The interpreter said, ‘The colonel tells you that the enemy has suffered a sharp defeat and severe losses—the equivalent of one complete battalion. The last detachments are now making their way back across the Red River on improvised rafts. They are shelled all the time by the Air Force.’ The colonel ran his hand through his elegant yellow hair and, flourishing his pointer, danced his way down the long maps on the wall. An American correspondent asked, ‘What are the French losses?’
The colonel knew perfectly well the meaning of the question—it was usually put at this stage of the conference, but he paused, pointer raised with a kind smile like a popular schoolmaster, until it was interpreted. Then he answered with patient ambiguity.
‘The colonel says our losses have not been heavy. The exact number is not yet known.’
This was always the signal for trouble. You would have thought that sooner or later the colonel would have found a formula for dealing with his refractory class, or that the headmaster would have appointed a member of his staff more efficient at keeping order.
‘Is the colonel seriously telling us,’ Granger said, ‘that he’s had time to count the enemy dead and not his own?’
Patiently the colonel wove his web of evasion, which he knew perfectly well would be destroyed again by another question. The French correspondents sat gloomily silent. If the American correspondents stung the colonel into an admission they would be quick to seize it, but they would not join in baiting their countryman.
‘The colonel says the enemy forces are being over-run. It is possible to count the dead behind the firing-line, but while the battle is still in progress you cannot expect figures from the advancing French units.’
‘It’s not what we expect,’ Granger said, ‘it’s what the Etat Major knows or not. Are you seriously telling us that platoons do not report their casualties as they happen by walkie-talkie?’
The colonel’s temper was beginning to fray. If only, I thought, he had called our bluff from the start and told us firmly that he knew the figures but wouldn’t say. After all it was their war, not ours. We had no God-given right to information. We didn’t have to fight Left-Wing deputies in Paris as well as the troops of Ho Chi Minh between the Red and the Black Rivers. We were not dying.
The colonel suddenly snapped out the information that French casualties had been in a proportion of one to three, then turned his back on us, to stare furiously at his map. These were his men who were dead, his fellow officers, belonging to the same class at St Cyr—not numerals as they were to Granger. Granger said, ‘Now we are getting somewhere,’ and stared round with oafish triumph at his fellows; the French with heads bent made their sombre notes.
‘That’s more than can be said in Korea,’ I said with deliberate misunderstanding, but I had only given Granger a new line.
‘Ask the colonel,’ he said, ‘what the French are going to do next? He says the enemy’s on the run across the Black River . . .’
‘Red River,’ the interpreter corrected him.
‘I don’t care what the colour of the river is. What we want to know is what the French are going to do now.’
‘The enemy are in flight.’
‘What happens when they get to the other side? What are you going to do then? Are you just going to sit down on the other bank and say that’s over?’ The French officers listened with gloomy patience to Granger’s bullying voice. Even humility is required today of the soldier. ‘Are you going to drop them Christmas cards?’
The captain interpreted with care, even to the phrase, ‘cartes de Noël.’ The colonel gave us a wintry smile. ‘Not Christmas cards,’ he said.
I think the colonel’s youth and beauty particularly irritated Granger. The colonel wasn’t—at least not by Granger’s interpretation—a man’s man. He said, ‘You aren’t dropping much else.’
The colonel spoke suddenly in English, good English. He said, ‘If the supplies promised by the Americans had arrived, we should have more to drop.’ He was really in spite of his elegance a simple man. He believed that a newspaper correspondent cared for his country’s honour more than for news. Granger said sharply (he was efficient: he kept dates well in his head), ‘You mean that none of the supplies promised for the beginning of September have arrived?’
‘No.’
Granger had got his news: he began to write.
‘I am sorry,’ the colonel said, ‘that is not for printing: that is for background.’
‘But colonel,’ Granger protested, ‘that’s news. We can help you there.’
‘No, it is a matter for the diplomats.’
‘What harm can it do?’
The French correspondents were at a loss: they could speak very little English. The colonel had broken the rules. They muttered angrily together.
‘I am no judge,’ the colonel said. ‘Perhaps the American newspapers would say, “Oh, the French are always complaining, always begging.” And in Paris the Communists would accuse, “The French are spilling their blood for America and America will not even send a second-hand helicopter.” It does no good. At the end of it we should still have no helicopters, and the enemy would still be there, fifty miles from Hanoi.’
‘At least I can print that can’t I, that you need helicopters bad?’
‘You can say,’ the colonel said, ‘that six months ago we had three helicopters and now we have one. One,’ he repeated with a kind of amazed bitterness. ‘You can say that if a man is wounded in this fighting, not seriously wounded, just wounded, he knows that he is probably a dead man. Twelve hours, twenty-four hours perhaps, on a stretcher to the ambulance, then bad tracks, a breakdown, perhaps an ambush, gangrene. It is better to be killed outright.’ The French correspondents leant forward, trying to understand. ‘You can write that,’ he said, looking all the more venomous for his physical beauty. ‘Interprètez,’ he ordered, and walked out of the room leaving the captain the unfamiliar task of translating from English into French.
‘Got him on the raw,’ said Granger with satisfaction, and he went into a corner by the bar to write his telegram. Mine didn’t take long: there was nothing I could write from Phat Diem that the censors would pass. If the story had seemed good enough I could have flown to Hong Kong and sent it from there, but was any news good enough to risk expulsion? I doubted it. Expulsion meant the end of a whole life, it meant the victory of Pyle, and there, when I returned to my hotel, waiting in my pigeon-hole, was in fact his victory, the end of the affair—a congratulatory telegram of promotion. Dante never thought up that turn of the screw for his condemned lovers. Paolo was never promoted to Purgatory.
I went upstairs to my bare room and the dripping cold-water tap (there was no hot water in Hanoi) and sat on the edge of my bed with the bundle of the mosquito-net like a swollen cloud overhead. I was to be the new foreign editor, arriving every afternoon at half past three, at that grim Victorian building near Blackfriars station with a plaque of Lord Salisbury by the lift. They had sent the good news on from Saigon, and I wondered whether it had already reached Phuong’s ears. I was to be a reporter no longer: I was to have opinions, and in return for that empty privilege I was deprived of my last hope in the contest with Pyle. I had experience to match his virginity, age was as good a card to play in the sexual game as youth, but now I hadn’t even the limited future of twelve more months to offer, and a future was trumps. I envied the most homesick officer condemned to the chance of death. I would have liked to weep, but the ducts were as dry as the hot-water pipes. Oh, they could have home—I only wanted my room in the rue Catinat.
It was cold after dark in Hanoi and the lights were lower than those of Saigon, more suited to the darker clothes of the women and the fact of war. I walked up the rue Gambetta to the Pax Bar—I didn’t want to drink in the Metropole with the senior French officers, their wives and their girls, and as I reached the bar I was aware of the distant drumming of the guns out towards Hoa Binh. In the day they were drowned in traffic-noises, but everything was qu
iet now except for the tring of bicycle-bells where the trishaw drivers plied for hire. Pietri sat in his usual place. He had an odd elongated skull which sat on his shoulders like a pear on a dish; he was a Sureté officer and was married to a pretty Tonkinese who owned the Pax Bar. He was another man who had no particular desire to go home. He was a Corsican, but he preferred Marseilles, and to Marseilles he preferred any day his seat on the pavement in the rue Gambetta. I wondered whether he already knew the contents of my telegram.
‘Quatre Cent Vingt-et-un?’ he asked.
‘Why not?’
We began to throw and it seemed impossible to me that I could ever have a life again, away from the rue Gambetta and the rue Catinat, the flat taste of vermouth cassis, the homely click of dice, and the gunfire travelling like a clock-hand around the horizon.
I said, ‘I’m going back.’
‘Home?’ Pietri asked, throwing a four-to-one.
‘No. England.’
PART TWO
1
Pyle had invited himself for what he called a drink, but I knew very well he didn’t really drink. After the passage of weeks that fantastic meeting in Phat Diem seemed hardly believable: even the details of the conversation were less clear. They were like the missing letters on a Roman tomb and I the archaeologist filling in the gaps according to the bias of my scholarship. It even occurred to me that he had been pulling my leg, and that the conversation had been an elaborate and humorous disguise for his real purpose, for it was already the gossip of Saigon that he was engaged in one of those services so ineptly called secret. Perhaps he was arranging American arms for a Third Force—the Bishop’s brass band, all that was left of his young scared unpaid levies. The telegram that awaited me in Hanoi I kept in my pocket. There was no point in telling Phuong, for that would be to poison the few months we had left with tears and quarrels. I wouldn’t even go for my exit-permit till the last moment in case she had a relation in the immigration-office.
I told her, ‘Pyle’s coming at six.’
‘I will go and see my sister,’ she said.
‘I expect he’d like to see you.’
‘He does not like me or my family. When you were away he did not come once to my sister, although she had invited him. She was very hurt.’
‘You needn’t go out.’
‘If he wanted to see me, he would have asked us to the Majestic. He wants to talk to you privately—about business.’
‘What is his business?’
‘People say he imports a great many things.’
‘What things?’
‘Drugs, medicines . . .’
‘Those are for the trachoma teams in the north.’
‘Perhaps. The Customs must not open them. They are diplomatic parcels. But once there was a mistake—the man was discharged. The First Secretary threatened to stop all imports.’
‘What was in the case?’
‘Plastic.’
‘You don’t mean bombs?’
‘No. Just plastic.’
When Phuong had gone, I wrote home. A man from Reuter’s was leaving for Hong Kong in a few days and he could mail my letter from there. I knew my appeal was hopeless, but I was not going to reproach myself later for not taking every possible measure. I wrote to the Managing Editor that this was the wrong moment to change their correspondent. General de Lattre was dying in Paris: the French were about to withdraw altogether from Hoa Binh: the north had never been in greater danger. I wasn’t suitable, I told him, for a foreign editor—I was a reporter, I had no real opinions about anything. On the last page I even appealed to him on personal grounds, although it was unlikely that any human sympathy could survive under the strip-light, among the green eye-shades and the stereotyped phrases—‘the good of the paper,’ ‘the situation demands . . .’
I wrote: ‘For private reasons I am very unhappy at being moved from Vietnam. I don’t think I can do my best work in England, where there will be not only financial but family strains. Indeed, if I could afford it I would resign rather than return to the U.K. I only mention this as showing the strength of my objection. I don’t think you have found me a bad correspondent, and this is the first favour I have ever asked of you.’ Then I looked over my article on the battle of Phat Diem, so that I could send it out to be posted under a Hong Kong dateline. The French would not seriously object now—the siege had been raised: a defeat could be played as a victory. Then I tore up the last page of my letter to the editor. It was no use—the ‘private reasons’ would become only the subject of sly jokes. Every correspondent, it was assumed, had his local girl. The editor would joke to the night-editor, who would take the envious thought back to his semi-detached villa in Streatham and climb into bed with it beside the faithful wife he had carried with him years back from Glasgow. I could see so well the kind of house that has no mercy—a broken tricycle stood in the hall and somebody had broken his favourite pipe; and there was a child’s shirt in the living-room waiting for a button to be sewn on. ‘Private reasons’: drinking in the Press Club, I wouldn’t want to be reminded by their jokes of Phuong.
There was a knock on the door. I opened it to Pyle and his black dog walked in ahead of him. Pyle looked over my shoulder and found the room empty. ‘I’m alone,’ I said, ‘Phuong is with her sister.’ He blushed. I noticed that he was wearing a Hawaii shirt, even though it was comparatively restrained in colour and design. I was surprised: had he been accused of un-American activities? He said, ‘I hope I haven’t interrupted . . .’
‘Of course not. Have a drink?’
‘Thanks. Beer?’
‘Sorry. We haven’t a frig—we send out for ice. What about a Scotch?’
‘A small one, if you don’t mind. I’m not very keen on hard liquor.’
‘On the rocks?’
‘Plenty of soda—if you aren’t short.’
I said, ‘I haven’t seen you since Phat Diem.’
‘You got my note, Thomas?’
When he used my Christian name, it was like a declaration that he hadn’t been humorous, that he hadn’t been covering up, that he was here to get Phuong. I noticed that his crew-cut had recently been trimmed; was even the Hawaii shirt serving the function of male plumage?
‘I got your note,’ I said. ‘I suppose I ought to knock you down.’
‘Of course,’ he said, ‘you’ve every right, Thomas. But I boxed at college—and I’m so much younger.’
‘No, it wouldn’t be a good move for me, would it?’
‘You know, Thomas (I’m sure you feel the same), I don’t like discussing Phuong behind her back. I thought she would be here.’
‘Well, what shall we discuss—plastic?’ I hadn’t meant to surprise him.
He said, ‘You know about that?’
‘Phuong told me.’
‘How could she . . . ?’
‘You can be sure it’s all over the town. What’s so important about it? Are you going into the toy business?’
‘We don’t like the details of our aid to get around. You know what Congress is like—and then one has visiting Senators. We had a lot of trouble about our trachoma teams because they were using one drug instead of another.’
‘I still don’t understand the plastic.’
His black dog sat on the floor taking up too much room, panting; its tongue looked like a burnt pancake. Pyle said vaguely, ‘Oh, you know, we want to get some of these local industries on their feet, and we have to be careful of the French. They want everything bought in France.’
‘I don’t blame them. A war needs money.’
‘Do you like dogs?’
‘No.’
‘I thought the British were great dog-lovers.’
‘We think Americans love dollars, but there must be exceptions.’
‘I don’t know how I’d get along without Duke. You know sometimes I feel so darned lonely . . .’
‘You’ve got a great many companions in your branch.’
‘The first dog I ever had was
called Prince. I called him after the Black Prince. You know, the fellow who . . .’
‘Massacred all the women and children in Limoges.’
‘I don’t remember that.’
‘The history books gloss it over.’
I was to see many times that look of pain and disappointment touch his eyes and mouth when reality didn’t match the romantic ideas he cherished, or when someone he loved or admired dropped below the impossible standard he had set. Once, I remember, I caught York Harding out in a gross error of fact, and I had to comfort him: ‘It’s human to make mistakes.’ He had laughed nervously and said, ‘You must think me a fool, but—well, I almost thought him infallible.’ He added, ‘My father took to him a lot the only time they met, and my father’s darned difficult to please.’
The big black dog called Duke, having panted long enough to establish a kind of right to the air, began to poke about the room. ‘Could you ask your dog to be still?’ I said.
‘Oh, I’m so sorry. Duke. Duke. Sit down, Duke.’ Duke sat down and began noisily to lick his private parts. I filled our glasses and managed in passing to disturb Duke’s toilet. The quiet lasted a very short time; he began to scratch himself.
‘Duke’s awfully intelligent,’ said Pyle.
‘What happened to Prince?’
‘We were down on the farm in Connecticut and he got run over.’
‘Were you upset?’
‘Oh, I minded a lot. He meant a great deal to me, but one has to be sensible. Nothing could bring him back.’
‘And if you lose Phuong, will you be sensible?’
‘Oh yes, I hope so. And you?’
‘I doubt it. I might even run amok. Have you thought about that, Pyle?’
‘I wish you’d call me Alden, Thomas.’
‘I’d rather not. Pyle has got—associations. Have you thought about it?’
‘Of course I haven’t. You’re the straightest guy I’ve ever known. When I remember how you behaved when I barged in . . .’