Dragon Apparent, page 19
* * *
The scenes and sensations of the next four days followed each other so thick and fast that the memory of them is a photo-montage, a jumble of hardly separable images; the enemy strongpoint seen through the bamboo palisade – irresponsive to the machine-gunner’s provocation; the thump of the armoured barge nosing through the sedges, ibises rising up from its bows; the soldiers in isolated posts, reining in their minds with spinsterish occupations, mat-making or knitting; the resigned homage of the notables of fifty villages; the cannonading at night heard from the dim, daemonic interior of a mandarin’s palace.
Luong Hoa stands out. There was a Catholic church with a statue of an Annamese saint standing before a junk, and a remarkable grandfather clock which might have become a cult-object, since the priest bowed slightly in passing it. The clock was covered all over with those rather sickly illustrations which usually accompany religious texts, but it was evident that this was local work as a few Chinese lanterns had been fitted in among the roses and angels. Ever since the Jesuits first went to China, the Far East has been bombarded by clocks, and the palaces of most oriental potentates are as cluttered with them as a French municipal pawnshop. But this, if only on account of sheer size – it must have been nine feet tall – was certainly a worthy object of the villagers’ pride. Luong Hoa had recently suffered forty casualties in a battle with the Viet-Minh.
The French senior officer commanding in this section who showed me round was a man in his middle fifties who bore an astonishing resemblance to the French film actor Raimu. He was a typical père de famille, bluff-natured and mildly eccentric, who liked to have a drink with the sergeant in charge of any post we visited. Dogs took to him wherever we went, and hung about snuffing affectionately at his boots. He carried a tin of condensed milk in his pocket and every now and then would pour out a dollop for them to lick up. It seemed impossible to associate this man with the bloody happenings that must have occurred within the zone of his command, and perhaps by his orders.
We went stumping together through the next village on foot. It was a delightful place, with half the village fishing in a stream by the side of the road and brightly painted houses with good quality coffins displayed for the neighbours’ benefit outside most of them. Bougainvillaea exploded streakily across the ceramic-tiled front of a pagoda; a benign dragon writhed across the roof-top, and a dancer, embarrassed by trailing robes of porcelain, waved her cymbals across the gables at a jovial savant facing her. The Commandant patted the heads of Vietnamese children and said that to attempt to drive through the village after dark, let alone walk, would be certain death. He was another of those French officers who remembered with affection some dingy jumping-off point in England for the invasion of Europe, and we were joined from the first moment by the bond of our common experience of Ellesmere Port.
Our road threaded continually through Catholic and Cao-Daïst areas which were said to war incessantly with one another. The local Cao-Daïsts, although in some way schismatic, recognised the Pope at Tay Ninh, even if they did not subject themselves wholeheartedly to his authority. The Commandant said that they specialised in piracy on the waterways with which the province was networked. It had always been Cao-Daïst policy to attempt to duplicate French administration with their own exact counterpart on the ecclesiastical level, but now, he said, they were trying to extend this principle to their military organisation, and only the other day a complete Headquarters’ Staff arrived from Tay Ninh to be attached to his own HQ at Tanan. He sent them packing.
The Catholics, said the Commandant, with no diminution in cheerfulness, were an even worse menace. Some of them hadn’t had an ordained priest since the missionaries were expelled in the early part of the last century and they spent their time raiding other villages, gathering in their church for two hours every evening to howl the canticles, after which they raped their female captives. Every village we passed was surrounded by double or triple stockades, and sometimes a moat, and overlooked by miradors. Some of these structures, said the Commandant were so rickety through neglect that they would topple over if anyone tried to climb up them.
And this was the state to which the Jesuit Borri’s ‘near heaven’ had come.
* * *
That night we dined in the officers’ mess at Tanan. On the previous night one of the hand-grenades, which I succeeded always in just missing, had come in through the window and wounded an officer. This time the Commandant had posted sentries so that we should all have a nice quiet evening. But no sooner had we taken our seats than there was a series of explosions. The defence towers on the outskirts of the town were being attacked by mortar-fire. A few minutes later the French 25-pounders joined in. One after another the officers were called to their posts. By the time the entrée was served the Commandant and I faced a very junior officer across an otherwise deserted table. Soon the light failed and we decided to call it a night.
Of the next day, I remember that we visited the exemplary village of Than Phú, whose state of grace was due to the fact, the French thought, that except for fifteen nominal Catholics the village was a Buddhist one, without Cao-Daïst converts. Than Phú possessed a historic pagoda, the only building, the French said, that had been spared when the Viet-Minh burned the place. It contained a bell in which about one hundred and fifty years ago Gia-Long, the last of the great Emperors, had hid when fleeing from the rebellious Taysons. To prove that this could be done the bonze crept into the bell. But he was a tiny, wizened old fellow and it was very evident that Gia-Long’s descendant, the present Emperor, would have little hope, if the need arose, in emulating his ancestor’s feat. The real interest in this pagoda lay in a great cautionary fresco depicting the respective fates in the hereafter of the blessed and the damned. The old bonze, who by the way was much respected by the Commandant, was very proud of this, and there was a smile of gentle satisfaction on his face when the time came to show it off.
The rewards of evil-doing were portrayed with great fidelity to detail across the whole of one wall. Minor crimes that had escaped detection in life were punished here according to their gravity with the four prescribed degrees of chastisement: the facial mark, removal of the nose, amputation of the foot and castration. The duplication in hell of a felon’s death began with the mere strangulation by devils of those who had erred, perhaps, rather than sinned, and included the varieties of slow death prepared for the perpetrators of such atrocious crimes as grossly unfilial conduct. Fiends worked on these offenders with knives marked with the bodily member to be sliced, drawn at random, according to the ancient penal practice, from the lottery sack. Tigers devoured others, and yet others, who had probably in their lifetimes questioned the heavenly mandate of the Divine Emperor, were being dismembered by the elephants specially trained to inflict capital punishment. Demon executioners stood apart, in corners, practising their aim on bamboo stalks, marked according to tradition with betel lines.
All the victims concerned were neatly dressed for the occasion, and did not appear to despair; a reflection perhaps of the Annamese custom of encouraging the condemned to meet their ends with as much dignity as the circumstances permitted, and insisting indeed on a show of composure which included the elegant performance of the five ritual prostrations in taking leave of the accompanying relations.
On the opposite wall the blessed were shown in their bliss. But as beatitude is less keenly felt than suffering, the rewards of virtue were insubstantial, even insipid. Heaven was one of those briefly sketched Chinese landscapes; a few misty, not altogether credible peaks, pine trees, a stream, a bridge. It was the heaven of the poet and the artist of one of the early Chinese dynasties, and the Annamese souls in glory wandered through it disconsolately and somewhat out of their element. The old bonze, too, was soon bored with this and lured us with gentle insistence back to the vigorous scenes of damnation, pointing out to us obscure refinements of torture that we had missed.
That a Buddhist pagoda could be decorated in this way, of course, was a measure of the distortion that the religion had suffered in the course of its slow propagation through India and China and finally into Cochin-China. Nirvana had become a picnic excursion to the hills, and the sorrows of the soul bound to the wheel of incarnation, a series of vulgar episodes in the torture-chamber. An illustration, indeed, of the barbarism that infects the great religious systems in their decline.
There was never, by the way, any cause for embarrassment in going boldly into any pagoda in Indo-China, prying curiously among its shrines, watching the rites, and even photographing them. The officiants, on the contrary, were delighted at any manifestation of interest. It is part of a genial Confucian tradition, which has spread to all the other cults. ‘The Master having gone in to the Grand Temple, asked questions about everything. Someone remarked “who says that the Son of the citizen of Tsou (Confucius) has any knowledge of ceremonial observances. He comes to the temple and asks about everything he sees”. Hearing the remark, the Master said: “This in itself is a ceremonial observance.”’
Later, when alone, I would make a trifling donation to the pagoda funds, which would be enthusiastically acknowledged by the beating of a great gong, and the burning for my benefit of a few inches of one of the great spiralling coils of incense, suspended from the roof. And sometimes the old priest would throw in a minor piece of divination, shaking into my hand one of a jarful of what looked like spills, but which were assorted prophetic utterances from the classics, written on slips of screwed-up paper. Coming to my help with the elegant but inexplicable ideographs he would clearly indicate by his gleeful, congratulatory smile that at last Fortune was about to open wide its arms to me.
* * *
Than Phú, the exemplary village, was followed by the ideal French post. It had been the work of a sergent-chef who, like the Commandant, would shortly be returning, demobilised, to France, where it was obvious that they would both spend the rest of their days in a Kiplingesque nostalgia for Indo-China. And yet, much as the colonies had become his spiritual home, and depressed as he was at the thought of his repatriation, the sergent-chef was extremely proud of the fact that he had made his post a Corner of France. And at what a cost. He had imported bulbs by airmail and there had been a painful sprouting of tulips, dragged inch by inch from that ochreous soil, their heads now hanging a little wearily in the nooses that attached them to their supporting canes. Over them reared up exuberant ranks of canna, grown only to afford shade for the European importation. A native hut, too, had been pathetically camouflaged as a bistro; a rendezvous des sports for the benefit of visiting NCOs. Anything to shut out for a while the hateful sight of bamboos, the memory of which would become so dear in a few months’ time.
The sergent-chef also kept a boa constrictor in a cage. It was fed monthly with a live duck, a ceremony which collected appreciative crowds. He said that the snake refused to interest itself in food that was not alive.
A new Vietnamese village had formed like a series of cells round the ideal post. In their tragic situation, the prey of every kind of gangster and bandit, the peasants’ one craving is for protection and stability. Their village destroyed in military operations, they live uncomfortably dispersed in temporary shelters and eat the shrimps and undersized fish caught in the irrigation ditches. As soon as a military post goes up in their neighbourhood they are naturally attracted to it, and under the cover of its machine-guns they rebuild their huts, plant their vegetables, establish a market. They are encouraged to do this, and tragedy only happens when the Viet-Minh, first terrorising the villagers, use its cover to attack the post. Massacres have occurred in the subsequent reprisals, which, since by this time the Viet-Minh have left, are directed against the villagers.
The new village without a name was, temporarily at least, prospering. The sergent-chef had appointed himself unofficial mayor and was insisting on European sanitary standards, which, to his surprise, were scrupulously carried out. He held a daily inspection of the streets and market place, made vendors mark the prices on their goods, awarded certificates of merit for the best-kept houses. He helped to fit up a town-hall and a theatre – the two essentials of Vietnamese communal life – and presented the information centre with a frivolous dragon which he found in a deserted ruin. The Vietnamese, who had probably seen their last village blown off the face of the earth, were as surprised, no doubt, as they were gratified. It was a pity, the sergent-chef said, that we had not been there the day before, because he had helped the villagers to celebrate the Têt by organising a regatta, with sampan races for both sexes and all ages, and he had taken the liberty of offering a few tins of army rations as prizes. The Commandant nodded in benevolent approval.
This, I believe, was the average French soldier’s attitude. If given half a chance he would make a kind of pet of anyone who was dependent upon him – even Vietnamese peasants. He soon began to feel as responsible for their welfare as the administrators I met did for that of the Moïs. The soldiers had none of the civilian prejudices towards the Vietnamese. I asked the sergent-chef if it was a fact that they had no sense of humour, and he was staggered by such an absurd suggestion. I wondered how the Commandant and his NCO would have reacted if called upon to put into practice paragraph four of the military proclamation which says, ‘every native quarter situated in the immediate neighbourhood of a point where an important act of sabotage has been committed, will be razed to the ground’.
* * *
The situation at Binh Long Dong was less favourable. I was in another Zone of command now, and the familiar warring factions in the neighbourhood had been overshadowed by a partisan-chief, an unsmiling mountain of a man, who had been decorated with the Croix de Guerre, and lived in a magnificent fortified villa, full of paddy and streamlined furnishings. The main piece of furniture, however, in the reception room was a rack, an intelligent adaption of the umbrella stand, on which guests hung their weapons. The room was gay with the most expensive artificial flowers of cloth and paper, and we were offered champagne and sweet biscuits. This man was a rare sport of nature, the archetype of a Vietnamese pirate turned Governor, or a Chinese War-Lord. One wondered if whatever factor it was that had produced all this bone and muscle from the slender Vietnamese stock had also created the fierce, resolute character. He was quite illiterate, but had recently begun to interest himself in the choicer rewards of success, and had built pillars of precious wood into his house, specially brought from Tonkin, at a cost of three thousand piastres each.
About half the land of this community was owned by big proprietors who had been finding it practically impossible to collect their rents. If they put the screw too hard on the peasant farmers, they were liable to be kidnapped by the Viet-Minh and receive a period of ‘re-education’ and an enormous fine before being released. Nowadays they could hire bodyguards from the partisan-chief who specialised in protection for prominent citizens and industrial enterprises. But even this, they were beginning to realise, wasn’t doing them much good, as the farmers had got into the habit of telling them when they called for the rent: ‘Too late, I’ve already had to pay it to the Viet-Minh.’
A ferry nearby provided a racket for yet another petty regional boss. There he stood by the shore in his uniform of a lieutenant in the Bao-Dai army and bright yellow boots, prepared, for a concussion (most descriptive word), to grant priority to any vehicle not wishing to take its turn in the queue. If no concussion was forthcoming you waited in the line, perhaps an hour, perhaps half the day. The village at the ferry, overtopped with its crop of miradors, looked like a mean Siena, but rose-coloured pastors instead of starlings crowded sociably on the roofs. While we awaited the ferryboat a partisan patrol passed, complete with their wives. Several of them carried birdcages as well as rifles.
There was an undercurrent of artistic feeling in these harassed villages of Cochin-China that the quilting of poverty could not entirely suffocate. A tree grew in the garden of a fisherman’s hut. The leaves had been stripped off and replaced by small, silvery fish, which from an aesthetic quirk he preferred to dry in this manner. Sometimes a lamp had been planted outside a hovel, graceful yet solid, like a reduced version of a London lamppost, but with a golden-scaled dragon curled on the top. Or perhaps the usual platform set upon a post with offerings to the wandering and neglected spirits had been elaborated into a tiny pagoda, containing say, along with the teacup and the incense-sticks, a packet of Craven A. There were wayside food-stalls everywhere, and as much attention, one felt sure, was paid to the matching of the colours of the food displayed in the bowls, as to the flavour itself.
