The Centurions

by Jean Larteguy

  “If they had found out who I was and what I was doing,” Boisfeuras calmly replied, “I wouldn’t have had a chance of getting away with it. But they would have waited a long time before trying me and perhaps they would have handed me over to my old friends the Chinese. For I was never at Phong-Tho, and I wasn’t born in Viet-Nam but in China.”

  “You took the only course that could save you . . . as though you knew the Viets extremely well.”

  “I once lived among them—it was in 1945—but they’re no longer the same as they were then. You who’ve been with them for the last four years, could you tell us what the Vietminh is really like?”

  Merle clapped his hands:

  “Take your seats for another instruction period, only this time everyone will tell the truth.”

  Imitating the Voice, his impersonal and self-satisfied tone, he began:

  “Our veteran comrades, re-educated by four years of a policy of leniency, having reverted, now that night has fallen, to what they have never ceased to be, that’s to say vile colonial mercenaries, will now give an objective account of what they think of the psychology and behaviour of that strange, repellant beast, the Vietminh.”

  “So as to be able,” Esclavier interjected, “to show him what we’re made of, to pinch his crops and even rape his woman if possible . . .”

  “It’s not possible,” Orsini regretfully observed.

  “To beat him in the end,” Glatigny concluded with a certain solemnity.

  “You kick off, Marindelle,” said Leroy.

  Marindelle promptly entered into the spirit of the game:

  “Comrades, contrary to what you may believe, we are no longer absolutely vile colonial mercenaries, for these repellant people have forced us to learn certain things. The Voice is perhaps not completely wrong when he tells us we must recognize our faults, or rather our ‘errors.’”

  “Our tactical errors?” Glatigny asked.

  “No, our political errors. In the strategy of modern warfare military tactics are a matter of secondary importance, politics will always take precedence.”

  “Let’s discuss the enemy,” exclaimed Esclavier, who was irritated by this preamble.

  “They’re of adverse will, as Clausewitz would say. The Vietminh have been hardened, changed by seven years of fighting. You’re right, Boisfeuras, they’re no longer the same as they were in 1945. They have created a human type which is repeated indefinitely and cast in the same mould. For example, every year, in every Vietminh division, at the end of the rainy season a recollection is held.”

  “What’s that?” Pinières asked.

  “It’s a favourite term of the Jesuits. Nothing resembles the Vietminh world as closely as the Jesuits. I know, I was brought up by them. A recollection means a retreat, communal withdrawal, the examination of one’s conscience over the period of a year.”

  “Go on.”

  “With the Viets it lasts a fortnight and in some units up to ten per cent of the personnel are sometimes shot because they no longer conform to the model laid down. In this process the guilty are their own public prosecutors and demand their punishment themselves.”

  “Nevertheless,” said Glatigny, “in spite of our strokes of audacity and strokes of luck, in spite of our fits of laziness and energy, there was always Vietminh organization, Vietminh pertinacity: an ant-heap for ever active and in the process of reconstruction.”

  “That’s true,” said Marindelle. “The Vietminh coolie, soldier, officer and propagandist have always worked relentlessly and with a sense of purpose that is scarcely human. They have built dug-outs, trenches, underground villages . . .”

  This reminded them all of the operations in the Delta, of the whole of that landscape remodelled and camouflaged by the human termites.

  “We should have dragged them out of their holes one by one,” said Esclavier, “like snails out of their shells.”

  Marindelle went on with undisguised admiration:

  “During the day they cultivated their paddy-fields and made war; by night they organized committees, sub-committees and associations of old dodderers and lads of ten. They hardly ever slept; they were under-nourished, they always seemed to be on their last legs, but they still had the strength to carry on. Weren’t you struck, as I was, by their physical appearance—their ascetic faces, their feverish eyes, their silent, gliding gait? In their outsize Chinese-style clothes they looked like ghosts . . .”

  “I thrashed it all out,” said Orsini, “with a Viet from the 304th who spoke French fairly well. He told me something about his life. ‘We only moved at night,’ he told me, ‘in single file and in complete silence. We each used to carry a firefly in a little cage of transparent paper attached to our haversacks. So as not to lose our way, we simply followed these little lights. Some of my comrades made the same firefly last three nights running. So as to avoid being encircled, we often used to march for twenty-five nights at a stretch and our only food was a bowl of rice, a few wild herbs and, occasionally, a little dried fish. In the end I felt my body was a machine which moved, stopped, started up again of its own accord and I myself was outside it, half dreaming, half asleep . . . ’”

  “We’ve all been able to see how the Viets work,” Glatigny went on. “All the way along the roads and trails which their convoys used, they had rigged up military shelters under the thick foliage of the jungle. At the mere sound of an aircraft everything, trucks and men, disappeared in a matter of minutes, and there was nothing left but an empty trail. That was all our pilots could see on each of their sorties—empty trails. Just think of the work involved! And it was carried out over hundreds, over thousands of miles, and only by coolies who had nothing but picks, shovels and hatchets and who could only work by night. Meanwhile we were idling away in the brothels and opium dens . . .”

  “It’s through the coolies they got the better of us,” said Boisfeuras, “by means of that vast horde swarming through the elephant grass with their baskets balanced on their shoulders. They used to start off from the Delta with a hundred pounds of rice slung on their poles. They would march three hundred miles over the twisting trails of the Haute Région in order to deliver ten pounds of rice to the bo-dois. They had to feed themselves on the way and still keep a pound or two back for the return journey. These thousands and thousands of coolies trotting along the trails were invisible to our aircraft . . . It wasn’t only terror that kept them going.”

  “Propaganda as well?”

  “Even that’s not enough. Propaganda doesn’t work or give such good results unless it touches something deep, something real in a man.”

  “Such as breaking his solitude,” Esclavier solemnly explained.

  “It’s been a long time since the Viets have known solitude,” said Marindelle. “The Viets remind me of those grinds at school, those bookworms who by dint of sheer hard work and perseverance carry off all the prizes at the end of the term. And yet they’re the least gifted.

  “We soldiers of the expeditionary corps were fairly well off. We had our cars waiting outside as we set off on operations, we had our cases of beer and our rations. Sometimes we felt rather parched, so aircraft would come and drop us some ice. Now and then we carried out some brilliant raids before breakfast, but never bothered to follow them up. Meanwhile the earnest, hardworking grinds carried on with their laborious war. The Vietminh were not better soldiers than we were, especially when you compare their untold strength to our twenty thousand-odd paratroopers and legionaries who were the only ones to face them in pitched battle. Even so they had to be five or ten against one to get the better of us. But then the Viets all made war, and without stopping, day and night, whether they were regulars, coolies, Du-Kit guerrillas, women or babes in arms . . . They made any amount of mistakes, they had about as much gumption as an old boot, but they never failed to learn from their mistakes.

  “As a result of t
his sort of warfare, these termite methods,” Marindelle went on after a short silence, “the Viets have become pernickety and bureaucratic-minded. They take endless notes, make reports and keep files at every level of command, using tiny little bits of paper, because that’s what they’re short of, paper.”

  “For the last four years,” said Leroy, “we’ve been pushed around the whole time by the can-bos or the officers. They keep whipping out note-book and pencil, demanding to know our names and why we came to Indo-China, asking a mass of technical questions about weapons and equipment. They solemnly take down anything you can think of, then wander off completely happy.”

  “That mania of theirs was extremely useful to us,” said Glatigny. “They never stopped working their W.T. sets to broadcast the minutest detail. Every evening, at every level, they gave us a full report of their activities. We were able to intercept it all and we knew to the nearest pound what they were getting from China.”

  “Then why the hell did we come to grief?” Esclavier rudely inquired. “We knew everything to the nearest pound. And the Viet artillery at Dien-Bien-Phu? We knew everything, and that’s all; we did nothing about it.”

  “Without that information we might have been driven out of Indo-China two years earlier.”

  “Well spoken, my little staff officer!”

  Seeing that the discussion was taking a nasty turn, Orsini broke in:

  “Here, in the camp, the Viets keep revising the nominal roll over and over again. They jib at an accent, at a comma. They’re so bigoted, it makes you sick. You’re not allowed to use the word ‘Vietminh’; you must always talk about the Democratic Government of Viet-Nam, and say ‘sir’ to the lowest bo-doi besotted by propaganda. But we haven’t the right to wear our badges of rank. There’s no way of knowing what they think or how they live. You come up against a blank wall and their reply is the same old phonograph record.

  “To begin with, during the first year or two, we thought they were wary of us. Then we noticed it was more than that. They simply have nothing to say apart from ready-made phrases, there’s nothing personal about them. The Party and the army, that’s their whole life. Outside them they have no existence whatever.”

  “That explains it,” said Boisfeuras. “Many of the officers and other ranks have been waging clandestine war for the last seven years. They’ve lived in bands quartered in out-of-the-way little villages, either in the mountains of Thanh-Hoa or the limestone country of the Day. They had nothing in common with the mountain people who despised them as inhabitants of the Delta. So they were reduced to living among them in this military, intransigent, rigorist and highly organized community . . .”

  “That’s absolutely true,” said Marindelle. “Even the Voice, who’s a graduate of Hanoi and quite brilliant, I believe, has ceased to have an original thought or to struggle against his surroundings. All those chaps, just in order to survive, needed all the strength they had. They had to endure night marches, battles to the death, insufficient food. In their leisure hours they were transformed into propaganda machines. They were compelled to reiterate again and again the same slogans that had to be hammered into the thick skulls of the nah-ques. They organized all sorts of associations to embrace the civilian population and saw to it that these associations did not come adrift immediately. They had to instruct recruits, conscript coolies, collect money . . . These men didn’t have a minute to themselves; their life wasn’t their own, and when, utterly exhausted, they found time to sleep for a few hours, they preferred to accept the Communist system wholesale rather than to ponder over it and discuss it.”

  “You seem to be very fond of them,” Esclavier remarked rather nastily.

  “I try to understand them, certainly. If I had been a Vietnamese, I don’t think I could have held out, I should have sided with them. Imagine the life of a young militant before he is poured into the Vietminh mould which will eventually depersonalize him. He knows the romance of revolution. He slips into a village at night. In the depths of a hut lit by an oil lamp he organizes a meeting. Often it’s only a hundred yards or so from a French post. He hears the sentries clearing their throats. All that is known about him is his pseudonym; he leads a mysterious, fascinating life.”

  “You’ve been reading too much Malraux,” Boisfeuras gently remarked. “Communism isn’t like that at all.”

  “That doesn’t stop these peasants, who have never left their little bit of paddy-field, from talking about China and the U.S.S.R. He lets them think that he has just arrived from those distant countries and they gape at him in admiration. His voice becomes seductive and compelling. He uses words that have a magic ring to them, such as Michourism, Collectivism, which he is mad about himself. He leads a life of adventure and all the girls look at him with yearning as they peck away at their sunflower seeds.”

  “I’d also be on their side,” thought Merle. “And I,” thought Mahmoudi, “may soon be obliged to lead that sort of life, but in my case the canh-nas will be mechtas; China and the U.S.S.R., Egypt and Iraq; Communism, Islam.”

  “I’ve known that sort of thing,” Pinières reflected.

  Marindelle fell silent for a moment or two. The old Tho spat and cleared his throat. Marindelle went on in a calmer tone of voice:

  “And after a few years of communal life the result is a man without a soul who is totally inhuman and at the same time ambitious and incredibly naïve, like all those who believe they have found the one and only Truth. On top of that there’s the influence of the boy-scout movement, for Ta-Quan-Bau who’s in charge of the Vietminh youth is a former scoutmaster and inspector general of the Admiral Decoux schools. The doctrines of national revolution took firm root there and many of the leading Viets have been through those schools. You mustn’t overlook doctrinaire intransigence. They’re still in the first stage of Communism, that of revolution and single-mindedness. They have a faith untempered by any sense of reality.”

  “He’s a fine speaker is our Marindelle,” said Orsini with satisfaction.

  “I think I can round off your explanation,” said Boisfeuras. “There are times when the Vietminh appear to be solely a section of the Communist Party. Their implementation of the agrarian reforms, their methods, their propaganda system, particularly as addressed towards the women, their soldiers’ uniform, their manner of fighting, all these are Chinese. The Chinese Communist armies of Mao-Tse-Tung and Chu-Teh have brought those tactics to a fine art. Yet though this hold that China has on them is strong, it is not as complete as it might appear. Although linked to Peking, the Vietnamese Communist Party has its own contacts with the central organization in Moscow. Most of the Vietminh leaders were groomed in France by French Communists directly responsible to the U.S.S.R. The Vietminh is therefore more orthodox than the Chinese Communist Party. They have decided to apply wholesale Communism without trying to adapt it to the local temperament or climate, as Mao-Tse-Tung and his lot have done on a very big scale.

  “Perhaps that’s why the Vietminh fight shy of discussion and stick to their catechism. They seem to be afraid, they’re not sure of themselves. They haven’t the traditions or the intelligence of the Chinese. They’ve always been a slave nation.”

  “The Vietminh have become solemn and melancholy and have lost all their spontaneity,” Marindelle went on. “That has almost happened before my eyes. You hardly ever see them laugh and if they do it’s usually the private soldiers, never the N.C.O.s or officers. They have rapidly lost their youthful virtue, their revolutionary enthusiasm and ardour, and that’s why they’re so disturbing. They can’t stand a joke; they can’t even see one.”

  “What about the girls?” asked Merle.

  “The women are now considered equal to the men. They have the same rights, therefore the same duties. They have become officers, propaganda agents, political figures, but they have lost all their personality.”

  “Vietnamese girls as sweet as mangoes,”
Pinières involuntarily muttered at the memory of My-Oi.

  “Sentimental and even sexual relations are looked upon as useless, worthless and uninteresting. The Vietminh has become a puritan, partly by necessity. His exhausting life leaves him hardly any spare time or energy. He denies all religion, but behaves like the strictest Quaker.”

  Esclavier sniggered:

  “I wouldn’t mind having a go at a young militant Viet girl to see if Marxism prevents her from enjoying it . . .”

  “That sort of thing,” said Leroy, “is strictly forbidden between a tou-bi and a girl of the Democratic Republic of Viet-Nam. Anyway camp routine doesn’t allow the slightest carnal desire to exist. It’s the great sex truce. But if, in spite of everything, the impossible happened, it would mean the immediate liquidation of the tou-bi and a concentration camp for the girl, in other words death for both.”

  “In actual fact, to what use have you put these theories of yours?” Boisfeuras asked. “You seem to have landed on your feet all right in the artificial world of the Vietminh.”

  “In order to survive,” Marindelle explained, “we have found the right balance. This balance we call the ‘political fiction’ of the camp. It’s at the same time a philosophy, an organization and a way of life. It’s unexpressed and unacknowledged, but everyone here has assimilated it. It gives us the exact attitude to adopt in order to find the best solution to each problem of our daily life.

  “It’s time to go to bed. Orsini and Leroy have to get back to their barracks. There’s Mass tomorrow. Everyone goes, even those who aren’t Catholics, even those who don’t believe in anything. For us it’s the equivalent of taking up a political and moral stand. That’s why, Mahmoudi, I’d be grateful if you would come. You see, it’s our church against theirs and you belong to ours.”

  “I’ll see.”

  “You must come.”

  “All right then, I’ll come.”

  Glatigny lay awake for a long time. He never imagined this sort of conversation could have been possible among a group of young officers or that they could have been able to analyse the situation with such lucidity. And that child-lieutenant Marindelle, completely at ease in the Marxist world, talking quite naturally about the political fiction of the camp, urging his comrades to go to Mass because it was a question of taking a political stand . . . that child who was more mature than all of them with the possible exception of Boisfeuras and whose sister-wife back in Paris was being unfaithful to him with a certain Pasfeuro who was a journalist . . .