The Centurions

by Jean Larteguy

  “Brain-washing makes me sick,” said Pasfeuro, “any form of brain-washing. Propaganda’s a filthy business. Are you going to write about this show, Villèle?”

  Villèle put his head on one side and in a slightly scornful tone replied:

  “It’s only a detail. You’ve got to try and see things as a whole . . .”

  Three violins playing out of tune; a drum which couldn’t very well do anything else but play in tune; three little pig-tailed Vietminh girls going through the motions of a national dance, and behind them, looking very pale, the French prisoners.

  They marched under a triumphal arch of paper and bamboo which proclaimed the brotherhood of the masses, then another, smaller one, which wished them a safe and speedy return to hearth and home.

  Pasfeuro could scarcely recognize the emaciated youngster in the front rank as Yves Marindelle. He was no longer the mischievous noisy, truant schoolboy with his pockets stuffed with practical jokes and snares who had flown out to Indo-China four years earlier after entrusting him with his child-bride. This was a cross between an old man and an adolescent.

  Yves caught sight of him, rushed up and burst into tears.

  “It’s you, old man, you’ve come all the way here. How’s Jeanine?”

  “She’s waiting for you in Paris.”

  “Why didn’t she write . . . through Prague?”

  “She tried to . . . several times . . . through the Red Cross.”

  Glatigny had now come up behind them. He too had changed; he no longer looked like one of his horses.

  “Glatigny, let me introduce a cousin of Jeanine’s, who now goes by the name of Pasfeuro.”

  “I know him,” said Glatigny. “He’s also a cousin of mine.”

  He gave a slight bow and turned his back on him.

  “What’s wrong, Herbert? He doesn’t seem exactly delighted to see you. Oh, of course, it’s because you’ve changed your name.”

  “I’d almost forgotten,” Pasfeuro was thinking, “I’ve also got that silly Christian name, Herbert, maybe because my mother slept with a lord . . . or with the butler.”

  Pasfeuro had promised Jeanine to put Yves in the picture, to tell him it was all over between them, that she wouldn’t ever sleep with him again, that she would no longer be his wife but always his sister if he wanted. He couldn’t do it: it would have been worse than hitting a cripple. He would stand him a lot of drinks, give him the best meal that money could buy, get hold of a girl for him, the loveliest girl in Saigon . . . and afterwards perhaps he might bring himself to tell him.

  After having their names checked, the prisoners filed on to the LCT, still in complete silence. A few journalists followed them aboard. When the ramp was raised behind them a voice rang out, the voice of a former prisoner perched in the bows:

  “Off with this filthy crap!”

  He hurled his Vietminh helmet into the water. All his comrades followed suit.

  Villèle leaned towards Pasfeuro and asked under his breath:

  “Who’s that savage who’s trying to jeopardize our relations with the Vietminh by that idiotic gesture?”

  “Captain Phillipe Esclavier.”

  The helmets now mingled in the Red River with the bush hats and bobbed about in the wake of the boat as it drew away from the shore.

  The senior officers were liberated after the subalterns, and General de Castries on the last day.

  When a journalist asked him what he was looking forward to most, he replied with an extremely distinguished lisp:

  “Thteak and french-fried potatoeth.”

  Pasfeuro interviewed Raspéguy who was in great form, beaming with health and vigour; he had done two hours’ physical culture every day.

  “Did you have a very hard time in captivity, Colonel?”

  “Not at all. In fact I might even say I found it extremely interesting. I think it taught me a lot—for instance, how to go about it so as not to let those fellows get the upper hand . . . smart fellows, you know. Nowadays you’ve got to have the people on your side if you want to win a war.”

  “There’s no longer any question of war; the armistice has been signed.”

  “The armistice! That’s just another staff college idea! The armistice! There won’t be any now . . . or if there is it’ll be a swindle or some sort of racket. You didn’t by any chance see a man called Esclavier and his gang of ruffians go through?”

  “Yes, three days ago. They’re all in the Lannemezan hospital.”

  “Have you ever done any fighting yourself?”

  “Yes, and I can’t say I enjoyed it very much.”

  Raspéguy looked utterly bewildered; he could not understand how anyone could fail to enjoy fighting.

  Lescure and Dia were evacuated together, but by helicopter with the seriously sick.

  When Colonel V—— who commanded the French detachment saw the Negro doctor, he turned to his second-in-command and said:

  “Better keep an eye on that bird: a doctor, therefore an educated black; must have been influenced by Vietminh propaganda; a Communist most likely; make a note of him.”

  The colonel had a powerful voice; Dia, a sensitive ear; he had heard everything. He turned towards Lescure:

  “I suppose we’re going to run into bastards like that everywhere!”

  Lescure played two or three notes on his flute and shrugged his shoulders.

  • • •

  The former prisoners spent anything between one week and one month in various hospitals in Indo-China. Then they began taking to drink, sleeping with women or smoking opium . . . but hardly any of them seemed to be in a hurry to get back to France.

  They were becoming re-acquainted with the pleasures of Vietnamese life; instead of alienating them from “yellow skins”; their captivity had brought them closer. They could be seen arguing with rickshaw coolies and Chinese itinerant vendors. They proved to be amenable and not at all recalcitrant, they reported punctually whenever required and filled in any number of forms, but they appeared to be living outside the Army, in a world of their own; they eschewed the company of white women and of their former comrades who had not been through the same ordeal.

  One morning they were quietly herded on to a ship; it was the Edouard Branly, a stout old Chargeurs Réunis tub with good food and comfortable cabins. They put into Singapore, where they bought mangoes and Chinese knick-knacks; Colombo, where they made an excursion to Kandy; Djibouti and Port Said; and one day, towards ten-thirty in the evening, they reached Algiers.

  It was 11 November 1954.

  • • •

  They were told that the boat would be leaving again at two o’clock in the morning and that they could go ashore.

  Mahmoudi left them there. He had been ill during the voyage and an ambulance was waiting to take him to the Maillot hospital. He could hardly bring himself to part from them. In leaving them he seemed afraid he would once more be assailed by all his doubts, uncertainties and contradictions.

  The former prisoners of Camp One went ashore and were astonished to find the town as dead as though it was under siege. All the shops in the Rue d’Isly were closed. Patrols tramped the pavements in their hobnailed boots. The steps of the main post office were picketed by a platoon of C.R.S. wearing steel helmets and armed with submachine-guns.

  They made for the Kasbah in the hope of finding a night-club or brothel open but came up against barbed-wire entanglements guarded by Zouaves. They did not come across any of their comrades of the parachute units, and at the empty bar of the Aletti Guillaume the barman told them they had all left the evening before for the Aurès.

  Not knowing where to go, frightened of finding themselves plunged once again into an atmosphere of war, a fear to which they thought they had become impervious, they fled back to the boat. In the bar Merle had picked up a Paris newspaper, and since his comrades were jo
stling all round him, he read bits of it out loud.

  Seeing this little gathering, Raspéguy promptly joined them, followed by a portly little major of the Algiers garrison wearing the red forage cap of the Zouaves.

  Aurès. First major engagement. Entrenched in the caves, the fellaghas are firing on our troops. Thirty rebels captured in Kabylie. Batna, tenth November. The first major engagement in the general mopping-up operations in the Aurès is now taking place in the Djebel Ichmoul two kilometres from Foum-Toub; south of this locality a detachment consisting of two companies of paratroops have made contact with a band of outlaws who have taken refuge in some caves from which they are firing with automatic weapons. The battle was still going on at dawn this morning.

  Three paratroopers have been wounded, one seriously. They have been brought back to Batna by helicopter. The bodies of two rebels have been found and one prisoner has been taken; he was armed with a rifle and revolver.

  In Kabylie, near Dra-el-Mizan, two policemen have captured thirty rebels who had committed various offences in the area. While they were passing through the village, the population attacked them. In spite of the policemen’s intervention, one was killed and another wounded.

  In Algiers the police have discovered a store of bombs in the residential quarter of the town. A similar discovery has been made in the department of Oran, at Er Rahel.

  At Rio-Salado in the same department, the police have identified eight men who were being sought for terrorist activities and arrested six of them. Twenty pounds of explosive and three rifles were found in their house.

  For the last forty-eight hours all civilian aircraft have been grounded. An aeroplane was reported last night, flying with all lights extinguished above the Aurès range, while a number of fires were observed in the mountains; the authorities believe that the rebels, whose supplies are running short since the roads have been cut, may be receiving arms and food by parachute.*

  “It’s the same old war going on,” said Boisfeuras. “The Viets were right.”

  The little major could not let this pass. All the men arriving from Indo-China had their vision completely distorted by their captivity or engagements against the Vietminh. They had caught some nasty yellow infection of which they would have to be cured, come what may.

  “Captain,” he said, button-holing Boisfeuras but addressing all the other officers as well, “Algeria is not Indo-China. The Arab is a Moslem and not a Communist. We are dealing with an essentially localized rebellion, a few bands of Chaouia brigands. We have sent in the paratroops, which we should have done some time ago. It will all be over in a week. In Algeria there have always been flare-ups of this kind . . . ever since Bugeaud, and in the same area. Forget Indo-China, you’re now in Algeria, only a few hundred miles away from France.”

  He turned to Raspéguy who, as a senior officer, was surely bound to back him up.

  “That’s right, isn’t it?”

  Raspéguy sucked his pipe and cast a glance of inquiry at Esclavier.

  “No,” he abruptly replied. “I haven’t got much book learning and I don’t express myself very well, but I feel old Uncle Boisfeuras is right even though he has never set foot in Africa before. Your little flare-up in the Aurès isn’t going to be snuffed out just like that.”

  “I’ve been out here fifteen years, Colonel, I speak Arabic . . .”

  “Maybe you might have done better if you’d gone to Indo-China. Out there they were already talking about the next war.”

  Raspéguy repeated this sentence for his own benefit. He found it striking, but it didn’t seem to have much effect on that old sod Esclavier who was reading the paper over Merle’s shoulder. He must be doing it on purpose.

  Merle did not give a damn about this business in Algeria. It was all over; he was a civilian and he was glancing through the paper to see if there was anything that might interest a genuine civilian like him.

  The Socialists had replied to Mendès-France. Herriot had been invited to Moscow. So he was still alive, that old Republican gasbag! Dany Robin liked Picasso. But who the hell was Dany Robin? Hold-up in the Rue d’Avron, a million francs stolen from a cashier. A million wasn’t much . . . Floods in Morocco; twenty-three dead. Hossein Fatimi, the former Minister for Foreign Affairs of Iran, had been shot. After the execution, by way of a funeral oration, General Teimour Baktyar had stated that he had more blood than a bull. Another tender-hearted chap! One hundred and eighty eighteenth-century court costumes at the Musée Carnevalet. In the entertainments column Robert Dhery and the Branquignols claimed it was the audience that amused them; and on the book page Kléber Haedens was reviewing the memoirs of a writer who signed himself de Gaulle.

  De Gaulle—there was a chap who had soon been forgotten, even by those who wore his insignia, the Free French cross: the Esclaviers and Boisfeurases of the world. In camp no one had so much as mentioned his name.

  “General de Gaulle’s book is infinitely superior to the works that are usually written by war leaders and statesmen . . . Men in power, once their strength begins to decline . . .”

  The siren of the Edouard Branly announced their departure. The docks of Algiers were deserted. One by one the officers went below. It was cold out on deck.

  Two days later, at eight o’clock in the morning, a loud-speaker announced that the coast of France was in sight. Still half asleep, they went up on deck. Under the overcast sky the coast looked black. Gulls flew to and fro above the boat, giving their piercing cries.

  They were all there, pressed close together, leaning over the rail. The paradise they had dreamt about so often in the prison camps was slowly approaching and already it was losing its appeal.

  They were dreaming of another paradise: Indo-China—that was what was uppermost in the thoughts of all of them. They were not sorrowful sons coming home to lick their wounds, they were strangers. Bitterness welled up in them.

  In 1950, at Orange, a train full of Far East wounded had been stopped by the Communists who had insulted and struck the men lying on the stretchers. A Paris hospital advertising for blood donors had specified that their contribution would not be used for the wounded from Indo-China. At Marseilles, which could now be seen looming over the horizon, they had refused to disembark the coffins of the dead.

  They had been abandoned, like those mercenaries for whom there was suddenly no further use and whom Carthage had therefore massacred so as to avoid having to pay them their due. Cut off from their own country, they had re-created an artificial motherland for themselves in the friendship of the Vietnamese and in the arms of their slant-eyed women.

  They were almost horrified to realize that they now had more in common with the Vietminh whom they had hated, with the Voice and his mysterious smile, with the oafish bo-dois, than with these people who were waiting for them on the quayside with a wretched little military band and a detachment of soldiers sloppily presenting arms.

  “If the war had gone on,” Esclavier pensively observed, “if an honourable peace had been made, a real fusion might have come about between us and the Vietnamese and the world might have seen the birth of the first Eurasian race . . .”

  Which of them would the child of Souen and Esclavier have taken after?

  But he went on furiously:

  “No peace is ever honourable for the vanquished.”

  They had all picked up an insidious infection, the yellow infection. They were bringing it back to France with them and it was a crowd of contaminated men that disembarked on the quayside at Marseilles and kissed their wives, their mothers and their children whom they no longer recognized.

  Even the morning air smelled alien to them.

  PART TWO

  THE COLONEL FROM INDO-CHINA

  1

  THE CATS OF MARSEILLES

  Boisfeuras had parted from his comrades in Marseilles. On a grey November morning, with a catch in their throats,
they had seen his slim figure disappear. With his old cardboard suitcase whose handle was reinforced with string, and his cape which was too long for him and hung down to his heels, he was the perfect picture of the poor soldier back from the wars who has no idea where to go and who will shortly be a human wreck destined for the workhouse.

  He had given Florence’s address to the taxi which drove him off. The driver had a more pronounced accent than most Marseillais, which made him sound like a stage comedian deliberately overacting:

  “So the war’s over at last, Captain, eh?”

  “Yes, it’s over.”

  “Personally, mind you, I respect everyone’s opinion—but Indo-China, we couldn’t very well hang on to it since the people who lived out there wanted to see the last of us.”

  The taxi stopped outside a large modern block of flats in pink stucco built at the foot of Notre-Dame de la Garde. Boisfeuras felt the slight tremor that came over him each time he went to see Florence.

  “There we are, sir, home again, with your little wife waiting for you inside. That’s better than war now, isn’t it? That’ll be three hundred and eighty francs. The tip’s not included. No offence meant, but some people, after being overseas so long, tend to forget the customs of our fair land of France . . .”

  The driver laid particular stress on the last words. Feeling ill at ease, Boisfeuras said to himself:

  “Our fair land of France is enough to make one sick.”

  He paid off the taxi, gave the driver a tip and asked the concierge:

  “Miss Florence Mercardier’s, please?”

  “Third on the left. You can’t go wrong, there’s always music and a lot of noise.”

  She spoke in a dry, disagreeable tone; Florence was obviously up to the same old tricks. He went upstairs, dragging the suitcase whose handle had broken yet again, rang the bell and Florence was in his arms, against a background of sugary, insipid music dripping from the radio; the chairs, the tables, the floor itself, were littered with empty bottles, saucers of cigarette-ends and the remnants of a cold supper.