Dragon apparent, p.33
Dragon Apparent, page 33
I asked whether it would be possible to see such an operation, and the commander, with a trace of coldness in his manner, said he thought it was extremely unlikely. He had no authority whatever to give permission. Regretting perhaps his somewhat blunt refusal, he then said that actions of this kind were sometimes dangerous. Usually the tower surrendered without opposition at all, or only a token opposition, because they were always attacked in greatly superior force. But on one occasion recently, after a surrender had been arranged by peaceful negotiation, and at the moment when the Viet-Minh party was advancing to take over, the tower had opened fire, killing the officer commanding and a high official who had been sent to observe from headquarters. That, said the commander, was a rare example of a bungle. But it went to show that accidents did happen.
Among the statistical charts with which the room was decorated was a propaganda poster. It consisted of a map of the world with China and the Soviet Union united in a huge red mass. Across were written words in Vietnamese, which the Commander said meant, ‘These people are with you.’ He added, ‘Our enemies are slowly converting us to communism. If it is only by becoming communists that we shall achieve our liberty, then we shall become communists.’
* * *
We slept on bunks in the guard-hut. Mosquito nets were provided and there was a box of anti-malarial tablets open on a table. I was awakened before dawn by a bugle blowing but went off to sleep and awoke again when the sun was well up. Washing was done in a hut fitted with wooden bowls lined with sheet-metal. Large jars full of water were provided. Dinh, who was already up and came into the washroom, said that filling the jars from the river was one of the rota fatigues, like cooking and other domestic tasks.
Afterwards he suggested a dip and we went down and swam about in a pool of warmish, yellow water. Dinh mentioned that this was reserved for males only and that the ladies’ bathing pool was further along the river, modestly screened, I noticed, with an unusually dense growth of water palm. There had been a period, Dinh said, when ‘naturism’ and mixed sunbathing had received official sanction as cultural relaxations, allotted their half-hour in the day’s approved activities. But now they were viewed with disfavour, along with the composition of lyrical poetry, as unfavourable to the development of a realistic attitude towards present problems. Love affairs, too, were detrimental to efficiency and were something to be kept, like smoking, for furtive indulgence in the bottoms of junks.
At ten o’clock the first meal was served; a Quakerish affair, girls on one side of the table, eyes demurely lowered, and men on the other, all dressed in black calico. The temptation to stare at the European must have been great. Dinh said that in the interior of Viet-Minh territory some of the young people have not seen a Westerner since early childhood, and that their first experience of the fierce, red, and often bearded features of the enemy was particularly terrifying.
The meal consisted of tit-ca – pork stewed in coconut milk – and balls of riz gluant. Gluant, which means sticky, is exactly what the rice is not, and it could not possibly be more unlike the boiled rice eaten in England. Each separate grain is firm, greyish in colour and practically dry; but the cooking is done in such a way that the grains adhere to each other and can be kneaded into balls. There was a poor quality nuóc-mâm to dip it in; thin, black and powerfully malodorous. The food was eaten rapidly and in silence, fifteen minutes being allowed. It would be followed by fifteen minutes’ rest and then a short period of calisthenics, Dinh informed me. The commander corrected him. Conforming to a new directive, the second morning period of physical culture had been discontinued, but could be replaced, if circumstances permitted, with community singing. A jug of water and a bowl stood at the door of the hut, and all washed their hands as they went out to their rather staid, oriental version of Strength through Joy.
The post had a prisoner they were very proud of. They excused themselves by saying that they had not had the chance to send him back to the army cage. But it was clear that they were really keeping him as long as they possibly could, and that he was regarded much as the pet boa constrictor had been in the ideal French post – a fabulous monster which, once rendered harmless, had become a mascot; an object of amiable curiosity. He was a German legionary who had been found, more or less by accident, after his jeep had been blown up by one of their bamboo mines. The mine seemed not to have been very powerful as the other occupants of the car got away, leaving this man who had leg injuries. The Commander said that he had been found quite sympathetic to their cause, and undoubtedly had been compelled to fight for the French. He expected that after an indoctrination course and a period of observation he would be offered the chance to enlist in the Viet-Minh army. Dinh mentioned that the loyalty of suitable candidates of this kind was tested at the end of their indoctrination, by giving them every opportunity to escape. When commando raids were made in the neighbourhood of prisoner-of-war cages, the guards dispersed, telling the prisoners to stay where they were. Those who did so received good conduct marks and some small privileges.
No guard had been placed on the hut where the prisoner lay. Apart from his leg wounds, the Commander said, neither he nor anyone could ever hope to escape through the maze of waterways. The German was small, dark and slender; diminished, too, perhaps, by his misfortunes. He lay in the bunk in his uniform with his legs in paper bandages. When he found out that I was not another prisoner he was at first rather sullen and hostile. I asked him how he felt, and he said that his legs hurt him all the time and he would give a year’s pay for a packet of cigarettes. At first he refused to give his name but later he said that it was Breczina. He was a Sudeten and had been an unterscharführer in the Waffen SS – a selected man, he said – and had been wounded on the Russian and Western fronts. To my inquiry as to the treatment he had received, he said that he couldn’t complain, but that the food was filth. And was it true that he had been converted to the Viet-Minh’s point of view? He made a face. I could imagine what he thought of reds, he said, but if the worst came to the worst, he would sooner be an officer in the Viet-Minh army – and they had told him that Germans from the Legion sometimes got commissions – than rot in a prisoner-of-war camp again. His fate was of little importance, since the defeat of Germany had proved for him that there was no purpose behind the universe. At the moment he was inconvenienced only by the loss of his spectacles, and his one sorrow was that what had happened to him had still further postponed the day when he would see his parents again. He had not seen them since he left school to enter the army.
Later in the day there was some air activity. A plane came over and circled the area several times, as if it were taking photographs. The temptation to fire at it must have been great as it flew very low. Dinh thought that there would have been a fifty-fifty chance of bringing it down with machine-gune fire. He said that the Viet-Minh were badly provided with anti-aircraft defence in the south and that there was a standing order that immediately a gun had been fired it had to be removed to another site. Soon after the plane appeared, a whistle was blown as a signal for all personnel to take cover, and later an order was issued that no one not on duty was to leave the huts for the rest of the day. Front line experiences, unless with an army on the move, are very restricted in their scope, and when the sector happens to be a small island screened by walls of vegetation in a swamp, one might as well be in a submarine for all one sees.
It was arranged that we should leave as soon as it was dark, since, as there had been no daylight activity, the night was expected to be a lively one. We boarded the sampan at dusk, and from the commander’s last-minute cordiality it was clear that he was relieved to see us go.
Once again the night was of a rare and perfect brilliance, with a sky of transparent gun-metal fenced in by a tall horizon of white palms. Through shining spear-hedged lanes we thrust forward with a gondola smoothness; pulling into a bank at last, where we left the sampan and climbed a low hillock. Here once had been a village, for although the shacks housing the living had disappeared a cluster of old substantial tombs remained; a stark revelation of bone-white stone in the neutral earth. On three sides stretched out a bleached-paper jungle of palms, but ahead was clear ground. In the centre of this cleared stage, about a mile away, a tower rose up; a small, neat, medieval shape, with its low girdle of bamboo; isolated in a plain which shone with the dull granularity of an ice-rink. ‘I have a surprise for you,’ Dinh said, looking at his watch. ‘In fifteen minutes the attack will begin.’
But fifteen minutes later nothing happened. Another fifteen minutes passed and Dinh was getting nervous. The assault party would be there, he said, but undoubtedly hidden from us by some unseen dip in the terrain. And then a faint growling could be heard, the distorted ramblings of a radio set badly tuned in, or the unnatural bass of a gramophone running down. ‘The loudspeakers,’ Dinh said, in triumph. The tower was being invited to surrender.
The growling stopped and there was a long silence. It was drama of a high order, its effect heightened by the setting and the strange theatrical lighting. There was the tower, a graceful well-made toy, solid and intact. At this moment the dozen or score of men who defended it would be cowering somewhere in its base, having crawled perhaps for extra protection, as one sometimes does in such emergencies, under quite unsubstantial pieces of furniture. And at any moment this would crumple before our eyes, dissolve or fall apart in the slow-motion that always seems to attend such violent dissolution seen from a distance. It was like the moment in the bull ring when the door of the pen is flung open and one awaits the bull’s on-rushing entry with excitement and a faint trepidation.
There was a slight disturbance in the plain at an enormous distance from the tower, which gathered itself into a silver puff of smoke, and then lost shape again. An explosion thumped in our ears. It seemed impossible that the mortar-bomb had been aimed at the tower. Another insignificant bubble of smoke formed and floated upward. It was much nearer than the first, but still a long way away. Dinh thought that this might be an inexperienced team who were being given some practice. It was clear from the violence of the explosions that an unusually heavy mortar was being used, but it was also clear that it was hopeless for this task. A quite small gun would have blown the tower off the face of the earth in a few rounds, but unless one of the mortar-bombs could be landed fair and square on the sloping roof of the tower it was clearly useless.
And now there was a faint, distant screeching as of a heavy iron gate turning upon its hinge, and we both ducked slightly. The screeching ended in an explosion that was sharper but less heavy than that of the mortar-bombs, and the puff of smoke was nearer to the tower than the others had been. The attackers were under fire from a French twenty-five pounder. Another whistle seemed to be coming straight at us, and we crouched down behind the low wall of a tomb as black earth fanned out halfway between us and the tower. Dinh said in English, ‘exciting’. At the same moment, almost, smoke spurted at the foot of the tower, and we saw pinpoints of fire, which lasted for a few seconds and then went out. ‘A direct hit,’ Dinh said. ‘They will surrender now.’ And sure enough, we could just make out an insect movement beyond the stockade, soon absorbed in a fold in the earth. The garrison had given in. A few more twenty-five pounder shells came over, and then the silence closed in.
Asiatics could still be content, it seemed, to settle their differences, if left to themselves, with such a mild display of pyrotechnics. A whiff of powder and a face-saving show of resistance lasting half an hour, and it was all over. For the defeated it would be followed by a decent probationary period of indoctrination, and then a change of flag. All this was not so far removed from the old Sino-Annamese conception of warfare which had become so oddly picturesque now, so dilettante even, in its half measures and grotesque chivalries; the opposing generals meeting to agree over a pullet’s entrails the date and place of battle; the warriors carrying lanterns at night to give their enemies a fair chance to see them; the battle suspended while the weather cleared up; the victory conceded to the side showing greater proficiency in the beating of offensive gongs. One is reminded of the military manuals – indispensable to old-style Vietnamese warfare – of those genial fire-eaters, General Dao and Marshal Khe; with their leisurely discussion of the best way to cook rice on horseback, while on the march, and their emphasis on the value of aggressive masks – or, in their absence, of merely pulling faces at the enemy.
Victory, as Pasquier observes, in his study of the Vietnamese army, was usually accorded, avoiding final resorts to arms, to the side recognised as possessing the moral ascendancy. It is all part of the essential pacifism and civilisation – liable to crop out whenever given the opportunity – of a people who possess the proverb: ‘The greatest honour any human being can possibly hope for is to return to his village with the degree of Doctor of Letters awarded at the triennial competitions at Hué. After that it is not a bad thing to come back as Marshal of the Empire, having won a great victory over the enemy’.
* * *
In the afternoon of the next day, I saw Saigon again, and for the last time.
I was driving back with the engineer. It had been a quiet night in the city, he said. That was to say, only an average number of grenades had been thrown. But he was afraid that more trouble was expected, because a shipful of Africans had arrived and the streets were full of them.
In fact, as we came into the suburbs we saw them, the Senegalese, wandering like lost children near the posts they had taken over – the black heads of processional giants carried jerkily above the oblivious Asiatic crowd.
The first strangers to arrive here, says Borri, were shipwrecked mariners, who ‘took such an Affection to that Country that not a Man of them would go away; so that the Captain of the Ship was forc’d to drive them aboard with many Blows and Cuts, which he effectually did, loading the Ship with the Rice they had gather’d only by going about, crying, I am hungry’.
This, surely, was the end of the story; the completion of a cycle … these frightened blacks and the sullen natives of the country with their averted faces. The successors of the shipwrecked Europeans had come back in increasing numbers, preaching, trading, worming their way into the organism of the country, changing it, remoulding it, and finally taking it for their own. And now they had withdrawn again into the port of their entry, where behind this African rampart they awaited the findings of Destiny.
I wondered whether it had all been worth it – the brief shotgun marriage with the West, now to be so relentlessly broken off. Had there been, after all, some mysterious historical necessity for all the bloodshed, the years of scorn, the servitude, the contempt? Could some ultimately fructifying process have been at work? And would the free Nations of Indo-China, in their coming renascence, have gained in the long run by the enforced rupture with the old, unchanging way of life, now to be replaced, one presumed, by a materialist philosophy and the all-eclipsing ideal of the raised standard of living?
These were questions, since there is no yardstick for felicity, to which no final answer could ever be given. And even a partial answer would have to be left to an observer of the next generation.
About the Author
Norman Lewis’s early childhood, as recalled in Jackdaw Cake (1985), was spent partly with his Welsh spiritualist parents in Enfield, North London, and partly with his eccentric aunts in Wales. Forgoing a place at university for lack of funds, he used the income from wedding photography and various petty trading to finance travels to Spain, Italy and the Balkans, before being approached by the Colonial Office to spy for them with his camera in Yemen.
He moved to Cuba in 1939, but was recalled for duty in the Intelligence Corps during the Second World War. It was from this that Norman Lewis’s masterpiece, Naples ’44, emerged, a resurrection of his wartime diary only finally published in 1978.
Before that came a number of novels and travel books, notably A Dragon Apparent (1951) and Golden Earth (1952), both of which were best sellers in their day. His novel The Volcanoes Above Us, based on personal experiences in Central America, sold six million copies in paperback in Russia and The Honoured Society (1964), a non-fiction study of the Sicilian Mafia, was serialised in six instalments by the New Yorker.
Norman Lewis wrote thirteen novels and thirteen works of nonfiction, mostly travel books, but he regarded his life’s major achievement to be the reaction to an article written by him entitled Genocide in Brazil, published in the Sunday Times in 1968. This led to a change in the Brazilian law relating to the treatment of Indians, and to the formation of Survival International, the influential international organisation which campaigns for the rights of tribal peoples. He later published a very successful book called The Missionaries (1988) which is set amongst the Indians of Central and Latin America.
More recent books included Voices of the Old Sea (1984), Goddess in the Stones: Travels in India (1991), An Empire of the East: Travels in Indonesia (1993) and The World the World (1996), which concluded his autobiography, as well as collections of pieces in The Happy Ant Heap (1998) and Voyage by Dhow (2001). With In Sicily (2002) he returned to his much-loved Italy, and in 2003 his last book, A Tomb in Seville, was published.
