CHRISTIAN MARIE FERDINAND DE LA CROIX DE CASTRIES

  They talk of a garden-party seducer, of a locker stuffed with crumpled handkerchiefs and gambling debts. Yes, they say he fucked around quite a bit, Marie Ferdinand de La Croix de Castries, that his skinny little body contorted into dreadful positions, but always the same ones, on tiptoe. Of course, he didn’t need a stepladder, Marie Ferdinand de La Croix de Castries, he managed just fine when mounting his American ladies. He wore a red scarf around his neck, and while the women bawled out their words of love, he kept a firm hold on his riding crop. But once Marie Ferdinand de La Croix de Castries had ejected his little sac of sperm, he gently laid down his crop next to his Malaysian sabre. Oh, he was an odd duck, that Marie Ferdinand de La Croix de Castries. They say he listened unmoved to the most tragic tales but looked downright grave when it came to minor matters. They also say he was a night owl, a bad singer, a bad dancer, and that he played at being a street tough, sitting with other hardboiled types. How many times did he break a beer stein with his teeth? How often did he crunch broken glass between his jaws, jaws descended from eight lieutenant generals? And how many times did he swallow that horrible mash, simply for the pleasure of titillating a gaggle of girls or shutting some fuckface’s piehole?

  The La Croix de Castries family had counted one or two archbishops, a marshal, an alliance with the Mortemarts, a Knight of the Order of Malta, and even the wife of a President of the Republic. Who can top that? Still, someone even nastier and more snobbish than Saint-Simon might sneer that it only dates back to 1469, to Guilhem Lacroix, an ennobled usurer. Thanks to the insatiable curiosity of Pierre Burlats-Brun, author of Héraldique & généalogie, we can step even further down the social ladder, from Guilhem Lacroix to Jean Lacroix, who already sounds an off-note, then from Jean to Raymond and from Raymond to Johan Le Cros, fishmonger – which, given the pride of the Castries, is humorous, even touching in its humility.

  The Castries family thus boasted a Minister of the Navy, shovelfuls of dukes and marquises, and even until just recently they were sitting comfortably, in the person of Henri de Castries, in the Moroccan leather chair of the CEO of Axa, which is like a new archbishopric or another ministry of finance. Henri de Castries is a graduate of the top business school, Catholic, patron of the French Scouts. He’s not an ideologue – a right-winger, to be sure, but he still feels comfortable frequenting his old socialist classmates. He’s married to Anne Millin de Grandmaison, his cousin (small world). Number 7 on the archangelic list of highest-paid executives, between Pinault and Mestrallet; as head of the above-mentioned corporation, he earned 950,000 euros in fixed income, in the name of the unnameable Father; 2,034,171 euros in variable income in the name of the sacrificed Son; and the rest (director’s fees, stock options), in the name of the Holy Spirit, the smallest figure of the Trinity, 86,000 euros and change – almost a college professor’s salary. Still, deep down, the Castries are just like us: they were mostly merchants, fishmongers, and their invisible family tree harbours hundreds of beggars and thousands of hunter-gatherers. But very often a sizeable inheritance can be mistaken for destiny, and Marie Ferdinand de La Croix de Castries certainly saw it that way. Onward!

  It’s him who’ll command the base at Dien Bien Phu, he’s the one Navarre put in charge of the entrenched camp. Oh, he doesn’t especially like it, does Marie Ferdinand de La Croix de Castries; he prefers wide-open spaces, wars of movement, the cavalry. But ultimately he accepts. And now here he is, in his shelter covered with mats and sacks of earth, in front of his a/c, riffling through imbecilic papers and gnawing on pencils. He sees the world through mosquito netting. Whatever happened to that cute little Spanish number he met last month? And what about the Viets, what do they do for R&R? He spits a shard of pencil into the ashtray, then decides to go for a walk. In the evening, Colonel de Castries dines with some officers. Then he returns to the command post. The moon hasn’t yet risen. It’s cold. He runs his palm over his close-cropped head. That evening, several purple tracers slash the hillsides; there’s a sound of machine-gun bursts. The slightly dishevelled Colonel downs a second bottle. In the morning, fog chokes the valley. In his bunker, the Colonel is bored.

  ENCIRCLED

  Slowly the camp was encircled. They hadn’t seen it coming. On 7 December, the Pavie Track was cut off. It became impossible to leave camp without suffering massive losses; for all around them was forest, jungle. And that was something Navarre hadn’t counted on. From HQ in Hanoi, they don’t have a clue! As for Marie Ferdinand de La Croix de Castries, who knows all about it, he seems to believe in a possible victory, he seems to believe (sucking on his cane or his measuring rod) that he’s going to burst out of the ground from two metres below the surface and . . . – and what? He’s not really sure, he hesitates . . . – and whip the herds of buffalo under the sun, pierce the grey skin of the rice paddies, tear down the bamboo arches! And yet, the troops sent out to reconnoitre barely make it past the camp limits. On the survey maps, arrows wander hither and yon, leap over rivers, fly over mountain passes; but here in Dien Bien Phu, they’re pinned down. An arrow can easily cross over a hill at 1:25,000 scale, cross 1/25,000th of a stream, climb 1/25,000th of a mountain, and your hand can then plant a little paper flag on it. But at Dien Bien Phu, the little flags remain in their box, and the rivers are not 1/25,000th of themselves: they’re actual size, and the hills are covered in betel palms and undergrowth, and what on Navarre’s table over there is merely a centimetre, over here is twenty-five thousand times bigger! And after all, twenty-five thousand centimetres is two hundred and fifty metres, and two hundred and fifty metres of jungle, two hundred and fifty metres of steep inclines, two hundred and fifty metres intercut with cliffs, two hundred and fifty metres of Vietminh, is not exactly the same as a centimetre of gridded paper. Instead of making maps at 1:25,000, the French general staff should make maps wider than the big wide world, on which rivers would be less fordable than real rivers and hills would be more uneven than real hills. For one might well have dropped 127 tons of bombs on Mercury Point, the supposed nerve centre of the Vietminh’s provisions: bicycles, pushed by former coolies wearing cheap canvas and sandals, immediately take to the roads, forging a whole network of new paths, despite the heavy sacks of rice and mortars on their backs.

  Growing concerned, the last remaining Parisians go to see Navarre and visit the entrenched camp. They want to get an idea. Navarre meets them in Hanoi, in battle-dress, holding a small rosewood baton. He has been accorded a visit by M. Jacquet, the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. I’m not sure what Jacquet thought as Cogny listed the threats amassing around the entrenched camp; I don’t know whether (as Mayor of Barbizon) his pipe produced puffy white clouds like Corot’s and Daubigny’s; and no doubt he would have preferred even a third-tier restaurant to an officers’ mess, and no doubt he didn’t feel very at ease, standing between that hulking brute Cogny and the pinched, silent little Navarre. And then Jacquet goes to Dien Bien Phu, asks questions, doesn’t seem very convinced. But by 4 p.m., it’s time to leave, the Vietminh could attack at any minute. He’s spent two and a half hours at Dien Bien Phu, not really enough time to form an opinion.

  And so they send M. Pleven. Pleven has been, more or less, a minister nine times and Council president twice. He knows the score. Just before him, on 7 February, M. de Chevigné, Secretary of State for War, goes to Dien Bien Phu. On 8 February, at a stopover in Nice, Pleven crosses paths with Jacquet on his way back to Paris. They swap impressions over coffee, and the impressions are not very good. Meanwhile, in Dien Bien Phu, what does de Chevigné see? A chamber pot. Yes. He sees that the garrison is living, stricto sensu, at the bottom of a chamber pot. And he sees that the Vietminh are occupying the entire rim of that pot. This is all most troubling. In a kind of demonstration, to entertain Chevigné, whose daughter has married a Castries and whose grandmother was the model for Proust’s duchesse de Guermantes, the colonel has sent two battalions to attack the hills, supported by artillery and air cover. The point was to destroy a 75mm field gun that would sporadically fire on the camp. The two battalions of paratroopers were to scale Hill 781, backed by tanks and artillery. So what happened? Well, they barely managed to get over the rim of the chamber pot and advance a few kilometres, before, having sustained heavy fire, and despite the air support, they were forced to turn back.

  On 19 February, it was Defence Minister Pleven’s turn to make an inspection. At around 11 a.m., he took off from the airfield in Hanoi, heading for Dien Bien Phu. Navarre didn’t come, not wanting, he said, to influence the other man’s judgement. Castries greeted him and described the military facility, the forces at his disposal. Pleven, who had been in Indochina for ten days, was also wearing a curious battle-dress, with legs that were too wide and pockets that were too large, in which he seemed to float. Crowning this was a panama hat, which in the jungles of Tonkin was a dubious accessory. Suddenly, turning towards General Fay, Chief of Staff of the Air Force, Pleven asked what he thought of the entrenched camp. ‘I would advise General Navarre to get out of Dien Bien Phu, or else he’s done for,’ Fay replied without hesitation. For several minutes, the members of the small delegation stared fixedly at their shoes, and the visit ended on an awkward note. That evening, in the plane, Pleven seemed worried, chain-smoked. He left Indochina several days later – but not before presenting Navarre with the star of Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour. It’s still unclear why.

  BEATRICE! BEATRICE!

  It seems that Dante, despite his medallion profile and his extraordinary adventures in the bowels of our woes, never, but never, glimpsed or knew or loved a girl named Beatrice, and that the great love he crooned over in book after book was just a literary artifice. Truly wicked tongues might add that he was in the habit of banging his domestics on the fly and that gentle Beatrice was in fact his servant, and that the old owl had sung her a vita nuova between two stacks of dirty dishes. And so, by one of those sentimental fervours that soldiers are prone to – a trait they share with poets – they baptized one of their strongholds ‘Beatrice’.

  A stronghold serves to protect the heart, to protect the heart of a military facility, a command post, or an airstrip against enemy fire. And, from stronghold to stronghold, a fortification secures the positions. As such, strongholds protect one another, like a band of close friends. In order to do this, so that the entrenched camp could be on cleared terrain where they could manoeuvre freely, they evicted the villagers, burned their houses, torched the copses and grapefruit trees. It was quite a bit of work, carried out by prisoners, or Arabs. Some thousand peasants had been displaced since the arrival of the expeditionary force. But now, Beatrice stands proudly amid her bouquet of bare spikes. At night, she’s a ring of light surrounded by barbed wire, tunnels in the earth beneath wooden logs. A jeep with its windscreen folded down on the bonnet navigates to the command post, then returns. Days go by. They wait. It’s been weeks, months, that they’ve been waiting. It seems the Vietminh are going to attack. They dread it and long for it. Sometimes they forget about it.

  March 13th. Foul weather. At dawn, a Dakota lies grounded, in flames. Another one explodes near stronghold Isabelle. And from then on, everything falls apart. Another aeroplane catches fire. Two reporters, filming the scene, are hit by mortar fire; one dies, the other loses a leg. A little later, a fourth aeroplane catches fire. Another is shot down in mid-flight. They’ve been waiting for the confrontation, calling for it, and now here it is! And as usual, it’s much less fun than in storybooks, much less pretty than in paintings, even sadder than in memories. It stinks of petrol and dust. The air is full of smoke, you don’t breathe so much as cough, talk so much as yell, sing so much as spit. Caught between the expeditionary corps and the Vietminh, the Thai villagers pack up and leave: it’s the sign that an attack is imminent and the Vietminh have advised them to get out. It’s strange to see those lines of men, women, children, and elders carrying what they can, slowly, inexorably, leaving behind their empty houses, as if real life has become just a stage set.

  Suddenly, Christian Marie Ferdinand de La Croix de Castries thought he noticed something in the smoke from burning fuel, amid the first ruins. Yes, he did see it! There it was, and he didn’t know if it meant victory or death. At that moment, there was a great ‘Oh!’ in the entrenched camp. Everyone moved back. The Colonel stood alone, right before the thing. He stopped and stared. Good Christ, what is that? It’s not a tribe of blacks, it’s not a group of coolies bound together with wire, it’s not the poor railway saboteurs he’s heard about, it’s not a single young man holding a Browning, no, it’s a huge phantom rushing toward them. It’s the People’s Army.

  The entrenched camp holds its breath. Based on aerial photos and informant intel, the attack is predicted for 17:00 hours. The hour arrives under the great bloodless sky. Nothing happens. Five p.m. and one minute, two, five, ten . . . nothing. Still nothing. The legionnaires are silent, each man wrapped in his own anxiety, eyes wide open, breathing heavily, scraping the ground with his worn boot. Ten minutes! That’s a damn long time, an eternity; the entire history of the world can be contained in ten minutes! Admiral Charnier comes up the Mekong with a flotilla of several gunships, in one minute. The Emperor of Vietnam petitions for peace in two seconds, and one minute later the French are occupying Indochina. But they only occupy it briefly, for one minute after that, Ho Chi Minh arrives and proclaims independence. Then it’s war, for a minute, and here we are at the very final seconds of this great slice of life, at the Saturday evening of creation, an instant before sunset. Suddenly, at 5:30, an enormous tumult pulverizes the silence. These are not merely a few harassing volleys; they’re a hammer blow that splits your skull in two. Rows of men dash forward with noses to the ground, what a rude awakening! They quickly thread their way into the gutters, run in the dust, and from every direction it’s hit and slash, cables are ripped out, ceilings piss earth, shelters collapse. In several instants, the entire facility of the entrenched camp is convulsed. It no longer looks like a well-behaved giant, standing in the middle of the jungle – that’s over. From all sides, they wallow in rubble, the camp is pounded mercilessly. Every three seconds, the earth trembles and soil rains down. Beatrice no longer exists.

  They say that that’s when Marie Ferdinand de La Croix de Castries began showing signs of despondency and exhaustion. The Vietminh shells had opened in him an abyss of perplexity. For the next two months, Castries would not once leave his shelter. He wore his helmet night and day, and scrupulously relieved himself in the casque bearing his insignia.

  NAVARRE UP CLOSE

  While the battle is turning disastrous, Mme Navarre, in Paris, flits from salon to salon, conversing herself hoarse. She toasts her rangers only with the best Chambertin, tickles her palate with fine liqueurs, riddles partridge wings with small holes, and shivers at the crackle of a meringue. She is invited everywhere; her only enemies are the lemon slices concealed in bouquets of shrimp. From Saigon, General Navarre is preparing his Operation Atlante, which involves advancing, by a piston effect, from south to north, so as to conquer a large portion of the territory. But Operation Atlante goes awry; and the more Navarre dreams of his grand strategic movement toward the upper mountain plateaus, the farther he drifts from the verdigris clay valley of Dien Bien Phu.

  In the evening, after watching a movie at the Eden, Navarre goes home, climbs the stairs, pulls on his nightshirt and slippers, returns to his work table, and dreams. He dreams for a moment of writing that note he’s quietly been pondering for quite some time, a short scholarly note about the childhood of Antoine Henri de Jomini, the genius, the greatest military strategist of the nineteenth century – ‘Napoleon’s soothsayer’, they used to call him at the war college. And since the nights are long, he rereads a bit of the book by Courville, the great man’s great-grandson; it reeks of panegyric, but he adores that. Then he imagines what his essay would be like, a brief note on Jomini’s childhood in the alleyways of Payerne, like a more erudite War of the Buttons, larded with maxims by the master and illustrated with dustbin barricades on strategic street corners. But a dull anxiety pervades him. Has he indeed followed Jomini’s precepts at Dien Bien Phu? Did he truly absorb the master’s lessons at the war college? Has he let others lead him onto a slippery slope? Seized by doubt, he picks up The Art of War and plunges back into that tedious tome, barely disturbed by the noise of the air conditioner. Time passes, one o’clock, then two in the morning; and imagine his surprise to discover, the more he reads the celebrated score, that he had heard an entirely different melody. He suddenly feels troubled, feverish, riffs through the book faster and faster, and is forced to admit the extent to which his entrenched camp, his weird creation, contravenes not just one or two of Jomini’s precepts, but all of them!

  ‘According to my view,’ writes Jomini, ‘the real and principal use of intrenched camps is always to afford, if necessary, a temporary refuge for an army, or the means of debouching offensively upon a decisive point . . . To bury an army in such a camp, to expose it to the danger of being outflanked and cut off . . . would be folly.’ God damn it to hell! he says to himself, what the fuck have I done! Indeed, Dien Bien Phu is neither a temporary refuge nor an offensive means, but a good way to bury his army on the spot, plain and simple. He nervously leafs through the pages of the book: ‘Despite all this, these intrenched camps,’ Jomini adds, driving the nail home, ‘when only intended to afford a temporary foothold . . .’ Shit! Shit! Shit! What the hell is Jomini up to, he’s making an ass of me, he’s out of his mind! And a bit further on: ‘but it will never be more than a temporary refuge . . .’ Great God Almighty, how had he never spotted that? And General Ely, and good old Marshal Juin, why hadn’t they cried out: ‘Hold on, there, go back to your Jomini!’

 

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