The Centurions

by Jean Larteguy

Kind-hearted Tou-Le, the free Méo of the highlands, had delivered him into the hands of the little green men of the valleys and the deltas. Esclavier felt too weary; all he wanted was to sleep and let the night find some solution or no solution at all.

  In the morning Esclavier followed the Viets outside, spitting on the floor as he left the hut in which a man of the ancient law had failed to observe the sacred rules of hospitality. Tou-Le turned his face away and pretended he had not seen him. This evening he would smoke a few more pipes than usual and would go on doing so until the day came when “for the public good” some political commissar or other would forbid him any more opium. Then he would die; that was what Esclavier hoped.

  The four soldiers escorting the captain showed him every consideration and kindness. They were in high spirits; they sang French marching songs to Vietnamese melodies and helped him over the difficult places and slippery monkey-bridges. Like the Cochin-Chinese partisans he had commanded six months earlier in the marshy forest of the Lagna, they were lively and agile; their weapons were well cared for; they could march without making a sound and, when they took off their helmets, they displayed the shock-headed locks of mischievous schoolboys.

  At dusk they reached a main trail deeply pitted by the wheels of heavy trucks. Small detachments of soldiers or coolies kept passing them in both directions. They all trotted along with the same rapid jerky gait.

  By the side of the trail the bo-dois lit a fire and started cooking their evening meal: rice and lentil soup with one or two little chunks of pork floating in it. On a banana leaf they laid out a few pinches of coarse salt and a handful of wild peppers.

  They ate in silence, then one of them brought out a packet of Chinese cigarettes made specially for the Vietminh. He offered one to Esclavier.

  The little group surrendered themselves to the peace of the night. Their leader was reluctant to drag himself away from the glow of the fire. With an effort he rose to his feet, adjusted his equipment, put his helmet on and resumed the inscrutable mask of a soldier of the Democratic Republic of Viet-Nam. He turned to the prisoner:

  “I must now take you to an officer of the division who wishes to interrogate you.”

  It was an underground shelter with a floor made of gravel, illuminated by an acetylene lamp. At a table sat a man who looked a great deal more distinguished than the majority of his compatriots. His features seemed to be finely chiselled in very old gold; his hands were long and slender and beautifully kept.

  “Your name?”

  “Captain Philippe Esclavier.”

  Esclavier had recognized the inimitable voice. The first time he had heard it was in the dark, when it had ordered him to help push the Jeep.

  “I wasn’t expecting to see you again so soon, Captain. Have you been decently treated since our last conversation in the Muong-Phan basin? It seems, however, that you didn’t follow my advice. I’m glad your rather childish escapade has ended without your coming to any harm. You have now been able to see for yourself how deeply united our nation is, how close the bonds are between the mountain people and those of the lowlands and the deltas, and this despite all the efforts that the French colonialists have made to split us for the last fifty years.”

  The Voice fell silent, gazed at the captain with friendly curiosity and went on pensively:

  “What are we going to do about you, Esclavier?”

  “I suppose you’ll take some sort of disciplinary action against me. This time I agree with you entirely. I’m prepared to pay for my failure. I should like to inform you, however, that it’s the duty of every prisoner to escape and that I hope my next attempt will be successful.”

  This statement of principle sounded slightly absurd; it would not have seemed so, however, had he been dealing with a German, a Spaniard, an American—a member of his own “brotherhood.” This word had just occurred to him; he considered it more closely; it did not seem to carry much weight.

  “You want to be a martyr, don’t you, to be tied to a tree, beaten with rifle-butts, condemned to death and shot? In your eyes that would be a means of endowing your act with an importance which to us it does not possess. We’d like to put that act in its true perspective; as we see it, you’re nothing but a spoilt child who has been playing truant.”

  This time Esclavier was able to classify the person. His studied expressions: “I wasn’t expecting to see you again so soon,” and “playing truant”—the man was a schoolmaster. He had the condescending mannerisms of a “somebody.” He belonged to the race of pedagogues, but to him both men and arms had been entrusted. What a temptation for an intellectual gasbag!

  “I had already appreciated your frankness,” the Voice went on. “That frankness of yours will be the first condition of your re-education. During your stay in the Democratic Republic of Viet-Nam you will have time to learn how to conduct a self-examination. You will then realize, I hope, the immensity of your errors, your ignorance, your lack of understanding . . . This time no disciplinary measures will be taken against you. You’ll be taken back to your comrades. You will merely have to tell them about your attempt to escape. We rely on your frankness to give them an absolutely accurate account of what happened.”

  • • •

  “Instruction Period” in the Muong-Phan camp. The officer prisoners, seated on tree-stumps, formed a semicircle round a sort of bamboo platform on which the “pedagogue” stood, commenting on the latest news of the Geneva conference. As he spoke in his somewhat over-elegant, over-elaborate French, his eyes kept darting over his audience. A mah-qui of the termite world, he was there to hollow out the brains of all these men, to empty them of their substance and then stuff them full of propaganda rubbish.

  “There is immense hope among the people of France . . . The Vietnamese armistice commission has been able to make contact with the democratic elements of your country and to notify your families at last of your fate . . .”

  Then he read out an article in L’Observateur, fiercely attacking the intransigent policy of Georges Bidault who was opposed to any concession. The commissar seemed genuinely distressed by the desperate efforts of this warmonger who was trying by every means to obstruct the peace and brotherhood of the masses and, by the same token, the release of the prisoners. But he still had hope; a single individual could never impede the urge of the masses towards progress.

  He concluded his lecture and after folding up L’Observateur, with the pointed remark that this was a French paper and by no means a Communist one, he indicated Esclavier who was sitting at the foot of the stand:

  “Your comrade, Captain Esclavier, returned to our camp this morning. He will now tell you in his own words the circumstances of his escape and of his recapture.”

  A low murmur rose from the prisoners when Esclavier, with an inscrutable expression on his face, took the commissar’s place on the platform. He spoke in short, clipped phrases, without looking at any of them but only at the sky which was streaked with a few grey clouds.

  “Christ, I hope he doesn’t do anything silly,” Raspéguy muttered, leaning over to his neighbour, a fat colonel.

  “Such as?”

  “Such as strangling that little bastard who’s forcing him to behave like a clown. He’s one of my men, you know, a real tough nut who’s easily roused.”

  Esclavier described all the circumstances of his escape and his capture. He omitted nothing, neither the women’s friendliness, the juicy vegetable marrow, the smell of the meat grilling over the fire, nor the welcome warmth of the fireside in the Méo hut. As they listened to him, they all felt a profound nostalgia for their lost freedom and dreamt of escaping, even the most timid among them.

  “The only thing I regret,” Esclavier concluded, “is having chosen a bad route. I advise you against the mountain ridges which are held by the Méos and also against the valleys which are held by the Thais.”

  Then he stepped down from
the platform with the same inscrutable expression on his face.

  Glatigny leaned over towards Boisfeuras:

  “He got out of that one nicely. He’s given us all a longing to be free. I’m pleasantly surprised.”

  “Did you think he was just a big hairy-chested brute?”

  “Well, there is that side to him.”

  “Get to know him better; try and win his friendship—which isn’t easy—and you’ll find that he’s intelligent, sensitive, extremely cultured . . . but he doesn’t like to show it.”

  Lieutenant Mahmoudi had shut his eyes and was dreaming of his homeland, of the arid soil, the grey stones, the pungent smells of the Sahara, of the sheep cooked whole on a spit, of the hand that is dipped into the animal’s insides and withdrawn dripping with spicy grease. In the deep blue night a shepherd boy was playing a poignant and monotonous melody on a shrill reed pipe. Somewhere in the distance a jackal howled.

  “It’s very decent of the Vietminh, don’t you think?” Captain Lacombe asked him. “They might have taken it out on us for Esclavier’s escape and put him in solitary confinement . . .”

  “Captain Esclavier is the sort of man we admire in my country, even if we do have to fight him some day.”

  And Mahmoudi recalled a proverb of the black tents: “The courage of your enemy does you honour.” But Esclavier was not his enemy . . . not yet . . .

  As he entered the hut, Esclavier declared that he felt hungry, that his escapade and his little session of self-examination had sharpened his appetite. Without another word he took a tin of baked beans out of Lacombe’s haversack, opened it and fell to.

  He offered the tin to Glatigny:

  “Have some?”

  Lacombe felt powerless, he was on the point of tears. It was his very life this savage was devouring in his great champing jaws. Everyone else laughed, even Mahmoudi whose face glistened with cruel delight.

  Then Esclavier went and lay down on his bunk in front of the fire.

  3

  LIEUTENANT PINIÈRES’S REMORSE

  In the afternoon of the 15th of May, during the course of an “Instruction Period,” the man whom Esclavier called “The Voice” notified the prisoners that they would be leaving next morning for Camp One. They were split up into four groups, the first being made up of the senior officers and the wounded. The stores and equipment—some huge rice urns attached to bamboo poles, a few picks and shovels—were distributed among the junior officers of the three remaining groups. They were also given a three-day ration of rice. But since they had no sacks to carry it in, a number of them sacrificed their trousers which were transformed into sacks by tying the ends of the legs together.

  Lacombe wanted them to get rid of the madman and send him on with the first group. But he came up against violent opposition not only from Esclavier and Glatigny but from all the rest. They clung to Lescure as to a sort of fetish; they looked after him, took good care of him and forced him to eat his rice, thus forgetting their own wretchedness.

  Lescure’s cry of “Chickens! Ducks!” had become a rallying signal; in their own minds it no longer applied to code names for mortar shells, but to actual chickens and ducks which they hoped to scrounge in the process of moving camp.

  “For a prisoner, everything is justified,” Esclavier had declared, “stealing, lying . . . From the moment they deprive him of his freedom he is given every right.”

  Boisfeuras had asked him:

  “And what if a régime, a political ideology deprived the whole world of its freedom?”

  “Then there are no holds barred.”

  Each team was to elect a leader. Glatigny proposed the “victualling officer” Lacombe. He had made himself his campaign manager.

  “Lacombe has all the necessary qualifications,” he explained. “He’s sly. He knows how to fend for himself and provides for the future . . . Look at those six tins of beans . . .”

  Pinières, the former maquisard, had cottoned on at once:

  “He’s got the ugly face of a quisling, too. He’ll play the part of Laval with the Viets . . . and we’ll be the Resistance!”

  Thus it was that Lacombe was detailed as leader of the team.

  A search had taken place after the meeting; it had been extremely thorough. The bo-dois had not confined themselves to going through the prisoners’ pockets and the hems of their clothes, but had insisted on them stripping stark naked.

  Up till then Boisfeuras had managed to conceal his dagger, a thin stiletto which he carried strapped to the inside of his leg with adhesive tape like the silver piastre he had given Esclavier.

  Realizing he would be found out, while Merle, who was one in front of him, was in the process of being searched, he had extracted the dagger and brandished it in the face of the N.C.O. in charge, a former Hanoi rickshaw coolie bursting with self-importance:

  “Of course I’m keeping it, that’s agreed with the boss. He said each team was entitled to a knife for cutting wild herbs.”

  Recovering from his surprise, the Viet had thought it over for a moment, then given his assent, when he suddenly realized it was a lethal weapon the prisoner was putting back in his pocket:

  “No, you no ungderstangd; give me knife.”

  Glatigny managed to conceal two silver piastres by slipping them into his mouth, and Pinières a little mirror with a dent in the middle which could reflect the sun’s rays and thus be used as a ground-to-air signalling lamp.

  Then, at first light on 18 May, the team left for Camp One, with its rice urn slung on a bamboo pole, its madman who quietly followed behind like a poodle, Boisfeuras barefoot as usual, Glatigny and Esclavier, Merle and Pinières, Lacombe and Mahmoudi.

  “The camp has been set up near Dien-Bien-Phu,” Lacombe had told them, “so as not to be too far away from a landing ground. Once the armistice is signed at Geneva, aircraft will be able to come and pick us up.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Esclavier had replied. “They’ll make us move down towards Hoa-Binh on the edge of the delta and hand us over in Hanoi. Or maybe we’ll have to march as far as Son-La, and be taken on from there by truck.”

  “It’s much too far,” said Pinières. “We’re nearly a hundred miles from Son-La.”

  Glatigny felt it wiser to say nothing. At Christmas, as a propaganda move, the Vietminh had released four officers who had been taken prisoner at Cao-Bang in 1950. The C.-in-C. had made him responsible for their interrogation, and one of them had told him that Camp One, where the officer prisoners were held, was situated in the limestone country of the north-east, in the region of Bac-Kan, that’s to say some five hundred miles from Dien-Bien-Phu.

  Most of the prisoners were in a poor state of health and unlikely to stay the course.

  During the first day’s march the prisoners covered twenty miles or so in a north-easterly direction, towards China. The senior officers and the wounded had passed them in trucks.

  Raspéguy was sitting in the back of the last truck, with his bare feet dangling over the edge. A Vietminh sentry had been detailed to keep an eye on him. Had not Generalissimo Giap declared that his capture was the most important of all? Raspéguy and his battalion had repeatedly eluded the two most powerful Vietminh divisions and on one occasion had even destroyed the command post of one of them.

  Raspéguy waved to the team and shouted:

  “Conserve your strength; you’re in for a long march.”

  He would have liked to be with them, to encourage them and make them stick it out; and he would have shown them that, colonel though he was, he could do better than the youngest among them.

  He cast a friendly glance at the sentry; he would probably be forced to kill him when he made his escape—because he was going to escape and he was going to succeed where Esclavier had failed.

  The prisoners were now moving with the main stream of the Vietminh battalions
, trucks and coolies. They no longer existed as themselves; they formed part of a vast human tide.

  The heat, the exhaustion, the lack of water were beginning to tell. On the third day they reached Tuan-Giao, an intersection of the R.P.* 41 leading from Hanoi to Lai-Chau. The neighbouring forest swarmed with soldiers, coolies and trucks; it was full of supply stores and ammunition dumps. It was the big invisible base of the army which had attacked Dien-Bien-Phu. The prisoners were quartered in a little Thai hamlet half a mile off the road on a hillock surrounded by bamboos. There they were allowed twenty-four hours’ rest; they badly needed it.

  The team had not yet settled into a cohesive unit. Later on those who belonged to it came to be known as the “W.S.” or “Wily Serpents,” for they proved to be singularly impervious to every form of propaganda, with a pronounced taste for pilfering and polemics, and a sort of genius for exploiting every weakness of Vietminh organization.

  At the time they embarked on their long march they had not yet reached this stage.

  Lacombe was more and more obsequious towards the sentries and called them “sir,” a form of address which they demanded in vain from the other prisoners.

  Esclavier was quick to take offence.

  Boisfeuras seemed to live for himself alone. As he ambled effortlessly along the trail, his bare feet with their prehensile toes gripping into the mud, he never gave his comrades the slightest assistance and confined himself to carrying the rice urn when it came to his turn to do so.

  Glatigny occasionally gave himself airs. Lieutenant Merle had once asked him to help with some chore or other:

  “Will you give me a hand, Glatigny?”

  “My dear sir, I’m accustomed to my subordinates addressing me by my rank and not by the familiar ‘tu,’ especially when my uniform consists of a pair of dirty shorts and my prerogatives are reduced to obeying, as you do, a funny little green man who six months ago was a rickshaw coolie.”

  Mahmoudi did not say much, but more than once his comrades noticed a look of resentment come into his eyes when the food was doled out, as though he thought they were laughing behind his back because he was an Algerian and a Moslem.