‘Forgive me for taking Miss Phuong from you,’ Pyle’s voice said.
‘Oh, I’m no dancer, but I like watching her dance.’ One always spoke of her like that in the third person as though she were not there. Sometimes she seemed invisible like peace.
The first cabaret of the evening began: a singer, a juggler, a comedian—he was very obscene, but when I looked at Pyle he obviously couldn’t follow the argot. He smiled when Phuong smiled and laughed uneasily when I laughed. ‘I wonder where Granger is now,’ I said, and Pyle looked at me reproachfully.
Then came the turn of the evening: a troupe of female impersonators. I had seen many of them during the day in the rue Catinat walking up and down, in old slacks and sweaters, a bit blue about the chin, swaying their hips. Now in low-cut evening dresses, with false jewellery and false breasts and husky voices, they appeared at least as desirable as most of the European women in Saigon. A group of young Air Force officers whistled to them and they smiled glamorously back. I was astonished by the sudden violence of Pyle’s protest. ‘Fowler,’ he said, ‘let’s go. We’ve had enough, haven’t we? This isn’t a bit suitable for her.’
4
I
From the bell tower of the Cathedral the battle was only picturesque, fixed like a panorama of the Boer War in an old Illustrated London News. An aeroplane was parachuting supplies to an isolated post in the calcaire, those strange weather-eroded mountains on the Annam border that look like piles of pumice, and because it always returned to the same place for its glide, it might never have moved, and the parachute was always there in the same spot, half-way to earth. From the plain the mortar-bursts rose unchangingly, the smoke as solid as stone, and in the market the flames burnt palely in the sunlight. The tiny figures of the parachutists moved in single file along the canals, but at this height they appeared stationary. Even the priest who sat in a corner of the tower never changed his position as he read in his breviary. The war was very tidy and clean at that distance.
I had come in before dawn in a landing-craft from Nam Dinh. We couldn’t land at the naval station because it was cut off by the enemy who completely surrounded the town at a range of six hundred yards, so the boat ran in beside the flaming market. We were an easy target in the light of the flames, but for some reason no one fired. Everything was quiet, except for the flop and crackle of the burning stalls. I could hear a Senegalese sentry on the river’s edge shift his stance.
I had known Phat Diem well in the days before the attack—the one long narrow street of wooden stalls, cut up every hundred yards by a canal, a church and a bridge. At night it had been lit only by candles or small oil lamps (there was no electricity in Phat Diem except in the French officers’ quarters), and day or night the street was packed and noisy. In its strange medieval way, under the shadow and protection of the Prince Bishop, it had been the most living town in all the country, and now when I landed and walked up to the officers’ quarters it was the most dead. Rubble and broken glass and the smell of burnt paint and plaster, the long street empty as far as the sight could reach, it reminded me of a London thoroughfare in the early morning after an all-clear: one expected to see a placard, ‘Unexploded Bomb’.
The front wall of the officers’ house had been blown out, and the houses across the street were in ruins. Coming down the river from Nam Dinh I had learnt from Lieutenant Peraud what had happened. He was a serious young man, a Freemason, and to him it was like a judgement on the superstitions of his fellows. The Bishop of Phat Diem had once visited Europe and acquired there a devotion to Our Lady of Fatima—that vision of the Virgin which appeared, so Roman Catholics believe, to a group of children in Portugal. When he came home, he built a grotto in her honour in the Cathedral precincts, and he celebrated her feast-day every year with a procession. Relations with the colonel in charge of the French and Vietnamese troops had always been strained since the day when the authorities had disbanded the Bishop’s private army. This year the colonel—who had some sympathy with the Bishop, for to each of them his country was more important than Catholicism—made a gesture of amity and walked with his senior officers in the front of the procession. Never had a greater crowd gathered in Phat Diem to do honour to Our Lady of Fatima. Even many of the Buddhists—who formed about half the population—could not bear to miss the fun, and those who had belief in neither God nor Buddha believed that somehow all these banners and incense-burners and the golden monstrance would keep war from their homes. All that was left of the Bishop’s army—his brass band—led the procession, and the French officers, pious by order of the colonel, followed like choirboys through the gateway into the Cathedral precincts, past the white statue of the Sacred Heart that stood on an island in the little lake before the Cathedral, under the bell tower with spreading oriental wings and into the carved wooden Cathedral with its gigantic pillars formed out of single trees and the scarlet lacquer work of the altar, more Buddhist than Christian. From all the villages between the canals, from that Low Country landscape where young green rice-shoots and golden harvests take the place of tulips and churches of windmills, the people poured in.
Nobody noticed the Vietminh agents who had joined the procession too, and that night as the main Communist battalion moved through the passes in the calcaire, into the Tonkin plain, watched helplessly by the French outpost in the mountains above, the advance agents struck in Phat Diem.
Now after four days, with the help of parachutists, the enemy had been pushed back half a mile around the town. This was a defeat: no journalists were allowed, no cables could be sent, for the papers must carry only victories. The authorities would have stopped me in Hanoi if they had known of my purpose, but the further you get from headquarters, the looser becomes the control until, when you come within range of the enemy’s fire, you are a welcome guest—what has been a menace for the Etat Major in Hanoi, a worry for the full colonel in Nam Dinh, to the lieutenant in the field is a joke, a distraction, a mark of interest from the outer world, so that for a few blessed hours he can dramatize himself a little and see in a false heroic light even his own wounded and dead.
The priest shut his breviary and said, ‘Well, that’s finished.’ He was a European, but not a Frenchman, for the Bishop would not have tolerated a French priest in his diocese. He said apologetically, ‘I have to come up here, you understand, for a bit of quiet from all those poor people.’ The sound of the mortar-fire seemed to be closing in, or perhaps it was the enemy at last replying. The strange difficulty was to find them: there were a dozen narrow fronts, and between the canals, among the farm buildings and the paddy fields, innumerable opportunities for ambush.
Immediately below us stood, sat and lay the whole population of Phat Diem. Catholics, Buddhists, pagans, they had all packed their most valued possessions—a cooking-stove, a lamp, a mirror, a wardrobe, some mats, a holy picture—and moved into the Cathedral precincts. Here in the north it would be bitterly cold when darkness came, and already the Cathedral was full: there was no more shelter; even on the stairs to the bell tower every step was occupied, and all the time more people crowded through the gates, carrying their babies and household goods. They believed, whatever their religion, that here they would be safe. While we watched, a young man with a rifle in Vietnamese uniform pushed his way through: he was stopped by a priest, who took his rifle from him. The father at my side said in explanation, ‘We are neutral here. This is God’s territory.’ I thought, ‘It’s a strange poor population God has in his kingdom, frightened, cold, starving’—“I don’t know how we are going to feed these people,” the priest told me—you’d think a great King would do better than that.’ But then I thought, ‘It’s always the same wherever one goes—it’s not the most powerful rulers who have the happiest populations.’
Little shops had already been set up below. I said, ‘It’s like an enormous fair, isn’t it, but without one smiling face.’
The priest said, ‘They were terribly cold last night. We have to keep the monast
ery gates shut or they would swamp us.’
‘You all keep warm in here?’ I asked.
‘Not very warm. And we would not have room for a tenth of them.’ He went on, ‘I know what you are thinking. But it is essential for some of us to keep well. We have the only hospital in Phat Diem, and our only nurses are these nuns.’
‘And your surgeon?’
‘I do what I can.’ I saw then that his soutane was speckled with blood.
He said, ‘Did you come up here to find me?’
‘No. I wanted to got my bearings.’
‘I asked you because I had a man up here last night. He wanted to go to confession. He had got a little frightened, you see, with what he had seen along the canal. One couldn’t blame him.’
‘It’s bad along there?’
‘The parachutists caught them in a cross-fire. Poor souls. I thought perhaps you were feeling the same.’
‘I’m not a Roman Catholic. I don’t think you could even call me a Christian.’
‘It’s strange what fear does to a man.’
‘It would never do that to me. If I believed in any God at all, I should still hate the idea of confession. Kneeling in one of your boxes. Exposing myself to another man. You must excuse me, Father, but to me it seems morbid—unmanly even.’
‘Oh,’ he said lightly, ‘I expect you are a good man. I don’t suppose you’ve ever had much to regret.’
I looked along the churches, where they ran down evenly spaced between the canals, towards the sea. A light flashed from the second tower. I said, ‘You haven’t kept all your churches neutral.’
‘It isn’t possible,’ he said. ‘The French have agreed to leave the Cathedral precincts alone. We can’t expect more. That’s a Foreign Legion post you are looking at.’
‘I’ll be going along. Good-bye, Father.’
‘Good-bye and good luck. Be careful of the snipers.’
I had to push my way through the crowd to get out, past the lake and the white statue with its sugary outspread arms, into the long street. I could see for nearly three quarters of a mile each way, and there were only two living beings in all that length besides myself—two soldiers with camouflaged helmets going slowly away up the edge of the street, their sten guns at the ready. I say the living because one body lay in a doorway with its head in the road. The buzz of flies collecting there and the squelch of the soldiers’ boots growing fainter and fainter were the only sounds. I walked quickly past the body, turning my head the other way. A few minutes later when I looked back I was quite alone with my shadow and there were no sounds except the sounds I made. I felt as though I were a mark on a firing range. It occurred to me that if something happened to me in this street it might be many hours before I was picked up: time for the flies to collect.
When I had crossed two canals, I took a turning that led to a church. A dozen men sat on the ground in the camouflage of parachutists, while two officers examined a map. Nobody paid me any attention when I joined them. One man, who wore the long antennae of a walkie-talkie, said, ‘We can move now,’ and everybody stood up.
I asked them in my bad French whether I could accompany them. An advantage of this war was that a European face proved in itself a passport on the field: a European could not be suspected of being an enemy agent. ‘Who are you?’ the lieutenant asked.
‘I am writing about the war,’ I said.
‘American?’
‘No, English.’
He said, ‘It is a very small affair, but if you wish to come with us . . .’ He began to take off his steel helmet. ‘No, no,’ I said, ‘that is for combatants.’
‘As you wish.’
We went out behind the church in single file, the lieutenant leading, and halted for a moment on a canal-bank for the soldier with the walkie-talkie to get contact with the patrols on either flank. The mortar shells tore over us and burst out of sight. We had picked up more men behind the church and were now about thirty strong. The lieutenant explained to me in a low voice, stabbing a finger at his map, ‘Three hundred have been reported in this village here. Perhaps massing for tonight. We don’t know. No one has found them yet.’
‘How far?’
‘Three hundred yards.’
Words came over the wireless and we went on in silence, to the right the straight canal, to the left low scrub and fields and scrub again. ‘All clear,’ the lieutenant whispered with a reassuring wave as we started. Forty yards on, another canal, with what was left of a bridge, a single plank without rails, ran across our front. The lieutenant motioned to us to deploy and we squatted down facing the unknown territory ahead, thirty feet off, across the plank. The men looked at the water and then, as though by a word of command, all together, they looked away. For a moment I didn’t see what they had seen, but when I saw, my mind went back, I don’t know why, to the Chalet and the female impersonators and the young soldiers whistling and Pyle saying, ‘This isn’t a bit suitable.’
The canal was full of bodies: I am reminded now of an Irish stew containing too much meat. The bodies overlapped: one head, seal-grey, and anonymous as a convict with a shaven scalp, stuck up out of the water like a buoy. There was no blood: I suppose it had flowed away a long time ago. I have no idea how many there were: they must have been caught in a cross-fire, trying to get back, and I suppose every man of us along the bank was thinking, ‘Two can play at that game.’ I too took my eyes away; we didn’t want to be reminded of how little we counted, how quickly, simply and anonymously death came. Even though my reason wanted the state of death, I was afraid like a virgin of the act. I would have liked death to come with due warning, so that I could prepare myself. For what? I didn’t know, nor how, except by taking a look around at the little I would be leaving.
The lieutenant sat beside the man with the walkie-talkie and stared at the ground between his feet. The instrument began to crackle instructions and with a sigh as though he had been roused from sleep he got up. There was an odd comradeliness about all their movements, as though they were equals engaged on a task they had performed together times out of mind. Nobody waited to be told what to do. Two men made for the plank and tried to cross it, but they were unbalanced by the weight of their arms and had to sit astride and work their way across a few inches at a time. Another man had found a punt hidden in some bushes down the canal and he worked it to where the lieutenant stood. Six of us got in and he began to pole towards the other bank, but we ran on a shoal of bodies and stuck. He pushed away with his pole, sinking it into this human clay, and one body was released and floated up all its length beside the boat like a bather lying in the sun. Then we were free again, and once on the other side we scrambled out, with no backward look. No shots had been fired: we were alive: death had withdrawn perhaps as far as the next canal. I heard somebody just behind me say with great seriousness, ‘Gott sei dank.’ Except for the lieutenant they were most of them Germans.
Beyond was a group of farm-buildings; the lieutenant went in first, hugging the wall, and we followed at six-foot intervals in single file. Then the men, again without an order, scattered through the farm. Life had deserted it—not so much as a hen had been left behind, though hanging on the walls of what had been the living room were two hideous oleographs of the Sacred Heart and the Mother and Child which gave the whole ramshackle group of buildings a European air. One knew what these people believed even if one didn’t share their belief: they were human beings, not just grey drained cadavers.
So much of the war is sitting around and doing nothing, waiting for somebody else. With no guarantee of the amount of time you have left it doesn’t seem worth starting even a train of thought. Doing what they had done so often before, the sentries moved out. Anything that stirred ahead of us now was enemy. The lieutenant marked his map and reported our position over the radio. A noonday hush fell: even the mortars were quiet and the air was empty of planes. One man doodled with a twig in the dirt of the farmyard. After a while it was as if we had been forgotten by w
ar. I hoped that Phuong had sent my suits to the cleaners. A cold wind ruffled the straw of the yard, and a man went modestly behind a barn to relieve himself. I tried to remember whether I had paid the British Consul in Hanoi for the bottle of whisky he had allowed me.
Two shots were fired to our front, and I thought, ‘This is it. Now it comes.’ It was all the warning I wanted. I awaited, with a sense of exhilaration, the permanent thing.
But nothing happened. Once again I had ‘over-prepared the event’. Only long minutes afterwards one of the sentries entered and reported something to the lieutenant. I caught the phrase, ‘Deux civils.’
The lieutenant said to me, ‘We will go and see,’ and following the sentry we picked our way along a muddy overgrown path between two fields. Twenty yards beyond the farm buildings, in a narrow ditch, we came on what we sought: a woman and a small boy. They were very clearly dead: a small neat clot of blood on the woman’s forehead, and the child might have been sleeping. He was about six years old and he lay like an embryo in the womb with his little bony knees drawn up. ‘Mal chance,’ the lieutenant said. He bent down and turned the child over. He was wearing a holy medal round his neck, and I said to myself, ‘The juju doesn’t work.’ There was a gnawed piece of loaf under his body. I thought, ‘I hate war.’
The lieutenant said, ‘Have you seen enough?’ speaking savagely, almost as though I had been responsible for these deaths. Perhaps to the soldier the civilian is the man who employs him to kill, who includes the guilt of murder in the pay-envelope and escapes responsibility. We walked back to the farm and sat down again in silence on the straw, out of the wind, which like an animal seemed to know that dark was coming. The man who had doodled was relieving himself, and the man who had relieved himself was doodling. I thought how in those moments of quiet, after the sentries had been posted, they must have believed it safe to move from the ditch. I wondered whether they had lain there long—the bread had been very dry. This farm was probably their home.