After crossing the Red River at Yen-Bay, the prisoners headed in a northerly direction across the Moyenne Région. One night, during a longer lap than usual, they emerged on to the R.C. 2. In the moonlight they could see a signpost: Hanoi 161 kilometres, then another: Hanoi 160 kilometres.
These signposts with their French measures of distance, the good old kilometres of the Ile-de-France, of Normandy, Gascony and Provence, were like lifebuoys to which they could cling for a few precious seconds before being swept back into their nightmare.
Hanoi 157 kilometres. They left the Hanoi road and turned down a side-trail leading towards the Bright River. The surface was corrugated with six-year-old furrows over which ran a winding path for pedestrians and cyclists.
The following night they crossed the Bright River in canoes. The village of Bac-Nhang on the far bank was intact.
The Voice gave orders for the sick to be evacuated to the hospital and Lescure was taken from his comrades; then, as a “measure of leniency” he had the bonds removed from all the officers who had been tied up, with the exception of Boisfeuras.
At daybreak the column did not make its customary halt. By tortuous paths it kept going until it reached a vast open space flanked by a pebbly stream. Several columns of prisoners were drawn up at the edge of the forest, divided according to race: French, North Africans, Blacks. A little to one side stood the group of senior officers from Dien-Bien-Phu who had left Muong-Phan by truck a month earlier.
A small detachment of bo-dois had been detailed to keep watch over General de Castries.
The heat was suffocating.
There was a watch-tower near the river. A camera and tripod had been set up on its platform which was shaded by a strip of matting. Beside it stood a white man in a fibre helmet, surrounded by a group of can-bos. He was tall and fair, dressed in a bush-shirt, khaki slacks and light jungle boots.
“They’re going to film us for the news-reels,” said Pinières.
“They just want to kill us off,” said Merle, who was dying of fatigue, heat and thirst.
None of them had anything to drink and they were not allowed to draw any water from the river.
“Im . . . Im . . .”
The bo-dois were getting touchier and nastier. They had smartened themselves up and cleaned their weapons. The Voice was strutting about among the group of can-bos surrounding the film-director, while the prisoners stood pressed together, marking time in the full blaze of the sun.
Eventually the can-bos returned to their respective groups. They paraded the prisoners on the open ground formed by the deposit of the river and drew them up in one solid column twelve deep, the officers at the head, with General de Castries alone in front.
To give the impression of an endless mass, to create the illusion that the number of prisoners was infinitely greater, the last ranks were tucked away behind a bend in the river, and it looked as though these thousands of men were merely the advance guard of the huge captive armies of the West.
The white man directed the scene, giving his orders in a French which was barely distorted by his Russian accent, and his voice was solemn and melodious:
“Forward . . . slowly.”
The massive column staggered forward as he focused his camera.
“Back a few paces . . .”
It was essential not to show the rear ranks.
“Move the head of the column a few paces to the left . . . Forward . . . As you were . . . We’ll start again . . .”
This sinister ballet of the vanquished lasted until midday. Esclavier and Glatigny were marching side by side in the centre of one rank, their heads hung in shame, both of them overwhelmed by the same feeling of humiliation.
“The camera to which the vanquished are subjected,” said Glatigny. “The modern yoke, but more degrading. We’ll be seen under this yoke thousands and thousands of times in every cinema in the world.”
“Damned bastards,” Esclavier muttered, wild with rage.
The Soviet film-director Karmen, a familiar figure at the Cannes festival and in the bars of Paris, relaxed, professional and smiling, was trifling with the ultimate physical resources of his racial brothers for the sake of political propaganda.
“A dirty traitor,” Esclavier hissed. “If I could only get my hands round his neck and slowly choke the life out of him . . .”
He was identifying the Soviet film-director with his brother-in-law, little Weihl-Esclavier with his damp hands, who had robbed him of everything, even his name; it was Weihl he was dreaming of strangling.
“As you were . . . We’ll begin again . . . Forward . . .”
That evening three officers died of exhaustion.
• • •
One day the limestone formations came into sight and Glatigny knew that he had not been mistaken. They were being taken to join the prisoners of Cao-Bang in the Na-Hang-Na-Koc quadrilateral in which the French Air Force had been ordered not to operate. So as not to land fully laden, a pilot returning from a mission had once jettisoned his bombs on to some huts where he saw some men moving, and without knowing it had killed some of his own comrades. The commanders-in-chief were now on their guard against the trigger-happiness of the air force pilots.
The night marches came to an end.
On 21 June the prisoners were given their rice ration at dawn. The column then set off along a broad, “easy” trail, which climbed a gentle slope in a dead straight line. The rumour spread throughout the column that they were about to arrive and the men derived fresh strength to push on, though they had been ready to drop a few moments before.
The trail now ran past neat little villages with squat Vietnamese hutments. Red flags and banners everywhere lent a gay carnival note to the scene.
A few Chinese merchants, whose wares overflowed into the road, had adorned their shop-fronts with the Chinese Communist flag and a photograph of Mao-Tse-Tung looking fat and self-satisfied.
“Civilians at last,” Merle observed gleefully. “We’re back in civilization. Where there’s a Chinaman, there’s hope.”
Still tied up, Boisfeuras in his turn filed past the shops. The smell of Cantonese spices, the sight of pig’s bladders, the sound of a language which was even more familiar to him than Vietnamese, put new life into him. Boisfeuras loved China and was rather scornful of Viet-Nam.
Greater China was in a period of flux and her flag already floated over Tonkin, the Haute and Moyenne Régions. She would overrun Malaya, Burma, India and the East Indies and one day the tide would turn, perhaps under atomic bombardment. But the flow would gather fresh impetus. China was an ocean bound by cosmic influences and, in spite of their pertinacity, their diligence and cruelty, the contemptible and pretentious masters who thought they could direct her would suffer the same fate as the other invaders before them: the Huns, the Mongols, the Manchus. Because their junks had for a moment or two sailed over this ocean which was the Chinese people, they fondly believed themselves to be the masters of it.
And as he stumbled along between his three sentries, Boisfeuras used the pure Mandarin language of Mao-Tse-Tung to recite this poem by the new master of China:
Standing on the highest summit of the Six Mountains
Beneath the red flag waving in the westerly breeze
With a long rope in my hand, I dream of the day
When we shall be able to bind the Monster fast . . .
Mao was mistaken. China was not the monster, the dragon “with a hundred thousand mouths and a hundred thousand talons,” but this ocean which could not be bound fast with a rope or dominated by force of arms.
The column came to a halt by a thicket where there were some banana trees. Esclavier had got rid of his depression after the crossing of the Bright River at Bac-Nhang and was now seething with energy and revolt.
“We’re not dead yet,” he said. “I think we’ve got away with it this time. Now we’ll show these dirty little bastards what we’re made of. There are some bananas on those trees. Let’s have them. Come on, Pinières, Merle, Glatigny.”
The officers went and asked a sentry for permission to relieve themselves. The bo-doi accompanied them as far as the banana trees but, since he belonged to the puritan republic of Viet-Nam, he turned away as the four men squatted down on their haunches.
“Go!” Esclavier shouted, as though on a parachute jump, and they snaffled the bananas and crammed them into their pockets. But the sentry had turned round and caught Pinières who was slower than the others. Beside himself with rage, the little green dwarf started hammering his fists into the ginger-haired giant, the odious imperialist who had stolen the property of the people.
“For Christ’s sake don’t hit back,” Esclavier shouted out to warn him. “He’s only doing his job.”
Pinières was quivering with anger; to master his feelings, he stood stiffly to attention while the bo-doi went on hammering him with his puny little fists.
“You’ve still got the bananas?” Esclavier asked him.
“Yes.”
“That’s the main thing.”
Merle gave a couple of small bananas to Lieutenant Mahmoudi who was down in the dumps and racked with fever. But Mahmoudi took umbrage:
“Why are you giving me these bananas?”
Merle shrugged his shoulders:
“You’re not in very good shape, you know. Lack of vitamins, that’s the reason for your fever. You’re afraid to eat wild herbs as we do, so keep up your strength on bananas. It looks as though we’re over the worst and we don’t want to see you die.”
“Why?”
“Now listen. You’re an Algerian and a Moslem; I’m on the reserve and, if anything, anti-militarist. Army people bore me to tears. They’re not adult, not properly mature. But that’s a minor detail for you and me, as it is for Glatigny and Boisfeuras, for Pinières and Esclavier, and even for Lacombe. We’re prisoners, so we’re all in the same boat; we’ve got to survive, our bodies have got to hold out, but our characters have got to survive as well. We must safeguard whatever it is that makes us different individuals, each with his own particular quirk, his spirit of rebellion, his indolence, his taste for alcohol or girls. We’ve got to protect all this against these insects who are trying to grind it out of us. Esclavier’s right, we’ve got to show them what we’re made of.
“When that’s done we can settle our own accounts, between us, as people of the same universe.”
“There are only two universes,” Mahmoudi replied darkly, “that of the oppressors and that of the oppressed, of the colonizers and of the colonized—in Algeria, that of the Arabs and that of the French.”
“You’re wrong,” said little Merle, lifting his finger in a falsely sententious manner. “There are those who believe in mankind and can tear out their own guts without any danger, and those who defy the human species in order to deny the individual. The latter give you leprosy as soon as you touch them.”
They went through another village where they had to pass in front of a Chinese shop outside which there was a sort of large jar filled with molasses.
“Mahmoudi, how would you go about it to steal some molasses?”
“Me steal molasses?”
He seemed surprised. This chap Merle was really rather disconcerting with the way he had of jumping abruptly from one subject to the next, of showing after a whole month of cohabitation that he was capable of personal ideas and reflection in spite of his spoilt child manners. Stealing molasses . . . stealing . . . The word stirred his memory. It was at Laghouat, a market day in spring, when the grey and blue-throated doves coo in the palm trees and the streams run clear and swift like young colts. They were coming down from the mountains, a band of barefoot urchins, and in the hoods of their threadbare jellabas they were carrying a few handfuls of dates for the road. On the square, where the camels of the Black Tent nomads had their pitch, they gathered round the doughnut merchant. Two of them made a pretence of fighting and the others knocked over the stall and made off, their hands sticky with the sugared cakes.
“Merle,” said Mahmoudi, “I think I know a way. Let’s organize a fight in front of the Chinaman’s stall—between you and me, for instance. You call me a thief, I’ll go for you, and meanwhile the other chaps can pinch the molasses.”
“Why should I call you a thief?”
Mahmoudi gave a smile which lent his drawn features a certain mystery and beauty.
“It will remind me . . . of a doughnut merchant!”
They enacted the scene to perfection.
“Dirty thief!” Merle yelled.
Mahmoudi sprang at the lieutenant and both of them tussled together on the ground in front of the shop. The prisoners had gathered round the two men whom the sentries were trying to separate. The Chinese was jumping up and down, his arms outstretched, as fat and furious as a turkey.
“Di-di, mau-len!”
“Go!” Esclavier shouted.
Empty tins were whipped out of pockets and each member of the team plunged his into the pot of molasses. At the next halt Lacombe was elected to distribute the stuff between the members of the group. He was well qualified for the task.
Notified of the incident, the Voice sent for Mahmoudi.
“I hear,” he said, “that one of your comrades insulted you outrageously and that all the other prisoners, out of racial spite, took his side. If you will tell me who this comrade was, he will be severely punished.”
Mahmoudi gently shook his head.
“It was a purely personal misunderstanding and racialism did not come into it.”
The Voice abruptly dropped his impersonal tone. He became passionate:
“You’re a simpleton. With them racialism always exists. They make a show of being your brothers, those friends of yours, of considering you their equals, but if you really want to mix your blood with theirs, marry one of their women, for instance, then they send you packing as though you had committed some sacrilege. Which comrade was it?”
“No.”
“You needn’t feel any solidarity with them; they’re the colonialists who are holding your people in subjection, they’re the ones who were beaten at Dien-Bien-Phu. Dien-Bien-Phu is the victory of all the Arab nations which are still under the heel of France. It’s your duty to tell me which of them insulted you.”
Mahmoudi’s lips were dry. He felt a fit of trembling coming on . . .
“Your duty as an Algerian oppressed by French imperialism . . .”
The Voice’s finely drawn and handsome features had recovered their hieratic quality and beauty—also their spell, for he was the conqueror of an army which Mahmoudi had always admired.
The eyes in the golden mask opened and closed and the lieutenant felt he was being observed by a creature of infinite patience. To release himself from their spell, he confessed the truth:
“I organized that scuffle, sir, to enable my comrades”—he had stressed this word with a sort of fury which did not escape the Voice—“to steal some molasses from a Chinese merchant.”
“You ought to be punished . . . but I shall let you off. Go away.”
The Voice watched him as he went. He had avoided making the bad mistake of sending him back with his hands tied behind him. Because of this punishment the Arab would have felt an even stronger solidarity with the other prisoners, and party instructions on this score were explicit: use every means to separate the blacks and North Africans from the French.
Lieutenant Mahmoudi did not have the calm strength of Dia, the black medical officer, with the powerful laugh which rose from his belly. He was more apprehensive, more uncertain. But this imbecile had reopened a secret wound in the Voice’s heart.
It was in the days of Admiral Decoux. Pham was then a student at Hanoi and belonged to a youth movement founded by Commander Ducoroy. It was the first time in Indo-China that white youths and young Vietnamese were to be found together in the same camps and under the same organization. Stripped to the waist, in khaki shorts, mingling together like brothers, they saluted the striking of the French flag at sunset, while the whole of the White Man’s Asia was crumbling under the blows of the Japanese who already held the aerodromes in Tonkin.
It was there Pham had met Jacques Sellier, one of the group leaders, a lad of nineteen with sturdy calves and close-cropped hair, who wore a scout’s badge. Sellier made a cult of leadership, tradition, the Church, personal hygiene, physical fitness and frankness which he called loyalty.
A violent admiration had drawn him towards this prince whom the camp had somehow acquired. There was nothing unusual about this devotion, which they all showed towards him, yellow and white alike.
Jacques Sellier, more by instinct than reasoning, knew how to make his friendship valued.
At his table—a few planks on two trestles set under a big Chinese pine—the food consisted of rice and bully-beef and was served in metal mess-tins. But the boy he had selected to sit on his right because he had shown most stamina on a test march, or because he had constructed a raft of creepers and bamboo with his own hands or had killed a snake without even appealing to his comrades for help—that boy, the Prince’s guest, felt his endeavour and courage well rewarded by this distinction.
Pham often sat on Jacques’s right. Although he hated physical training, he had become supple and strong. Although he enjoyed sophisticated conversation and improving on reality by means of poetic fancy, he had become down-to-earth and even slightly brusque.
When they left camp Jacques Sellier, the son of a colonial administrator, had invited him home. His life as an impoverished student had been transformed. The Selliers were extremely affable; they considered that their religion gave them certain duties towards others and, like Anglo-Saxon parsons, they were inclined to play a role that was something between a director of conscience and a sports trainer. They had seven children; Jacques’s younger sister was called Béatrice. She was not very pretty, but had an indefinable adolescent charm. Every morning Pham and his friend went for a run round the Great Lake; they would come home panting and exhausted.
Béatrice used to say:
“You’re like a couple of puppies scampering after the wind and coming back with nothing. Tomorrow I want some flowers . . .”
Pham had brought her some flowers. She had smiled and kissed him on the cheek.
The young Vietnamese had fallen in love with Béatrice and did not hide it from her.
One day Jacques had said:
“Let’s not go running today. Come for a stroll round the garden.”
Pham still remembered the blaze of the flamboyants, the pale grey colour of the sky and the acid pear-drop flavour of the morning air.
With his hands thrust into the pockets of his shorts, Jacques hung his head and kicked up the sand in the path with the toes of his sandals.
“Pham, my parents have asked me to talk to you about Béatrice. You know, she’s only seventeen and nothing but a tomboy . . . and any idea of your marrying her is out of the question.”
“Why?”
“We’re Catholics and for us everyone, whatever his race, is equal and alike . . . in principle . . . but . . .”
Pham had felt the sort of ice-cold blast that heralds a bout of fever. Jacques had gone on:
“It will be difficult for me to see you again for some time. Oh, come along now, don’t take on so. If you could only see your face! It’ll work out all right in the end. You’ll forget Béatrice, you’ll marry a girl from your own country.”
Pham had left without a word. His friendship for Jacques and what he believed to be his love for Béatrice had turned into a deep-rooted secret hatred for all whites, especially those who tried to bridge the gap between the two races and then fought shy.
At this juncture he was approached by some of his university friends at Hanoi who belonged to the Indo-Chinese Communist Party. After its suppression in 1940, the Central Committee had been obliged to withdraw to China and the students were getting slightly out of hand. They harboured a sense of injustice and dreamed in a vague way of the independence of their country and of splendid destinies for themselves. Pham had followed them. He had the same feeling of resentment, the same ambition and not a vestige of political education.
But one morning a man had turned up from Tien-Tsin. He had assembled the students and had given them the latest international directives of the Komintern.
“From now on the Communist Party must take the lead in every national liberation movement and unite the maximum number of nationalist and socialist organizations in the struggle against Fascist imperialism.”
And Pham was the one whom the Central Committee’s envoy had made responsible for initiating his comrades into the Vietminh programme as it had been worked out in the depths of China by a certain Nguyen-Ai-Quoc who was now known by the name of Ho-Chi-Minh.
He could recite the three points of this programme by heart:
“We must get rid of the French and Japanese Fascists and aim at the independence of Viet-Nam.
“We must establish a democratic republic of Viet-Nam.
“We must form an alliance with the democracies which are opposed to Fascism and aggression.”
To Pham Fascism had assumed the brawny muscular form of Jacques Sellier.
But Jacques Sellier did not die as a Fascist. At the time of the Japanese advance he and two other scouts had joined a guerrilla band organized by a half-caste lieutenant. He had been wounded and the bandy-legged little soldiers of the Mikado had finished him off. Pham had never forgiven him, either, for meeting such a noble end.
He had already become a true Communist and he felt that outside the Party there could be neither hope nor heroism.
• • •
The halt lasted until early in the afternoon. Captain de Glatigny, banana thief and former staff officer, lay stretched out in the grass. He was dreaming vaguely of a number of things, of his comrades and of Lescure who had left them.
On the eve of his departure for hospital Glatigny had sat beside the madman who was teasing a cricket with a blade of grass. The captain had suddenly had the impression that Lescure was re-establishing contact with the real world. He called out to him in a parade-ground voice:
“Lescure! Lieutenant Lescure!”
Lescure went on playing with the cricket and, without raising his head, gently answered:
“To hell with you, captain. I don’t want to know anything, I don’t want to be told anything and I’m perfectly all right, thank you.”
To be like Lescure! To reject all the anxieties, all the problems to which modern life was bound to subject every officer, to adopt the favourite bureaucratic formula: “I don’t want to know”—how restful that would be!
The prisoners had to leave the trail to negotiate some slippery little mud embankments which ran between the bright green rectangles of the paddy-fields, past screens of bamboo and clumps of mango, banana and guava trees. Darkness was beginning to fall and lent a limpid crystalline transparency to the atmosphere.
It was then the two men appeared, emerging from behind a screen of trees. They were naked to the waist, clothed only in a cheap ke-kouan of uncertain colour and, to prevent themselves from slipping, they walked with their toes spread out like ducks. They were carrying a huge black pig suspended from a bamboo pole and moved extremely fast, trotting along with a loose-limbed gait like all Vietnamese peasants. But they were far taller, and their skin was not the colour of virgin oil but looked greyish and dull. One of them wore a sort of blackish beret on his head, and the other a grotesque hat made of rice straw.
They caught up with the column by a short cut, lowered the pig and the pole to the ground, rounded on a bo-doi who tried to make them move on, and watched the pitiful procession of prisoners with profound interest and unmixed pleasure.
“Here, I say, Esclavier,” said the one with the beret. “What are you doing here, sausage-face?”
Esclavier recognized that slightly rasping voice and also the expression “sausage-face,” but not the man with the translucid complexion, whose skinny body could not have weighed more than 130 pounds. Yet it could be none other than Lieutenant Leroy of the 6th BCP who had been reported missing at Cao-Bang—the athlete who had run away with the army athletics championship in spite of his 200 pounds’ weight.
Esclavier ran his tongue over his dry lips.
“Don’t tell me it’s you, Leroy?”
“It’s me all right, and the chap at the other end of the pig is Orsini of the 3rd BEP. We’ve been expecting you for several days.”
“Are we still far from the camp?”
“A mile or two. So long, sausage-face, we’ll come and see you this evening What the hell does this damned little bo-doi think he’s doing, pushing me around? And the peace of the people, what about that, you little monkey? It’s your duty to re-educate us, all right, but that doesn’t mean you can push us around.”
“Im! Im!”
Disconcerted by the assurance of the two old hands and the flood of words they let fly at him, the bo-doi calmly allowed them to pick up their pig and bamboo pole and move on. With their fast trotting gait they soon left the column behind them and disappeared behind a screen of trees.
A Tho village appeared with its houses raised on stilts among the trees.
“Halt!”
The column came to a standstill. Each group leader was ordered to count his men and then went and reported to the Voice. He was accompanied by another Viet, as squat and bandy-legged as a Japanese. A sort of map-case hung on his skinny buttocks. His name was Trin; he was the general supervisor; the head warder of Camp One. He was ruthless, brutal and efficient, and the Voice knew he could trust him implicitly.
The Voice was sensitive and certain things repelled him; Trin made himself responsible for these. The Voice was the pure conscience of the Vietminh world, Trin was the material element.
The Voice embarked on a speech:
“You have reached your internment camp. It is useless to try and escape. A certain number of your comrades captured at Cao-Bung have tried more than once. Not one of them succeeded and we had to take severe disciplinary measures. Now they have come to their senses and have mended their ways. You are here in order to be re-educated. You must take advantage of this stay in the Democratic Republic of Viet-Nam to instruct yourselves, discover the evil of your errors, repent and become fighters for peace. From now on you will have some of your former comrades as group leaders. We have selected them from the ablest among them.”
“Dirty rats,” Esclavier muttered through clenched teeth.
“You must obey them, follow their instructions . . . I also have a splendid piece of news to announce. The new French Prime Minister, Mr. Mendès-France, appears to be inspired with the best intentions with a view to signing the armistice.”
“Who’s this fellow Mendès?” Pinières asked Glatigny.
“An awkward character, who has always been in favour of the evacuation of Indo-China. I personally regard him as a sort of Kerensky, only less beguiling.”
“I know him,” said Esclavier, “on the strength of having met him once or twice in England, when he was with de Gaulle. He’s ugly, brittle and conceited but at least he fought, which is pretty rare for a politician; he’s intelligent, which is rarer still, and he’s got character, which is exceptional.”
“But a man like that won’t ever sign the armistice,” said Lacombe dejectedly.
“He’s a Jew,” said Mahmoudi contemptuously, “and a Jew might do anything. There are no Jews here with us.”
“You’re wrong,” said Esclavier, “as a matter of fact there are two: a captain who fought extremely well and who’s no different from any of us, and a crackpot lieutenant who dreams of stuffing himself with cakes and being made a librarian at the Nationale so as to be able to spend the rest of his life reading.”
Each team was quartered in a hut on stilts. On the far side of a tributary of the Bright River which the last storm had swollen and filled with mud, the prisoners could see the neat lines of huts of Camp One.
The officers taken prisoner at Cao-Bang had been living there for the last four years; ninety of them had survived.
Lacombe lowered himself on to his bunk with a deep sigh:
“Well, we’ve got here at last: we may as well make the best of it. I really thought I was done for and I’m sure if it hadn’t been for Pinières and you others . . .”
“Balls to that,” the lieutenant muttered. “Whatever you say, you’re part of the army and a comrade and that’s why we helped you.”
“What’s happened to Boisfeuras, I wonder?” Glatigny asked.
“Boisfeuras has got out of tighter spots than this,” Esclavier replied. “He was once in the hands of the Japs for three weeks . . . and he came through all right. I once had a brush with the Gestapo, we compared our experience. His was . . . slightly more refined, shall we say?”
Lieutenants Leroy and Orsini turned up shortly afterwards, still as unconcerned as ever. Out of their pockets tumbled some bananas and tobacco and an old copy of l’Humanité.
“L’Humanité’s not for reading,” said Orsini, who was short, thickset and swarthy, “it’s for rolling cigarettes.”
“How did you come by all this stuff?” Merle asked.
“How do you think? We pinched it, of course!”
“In the interest of reciprocal rights,” Orsini explained.
“Now here’s the dope,” said Leroy. “Your team seems to have a pretty bad reputation, since the group leader they’ve chosen for you is little Marindelle, who couldn’t be better at the job.”
“Marindelle!” Orsini said delightedly. “That’s someone to conjure with.”
“A bastard, is he?” said Glatigny. “That name seems to ring a bell.”
“A stool-pigeon?” Pinières asked.
“Our best friend,” said Leroy. “Officially the number one collaborator of the camp, but actually he could be called the head of the Resistance.”
“He’s got the right idea,”—Orsini scratched round his armpit and brought out a louse which he crushed between his thumbnails—“to get the best of the Viets you’ve got to humour them and give them confidence in you. He’s a double, a triple, a quadruple agent. He has got the best of everyone, the Viets, the Camp Commander, the Meteor, us and perhaps himself as well.”
“You’d better spread it around,” Leroy went on. “Potin, another group leader, is a Communist. He turned Communist here. He believes in it quite sincerely, but he makes a point of behaving decently and setting a good example. Ménard, on the other hand, is an absolute bastard, an out-and-out swine.”
“This is the difference we draw between them,” said Orsini. “Potin we’ll bump off but we’ll shake his hand first, and afterwards we’ll see to his wife and kids. Ménard we’ll do to death by slow degrees and then dump him in a shit-house.
“Fabert’s a chap who doesn’t give a damn so long as he’s left in peace and there’s no trouble. Trézec’s a bible-thumper and a dreary bore: always preaching, but for his own church, not the Viets.” Geniez is the only pederast in the camp and it’s not his fault. So he’s a progressive. Most people can’t stand him, but I’ve seen him fight and I know that he’s then a lion.
“Ah, here comes that dear little bastard, Marindelle.”
They made a face at the new arrival, got up and disappeared.