JONATHAN CAPE HAD HIGH expectations for Golden Earth, as the Burma book had been called, and now reached the conclusion that yet another book about South-east Asia would not be one too many. From the point of view of the peace of the world, the situation there was now worse than it had been two years before, for it was generally believed that with the probable collapse of the French, the United States would step in. In North Vietnam, where previously the French had been opposed by scattered guerrilla forces, regular armies were now appearing in the field, and were prepared to stand and fight. Only the towns and the largest villages were fairly secure. The rest of Indo-China had slipped away into no-man’s-land. Any new book would have to be about Hanoi and the North, where it was predicted that the decisive battles of the war were about to begin.
Having been bulldozed into the decision to return again to South-east Asia, it was at least some measure of compensation to discover that on this journey I could at least kill two or more birds with one stone. The Borneo Company, one of the spearheads of Western penetration of the Far East, had been casting round for someone to write a commissioned history of the firm. They now heard of me through Oliver Myers, and the firm’s manager in Thailand, Angus Buchanan, had invited me to their headquarters near Chiengmai in Thailand for a discussion over a possible alternative to the book on North Vietnam. This also provided an opportunity to call on Loke Wan Tho in Singapore, with whom I had recently exchanged letters on the subject of an expedition he was planning to Nepal.
Having settled on North Vietnam I phoned Buchanan to say I would be coming, flew to Bangkok and thereafter took the train to Chiengmai, where Buchanan had promised to meet me at the station on his elephant, assuring me that this was part of the company’s traditional hospitality offered to visitors. At Chiengmai, however, Buchanan awaited me in a Volkswagen. What happened to the elephant? I asked, to which he replied that it was suffering from ingrowing toenails.
The Company’s headquarters were a cross on an enormous scale between a pagoda and a cattle shed, full of the scent of ancient ledgers and exhausted spices although in one corner of a vast room at the time of our arrival the fragrance of kippers for breakfast lingered on. It turned out that the object of my visit had been lost to sight, for by now discussions over the proposed book were going on with Compton McKenzie, although later I was to learn that the fee he had suggested was considered too high. It would have made a fascinating book, for in this same room the contract had been signed for the supply of the celebrated Anna as a children’s nanny to Mongkut, King of Siam. It would have been only one of hundreds of arrangements of comparable importance to have been negotiated under the sincere gaze of the Company’s Victorian principals whose portraits decorated these walls.
This, as was to have been expected, was a treasure house of outmoded English custom, and of course speech. Elderly staff members clung to the public school slang of the twenties. Low-level employees, who happened to be seen as pretentious, were referred to as they had been in Punch before the First World War as ‘bumpers’, a term applied to those who only rode horses on Margate Sands. Prostitutes were ‘polls’, and to be caught out with one could be ‘deuced awkward’. This picture of men living at the far ends of the earth who had ceased to bother with home leave was complicated in the manner of some of Somerset Maugham’s characters by a tendency to go native. It was normal for people who might have spent a third of their lives in Chiengmai to break into the flow of public school English with sharp little interjections of Thai, spoken through the nose. The most senior company servant had taken to wearing a convenient and sensible vest-like garment, excellently adapted to the climate, with black silk Shan trousers down to the knee. For the last ten years most of his spare time had gone into writing a book about the four Idyllic Occupations, which were reading, farming, fishing and the gathering of firewood. The story was that he still kept a Thai mistress who was a ‘serene highness’ and was entitled to be shaded by three ceremonial umbrellas wherever she went, although now she was old and rarely to be seen.
Representatives of foreign firms such as the Bombay Burma and the Borneo companies were invited and even expected to attend local festivities, which most of them thoroughly enjoyed, and here, if they had any feeling for such things, there were traditional entertainments to be watched that had hardly changed in a thousand years, and which in their poetry and magnificence would have been hard to match anywhere else on earth.
Meadows, one of the Company’s old timers, gave me a lift over to the Wat Arun—the tallest building in the area—where a festival was taking place. The first sign of military sponsorship was a large placard bearing a notice in Thai, and beneath it an English translation.
ALL HAT WEARING. BRASSIERES ALSO TO WEAR.
ALL TO DANCE.
PARTNERS TO TOUCH. NOT WALK BEHIND.
LADIES HAIR CURL IN PERMANENT WAY.
LOW CASTE NO UMBRELLA-ING.
Meadows explained that among the new rules laid down in search of power and prestige was the requirement that hats be worn within the precincts of all pagodas. Sensibly, as they were never worn at other times, these were on hire, displayed on tables in long lines outside the Wat’s walls, and beside each lady’s hat had been placed an orchid, and a safety pin with which to secure it if desired. Behind the lines of hats were tumblers containing mekhong, a locally made whisky drunk hot, with adjacent primuses to deal with drinks that had cooled down. The monks had drawn the line at whisky drinking within the perimeter of the Wat itself, so to be on the safe side many of the males helped themselves to the equivalent of a half pint of Johnny Walker, becoming instantly drunk, and sometimes bursting into loud laughter.
A notice over the richly carved lintel of the entrance to the temple enclosure said: ‘All doors are open. Courtesy and affability conciliate.’ Through the entrance two wonderfully kept cows ambled past, chewing on the flowers they had snatched in passing from the hands of sauntering guests. To one side of the gate several members of the festival committee came forward to receive us and to present Major Chai Wut, Chief of Police, who happened also to be a registered astrologer. Meadows told me later that the Major had recently had several gold teeth put in ‘to make his face wider and happier’. He said he had taken rather a liking to the man. He was at his most pleasant when drunk, as he frequently was, and was well-known for the number of semi-destitute hangers-on whose rice he provided, largely from the proceeds of minor corrupt practices. Meadows complimented him on the new American pistol he was wearing and the Major showed himself delighted. ‘We are surrounded by evil men, Mr Meadows,’ he said. ‘It behoves us to antidote our precautions.’
In the matter of protocol first priority was a visit to the Wat itself, and we climbed the wide marble staircase leading to a L-shaped hall. The floor of this was packed with prostrate figures, and turning the corner of the L the huge figure of an enthroned Buddha came into view. Meadows nodded respectfully in its direction as if to a foreigner of distinction who might or might not feel inclined to return his salutation. Through the deep and throbbing drone of prayer came a muffled babel of sounds from outside the building: the shrieking voices of actresses, the tangled rhythms of several orchestras, and the crackle of .22 rifles on miniature ranges. Now and then we heard a thumping explosion. Meadows explained that this sound would be produced by the most up-to-date of the many attractions—the hand-grenade throwing range; it had recently been tested out in the Bangkok festivals and voted to be most popular of all side shows.
We went down the staircase and out into the open again. Here the scene was one of extreme vivacity, emphasised by the occasional appearance of Europeans from one of the companies who, even at such a time, contrived to move with a sort of stiff purpose through the formless ebb and flow of the holiday crowd. We were facing the entrance to a lofty tent in which the orchid show was being held, and at that moment a procession of beautiful women were leaving it. They were dressed in the wonderfully archaic costumes of the previous generations, now only worn by prostitutes catering for the romantic tastes of the Europeans of the companies. Meadows told me that they were from the best local house, The Retreat of The Transcending Concord. In one corner of this view an actress in a twelfth-century play defied a Mongolian rapist. In the other the gift promised for the occasion by the hereditary prince was led into sight. Traditionally this was a gambolling dragon of wicker and canvas, but this year, Meadows said, for educational reasons the prince had ordered a model of a dinosaur and an attendant tossed out leaflets listing scientific facts. The noise was overpowering, for at that moment what Meadows thought was the most powerful amplifying system in northern Thailand went into action—the gift, according to Meadows, of the leading opium traders in the town. The music was from the film The Asphalt Jungle, the most popular ever to be shown in the town.
The orchid house was claimed to have been the largest ever put up in Thailand. It was in effect an extremely large tent in the shape of a pagoda, with a stiffened canvas spire one third the height of the Wat Aran, glittering with gold leaf and coloured glass inserts in the sky above it.
The main exhibit, which we examined with proper respect, was a Vanda Coerulia, the blue Thailand Orchid, believed to be extinct in the wild. The prince had organised an expedition which, after a two-day journey by bulldozer from Chiengmai, had discovered the rare flower out of sight from the ground in the forest canopy. The orchid itself was six feet in length, and a packing case had to be built on the spot to accommodate both the plant and part of the tree. The journey back as far as the paved road was by bulldozer, after which the valuable load was transferred to a suitably decorated cart. In addition to the usual coloured streamers, and a picture of a magic tiger intended to deter hijackers, the orchid was accompanied on the final stage of the journey by a musician whose function it was to pacify any spirit the flower might contain by playing to it on an archaic form of panpipes.
A variety of birds had found their way into the tent and the attendants had put down saucers of food suited to their different requirements. There was a sharp hiss somewhere overhead and the birds flew up. ‘Could that have been a bullet by any chance?’ I asked Meadows.
‘It was,’ he said. ‘You hear them whistling about the place every now and then. Trouble is they will mess with guns. That and the fact that half of them are tight most of the time.’ A nurse in a sparkling white uniform was hurrying by; slowing down to bow slightly, she released a faint odour of ether.
‘Any casualties?’ I asked.
‘They expect a few. We’ll probably see the ambulance touring round. It’s very well equipped. I hear they had a couple of flesh wounds yesterday. Someone lost a hand at the grenade-throwing last year.’
The attendance at the orchid display struck me as respectful rather than enthusiastic. Along with the striptease it was probably part of the cultural revolution, something to be gulped down in dutiful style before passing on to more impetuous pleasure. A smiling, swaying colonel was in charge of the most popular of the attractions and, spotting us, he immediately hustled us to the head of the small queue that had formed. The grenades were the training variety, loaded with a small proportion of their usual charge and drilled with vent holes, which were supposed to prevent fragmentation. They were thrown at tiny models of tanks, guns and men fixed lightly to an electrical conveyor, and the prizes to be won were exhibited on a stand in the rear. Anyone who blew a model of a battle tank off the rails received a bedside lamp made from a shell case. The demolition of a self-powered gun was rewarded by a watch with a luminous strap, and that of a midget soldier by a gold-dipped fob-watch, engraved with a stylisation of a bursting bomb.
The front two rows of onlookers seated behind a protective barrier were occupied by the vacant-faced young novice monks who were the town’s leading citizens. Behind them, in order of importance, came the big opium smugglers, army and police officers, a few exquisite princesses descended from Mongolian war-lords and condemned to a vacuous liberty through the decline in harems, then the richest shopkeepers and the elegant and dignified prostitutes from the town’s leading brothel—each one carrying a plastic shoulder-bag proclaiming a progressive outlook. It was an occasion when the Siamese genius for good humour was shown to best advantage. Each contestant picking up his grenade received shouts of encouragement When a tank was knocked out a cheer went up. A bad throw provoked groans of disappointment. The management seemed anxious that people should win their prizes and failure caused them to click their teeth in dismay. Sympathetic-looking nurses were dodging about in the background of this and other gatherings in the vicinity, on the look-out for dead-drunks who were tenderly gathered up and carried away for treatment.
Meadows thought that I should go first. An army N.C.O. stepped up and placed three grenades on the bench at my side. In so far as a Thai could look anxious, this man did so. He mumbled something with lowered eyes, and Meadows translated. ‘He is concerned for your success and begs you not to fail.’ The N.C.O. handed me a white glove and I noticed that the palm of it was blackened by smoke. Meadows saw me staring at it and said, ‘There is a five-second delay. Probably better to give it three seconds. Be on the safe side, eh?’ At that moment an ambulance siren started up and the ambulance dashed off. I was looking down at the grenades and noticed they were smaller than in the old days, although the Italian ‘Red Devil’, which was the smallest of them all, could blow your forearm off and with it half your head, if you held it too long.
I picked up a grenade, which fitted snugly into the palm although it was heavier than I expected, and the thought flashed through my mind whether this one could have slipped through with the full charge intact. In the old days of grenade-throwing, either in practice or with serious intentions, the thrower sometimes fumbled and dropped the thing. The N.C.O., perpetually smiling, watched me closely and nodded encouragement. ‘Five seconds,’ he reminded me. ‘But better three.’ I noticed at this moment something about the music I found a little unnerving. Several orchestras were going at full pitch and predominantly the instruments employed were xylophones and gongs, but it was the sudden outburst of frantic squealing of rams’ horns that I would have preferred not to be obliged to listen to at that particular moment. I gripped the grenade, struck the pin projecting from its bottom on the bench, counted three fast to be on the safe side, and threw it at a midget battle tank that had come jerking into sight on the conveyor. The throw was too high. The grenade struck the iron background sheet before falling to the ground, and there was a two-second delay before it exploded with a belch of smoke and shower of sparks, accidentally almost derailing the personnel-carrier following the tank. ‘I have an idea that was a full charge,’ I called to Meadows, but he had moved two or three paces to the rear and there was no reply. My second grenade was wide of the mark and did not explode. The third just missed a self-propelled gun and exploded with a thunderous crack the moment it struck the ground. I turned round to Meadows. ‘Your go,’ I said, but he laughed and shook his head. ‘I’ve changed my mind,’ he said.
Fifty yards away they were dancing the Ram Wong on a raised circular stage under the supervision of a police lieutenant whose job it was to enforce the new cultural laws. These obliged couples to take each other in their arms in Western style, which they did so long as the policeman was able to keep his eye on them. He was obliged, however, to look after two other cultural side shows so that as soon as he left the Ram Wong the dancers, including several Europeans, changed back immediately into the traditional dance in which the man followed the girl, both partners jigging and waving their arms rhythmically to the music.
We turned away in the direction of the striptease, but halted by a notice at the entrance to the tent, TEASING TO STOP ONE HALF HOUR FOR NECESSITIES OF BODILY RELIEF. TO RESUME SO PLEASE TO RETURN WITH OUR THANKS.
Just as we reached the gate we were stopped by the sound of running feet from behind. It was the N.C.O., clutching a package which he thrust into my hands. ‘Please to open,’ he said, and I tore away the wrapping, and found myself holding one of the grenade-throwing bedside lamps. There was a note with it. For dashed good effort. To accept with compliment. ‘To compensate one grenade not explode,’ the N.C.O. said, baring his teeth with pleasure.
We examined the lamp closely. It was beautifully made, the surface incised with posturing figures from the Ramayana. How extraordinary, I thought, that you could only find a really excellent example of the ancient art applied to a shell case. ‘I find this’, I said to Meadows, ‘highly symbolical of the times and the place.’
Next day I left for Bankok and Singapore. Meadows drove me to the station in Chiengmai, where it was announced in an almost congratulatory way that the train would be no more than two hours late in leaving. Thus I was given an opportunity of seeing something of the old part of the most delectable of oriental towns in the early morning hours before the bustle of the day began.
Chiengmai, capital of the North, remained beneath a thin veneer of development Thailand’s most pleasing city. It was sedate enough at this hour to be explored on hired bikes, with everything worth seeing compressed into the old town within the medieval walls. Part of Chiengmai recalled scenes from old movies, of China before Mao, and a glance at the map confirmed that the remotest provinces of China were not far away. Men and women wearing hats like enormous lampshades hobbled past under the weight of a pole balanced on the shoulders with heavy burdens at each end. Time-defaced human and animal figures, ribald and threatening or merely grotesque, lay abandoned among the rubbish in odd corners. The department stores, open by seven, had special offers of spirit-houses to suit all pockets, from clearance lines in plastic to deluxe versions in richly-grained teak. They were put up everywhere to give shelter to the ancestral spirits of the family, and to such vagrant ones as might be tempted to take up residence, just as a bird may take over a nesting box.
The roofs of old Chiengmai, curling at the eaves, lay upon the city like autumn leaves, and from these arose the spires of many temples, spreading the faintest of haloes into the misted sky. There could have been no more poetic scene than the line-up soon after dawn of the archers with their crossbows, members of a clan enjoying the privilege of shooting at the stationary outlines of fish in the intensely green waters. All these men in their ancient garb presented roughly identical features to the rising sun as they muttered a prayer at the instant of releasing an arrow.
There was only time for one of the many pagodas, the Wat Phra Singh, enshrining the Buddha which, deposited momentarily on this spot while being taken to the king, refused to move further. The pagoda also possesses one of the largest collections of grandfather clocks in the world. We arrived when a stream of male citizens over fifty, who are allowed to sleep there once a week in order to benefit from the holy emanations, were taking their departure. With that the long-drawn-out whistle of the train was heard, and we said goodbye. ‘I cannot possibly tell you how much I wish I were coming along,’ Meadows said.
‘Why do you say that?’
‘I’ve been here too long,’ he said. ‘In the end you feel a change coming over you but by that time it’s too late. Before I know what’s happening I’ll be wearing Shan trousers. It’s time to go, the question is can I pull myself out?’
It was a sweltering afternoon in Singapore when I arrived. Attracted by its reputation for embalmed Englishery, I took a cab to the celebrated Raffles Hotel, and was allocated a room with chintz curtains, a telephone dressed up unconvincingly as a cat, a Gideon Bible, and bedroom slippers for both sexes which seemed only to emphasise the loneliness of the long-distance traveller. A call to Loke’s number rang only once before the receiver was picked up and a remote and passionless female voice held me at bay. I sensed well-controlled impatience at the other end of the line as a cautious questioning began. Having described myself as a personal friend of Mr Loke and outlined the purpose of my visit to Singapore, I was told that Wan Tho was out of town at that moment, but she hoped to be in touch with him that evening, in which case she was sure I would hear from him. From this I could only suspect that I had been fed into a system in which calls by the hundred for the great man were filtered and sifted, before a batch of possibles were delivered to a secretary for a final verdict as to who was acceptable and who could be forgotten about.
An hour or two passed. I wandered down to the bar and got into conversation with a man who was in office-building construction and Loke’s name came up. Loke, he said, with a laugh of satisfaction, had recently dabbled unhappily in steel futures, and now found himself with several thousand tons of steel girders on his hands. He had had to find somewhere to store these, temporarily, but it was no longer possible to find a square yard of unutilised land in Singapore. The only solution was to stack them in his magnificent garden, largely until then devoted to—and I knew this was coming—Malaysia’s foremost orchid collection. The ambience of Singapore, he assured me, was uniquely entrepreneurial.
Having eaten little since dawn, I was now beginning to feel the pangs of hunger. What was the food like here? I asked my friend. He raised his eyes to heaven, and said they prided themselves on traditional English cooking, including steak and kidney pie, with a curry evening meal on Saturdays, which was strongly to be avoided. It was quite pleasant in the garden, and most people ate there in the evenings, although long-sleeved shirts and antimalarial cream were a must.
I had to leave Singapore the following morning and I had given up hope of Loke, so I went down and occupied the only vacant table in the garden, which may have been turned down by other diners due to its positioning at the edge of a pool, in which large goldfish with sullen expressions and immensely bulging eyes circled endlessly in hypnotic fashion in an anti-clockwise direction. The waiter came with the menu, suggesting before I could speak ragout of beef with herb dumplings, which struck me as unsuitable in a climate in which even the sky seemed to sweat. The alternative to this was savoury meat loaf, to which I had just committed myself when everyone seated in the vicinity was suddenly distracted from whatever they were doing as five white Cadillacs, moving so silently that only the scrunch of their tyres on the gravel could be heard, crept up the drive to form a line outside the hotel’s entrance. It reminded me of the funeral cortège of an American gangster, minus the flowers, and I was never more surprised than at that moment when I saw two figures crossing the lawn in my direction, one being someone from the hotel, and the other Loke.
He was full of cheerful apologies, including one for the cars. ‘Kind of thing I hate,’ he said, ‘but I have to put up with. Marvellous you chose to turn up now. We’re on our way to my sister’s birthday party, dear boy. Black tie, white Cadillac. There’s no getting out of it. Hop in.’ Five years had passed since the days of our bird-watching in Pembrokeshire, but birds and photography played as great a part in his life as ever, he said. He had a wonderful story to tell: he was now a bosom friend of Malcolm Macdonald, the British High Commissioner for Asia, who also knew something about birds. Loke had found him a house in Kuala Lumpur, in the garden of which an extremely rare eagle was about to build its nest. Loke persuaded Macdonald that the chick-rearing operation ought to be kept under observation, and within days of the Commissioner agreeing to this, he found a thirty-foot tower erected next to the tree with the nest, at the top of which Loke spent most of his spare time for a month.
We were bound for an open-air restaurant a mile or so out of town, the central feature of which proved to be a rotunda set in a garden of flowering trees among which bird cages were artfully concealed, some furnished with real songsters, others with vociferous mechanical bulbuls, used to stimulate birds in the neighbourhood into natural song. About two hundred Chinese guests were seated at long tables forming a hollow square. Within the rotunda a pianist in tails seated at a grand piano worked his way with some panache through a repertoire of Sankey and Moody hymns.
Loke explained that most of the guests were Christadelphians, members of an American fundamentalist sect that attempts to inculcate severe morality in its adherents, including—despite the example of the marriage at Cana—an absolute ban upon alcohol. For this reason all believers present were invited to wash down the exquisite food placed before them with Dr Pepper, 7-up, or other such blameless refreshments. ‘Don’t despair, old boy,’ Loke said. ‘We’ll do something about it in your case. You’re unsaved, so you don’t count.’ More white Cadillacs were arriving, and he said of the colour, ‘I imagine it’s part of our way of showing our faith.’ He slipped away and his sister dropped into the empty chair. She was exceedingly pretty, with features veering in the direction of European models, as I had often noticed in the case of upper-crust Chinese beauties. She was carrying a bowl of great delicacy which I later found out was Ming. She picked up the gilt-edged card at the side of my plate, giggled and read the text, ‘Let us continue in the breaking of bread, and prayer.’ With that the glass was filled from the splendid bowl. ‘Malt,’ she said. ‘I hope you approve … well, I guess only God sees this. Cheers.’ She went, and Loke was back. ‘I checked with one of the elders, and I was right. He said the colour emphasises the concept of purity.’
It was a lively affair. The guests exchanged jokes, pulled funny faces, demonstrated conjuring tricks and punned in English—probably in Chinese, too. They were easily amused. A feature of the banquet, which ran to some thirty dishes, was a partridge served to each guest in which a simulated and edible bird’s nest had been inserted. Someone stood up and said, ‘Normally the bird is to be found in the nest. Now we are eating a nest that was discovered in the bird.’ Everyone clapped.
The real and mechanical bulbuls warbled in their cages, the pianist charged for the third time into Through the Night of Doubt and Sorrow, played as if it were a wedding march, and a Chinese lady wearing a kind of surplice arose to upbraid us all in a brief sermon in English, which appeared to fall on deaf ears. Now, with the disposal of the last of the simulated birds’ nests, the signal had gone out for ‘the hour of contagious joy’ to begin. Red noses and false moustaches were distributed and a pentatonic twittering arose from the guests as they indulged at this stage in horseplay of a decorous kind.
At the end of the night the scent of the frangipani strengthened, Sankey and Moody had been put away, and I was reminded of the past’s indelible grandeur by the strumming of an ancient zither someone had smuggled into this most modern of scenes. With the first flush of dawn Loke drove me to the airport. On the way we talked about his forthcoming expedition to the Himalayas, where for two whole months he proposed to wash his hands of his business concerns, sever communications with Singapore and do nothing more than hunt down, photograph and skin rare birds. The invitation to me to join the party was renewed. Had I ever thought about taking up taxidermy? he wanted to know, and I told him that I hoped to do so when I had the time. ‘You’re bound to spoil a few birds at first,’ he said, ‘but you’ll soon get the hang of the thing.’
With that, we parted in hope, continuing a regular correspondence but never to meet again. There was to be no expedition, for a year or two later Loke was killed in a plane crash in Taiwan.
On the occasion of my first visit to Indo-China in 1950, my flight from Paris to Saigon by DC4 had taken, including a night’s stopover, an excruciating four days, but by the greatest of good fortune had provided an opportunity to get to know a senior French policeman, Vincent Lagrange. Shortly after our arrival he had invited me to dinner at his house in the rue Catinat. Here he lived in resplendent surroundings with a Vietnamese mistress of outstanding beauty, Nam Chuan. A curious situation had arisen, for the fourth member of the party was Chu Ti, a bosom friend of Nam Chuan who lived in a cottage in the garden. Nam Chuan and Chu Ti had been born in the same village, but the two girls were poles apart. Lagrange’s girlfriend was worldly, a typical French official’s mistress, swathed in silk and tinkling softly with concealed jewellery as she moved about the room. Chu Ti was beautiful, but her attractions were of a different kind, including the freshness and simplicity of a village girl in country cottons, and the clogs worn by country people in their muddy fields. In my discussions with the girls, I was astonished to find that, despite Lagrange’s position as an upholder of French Dominion, no secret was made of the fact that Chu Ti had been fighting in the jungle with the rebel Viet-Minh, and had been wounded in a skirmish before being smuggled into Saigon to convalesce.
Although Lagrange never made reference to this episode he must have been aware of it, and it was only to be concluded that he was firmly under Nam Chuan’s thumb. Later in our relationship he had admitted to a near-certainty that Nam Chuan had something going with his house-boy who took over whenever his employer was on tour. Lagrange was philosophical (‘Ah, qu’est ce que vous voulez? Elle est jeune et jolie et je suis vieux’). Whatever their domestic complications, I saw a good deal of the Lagrange household. Vincent seemed happy to have me accompany him on official trips, and I took Chu Ti to the movies, which she adored, although with a strong preference for gangster films. How extraordinary it was that this little jungle fighter who had seen prisoners’ throats cut and men frizzled by flame-throwers in battle should squirm in her cinema seat not only from the pain of unhealed wounds but at the adventures of Edward G. Robinson acting the part of Al Capone.
Before making this second trip to Saigon, I had written to Lagrange but received no reply. Having settled in at the Hotel Continental, my first concern was to get in touch with him. There was no reply when I telephoned so I took a cyclo to his house where I was met by a concierge who was new to me. She told me that Lagrange was on three months’ leave in France, and that Nam Chuan, who for her was Madame Lagrange, was staying with relations for the great spring festival, the Tet. Chu Ti she had never heard of. I wrote out a note for Nam Chuan which she promised to have delivered, and next morning they phoned up from the reception at the hotel to say that someone was waiting for me. It was Chu Ti, who in the first moments seemed almost unrecognisably changed, although in a matter of moments I realised that the transformation was due to nothing more than the town-clothes she was wearing. I remembered that a reporter on Le Figaro had mentioned that because the Viet-Minh were now in most of the villages, a warning had gone out to country girls to leave their pyjamas and coolee hats behind when they came into Saigon to avoid being suspected of spying or worse. I stammered my pleasure and surprise, and we touched hands. Meetings of the kind are not publicly effusive in South-east Asia. I could see that she was daunted by the surroundings. ‘Can we go somewhere else?’ she said. We took one of the pedecabs waiting at the door, and told him to take us to the Jardins Botaniques.
These, too, had changed, having benefited from the cash-flow of war, although losing none of their charm. For the Tet, the municipality had splashed out, filling the gardens with a purchase of tame silver and golden pheasants, birds that could be seen in the wild on the outskirts of the city, but were here for this occasion in recognition of the good luck with which they were supposedly charged. It was a merit-acquiring exercise to feed these magnificent birds with specially dyed grain on sale for the purpose, and everyone who could afford a piastre’s worth for distribution made a purchase.
Luck was seen or stored in the least likely of ways. Spoilt, yapping little dogs of a kind once bred for the old imperial family were brought here for the Tet. For a miniscule fee one could be taken on a lead to urinate against a small post carved with the signs of longevity and peace, in this way discharging luck like a strong electric current. Soft drinks were to be had in the six symbolic colours, but possessing no flavour of any kind: included in the purchase was a horoscope cast on the spot. The pursuit of good fortune seemed often to be linked with absurdities to which even the most sensitive members of the community were prey. Chu Ti, for example, for whose discrimination and intelligence I had the highest respect, was clearly happy to scatter festive grain in the path of a pheasant, and showed signs of disappointment when the birds pecked at her offering in a disinterested fashion.
We sat under a tree to which a little banner had been fastened thanking it for flowering at such an appropriate time, and I asked her about the two years that had passed since our last meeting. ‘The future is beginning to smile,’ she said. ‘By next year the war will be over. We shall be liberated.’
‘Do you still go to the jungle?’
‘When they need me. I help with the wounded, but there’s less fighting.’
‘And your own wounds?’
‘They’ve healed. The bullet is still there, but it gives no trouble.’
‘I’m glad. And what is the news of Nam Chuan?’
‘The news is good. She has been honoured by one of the leaders.’
‘The Viets? You don’t mean the Viets?’
‘No, the Cao-Dai.’
At that moment I remembered Lagrange had told me that both girls had become followers of the strange new religion, based on Buddhism, the teachings of Confucius and Christianity, that was sweeping through South Vietnam and had even been successful in recruiting membership among the largely communist Viet-Minh. Their saints included Victor Hugo and Joan of Arc, Lagrange said. Also St John the Baptist and the Jade Emperor. They had a Pope, archbishops and bishops galore. They held spiritualist séances and went to Mass. Everybody was an official with a title of some sort or another, so there was something in it for all. ‘Vegetarians, aren’t they?’ I had asked, to which Lagrange replied, ‘It’s not all jam. You live on soya and vegetables. After forty you’re not allowed to go to bed with your wife.’
‘I forgot you were Cao-Dai,’ I said to Chu Ti. ‘Last time I was here the French took me to see the cathedral of Tay Ninh.’
‘Did you like it?’ she asked.
‘Well, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Have you ever heard of Walt Disney?’
‘No.’
‘He’s a man who went in for fantastic things. He could have designed the Cathedral. It’s very fantastic. It has a statue showing Jesus Christ borne on the shoulders of Lao-Tse, who is carrying Buddha and Confucius. They’ve been made to look like Japanese acrobats just about to go into their act.’
Chu Ti’s expression made me suspect that she saw nothing incongruous in this. I wondered sadly what was to become of the unapproachable style and taste of these gifted people under assault by the vulgarity of the West, of which Cao-Daism offered a foretaste.
‘Nam Chuan is now a member of the Charity Corps. She has been elevated to the rank of fidèle-ardente.’
‘And has all this altered her life in any way?’
‘Her life is changed. She releases captive birds. She eats rice. Three nights a week now she sleeps in the garden.’
‘What does Lagrange think about this?’
‘Monsieur Lagrange is not happy.’
‘That I can well imagine,’ I said.
Next day I had an appointment with my old friend Monsieur de la Fournière, director of the Office of Information and Propaganda, who, as architect and organiser of my earlier journeys into the country, had even been able to persuade his contacts among the military to allow me to travel on their convoys.
He was a man full of enthusiasm. Recognising me as I came through the door, he bounded from his chair and rushed to grab my hand. There was the usual banter about the English winter climate. ‘So you couldn’t put up with the fogs,’ he said. ‘I must say I’m delighted to see you, and you couldn’t have come at a better time. As you’ll see for yourself the war’s been won, and it’s practically over.’ He was a man whose optimism was so blind and persistent as to rank almost with the mildest of mental disorders. He hustled me to a wall map and threw out his arm to show the bold black arrows representing the French Forces in the field hurling back the weak and scattered Viet-Minh, clearly now at the point of annihilation. ‘Quite a change since you were last with us, eh?’
I congratulated him warmly, but for me this map had not changed. I waited for him to say, ‘We have them on the run,’ and he did.
‘I can’t tell you how much I resent being chained to this desk,’ Fournière said, ‘at such a time, when you writing fellows go round having all the fun. How about your taking over here for a week or two and I’ll do your job? Well maybe it’s less exciting than I think. Still, you had a few nice trips. I remember that Dalat run when they got the Chef de Convoie.’
‘I missed that one,’ I told him.
‘Yes, of course you did. You missed all the bad ones. They should have taken you along as a mascot. Still, we’ve put the bad times behind us now … So what can I do for you? Would you like to go somewhere? I suspect that’s what you’ve come to see me about.’
‘If at all possible I’d like to go to the North.’
‘You mean Laos, say Luang Prabang? But didn’t I send you there before?’
‘It was Hanoi I had in mind,’ I told him, and I saw his eyebrows go up. ‘But why? Why Hanoi?’ he said. ‘Where does the interest lie?’
‘For a writer it’s interesting because not much gets written about it.’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I suppose that’s true, but I have to be frank with you. This is an awkward time.’
‘The last thing I want to do is be an embarrassment.’
‘There is no question of that. I must explain that until now all our energies have been concentrated in the South. A policy, I may add, that’s been crowned with success. Hanoi has been left to wither on the vine. One thing at a time. Now perhaps there are signs we are turning our attention to the North.’
He followed my eyes as I turned again to the map. Up in the north there were no bold, black arrows, and rivers spread from Hanoi like the legs of a spider across an empty landscape to the sea. Scattered to the south of the town were small zones cross-hatched in red. ‘There is no established resistance,’ Fournière said. ‘What you see are areas of temporary intrusion. Is this really interesting to you? Do you still want to go?’
‘If possible, yes.’
‘There are no convoys. You cannot get through by road.’
‘And by air?’
‘One plane a week. It is usually monopolised by the army. There is a plane in two days’ time.’
‘Any hope?’ I asked.
‘I will do my best for you, as I have always done. An even chance, I suspect. Come and tell me all about it when you get back,’ he said.
Next day was the first of the Tet, involving the many foreigners in Saigon in a crisis of the kind I’d been through before. It could be summed up in the fact that all the Vietnamese who looked after their bodily and spiritual needs had deserted them. Although the hotel had done its best with all manner of inducements to enlist a temporary staff, the innumerable maids, the bell-boys, the floor-cleaners, the waiters, the kitchen staff and the cooks had simply packed up and gone home. There, dressed for the most part in plain white garments, they would spend much of the day on their knees, burning incense before the shrines set up for the spirits of their ancestors, and praying for a year that would be at the very least an improvement on the last.
The hotel had given little advance notice of this dislocation, but late on the previous night, as panic struck, little agonised notices had been pushed under bedroom doors warning that only tea and biscuits would be available for breakfast, and that beds might not be made the next day, and supplying the addresses of restaurants likely to be open, although these were mostly in Cholon, two miles away, to which, in the probable absence of pedicabs, guests would be required to walk.
I was awakened by the room-boys running up and down the corridors beating small gongs. This was followed by silence. I got up, dressed, went down to the dining-room to swallow two cups of tea, and then went out into the street. This, normally one of the busiest on earth, was now not only transformed but unrecognisable in its emptiness, in which the clatter of sandals of the hotel’s head porter and his wife hastening homeward was audible fifty yards away.
I had arranged a meeting in the morning with Chu Ti, the victim of a common predicament in Saigon at this time, having been orphaned by the war and left with no home to which to return. She had been born in a village near Vinh Long, believed to have been an early stronghold of the Viet-Minh, and one morning while out digging clams the village had been attacked by a single plane which had dropped a single bomb on its centre. The legend was that the French had been trying out a bomb fitted with liquid air possessing many times the destructive power of conventional high explosives. Rushing back at the sound of the fearful blast, Chu Ti found that little was left of the village but heaps of rubble, one of them entombing her parents. It was a loss that had left the first day of the Tet with little meaning for her. Nevertheless the emerging new religion of the Cao-Dai had adapted itself to such situations with sympathy and protection. After a spiritualist seance with Victor Hugo whose opinion the Pope Ho-Phap always consulted, followers like the bereft Chu Ti were told that they might pray for their ancestors in the temples of any religion.
I found Chu Ti in the garden of the house in the Rue Catinat. ‘So how have you decided to spend the day?’ I asked.
‘First of all I shall burn incense in the Cantonese Pagoda,’ she said.
‘And am I allowed to come with you?’
‘I was hoping you would.’
Remembering Lagrange’s description of this celebrated place of worship I was delighted by her choice. We walked the two miles to Cholon and found the pagoda in a mean street with seriously ill people left by its doors to die in peace. ‘They’re nervous about women,’ Chu Ti said. ‘But if you buy enough incense they’ll let me stay.’ The pagoda was dark and full of the cold reek of antiquity. All the shapes it contained were seen through smoke, which had a strange, heady smell, and people were standing in rows in the misted depths of the building, swaying with their eyes closed. Whispering, Chu Ti explained they were seeing visions. I listened to the bass grumble of monks in prayer somewhere out of sight. A sound came and went like the rattling of shaken bones, but underlying all these was the incessant purr of some great gong, like the breath of a sleeping tiger. ‘You’ll find it very strange,’ Chu Ti said. ‘If you want to we can leave.’ A monk had followed us from the door and we greeted each other, hands clasped together. He smiled continuously showing black-enamelled teeth in the surface of which tiny patterns had been cut to reveal the white bone beneath. The monk lit two spirals for us, then stood back holding the long tongs with which he would snuff out the burning end of the spiral when the amount paid for had been used. Another monk was there to hold out a plate with our horoscopes: illegible splashes of ink on fragments of crumpled silk. Of these practices Lagrange, a willing target of superstition beneath the sceptical façade, had said, ‘It’s only an amusing old con but so well done you almost fall for it. There’s no charge for the horoscopes, and they’re always favourable, which is rather pleasant. As for the visions, my guess is they sneak some drug into the incense. I managed to have one once, but it was the usual highly idealised female, and even then only lasted a few seconds.’
Chu Ti’s eyes were tightly closed, and she was swaying with the rest. ‘Any visions?’ I whispered. ‘I’m trying hard,’ she whispered back, ‘but nothing so far.’
Having satisfied the ancestors, Chu Ti wanted to go down to the river, where we found that despite the restraints of the first day of Tet this part of the town was coming to life again. It was said that nearly half the population of Saigon had transformed themselves into boat people, thus forming over a century or so an aquatic society, equally complex if certainly more mobile than the old. Standing on a small hillock, we looked down on many hundreds of sampans, moored in disciplined rows, occupied usually by large families who could only move along their boat like trained soldiers on manoeuvres. Further out the bigger boats began; the nearest of the junks belonging to the aristocracy of the river were anchored in deep water a hundred yards away. The owners kept chickens, ducks and piglets, had pot plants, and washed themselves comfortably on deck instead of jumping into the river. There was a bluish tinge in the light here that was more restful than the brazen yellowness of the town, and the air was several degrees cooler. For this reason it was the custom of many of those who could spare the time to take an hour or so off work in the heat of the day and go down to recuperate near or among the boats. It was both restful and instructive for people who had lost all notion of how to relax to study the lives of the boat people who could. Through openings in the sampans’ sides you could watch every conceivable incident of the domestic routine, most of them conducted with exceptional calm.
People were sprawled about under the canopies of the sampans, playing cards, dicing, chatting, being visited by doctors who did little more than study the whites of their eyes. A fishing rod poked over the side of every boat, but I never saw anyone catch a fish. Round about midday members of a society of pig-admirers came ashore and exercised their pigs on leads. Chu Ti took me to a waterside café where people dropped in for a snack of semi-hatched eggs with small apertures cut in their sides to allow choice in the degree of incubation, but I refused to experiment.
Chu Ti was not here for the river-front scene but because most of the town’s Cao-Dai supporters had gathered down by the river for an extraordinary event that was to take place. Opposition from the established religions had been successful in preventing the Cao-Daists from setting up a pagoda in Saigon itself, so now they proposed to bring a large and splendidly equipped junk round from their headquarters at Tra Vinh, and establish it as a floating pagoda in the river. The news was that the junk had sailed from Mytho on the previous day and was due to arrive at any time. For Chu Ti there was no doubt that this would happen. She fished in her bag and pulled out the horoscopes. As in the case of such transactions the world over, the future as presented was comforting but vague. Chu Ti was to experience a marked change for the better. It seemed likely that I had been summed up as a visitor who would not be staying long, and the horoscope assured me that the journey upon which I was about to embark would be successful.
In the late afternoon the Cao-Dai junk nosed its way through a jostling encirclement of sampans. Even at a distance it stood out in the extreme maritime diversity of its surroundings, for it had been painted white with a somewhat ghostly effect. As it came closer to the shore, unusual features were discerned: the masts, for example, were sheathed in gilt decoration, imitating the foliage of parasitic plants, into which—I noted through my binoculars—plaster monkeys were scrambling. A profusely ornamented background had been erected on the deck, in front of which assembled, as if for a group photograph, the visiting delegation of Cao-Dai notables. They had been assembled in rows, with the most important on a stand at the back. The top row included legislators, inspectors, bishops and an archbishop. At the top of this flattened human pyramid the tiny, wizened figure of a cardinal, swaddled in silks and sprouting wings, was enthroned under a large portrait of Victor Hugo. The great writer, now principal saint charged with transmitting the ordinances of Heaven in verse form, had been orientalised by the artist with the addition of a few straggling white hairs at the corners of his mouth, and his subject seemed faintly amused.
I made the mistake of laughing. Two of our immediate Vietnamese neighbours in the crowd looked up, plainly shocked. ‘Why do you laugh?’ Chu Ti said. ‘Is this funny?’
Snatching at an excuse, I said, ‘A little boy was making faces.’
‘Ah,’ she said, nodding. I had had a lucky escape.
By this time I knew her well enough to realise that, despite a show of imperturbability, she was intensely excited. ‘It’s the horoscope,’ she said a moment later. ‘Now you will see.’
A small scarlet barge had been lowered into the water from the junk and was being rowed in our direction, and the old-fashioned winged hat worn by the man standing in its bows indicated the distinction of its wearer. Another bishop, I almost said, but checked myself in time. The barge wound its way through the sampans, and the boat people gathered on their decks to wave their flags. ‘The messenger is coming,’ said Chu Ti, with the almost unnatural calm held in reserve by any Vietnamese rejecting unseemly excitement. She made for the water’s edge and I followed her through the thickening crowd. The boat bumped into the bank and the man in the winged hat scooped up his toga and jumped nimbly ashore. Chu Ti went to meet him, they both bowed and the man unrolled a paper and began to read. Several other young men and women had come running and placed themselves at Chu Ti’s side. The man in the winged hat was reading from a list. He would read out what seemed to be a name, followed by an interrogatory grunt, and someone in the rapidly forming crowd would grunt back. Mysterious things were happening on the junk, from which came the shrilling of the boatswain’s whistle and the popping of small fire-crackers. A party of rich Vietnamese in Western tropical clothes had just climbed aboard and were making deep obeisances to the cardinal, who had come down from his position under Victor Hugo’s portrait and now sat on a golden throne.
Chu Ti came back from the gathering at the waterside. It was good form not to show curiosity, so I waited for her explanation of what had been going on. The Cao-Dai had issued an information leaflet describing itself as the ‘Universal Religion of the Age of Improved Transport’, proving that there was no absurdity of which it was incapable. It was hard not to laugh at the pompous old men who had taken everything that could be used from Confucius and Lao Tze and fitted it into the new faith. Chu Ti said, ‘They have come to their decision.’
‘About what?’
‘The promotions,’ she said. ‘There are five new fidèles, and two fidèles ardentes. I am one of the two. They have given me a grade one.’
I took her hand. ‘That’s wonderful news. You must be relieved.’
‘What is relieved?’ The word was outside her vocabulary. Something from the no-man’s-land of the emotions with no equivalent in the firm definition of Vietnamese speech.
‘You must be very pleased,’ I said. Grade one, I thought. So even the ghost of the old examination system lingered on.
‘Tomorrow I have to make the three prostrations,’ she said. ‘Then I receive my toga. Will you come?’
I shook my head. ‘Tomorrow I’m going to Hanoi,’ I said, in effect detaching myself from her future. Then suddenly I found I was embarrassed. Surely I could have said that better? I asked myself. I knew by now that ceremony lurked everywhere, smoothing out human relationships among these people. Blunt announcements of all kinds were ruled out, and correct forms followed. The prostrations would almost certainly be the supreme moment to date in Chu Ti’s life and her invitation had been an honour. I wanted to explain in self-defence that as an outsider I had been given no models to go on. Doing my best to save the situation I said, ‘I am disappointed not to be with you, but the Information Office has booked a flight for me. I shall be back in two or three weeks’ time. I hope you will still be here.’ Nothing in her expression revealed her thoughts. Very often, as now, the faint beginnings of a smile might have recalled a pleasant memory. ‘There is no way I can tell,’ she said. ‘From now on I must listen to the orders of my superior in the Cao-Dai. Let us say, perhaps I will be here.’
At this point at least I knew what was expected of me, for I had already been warned that Vietnamese who have rejected the influence of the West do not say goodbye. We each turned and walked away, and the speechlessness at this conclusion of our meeting was part of a ceremony correctly performed.
De la Fournière came to the hotel to see me off. To emphasise that this was a social occasion he was dressed informally in sporting attire which included a tropical version of knickerbockers. ‘I can’t tell you how much I envy you,’ he said. ‘They’re real people up there. You’ll find it quite a surprise.’
The check-in formalities were conducted on the pavement, before boarding the bus. The police were there to inspect passes and there was a perfunctory frisking for weapons. At this point accompanying friends were turned back. The armoured car that would lead the way to the airport rumbled into position, but there was a further wait for news of conditions on the road.
‘You’ll enjoy Hanoi,’ de la Fournière said. ‘A nice, old-fashioned town. The hotel is a disaster but I’m glad to say we were able to get you into the Camp de la Presse. Cheerful atmosphere, besides which you’ll be with people in your own line of business. All the home comforts and a wonderful directrice with a bunch of keys dangling from her belt. And, by the way, the chef is from Périgord. Do you enjoy frogs?’ Someone blew a whistle and I was clasped in a Gallic embrace. ‘Well, I’m afraid I have to leave you in peace. Have a good time. I’ll look forward to hearing all about it.’
We boarded the plane. There was a further delay while airport staff scrambled all over it searching for hidden explosives; then we took off. Few such experiences in this life turn out as expected. Despite De la Fournière’s forecast, we were carrying no soldiers. The handful of passengers included several Vietnamese government officials, immersed in their paperwork, and the Emperor Bao Dai’s ex-mistress who had risen to fame as Miss Saigon two years before. Now, according to the Vietnamese stewardess, she was popping up north for a brief visit to a French general she had got to know. She was exceedingly outgoing, flashed smiles in all directions, and fell almost instantly into a close-knit conversation with a French passenger who moved into the next seat. Hardly had we sat down when the captain came back with the chief steward carrying champagne and squares of toast spread with caviar. After a pause for him to settle his distinguished passenger’s nerves, he moved on to me and there was an opportunity to talk about Hanoi. All he could think to say about it was that it was a good place to pick up antiques. There was a market for Buddha images, stashed away over the centuries by the thousand in local caves. You could pick them up for nothing from the local peasants. He had brought back a crateful on his last trip, flogged the best of them and given the rest away to his friends for Christmas.
‘Any drawbacks at all?’ I asked, and he said that he couldn’t think of any but the diabolical weather. ‘Think to bring a raincoat?’ he asked. I said I hadn’t, and he said, ‘Pity. You’ll need one and they can’t be had for love nor money.’
I looked down through the window at the most brilliant bird’s-eye-view I’d ever seen. A huge swamp, shining green lamp-light up at us, turned away with mechanical smoothness, and was invaded by a purple segment of sea. A chessboard of fields drifted into sight with a minute ivory pagoda like a chess-piece waiting to be moved.
‘Where are we?’ I asked.
‘We just passed Qui Nhon,’ the captain said. ‘That’s the lake. An hour and a half to go.’
‘Do you have any troops down there?’
‘No, it’s all Viet-held territory.’
‘Is there a forecast for Hanoi?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It’s raining, and that’s the way it’s going to be.’
His prediction was correct. It was raining in Hanoi and exceedingly cold. Bao Dai’s girlfriend was whisked away out of sight in an American car while the rest of us waited in the minibus for confirmation that the road into town was safe. This kind of rain, which would go on for a couple of months, was called here le crachin; it was something between mist and drizzle which formed and dissolved shapes with a curious animation. Awaiting permission to leave, I noticed the way the crachin had filtered the colours from this landscape, leaving nothing but greys and a depressed bluish green. There were paddies nearby in which the peasants were transplanting rice-seedlings. They wore over-size conical hats and their enormously long, tapering thighs protruded from straw cloaks of the kind illustrated in Japanese woodcuts. The owner of each paddy was seated in a raised chair under a huge, black umbrella. I tried to photograph this scene, and stood for some minutes inhaling the soft feathers of rain and trying to clear the lens before giving it up. At one moment the hammering of distant machine-gun fire was to be heard. I drew the driver’s attention to it. He said, ‘It’s nothing. It happens all the time. You get used to it.’
The two soldiers who were to escort us now emerged from the airport building, climbed aboard, and we took off and were shortly on the outskirts of Hanoi, appearing largely as an assortment of palm-thatched shacks among boulders and pines. Closer to the centre the fussy, over-elaborate houses of the rich began to appear with pillars decorated with auspicious lettering and flattened dragons on the rooftops. Next came the commercial centre plastered with advertisements for cough-mixture and Coca-Cola. There was a last stop for checking of passes, then I was dropped off at the Camp de la Presse. This was a back-street mansion in French, end-of-century style, bulky and a little severe, with an unnecessarily wide flight of steps up to an entrance imposingly guarded by a pair of gryphons, both seriously vandalised.
A Monsieur Jouin, head of the local information service, awaited me under a portrait of General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny who had recently announced that France would be in Vietnam for a thousand years. He had been at the London embassy, spoke English excellently and took a pride, as I was to learn, in a habit of understatement he claimed to have picked up from the English. Welcoming me to Hanoi he described it as a nice little provincial capital where you could put your feet up and relax, although I could not help noticing the workmen engaged in fitting wire-mesh screens to the windows to keep out the bombs.
Jouin hoped I’d join him for lunch and, remembering the chef from Perigord, I willingly accepted. There was a strong smell of cooking about the place, of a kind I could not associate with French cuisine. This was soon explained when Jouin asked me if I had any likes or dislikes in the matter of food. ‘I ask’, he said, ‘because buffalo tends to feature on the menu up here. It’s an exotic experience for people straight out from Paris, but as it’s the only meat it can get monotonous. We’re lucky in having a cook who’s full of ideas.’
‘I hear he’s from Perigord.’
Jouin spread his hands in sorrow. ‘Ah, that one has left us. This man’s Chinese but he was quite a find. The last chap left his cookbook behind and he’s working his way through it. Today it’s tripes à la mode de Caen, except that buffalo will stand in for cow. If you’re feeling adventurous the alternative is duck’s feet cured in fragrant pine-smoke with sour sauce. Well anyway, see you in a half hour.’
Jean-Paul Baudouin was present at the lunch. He was a journalist on the staff of Le Monde, a man in his fifties, doyen of the French press corps in Indo-China, whose fame had reached my ears, although we had never met. At this moment Baudouin struck me as not entirely happy with his lot. Having allowed himself to be served sparingly with the main course, he carefully pushed the buffalo tripe aside with his fork and took a cautious mouthful of the riz Tonkinois, which from his expression failed also to awaken enthusiasm. Ill-advisedly, Jouin now began a fulsome account of his journalistic achievements and consequent fame both in Hanoi and Paris, to which Baudouin listened gloomily, eyes averted. Until now our conversations had been conducted in English, but as soon as Jouin came to the end of his speech Baudouin dismissed it with a flip of his hand, adding in French, ‘Ne dites pas des bêtises’. He then turned to me. ‘I’ve been sent here at great cost to my newspaper’, he said, ‘and inconvenience to myself. But what am I doing? The answer is, nothing whatever. This is the Siberia of Indo-China to which unsatisfactory war correspondents, or those raising their voices against the absurd policies of our government, can expect to be banished.’
Jouin seemed to enjoy the outburst. ‘Pay no attention to him,’ he said to me. ‘He’s upset because we refuse to allow him to get himself killed by taking part in an operation. Isn’t that so, Baudouin?’ The correspondent of Le Monde, who had lifted his glass, sniffed it and put it down again. ‘Where does this wine come from?’ he asked.
‘The forces’ usual suppliers in Saigon. Why?’
‘Tell them to go somewhere else,’ Baudouin said.
‘Well, as it happens, I’ve good news for you,’ Jouin told him. ‘After all these unfortunate delays, permission has come through for a little excursion tomorrow. The army will be taking you both to Can Son.’
‘And what does Can Son have to offer?’
‘An outstanding achievement. Something that’s been kept under wraps until now. You two gentlemen are going to be the first to have the honour of being taken up there. We’ve built a new-style voluntary co-operation village where our friends among the tribal peoples will live in peace and security. The name it’s been given is Vietnamese for Harmonious Presence. It’s all part of General de Lattre’s “Operation Turning the Tide”.’
‘You are victims of your own propaganda,’ Baudouin said. ‘As for the tide turning, what you don’t understand is that it’s already done that, but you can’t see it.’
A Captain Doustin picked us up in a command car next morning at dawn and we drove through streets where the Tet lamps of the night were still burning feebly behind window panes blurred with rain. ‘My problem’, said Doustin, ‘was that after three months of the jungle all that interested me was to find a quiet place. You’re up against people who never let up. You can’t imagine the luxury of sleeping in a bed with a mattress once more.’
‘Let’s hope you don’t find this too quiet,’ Baudouin said. ‘It’s been too quiet for me. I need a battle with plenty of blood for the customers, V.M. atrocities and a story about one of our heroic generals.’ He switched on a light to study a map. ‘Any idea where we’re going?’
‘No more than that it’s up in the mountains. There should be a guide waiting for us at Thai Nguyen. Four hours, more or less, from here. Great scenery, they say. Harmonious Presence is quite a name for a village. I can quite understand you’ve seen enough of harmonious presences, but it might amuse the readers.’
‘And what do we do when we get there?’ Baudouin asked.
‘Sorry to spring this one on you, but there’s a little ceremony to perform. A loyalty and medals, as they say in the trade. The Chef de Canton reads out an address, we pin medals on the notables, they sacrifice a cockerel or two, then we eat.’
‘Oh God,’ Baudouin said.
‘Sorry, the General absolutely insists we eat whatever they offer us. It could be absolutely anything from a length of snake’s gut to a bat, but whatever it is, down it goes. These people are important to us and we can’t risk offending them.’
‘I offend the bastards all the time and shall continue to do so,’ Baudouin said.
We bumped along over the rutted track leading to Thai Nguyen and the mountains and the dawn opened a pallid fan behind the crachin, and played tricks with snatches of landscape seen through the rain. Clear vignettes came and went in the watery opacity, peasants in their straw capes, yoked buffaloes, the ruin of a pagoda, a weeping tree. ‘Why aren’t they observing the Tet here?’ Doustin wanted to know, and Baudouin told him, ‘They’re tribals. They don’t come into it.’
We came over a low hill and Thai Nguyen grew suddenly out of the earth like a grey mass of toadstools, and when we went down into the town the people, men, women and children, were out in the streets gambling under umbrellas of all sizes and shapes on the third day of the Tet. The guide had not shown up at the checkpoint, and as the rain had slackened off we found our way down to the market place to drink tea, and in doing so discovered a most extraordinary collection of painted clay figurines specially made for the Tet, and displayed on a large number of stalls. These depicted in charming and vivacious forms every aspect of village life in Vietnam. A man scraped the mud off a buffalo, boys flew kites, families picnicked, watched acrobats or went for rides in boats, a doctor looked into a woman’s eyes, an old man led a duck on a lead, a little girl held up a bird, lovers admired a flowering tree. These scenes, so lovingly recreated, were the enjoyments of an ancient civilisation that has hardly been bettered. We collected as many as we could carry, exchanged greetings with a group of smiling patriarchs who had staged a chrysanthemum show, then went back to the checkpoint, where there was still no sign of the guide, so we set off again.
Twenty miles north of Thai Nguyen the calcaires began—a sudden visual impact that took me by surprise. We are accustomed to a gradual approach to mountains through foothills, a cooling in the climate, and vegetation of a less restrained kind. Here it was a confrontation without warning. Starting from a base well below Thai Nguyen, the Vietnamese had pushed their light orderly tessellation of fields for fifty miles up a wide valley, then abruptly the advance came to an end against a great blue-grey limestone wall topped by pinnacles like gnarled old fingers scratching at the sky. With this every aspect of the plains was instantly cancelled. Gone were the buffalo and the peasants groping in mud under their big coolie hats. Mountain people lived hard, frugal lives among these peaks that continued for a thousand square miles across southern China as far as Kunming. One of the Chinese emperors, carried here some centuries back in search of exotic adventures, fell in love with the exaggerated landscape and ordered court painters to get more crags and mist into their work. This they did, inventing a classical style which has become so familiar. Here, an hour by slow road from Thai Nguyen, where a two-thousand-foot cliff with great trees growing from the cracks in the sheer face appeared to bar the way, we were seeing China (as this had once been) as the emperor had seen it.
It was slow going from now on along the track avoiding colossal limestone obstacles, and the Vietnamese who persisted in pushing on with their buffaloes to the north did so by circuitous routes and by eventually isolating themselves from the main body of their countrymen behind the towering ramparts of the calcaires. The mountains themselves had always been in the possession of Thai and Mon tribes, both closely related to the Siamese. At the Camp de la Presse I had spent an interesting hour with two cartographers from Paris who presented me with a magnificent ethnological map they had made of the area. It showed Thais and Mons dotted through the mountains, and most numerous at Can Son. Here we were to see the recent Vietnamese immigrants installed under the army’s surveillance in their voluntary co-operation village of Harmonious Presence.
It was approaching midday by the time we were through the last of the calcaires, with a view over a wide plateau and the swamp to be converted by the Vietnamese settlers into paddy-fields. All these pockets of humanity scattered through the mountains had always managed to get along with each other well enough in the past. One of the cartographers told me, ‘Somehow or other we managed to shake things up so things aren’t so good as they were.’ The first evidence that all was not well was the appearance suddenly by the roadside of a buffalo lying in a pool of fresh blood.
Round the bend the Harmonious Presence came into view built on high ground over the swamp. A fenced enclosure of densely packed roofs and narrow lanes was allied at a lower level with an assembly ground for markets and the occasional ceremony of the kind we had come to take part in. It was here that the notables of the village should have awaited us, flying kites painted with messages of welcome. Not a villager was to be seen, instead several French soldiers came through the fence and scrambled down the slope.
Doustin pulled up. We got down from the car and went to meet them. More soldiers appeared from the wings of this scene; parachutists who carried themselves with a certain weariness, slouching almost under the weight of their equipment. Without a word being exchanged between us I knew that something was wrong. A sergeant-chef detached himself from the rest, and there was something in his posture and that of his parachutists and also in their silence that reminded me of the strange sequel of calm, the aftermath of near-sleep, I had known to follow violent events. The sergeant-chef and Doustin drew aside, they talked together without emphasis, shrugged shoulders, shook heads. Doustin came back. ‘There was an infiltration and an attack,’ he said, in a resigned and lifeless fashion. ‘It was quite a battle.’
Baudouin gestured to the sergeant-chef. ‘What happened to all the people? The villagers?’ he asked. ‘Where are they?’
I could see that the sergeant-chef resented the bitter, ironical manner, and he chose his words as if addressing an officer. ‘They’ve been conducted to safety,’ he said. ‘The Viets have sustained heavy casualties.’ He led the way to a shallow moat separating the assembly ground from the village itself. This was still dry, and lying at the bottom we saw a long row of bodies, some showing dreadful injuries. They exhibited a good deal of physical similarity of the kind often imposed by violent death. Most of the victims lay on their backs, eyes open and lips drawn back in a contorted half-smile through gritted teeth. One man had lost the top of his skull, and his brains lay nearby in an intact membranous sac, varnished smoothly with blood.
‘Why are they not in uniform?’ Baudouin asked.
‘With respect, half of them never are,’ the sergeant-chef said. ‘Prisoners tell us there aren’t uniforms to go round.’
Baudouin bent down and with some effort rolled a dead man over on his back. ‘The hands are tied,’ he said.
‘We carried out executions as ordered.’
‘With hand-grenades. You threw grenades at them?’
‘We completed the orders given. I refer to Major Leblanc who was in command of the operation.’
Baudouin turned to me. ‘As an unprejudiced observer,’ he said, ‘I am asking your opinion. Are you ready to swallow any of this? Do you believe these stories of infiltrations? Why have all the people of this village been suddenly spirited away? Who are these people with their hands tied before they are killed?’
‘Could it have been the Viet-Minh’s punishment of collaborators?’ I suggested.
‘Then what were the paras doing here?’ He rounded on Doustin. ‘I demand to see the commanding officer.’
Doustin shook his head. ‘I suspect you will be unable to do so.’
‘At any rate I can count on your backing?’
‘To a limited extent,’ Doustin told him. ‘I was sent here to conduct a ceremony which turned out to be impossible. I shall report the facts as you and I saw them, but I am absolutely debarred from comment. Nor could I allow myself to be involved in an on-the-spot investigation. This would be seen as a breach of discipline.’
‘Of course,’ Baudouin said. ‘I understand you cannot compromise yourself.’ He turned his head away, ‘In that case may we return?’
Doustin went ahead to the car and climbed in without looking back. Baudouin and I followed. ‘These things are always fixed up for their New Year,’ he said. ‘The hope is to hit them while they’re playing cards. Sometimes it still works, but not so often these days. They’re learning fast.’ He sighed. ‘Well so much for the third day of the Tet with one more to go. Let’s see what tomorrow brings forth.’ There had been some talk on the previous day of a visit to the ‘front, and when Captain Doustin picked me up at the Camp de la Presse he was wearing a Colt automatic, as was the driver who came along on this occasion The front was thirty kilometres along the road to Hoa Binh on which we should be travelling, and the order was that all troops would be armed. Exactly as promised, at the thirty-kilometre milestone war awaited us. Suddenly faces were harder, and all the military personnel in sight were moving in a brisker and more resolute fashion. Orders were given in resounding tones. Foreign Legionnaires in white kepis and bearded like fierce Santa Clauses advertised the proximity of real combat, and somewhere far away bombs were thumping down with the sound of prize potatoes being emptied out of a sack on to a solid floor. ‘Sadly the requested extension for Monsieur Baudouin’s permit did not come through in time,’ Doustin said, although there was little evidence of sorrow in his voice. ‘He would have much enjoyed a visit to Hoa Binh, although they are saying now that the chances of getting through are no better than fifty-fifty.’
We were shunted off the road by the security guards and directed to take our place in a line of tanks and lorries waiting to move off. As soon as the security officer turned his back Doustin told his driver to pull out of line and go up to the head of the queue, and I noticed that in this environment he had become a little piratical. Waiting until the half-track in front had a lead of a hundred yards, we started after it. This method of moving vehicles singly through a danger zone had replaced the convoy system I had experienced on several occasions. Before reaching Hoa Birth there were a hundred natural death traps. Whenever the Viet-Minh felt like doing so they could pick off an isolated car, but the new arrangement had put an end to the regular massacres that took place when a solid jam of vehicles, immobilised, say, by the blowing of a couple of bridges, was annihilated at the pleasure of the attackers. ‘Until now we have been unable to get at them, and success has gone to their heads,’ Doustin said. ‘Now they want to fight a big battle. We’ve enticed thirty thousand of them out of the holes in the mountains, and we’re waiting for them at Hoa Binh. We can look forward to an exciting day.’
We were in calcaire country again. On all sides these massive limestone ruins soared from the matted jungle, their surfaces seamed and pitted like carious teeth. Whole armies could have played hide-and-seek about their bases, protected from the air in innumerable caverns and from ground attack by impenetrable pallisades of tree-trunks. Heavy artillery had been manhandled into position here. Fisherman naked from the waist down dangled nets hardly larger than handkerchiefs in the streams beneath, and watching them I saw the water’s surface twitch and shiver with the explosions of the heavy guns in the casemates above. Doustin reached for his camera but changed his mind when we passed an abandoned car floundering on flat tyres, and puckered with bullet holes. ‘They’re in the woods all round,’ he said, glancing over his shoulders as we accelerated away. A more compelling opportunity for photography encouraged risks a few moments later when we ran into the aftermath of an ambuscade in which two men had been wounded—one disastrously with the loss of a leg and his genitals. Doustin leaped down to record this atrocity. Rain and plum blossom blew in our faces and the crachin hung like webbing from a tapestry of branches woven overhead into a grey and dripping sky. Doustin composed his picture: the restless bodies, a middle-distance with a roofless pagoda under the jagged mountain background—a click of the shutter, then back into the car and we moved on. This brutal scene alone, with the ambulance men tussling with their gear, and the gulping rhythm of groans, had detached itself from the ordinariness of battles. Peasants passed, threading their way through the jumble of stalled military vehicles going about their business with a terrific indifference, willing themselves, perhaps, to be no part of these happenings, with not so much as a side glance at a drama having less reality probably for them than an episode from a subplot of the Ramayana. Two woodcutters stopped for a moment to shift the positions of their immense loads. At the end of the valley a white flake broke from a cliff struck by a shell and fell, trailing a corner’s tail of chalk, into the woods. What were they firing at? Doustin wondered aloud, and a tank gunner popped his head out of a turret to explain that the howitzers were targeting the mouths of caves, and this was a radar error. Below us in the shallows of the Black River nothing had distracted the fishermen’s gaze into shallow pools, and never for a moment had they ceased to wave their arms as rhythmically as dancers as they guided the tiny fish into the nets.
A mile or two ahead the last of the great limestone peaks closed in on the road to form a miniature Khyber, and as we joined the queue through this we found that the tanks, half-tracks and armoured cars were squeezing cautiously and at a terribly slow pace, overlooked (as was feared) by the advance guards of a tenacious and resourceful enemy. In a mood of gloomy prognostication, Doustin recalled methods adopted in past situations of the kind, when a column had been encouraged to dissipate its strength by allowing half the vehicles through such a bottleneck before the middle sections and both ends were attacked. In the long wait to enter the pass Doustin explained the task faced by this force. For the first time the Viet-Minh had succeeded in putting a real army in the field, which, advancing down the Black River Valley at great speed, threatened to cut off Dien Bien Phu and Hoa Binh, both garrisoned with insufficient French troops. We were now ten miles from Hoa Binh, from which the news was far from good. Up to this point, Doustin said, the Viets had been content to take over villages. Now, such was their confidence and strength, they were ready to attack towns.
There was time to be used up in the delays and confusions of such operations and Doustin was suddenly eager to talk. He had been in this war since the beginning, holding down a comfortable staff job at Army HQ, Saigon, until after a year at a desk, he had suddenly been overtaken by a craving for action. ‘They put me in command of a strong-point overlooking the Ho-Chi-Minh trail,’ he said. ‘Can you imagine what it was like sitting in such a post for a year, two years, even three years, without ever seeing the enemy, waiting to be attacked. Then one night your first action happens, and for many of us it was the last. I don’t mind confessing, I still get the eerie sensation that I had in those days. In the end it may have become noticeable, and they switched me to what I’m doing now.’
‘Is it cowardice?’ he asked. ‘I hope not. It is the feeling I get at this moment that we are at grips with something ant-like rather than human. These unemotional people driven on by some blind instinct. I feel that my intelligence and my endurance are not enough. Take, for instance, those fellows they send up to dig holes close to the wire, before an attack. You’d expect them to show some human reaction when our supporting guns start dropping shells among them, but they don’t. They go on digging until they’re killed, and then some other kind of specialist fellows come crawling up and drag the bits and pieces away. Some time later that night you know the shock-troops are going to come up and get into those holes and then you’re for it. Losses simply don’t bother them. All they’re concerned about is not leaving anything behind. They actually tie a piece of cord to every machine gun, so that as soon as the chap who is using it gets knocked out it can be hauled back to safety.’
I nodded. ‘I had a brief close-up view of them last time I was here,’ I told him. ‘When a man reaches his fortieth birthday his friends club together to buy him a coffin,’ I said. ‘They have a great party. It’s a different attitude to death.’
An hour or so passed before they waved us into the column, and we began the long, slow, suspect grind through the sinister labyrinth which finally opened on to a distant view of the military installations, the earth-works and the lined-up cannonry of Ao-Trac, the principal defence-post of the southern valleys, and the supremely important Route Coloniale No. 6 to the west. A huge effort was being made to strengthen the defences on this side of the small town, and engaged on this were several hundred Vietnamese civilian suspects, kept hard at it by a number of gigantic Senegalese soldiers who rushed among them screaming abuse and lashing out with their switches.
At this point there was a halt while a scout car was sent ahead to report back on the situation, and during this pause I noticed the onset of what might have been a malarial attack of the kind I suffered at irregular intervals when exposed—as I was at this moment—to excessive cold. In Saigon it had been hot and I had mistakenly assumed that Hanoi would be at least warm, too. Instead it was both cold and wet. Fortunately I was prepared. At the Camp de la Presse, Monsieur Jouin had eyed my tropical cotton doubtfully, and said, ‘You should be better protected. I have just the thing for you,’ and he went away and came back with an amazing overcoat discarded by a foreign visitor who had left the country. It was a coat of the kind with a velvet collar worn until a few years previously by men of affairs. Dismissing the pretended enthusiasm with which I took up the offer, Jouin went on to say, ‘The weather here can take you by surprise. It may come in handy.’ He stuffed the coat into a brilliantly patterned ethnic bag made by a tribe called the Kala Nyangs, and handed it to me. The moment had come, I now decided, when I could no longer put off covering my shivering limbs with this garment, and I was wearing it gratefully an hour later when we arrived in Ao-Trac. Here we followed the road signs to the sand-bagged dug-out where Doustin was informed that the senior officers of this redoubt of the French colonial possessions were at that moment gathered for lunch, and that we were expected to join them.
The officers’ mess was in a dug-out with enormous guns pointing at the sky all round, and each time one of these fired, earth slid down like loose snow from the sloping roof. Within, we sipped Pernod while waiting to be seated, chatting in lowered voices out of respect for the presence of the commanding officer. Around us bottles were ranged with almost mathematical exactitude on the shelves, among photographs of French film actresses on display in unsuitable plush frames. The colonel was exuberant and euphoric, holding forth confidently on the prospect of rapid victory. We clinked glasses. ‘I do apologise for the coat,’ I said, ‘I’m suffering from the shivers.’
‘Of course you are,’ he said. ‘Think nothing of it. Happens to the best of us here all the time.’
He made frequent jokes which the junior officers listened to obediently, ready with their guffaws.
‘I echo’, the colonel said, bursting with optimism, ‘General de Lattre’s words, namely that we are here to stay for ever. To these I add my support—in the humility befitting my lesser rank—if God wills it, plus a single stipulation: that they continue to send us a sufficiency of shells and a half litre of wine per man a day.’ He laughed suddenly: a full-blooded man acting to perfection his part of happy acclimatisation to the proximity of death. The junior officers added their guffaws, and an immaculate Senegalese mess-boy went round to replenish glasses.
Seated at table we enjoyed an excellent wine with the fish and a ’47 Patriarche to accompany the beef. ‘We try to look after ourselves here,’ the colonel said, ‘with particular emphasis on rations.’ He turned to me. ‘The men get the same food as the officers. Might as well be as comfortable as we can?’ The diabolical crash of 155 howitzers drowned the rest of his words, set the burgundy glasses chiming thinly and a bottle fell from a shelf. Shells plunged with harsh sighs into the sky and exploded six seconds later in staccato thunder. The colonel’s easy smile was unchanged. ‘By the way,’ he said to me. ‘I’m afraid Hoa Binh’s out unless you feel like being parachuted in, which could probably be arranged, although I’m afraid you’d have to leave your coat behind. The Viets are shelling the Black River ferry now. Sank the ferry boat yesterday with the second round at 2,000 metres which is something of an achievement. They use those recoilless mountain guns they make up themselves. Very easy to manhandle. Means they can keep shifting them all the time, and all we can do is plaster the whole area and hope for the best.’
Suddenly a dull, grumbling undertone of heavy machine-gun fire filled in the silences between the cannonading, and crashing echoes chased each other across the valley below. ‘It’s unusual for the tanks to be in action this time of the day,’ the colonel said. He pushed his chair and got up. ‘I’m afraid I must leave you. Hope you’ll be staying the night. You’ll find it a bit primitive—and, of course, noisy. We’ve hardly settled in yet, but I’ve great plans for the future. Come back and see me in a year’s time, and I promise you you won’t recognise the place.’
The colonel left us with dignity and no evidence of haste, but as soon as he had gone there was a scramble for the steps to follow him, in which Doustin joined. I was last, suddenly caught up in the huge loss of energy of the second wave of the malaria attack. Reaching the open, I made for a gap in the buildings. There were shouts and twenty yards away a howitzer fired and the concussion was like a heavy blow in my ears. Yellow fields sloped down to the Son Boi River over which the crachin raised and lowered its veils, and I walked towards it until two tanks came into view, moving along the bank like badly adjusted clockwork toys in a series of jerks. Droplets of water blown into my face carried with them the staccato of machine guns, and something I took to be a mortar bomb thumped powerfully between the tanks and myself, opening a ragged fan of blue smoke. In a matter of minutes my ridiculous city overcoat was soaked through and my teeth chattered uncontrollably.
But where were the enemy the French must eventually fight it out with? I was beginning to understand that the battles of the past were no more. The word ‘battle’ once conjured up Lady Butler’s defiant guards in their squares at Waterloo, the orderly advance of cohorts and legions, the bugle-call for the charge, ‘standing fast’ and ‘face to the foe’. Now all was improvisation and chaos, with an invisible enemy in limestone labyrinths, in a pine forest as black as night, or simply wrapped up in mist. There was a rumour that the fishermen I could still see down by the Son Boi hid their guns on the river bank while they scooped up their small fish, and it now occurred to me that I was well within range of them.
I turned back and began to walk uphill towards the Colonel’s dug-out and met Doustin who was out looking for me.
‘We’re leaving immediately,’ he said. ‘The road is under fire. Here, put on this tin hat.’
Back in the Camp de la Presse in Hanoi I went to bed and stayed there for four days, getting up on the fifth to attend a press conference called by the general. The point of his lengthy harangue came after forty minutes, but the assembled correspondents, knowing what to expect, could take only a mild, connoisseur’s interest in the peroration. ‘People put it to me this way,’ said the general, his fine, brooding eyes fixed reproachfully on his audience. ‘“Having achieved your purpose in forcing the enemy to give battle—having destroyed in that battle his two best equipped divisions—why do you retain so many men in a position where from lack of opposition they can no longer be effectively employed?” In deference to this logic, which is unanswerable,’ said the general, ‘I have decided to displace the centre of gravity of our forces, which will henceforward be concentrated in the delta, and Hoa Binh, which is now without value to us, has been evacuated.’
On this occasion I saw Baudouin for the last time. ‘I’ve eaten my last duck’s foot for a year. Off to Paris tomorrow.’
‘But you expect to be coming back again?’
‘There’s no way out of it. I’ll have to be in at the end.’
‘And you put that at a year hence?’
‘More or less,’ he said. ‘They’ll take Dien-Bien-Phu, then the Americans will come in. At least we will be out.’