Dragon Apparent, page 32
‘In the maquis we only eat twice a day,’ she said, with austere satisfaction. ‘A little fish with rice. Some of our brothers and sisters who have been used to over-indulgence find it difficult at first, but they soon get used to it. But then, the life is very healthy. We start the day at five with physical exercises. And, of course, running and hiking are very popular. It is all good for the health. People are full of joy. They are always smiling. In the liberated territory there is a great deal of music. Everyone is expected to play a musical instrument. But not decadent music, of course. Beethoven and Bach – yes. We like them very much.’
And so, breathlessly, it went on. It was a revivalism, but an Asiatic brand of revivalism. An ultra-puritanical movement is launched at the drop of a hat in these countries. The prohibition of smoking (‘some of our brothers and sisters do it in secret on the junks’), of gambling, of drinking, of feminine make-up; the rough standardised clothing, the communal pastimes, the obligatory sports, the compulsory culture (‘in our spare time we volunteer to educate the peasants’) … it is all repugnant to Western individualism and habits of freedom. But state interference in almost every aspect of the citizen’s existence was the normal thing under the paternalistic system of government of Vietnam before the European’s arrival. A modern communist state is libertarian by comparison with Vietnam under Gia-Long, the last of the great Emperors.
Dinh’s enthusiasm was more reasoned than that of the girl, and when the girl had gone out he even allowed himself a slightly bitter reflection. I asked in a roundabout way if Viet-Minh losses had been very heavy, and he said that practically all those who were in the movement from the beginning had been killed. ‘All except the intellectuals,’ he then added. ‘The intellectuals don’t get themselves killed.’
I asked him why the Viet-Minh permitted minor acts of terrorism in Saigon, such as the nightly throwing of grenades into cafés and into cinema entrances. He said that the reason for this was that the owners had failed to pay their contributions towards Viet-Minh funds, and were therefore made an example of. In a way, it was also to show disapproval of such frivolities when there was a war on. He said that jobs of this kind were done by selected ‘executioners’, and, using the word, he grimaced with distaste.
* * *
These tentative arrangements fell through. It was unfortunate for me that at this time the Viet-Minh started several small, simultaneous offensives, the most serious of them being at Tra-Vinh, about thirty miles south of Saigon. Nothing could be done while the battle was going on.
After a few days I had another interview with Dinh; once again in the doctor’s waiting-room. As it seemed as though I might be kept waiting for weeks to make the official visit to the General’s headquarters on the Plaine des Joncs, I asked whether something less ambitious could be arranged. I mentioned a certain engineering firm I had heard of, which, although working on the French account, was actually allowed to pass unmolested in any way through Viet-Minh territory. The engineers used to travel every day in a private car down a road where not even a French armoured vehicle would have dared to show itself, and Viet-Minh soldiers sometimes strolled up to watch them at their work. It was another of those privately organised live-and-let-live arrangements, like the one by which foodstuffs are imported by Chinese go-betweens from Viet-Minh areas into Saigon. In this case, the construction work was allowed to go on because the Viet-Minh were clearly of the opinion that it was they who, one day, would derive the benefit from it.
I now asked Dinh whether, as I knew the engineers, and they had agreed to take me with them, it would not be possible to enter Viet-Minh territory in this way, and whether he could not obtain for me a safe conduct to allow me to move about freely once I got in. But the Vietnamese are formalists and bureaucrats by tradition. They revere the written word, documents that have been properly signed, stamped and counter-stamped, passwords, countersigns and standing orders. Having been governed for many centuries by a civil service into which it was the ambition of all to enter, they are respectfully familiar with all the delaying devices which such a system imposes. Behind the smoke screens of his excuses I was sure that the real trouble was that Dinh would have to refer back to higher authority for a decision.
The most important objection he raised was that the suggested area was cut off from the main body of Viet-Minh territory and that I should therefore miss all the showpieces: the broadcasting station, the arms factories, the cloth mills, the schools, the 105mm howitzer recently captured from the French, and, most important of all, the ‘re-education’ centres. I told him that as funds were running out and I should not be able to stay much longer in Indo-China, anything would be better than nothing at all. He agreed to inquire what could be done, and to give me the answer in two days.
When the two days had passed the Tra-Vinh battle was still being fought. The Viet-Minh had captured a large number of defence-towers and instead of withdrawing as usual with the captured equipment, they brought up reinforcements and awaited the French counter-attack. Ambushes were laid for the French troops rushed from other areas, and further diversionary attacks were launched in neighbouring provinces. Neither the French nor Dinh knew whether any of these might not develop into the general offensive the Viet-Minh had promised before the dry season broke. It was therefore agreed that I might go with the engineers to the town in question, where I was to wait at a certain hotel, and an attempt would be made to pick me up. If the worst came to the worst it would simply mean sleeping a night there and being brought back by the engineers – who made the trip daily – next day. Viet-Minh troops and partisans in the town would be warned of my presence.
Next afternoon I left Saigon in the car belonging to a director of the engineering firm. It was driven by one of the junior employees who had just arrived from Europe, was not a Frenchman and knew nothing whatever of the political situation. It was he who had staggered the French in Saigon by his description of how he had fraternised with a Viet-Minh patrol. He had been swimming in a river at the time and had found them waiting for him when he came out. A quite friendly chat followed and when the patrol found out he was a foreigner they shook hands and went off. My friend who still didn’t know the difference between Viet-Minh and Vietnam believed his nationality a kind of talisman protecting him from dangers of all kinds. I told him that to a Vietnamese all Europeans looked exactly the same, but he refused to believe it. He was quite sure that his extra ten per cent of Mediterranean characteristics was universally recognisable.
After Laos, Cochin-China was harsh and brilliant. It was as if the earth had gone to rust at the tail-end of the dry season. Sometimes there was a crystalline glitter where the sunlight shattered on the tiles of a flattened tomb. Buffaloes scrambled over the parched earth, bearing gleaming crescents of horns. The lagoons had blackened in stagnant concentration, and the peasants groping for fish were stained by the muddy water so that at a distance their circular hats seemed to float like brilliant money on the water. Junks were moving hull down through the canals and rivers, and only the sharks’ fins of their sails could be seen cutting across the plains. An armoured car had nosed into a clump of palms, where several white-haired, pink-faced Teutons of the Foreign Legion hid from the sun.
The town contained a single, sordid, colourful little hotel. You went in through a café, passing under an awning of dried fish, to mount a narrow staircase in complete darkness. The rooms had swing doors like saloons, but the town must have lived through former days of grandeur as each chamber had a bath alcove. A Chinese lady was taking a bath in mine, but she soon dressed and came out and we smiled and bowed to each other in the passage. Radio sets appeared to be going at full blast in every room; all tuned in to different stations. Soon after my arrival the proprietor came up and asked me to pay. He brought with him a bottle of cherry-brandy and presented me with a drink on the house. The change was brought by a small Oriental chambermaid, who sat on the edge of the brass bed, singing, while she counted out the incredibly filthy notes which she hoped that I would return to her in disgust.
A few minutes later the proprietor was back, with a Vietnamese girl of about twelve, who, he said, had come to take me to the house of a friend. Following this child I was taken to a gloomy little palace in a back street. Here I was invited to seat myself in a carved chair that was all the more throne-like from the fact that it was raised on a low dais, and left alone. A few minutes later the little girl was back again with a glass of lemonade and then once again with a saucer of nuts. The dragons and unicorns writhing through the mother-of-pearl-studded surfaces of the furniture gradually sank into darkness. It was night.
I was dozing when Dinh arrived. He was accompanied by a rather chinless and bespectacled youth called Trang and seemed cheerful and nervous at the same time. Both of them wore dungarees and carried Stens. Dinh had brought a pair of rubber boots which he told me to put on, but they were too small. He seemed worried about my white shirt and trousers, but when we got outside we found ourselves in brilliant moonlight. The dress made no difference. If possible they were more conspicuous than I was in their black against the broad, whitewashed surfaces of wall and road.
The streets were quite empty. Bao-Dai troops garrisoned two towers on the other side of the town, but Dinh said that they had orders never to leave the towers after sunset. We heard several distant rifle-shots which set the dogs barking, the barks ending in howls as the dogs were kicked into silence. We walked in the shadow of a wall; Dinh in front, followed by myself and then Trang. In a few minutes we were outside the town and scrambled down a low embankment into the rice-fields. We were on very low ground by the river, threading our way through a morass of quicksilver. Mist trailed in banks above the water. In the moonlight its surface was curiously solid. When we splashed through shallow pools a phosphorescence exploded round our boots. An enormous owl came flapping down to inspect us, and passed on with a strange, booming cry.
We reached a canal where a sampan awaited us, hidden among the water palms. Two soldiers standing in the boat held out their hands to steady us as we climbed aboard. They, too, were dressed in dark dungarees and wore Australian-type bush hats. We sat in the bottom of the sampan while the two soldiers, one standing at each end, began to row it along the canal. They rowed by a long single oar fastened to a post. After a short distance, one of them stopped rowing and tried to start up an engine. He had great difficulty, and Dinh held a torch while he took the carburettor to pieces. Trang said that the petrol was of very bad quality. They bought most of it from the Chinese who usually adulterated it with paraffin. In the end the engine was started. It was fitted with a very efficient silencing system, which Dinh said was of their own design. There were a few mechanical rattles, but no exhaust noise could be heard.
Little could be heard in fact along most of the reaches of water above the tremendous chirpings of frogs, which as we turned into narrow channels plopped into the water ahead of us in their hundreds. Twisting and turning through a maze of waterways we went on. The mosquitoes were very troublesome, biting through the three pairs of stockings I always wore, to get at their favourite area, the ankles, as well as feeding greedily on the neck, wrists and forehead. We passed clumps of water palms where fireflies were carrying on an extraordinary display, weaving a scroll-work through the fronds like the fancy terminals of the signatures of the Victorian era. In such a clump the sampan was stopped, with the engine switched off, while the soldiers listened to heavy mortar and machine-gun fire, which sounded, allowing for the water, as if it might be two or three miles away. A few hundred yards further on we stopped again. A dark shape, silhouetted by moonlight, lolled in the water ahead. Someone on our boat switched on a small searchlight and, as this happened, large aquatic birds flustered up with a great commotion from some low bushes among the reeds. The dark object was a sampan lying low in the water. We approached it slowly with levelled tommy-guns, but it was empty and partially waterlogged. Further down still, we ran into another obstacle; a log across the water. But this was the equivalent of a roadblock, and after an exchange of passwords with unseen guards on the bank it was pulled back far enough for us to pass through.
Soon after, a plane passed low overhead. It dropped a Very light a long way from us, so that the flickering reflection hardly imposed itself on the moonlight. The machine-gun and mortar fire started again. Dinh said in English ‘exciting’. This was one of the three English adjectives he occasionally produced; the others being ‘captivating’ – used to describe any aspect of life in Viet-Minh territory – and ‘regrettable’ – reserved for the French and all their doings.
We stopped again when we overtook a sampan full of peasants. They were ordered ashore, where one of the soldiers, who it appeared was an officer, harangued them in angry tones. Dinh said that the brother officer had criticised them for failing to obey the curfew order; summary criticism being the lowest grade of disciplinary measures. And what came next? I asked. Arrest followed by public criticism, Dinh said. Although nobody wanted to be too hard on first offenders. I mentioned the old, Vietnamese simple correction of thirty strokes with the rattan cane, and Dinh said that naturally anyone would prefer that, as public criticism was so much less dignified. There had never been any stigma in a beating, because the offence was purged on the spot, but a public criticism took a lot of wearing down. People tended to say, there goes so-and-so who was publicly criticised. Psychological methods, besides being less barbarous, were more effective. A typical offence in the case of which such a punishment might be awarded, said Dinh, would be the failure, after warning, to build a proper outside latrine for the use of one’s family.
We landed and went in single file up a lane through the palms. The moon was sinking now and the sound of the distant firing had ceased. In Indo-China the two sides seem to have reached an informal agreement to restrict their nocturnal combats to the early part of the night. Even the relentless chirping of the frogs had quietened. A few yards from the water’s edge we came to huts made of branches and palm leaves. It was the local military headquarters.
Dinh explained that the unit, which had been newly established here, was chiefly occupied with observation of enemy movements, but that all male members were fully trained for combatant duties to which they could be transferred in emergency. It was one of a number of similar posts which formed an outside screen, interlinked by radio and sending back information to the army’s headquarters in the centre of the plaine des joncs. Observers were sent out from here with portable signals equipment with which they kept a twenty-four-hourly observation of troop movements in a defined territory. This information was passed on regularly to the army signals centre where it was all pieced together and collated with the other information received, so that in theory a complete track was kept of the movement of every French patrol or operational group from the moment it left its barracks until it returned. A great deal of stress was laid upon the necessity for absolutely accurate information regarding numerical strengths and types of weapons carried. In this way army headquarters was able to decide whether the enemy was to be attacked or avoided. This particular post, Dinh said, owing to its perfect situation, was invulnerable, except from the air. It could only be approached by small, lightly armed craft which could be blown up in the narrow waterways by mines manufactured specially for this purpose. It was screened from the air by the method of building the administrative huts into the palms, close to the water’s edge. Reconnaissance planes were never fired at, however low they flew. At a later stage – quite soon now, Dinh thought – these peripheral posts would throw out offshoots, further in the direction of French occupied territory, while they themselves would be transformed into battalion headquarters, with a purely operational function.
There was a second purpose which the post fulfilled. This was an educational and propaganda one. It was their job, for which they were allotted a certain time, to stamp out illiteracy in their area. From total literacy in the old pre-colonial days, when every man’s ambition had been for his son to be able to compete in the civil service examinations, the literate minority of the population had dropped as low as twenty per cent. The people would now be educated, said Dinh, and in the interior of Viet-Minh territory where peaceful conditions prevailed it had been declared (with a touch of the old authoritarian sternness) a punishable offence to be unable to read and write. In frontier areas such as this it was left to public opinion. To be illiterate was unpatriotic, the Viet-Minh had told the peasants. And when they could read the Viet-Minh would of course supply their intellectual food.
* * *
By the time we arrived all the personnel of the post, with the exception of the duty staff, were already in bed. Dinh explained that the last meal was taken at five o’clock, and after that parties went canoeing, swimming or walking, or to their improving labours in the villages. But for the last week they had all been virtually confined to barracks owing to the fighting in the neighbourhood. Radio warnings had been received of several marine-commando raids in their area, and once they had been obliged to send men to create a diversion when a nearby post had been attacked. We had timed our arrival, it seemed, most unfortunately.
The commander of the post now came in. He had been out watching the attack which we had heard and which had been directed against a group of towers held by Bao-Dai forces. He was about twenty-five years of age, small, slight and grave, with features blunted with deep pock marks. He carried no badges of rank, but was the equivalent, Dinh said, of a captain. Officers were not saluted and were called brother, like anyone else. ‘A respect for his superiors is second nature to any Vietnamese. It could not be increased by the addition of titles.’
Apologising for being too busy to show me round in person, the commander said that there had been a flare-up of activity in all sectors and that Bao-Dai troops drafted into the area had just received orders to attack them. I asked how they knew that, and the commander smiling rather distantly said that it was their business to know. To forestall any such attack, it had, at all events, been decided to capture all the towers, and a combat team had been sent with the necessary assault equipment. Asked whether the towers would be held when captured, the commander said no, there was no point in it. They would be demolished. Two towers had been taken that night, but he thought that army headquarters might have decided to make a daylight attack on those that remained. Where possible they liked to have a cameraman filming such actions so that the staff officers could see how the commanders in the field were doing their jobs and correct their mistakes where necessary. Films of well-organised attacks also served instructional and propaganda purposes.
