The Centurions

by Jean Larteguy

  The Voice behaved like a scientific chemist; he regulated their hunger, their fatigue and their despair so as to reduce them to the exact point at which, broken and deranged, he could at last work on them and drill them against their past by concentrating on what still remained: the elementary reflexes of fear, fatigue and hunger.

  He kept assembling them incessantly for “instruction periods.” One day he started inveighing against the French command which had just refused to take over the wounded of Dien-Bien-Phu.

  As though to confirm his words, the French Air Force came and bombed the road.

  After a night march which was even more exhausting than usual, he kept telling them in that smooth, impersonal, relentless voice of his:

  “We are obliged to make you march by night to protect you from being bombed by your own aircraft. That is what Capitalism, with its internal contradictions, leads to.”

  This was more than Pinières could stomach. He turned to Boisfeuras and asked:

  “What the hell does he mean by ‘the internal contradictions of Capitalism’?”

  “Not daring to wage the sort of war that’s necessary to defend oneself. Not reorganizing and remodelling oneself so as to carry the war into the enemy camp, shutting oneself up in ivory towers, not fighting by night, employing mercenaries—like us, for instance—instead of hurling into the fray everyone who is anxious for the Capitalist system to survive, using money and technology as a substitute for faith, forgetting that the masses are the mainspring of all endeavour, corrupting them with modern amenities instead of keeping them wiry and alert with the offer of some valid purpose in life . . .

  Pale and emaciated, Merle angrily retorted:

  “The masses enjoy modern amenities as much as we do. In Europe they discover the refrigerator and television. The Arabs also take to modern amenities, so do the Hindus, the Chinese and the Patagonians. When I get back to France I shall lie back and wallow in all those amenities. I shan’t drink anything unless it’s iced and I’ll only go to bed with nice clean little girls who wash between the legs with disinfectants.”

  “The civilization of the frigidaire and the bidet,” Esclavier sneered.

  • • •

  On the 7th of June Esclavier stole a fork from one of the bo-dois and on the 8th they forded a river in spate. There were several hundred coolies at work in the dark, repairing a bridge by the light of bamboo torches, and each gang, by means of slogans and songs, maintained an illusion of feverish activity.

  The sound of an aircraft overhead brought them to a standstill; all the torches were instantly extinguished. Complete silence ensued among coolies and prisoners alike.

  All of a sudden Lescure burst out into his mad guffaw.

  Two officers from the adjacent group tried to make a break for it, but they were brought back a few hours later, knocked senseless with rifle-butts and dragged before their comrades.

  The days of leniency appeared to be over and Lacombe, who had stepped aside into the undergrowth in order to relieve himself, was trussed up as though he too had been trying to escape.

  He protested his innocence in a sorrowful voice and was beaten up for his pains.

  Boisfeuras, who suddenly felt anxious, eavesdropped on the sentries’ conversation: the Geneva conference had fallen through. The number of prisoners who were tied up increased every day.

  The Haute Région had now given place to the Moyenne. The mosquitoes were voracious and countless; leeches had appeared on the scene; it began to be extremely hot.

  The days and nights never varied in their routine. Daylight meant the rice chore and a period of rest in the midst of a cloud of mosquitoes; as soon as night fell the bo-dois lit their torches and resumed their march through the forest and paddy-fields.

  Lacombe, who had his hands tied behind him, kept stumbling, a grotesque Christ with pendulous cheeks like an old hag’s bottom. He did not even beg Pinières to help him along any more. The injustice of which he was the victim struck him as being so enormous that he could not bring himself to protest. Something must have gone seriously wrong with the workings of the Almighty if they believed him to be capable of such incorrect behaviour as escaping! Yet he was prepared to like the Vietminh and believe in all their nonsense. In the first place he had always been in favour of universal peace. The commissariat had nothing to do with war; a supplies officer was simply a grocer at the disposal of the army, and he fully intended, when he retired, to start a shop at Bergerac where his wife’s family lived.

  He felt a hand behind him unfastening his bonds. It was Mahmoudi taking pity on him.

  “They’ll see,” protested Lacombe, who insisted on enduring his punishment even though it was unjust, to show he was well disposed.

  “Leave him alone,” said Pinières. “Can’t you see he’s enjoying it? He’s loving every moment.”

  A bo-doi walked down the column and Lacombe wriggled away from Mahmoudi’s hands, heaving deep sighs so that the sentry should hear him and see for himself how much he was suffering. He kept going, tittupping along the track.

  Many of them were worn out by dysentery and were passing blood. The Voice gave orders for them to be left behind in the villages through which they passed.

  “Our medical service will take care of them,” he promised.

  Not one of those prisoners was ever seen again. They died secretly in the corner of some thatch hut, wasted away by dysentery, festering from their wounds.

  The march now appeared to be endless; it went on and on, in the rain and in the mud, among the mosquitoes and the leeches; it looked as if it might continue all the way to China, until all the prisoners died of dysentery by the side of the road.

  One night, which was less dark than usual, long after the crossing of the Black River by ferry-boat from Tak-Hoa, they noticed that the wild vegetation all round them was being succeeded by a semblance of cultivation. The trail, which was broad and straight but hemmed in by tall grass, led towards a little hummock. On the summit stood the blackened ruins of a large colonial house with its veranda. There were broad open spaces between the rubber-trees and between each coffee bush, and the undergrowth had not yet encroached on these.

  “The pitiful stamp of the white man,” Boisfeuras said to himself.

  Some peasant had come all the way out here from the mountains of Auvergne or the banks of the Garonne, some stubborn peasant with fists like hams. He had cleared the soil and built himself a house, recruited coolies, sometimes with a kick in the ass, but he had stuck to this valley, the only one of his species, like a medieval robber-baron. He had struggled against the climate, against fever, against the jungle which he forced back step by step, also against the men whom he induced to work according to his methods and to live according to his pace.

  The French colonial had come out to Indo-China at a time when white men still deserved to be masters of the world by virtue of their courage, their stamina, their energy, their pride in their own race, their sense of their own strength, their superiority, their lack of scruples.

  Boisfeuras did not belong to this category, he was a marauder. His type had infested China. He looked back on his youth as a series of flickering images, like an old news-reel accompanied by the burning, thudding rhythm of fever.

  Shanghai: the gunboats on the Whampoo, the evenings at the Sporting Club, the lovely Russian refugees from Harbin, and the bandy-legged little Japs worming their way into the concessions and disembarking their troops . . .

  His father collected old jade and little Chinese prostitutes, and officially acted as political adviser to the Chamber of Commerce; he delighted in playing the part of a man of mystery. Perhaps it was from him that he inherited his taste for clandestine activity, which alone could account for his presence in the army of this “secondary” country, among these wretched prisoners.

  Chiang Kai-Shek’s forces were hammering at the gates of the
City on the Mud Bank. Julien Boisfeuras was ten years old; his father and a few other old sharks of his sort met the Chinese generalissimo in secret. They convinced him that the Communists had decided to kill him to get complete control of the Kuomintang.

  Chiang believed them or pretended to. He came to an arrangement: he stuffed his pockets with dollars and his troops wiped out the Communists and dipped the skinny little students of Canton into boiling cauldrons.

  Julien Boisfeuras was eighteen; he had gone to bed with girls and found it boring, played poker and felt that it was not worth gambling unless one staked one’s whole life and soul. He made friends with some young Communists and with a certain Luang who was operating with his group in the territory of the International Concession. He provided them with information and money, both of which he got hold of at home.

  His old man worked under cover and was pleased to instruct his son in the manifold aspects of underground political activity in China. One night Julien asked him:

  “Was it true about that plot against Chiang Kai-Shek?”

  Armand Boisfeuras simply replied:

  “Where there are Communists, there’s always a plot. Chiang realized that.”

  “That’s not the kind of information we want,” Luang told him. “That’s all over and done with and we don’t give a damn. Has your father met the Japanese consul-general; what did Chiang say to him the day before yesterday? That’s the sort of thing we’re after.”

  On another occasion his father explained:

  “The balance of the world depends on the disunity of China. A united China in the hands of a single group, of a single party, is liable to set the world ablaze. Communism is the great danger because only the Communists are capable of uniting China; they have all the necessary qualifications: inhumanity, intolerance, single-mindedness, and they’re mad . . .”

  “The prattlings of your father?” Luang would say. “Not the slightest interest to us. But we shall be needing arms . . . and through him you could get some for us.”

  Julien was nineteen. His father had summoned him to his office in the Chamber of Commerce; he had heard about his connexion with the Communist Party. The old man did not moralize—that wasn’t his way—he cut him off without a penny and turned him out of the house.

  “You can come back when you’ve got over this nonsense.”

  But Luang dropped Julien. He was no longer living with his father, he was therefore of no further interest. He did not believe in the conversion of the sons of taipans. Their fathers had plundered China, their sons thought they could make amends with a show of remorse and a few contributions. That didn’t work. Young whites who were well-disposed were to be handled only as long as they were useful, then they were chucked away like a paper napkin. After all, they had much the same colour, consistency and fragility as one.

  Julien was twenty. He was reconciled to his father and the old man had sent him to a business college in America. Came the 1940 armistice in France. Julien felt it was unpleasant but was not deeply affected by it. He did not regard himself as a citizen of a small western country but as a white man of the Far East, and to him the internal quarrels of Europe seemed ludicrous.

  Came the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, which forced him to come to some decision. He had a French passport, he was living in America, his father was in China. He therefore joined up in the British Army.

  At the age of twenty-two he had the D.S.O., amoebic dysentery, an abscess of the liver and malaria. Within six months he was patched up in a hospital in New Delhi. His father was then in Chungking, acting as official adviser to Chiang Kai-Shek. He went and joined him.

  The old man was still surrounded by his retinue of policemen, intelligence agents, prostitutes, smugglers, bankers and generals. He was like certain mushrooms, he needed all this dung in order to live. The old man was still pursuing his pet ideas, enjoying his pipe of opium and going to bed with younger and younger girls.

  He considered that the real enemies of China were the Communists, not the Japanese whom the Americans would soon bring to heel. He urged Chiang to use the arms and equipment provided by the U.S.A. against the troops of Mao-Tse-Tung and Chu-The while these were still badly organized. But at this American sentiment rebelled. Washington could only deal with one war at a time and the crafty taipan Boisfeuras was sent into exile.

  Julien joined the French Army and was posted to Mission Five at Kung-Ming. He set off for Yunnan, reached the Haute Région of Tonkin and made contact for the first time with the Vietminh guerrillas.

  In fulfilment of his mission, he convinced the Communist leaders that he had come as a defender of democracy and not as the vanguard of a colonial reconquest. He already considered the Vietminh efficient and dangerous. He was frequently sent into China. Each time he came back to Indo-China he noticed the Vietminh were organizing and developing according to the self-same methods as the Chinese Communist Party.

  When he went down to Saigon, he stayed with the director of the Bank of Indo-China and established close connexions with the big Chinese bankers of Cholon. The American and Chinese services in Formosa repeatedly invited him to work for them, but he was not interested in money. The French intelligence service was better suited to his temperament and to the aim he had in mind. Its disorganization and complexity allowed him a completely free hand.

  He had an old score to settle with Luang; for that purpose it was more convenient to be in uniform . . .

  His father stayed on in Shanghai when the Communists entered in order to negotiate some commercial agreements with the new régime. He had plenty of guts, the old bastard! His negotiations met with failure; there was no one left to corrupt except the whole régime, and even that could not be done at once. For four years taipan Armand Boisfeuras, deprived of his opium and little girls, had remained as a hostage in the hands of the Communists; then he had gone back to France. The Communists had denied him the dung on which he lived; it was a wonder he did not die.

  In China the only form of self-indulgence left was the synthetic breeding of sexless ants in chemically pure surroundings.

  • • •

  In the morning one of the bo-dois came to fetch Boisfeuras. The Voice watched the captain approaching. There was a strange smile on his face as he offered him a cigarette.

  “You don’t seem to have suffered much from this arduous march, Captain.”

  Then all of a sudden he broke into Vietnamese.

  “I’m told you speak our language extremely well . . . as only those who have got our blood in their veins can do. You’re a half-caste, aren’t you, at two or three generations’ removed perhaps?”

  “I was brought up by a Vietnamese nurse and I learnt your language before my own.”

  “What were you doing at Dien-Bien-Phu?”

  “I was in charge of the Pims because of my knowledge of Vietnamese. I’ve already told you that.”

  At a sign from the Voice two bo-dois seized the captain. They tied his hands behind his back with a length of wire, pulling his elbows up with a jerk.

  “That was a lie, Captain Boisfeuras. You belonged to the G.C.M.A.* organization and you only got to Dien-Bien-Phu during the last few days. Before that you were north of Phong-Tho where you commanded a group of partisans. You were one of those wretches who were trying to raise the mountain minorities against the Vietnamese people.”

  Boisfeuras had only passed through Phong-Tho. He had gone farther north to deal with the Thais of Yunnan. The Voice was confusing him with a quadroon officer who belonged to that organization and had tried to form a guerrilla group from the mountain people and some Chinese bandits. The officer had been killed in an ambush laid by his own men: there had been some fuss over a girl or over money or opium. The Vietminh had had nothing to do with the business.

  He saw that it was very much in his interests to be confused with this half-caste.

  “I
admit I lied.”

  “I appreciate your frankness, late though it is. It’s my duty to punish you. You will be tied up for the rest of the march. You are absolutely forbidden to say a word to the sentries. But if you are so keen on practising Vietnamese, you can always come and see me. We could then discuss what you were doing north of Phong-Tho.”

  “My mission there was a failure . . .”

  “It was bound to be. We shall hold a court of inquiry to see if you committed any war crimes. Until then you will be under special surveillance.”

  Boisfeuras completed the march isolated from his comrades and under the close watch of three sentries who jabbed the barrels of their submachine-guns into his ribs as soon as he opened his mouth. His guards were changed every day.

  Tied up between two bo-dois, Boisfeuras marched at the end of the column. The wire had bitten into his wrists; his swollen, purple hands were paralysed. He had lost his former agility and stubbed his feet on every obstacle in his path. Sometimes his ears, buzzing with fever, echoed with the din of heavy hobnailed boots tramping over delicate porcelain, with the shrill cries of women being raped and with the noise of tearing canvas. Then in his mind’s eye he saw that lovely painting on silk that used to be in his father’s house in Shanghai and which came from the plunder of the Summer Palace. It represented three reeds and a corner of a lake by moonlight.

  “They smashed everything,” his father told him, “with the toes of their boots or the butts of their rifles, the loveliest and oldest vases in the world. There was a marine lieutenant with them who suddenly found he had a taste for Chinese objects. He only broke what he could not steal; that was your grandfather, my boy.”

  As Boisfeuras’s exhaustion increased, the sound of breaking porcelain became louder and more ear-shattering until he had to clench his teeth.