’s, which would balk him of this strange triumph, that he refused to ask him.

  “Captain,” he declared, “because of your attitude all your colleagues who were taken prisoner with you will likewise be tied up and they’ll know that they owe this to you.”

  The guards dragged Glatigny off to a deep ravine in the heart of the jungle.

  There was a hole there, six feet long, two feet wide, three feet deep: a classical fox-hole which could easily serve as a grave. One of the guards checked his fetters, then stood him over the hole. The other loaded his submachine-gun.

  “Di-di, di-di, mau-len.”

  Glatigny took a pace forward and lowered himself into the trench. He lay stretched out on his numb and fettered arms. Above him the sky looked particularly clear through the foliage of the tall trees. He closed his eyes, to die or else to sleep . . .

  Next morning they hauled him off and shackled him to his comrades. The man in front of him was Sergeant Mansard who kept repeating:

  “We don’t hold it against you, you know, sir.”

  And to reassure him, he began talking through clenched teeth about Boulogne-Billancourt where he was born, about a dance-hall on the banks of the Seine adjoining a gas station. He used to go there every Saturday with girls whom he knew well since he had been brought up with them. But their pretty dresses, their lipstick suddenly gave them fresh confidence, which made him feel shy.