Ways of Escape

  January 18, 1954

  After drinking with M and D of the Sûreté and a dinner with a number of people from the Legation, I returned early to the hotel in order to meet a police commissioner (half-caste) and two Vietnamese plainclothes men who were going to take me on a tour of Saigon’s night side. Our first fumerie was in the paillote district – a district of thatched houses in a bad state of repair. In a small yard off the main street one found a complete village life – there was a café, a restaurant, a brothel, a fumerie. We climbed up a wooden ladder to an attic immediately under the thatch. The sloping roof was too low to stand upright, so that one could only crawl from the ladder on to one of the two big double mattresses spread on the floor covered with a clean white sheet. A cook was fetched and a girl, an attractive, dirty, slightly squint-eyed girl, who had obviously been summoned for my private pleasure. The police commissioner said, ‘There is a saying that a pipe prepared by a woman is more sweet.’ In fact the girl only went through the motions of warming the opium bead for a moment before handing it over to the expert cook. Not knowing how many fumeries the night would produce I smoked only two pipes, and after the first pipe the Vietnamese police scrambled discreetly down the ladder so that I could make use of the double bed. This I had no wish to do. If there had been no other reason it would still have been difficult to concentrate on pleasure, with the three Vietnamese police officers at the bottom of the ladder, a few feet away, listening and drinking cups of tea. My only word of Vietnamese was ‘No,’ and the girl’s only word of English was ‘OK,’ and it became a polite struggle between the two phrases.

  At the bottom of the ladder I had a cup of tea with the police officers and the very beautiful madame who had the calm face of a young nun. I tried to explain to the Vietnamese commissioner that my interest tonight was in ambiance only. This dampened the spirits of the party.

  I asked them whether they could show me a more elegant brothel and they drove at once towards the outskirts of the city. It was now about one o’clock in the morning. We stopped by a small wayside café and entered. Immediately inside the door there was a large bed with a tumble of girls on it and one man emerging from the flurry. I caught sight of a face, a sleeve, a foot. We went through to the café and drank orangeade. The madame reminded me of the old Javanese bawd in South Pacific. When we left the man on the bed had gone and a couple of Americans sat among the girls, waiting for their pipes. One was bearded and gold-spectacled and looked like a professor and the other was wearing shorts. The night was very mosquitoey and he must have been bitten almost beyond endurance. Perhaps this made his temper short. He seemed to think we had come in to close the place and resented me.

  After the loud angry voices of the Americans, the bearded face and the fat knees, it was a change to enter a Chinese fumerie in Cholon. Here in this place of bare wooden shelves were quiet and courtesy. The price of pipes – one price for small pipes and one price for large pipes – hung on the wall. I had never seen this before in fumerie. I smoked two pipes only and the Chinese proprietor refused to allow me to pay. He said I was the first European to smoke there and that he would not take my money. It was 2.30 and I went home to bed. I had disappointed my Vietnamese companions. In the night I woke dispirited by the faults of the play I was writing, The Potting Shed, and tried unsuccessfully to revise it in my mind.

  January 20, 1954. Phnom Penh

  After dinner my host and I drove to the centre of Phnom Penh and parked the car. I signalled to a rickshaw driver, putting my thumb in my mouth and making a gesture rather like a long nose. This is always understood to mean that one wants to smoke. He led us to a rather dreary yard off the rue A –. There were a lot of dustbins, a rat moved among them, and a few people lay under shabby mosquito-nets. Upstairs on the first floor, off a balcony, was the fumerie. It was fairly full and the trousers were hanging like banners in a cathedral nave. I had eight pipes and a distinguished looking man in underpants helped to translate my wishes. He was apparently a teacher of English.

  February 9, 1954. Saigon

  After dinner at the Arc-en-Ciel, to the fumerie opposite the Casino above the school. I had only five pipes, but that night was very dopey. First I had a nightmare, then I was haunted by squares – architectural squares which reminded me of Angkor, equal distances, etc., and then mathematical squares – people’s income, etc., square after square after square which seemed to go on all night. At last I woke and when I slept again I had a strange complete dream such as I have experienced only after opium. I was coming down the steps of a club in St James’s Street and on the steps I met the Devil who was wearing a tweed motoring coat and a deerstalker cap. He had long black Edwardian moustaches. In the street a girl, with whom I was apparently living, was waiting for me in a car. The Devil stopped me and asked whether I would like to have a year to live again or to skip a year and see what would be happening to me two years from now. I told him I had no wish to live over any year again and I would like to have a glimpse of two years ahead. Immediately the Devil vanished and I was holding in my hands a letter. I opened the letter – it was from some girl whom I knew only slightly. It was a very tender letter, and a letter of farewell. Obviously during that missing year we had reached a relationship which she was now ending. Looking down at the woman in the car I thought, ‘I must not show her the letter, for how absurd it would be if she were to be jealous of a girl whom I don’t yet know.’ I went into my room (I was no longer in the club) and tore the letter into small pieces, but at the bottom of the envelope were some beads which must have had a sentimental significance. I was unwilling to destroy these and opening a drawer put them in and locked the drawer. As I did so it suddenly occurred to me, ‘In two years’ time I shall be doing just this, opening a drawer, putting away the beads, and finding the beads are already in the drawer.’ Then I woke.

  There remains another memory which I find it difficult to dispel, the doom-laden twenty-four hours I spent in Dien Bien Phu in January 1954. Nine years later when I was asked by the Sunday Times to write on ‘a decisive battle of my choice’, it was Dien Bien Phu that came straightway to my mind.

  Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World – Sir Edward Creasy gave that classic title to his book in 1851, but it is doubtful whether any battle listed there was more decisive than Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Even Sedan, which came too late for Creasy, was only an episode in Franco-German relations, decisive for the moment in a provincial dispute, but the decision was to be reversed in 1918, and that decision again in 1940.

  Dien Bien Phu, however, was a defeat for more than the French army. The battle marked virtually the end of any hope the Western Powers might have entertained that they could dominate the East. The French with Cartesian clarity accepted the verdict. So, too, to a lesser extent, did the British: the independence of Malaya, whether the Malays like to think it or not, was won for them when the Communist forces of General Giap, an ex-geography professor of Hanoi University, defeated the forces of General Navarre, ex-cavalry officer, ex-Deuxième Bureau chief, at Dien Bien Phu. (That young Americans were still to die in Vietnam only shows that it takes time for the echoes even of a total defeat to encircle the globe.)

  The battle itself, the heroic stand of Colonel de Castries’ men while the conference of the Powers at Geneva dragged along, through the debates on Korea, towards the second item on the agenda – Indo-China – every speech in Switzerland punctuated by deaths in that valley in Tonkin – has been described many times. Courage will always find a chronicler, but what remains a mystery to this day is why the battle was ever fought at all, why twelve battalions of the French army were committed to the defence of an armed camp situated in a hopeless geographical terrain – hopeless for defence and hopeless for the second objective, since the camp was intended to be the base of offensive operations. (For this purpose a squadron of ten tanks was assembled there, the components dropped by parachute.)

  A commission of inquiry was appointed in Paris after the defeat, but no conclusio
n was ever reached. A battle of words followed the carnage. Monsieur Laniel, who was Prime Minister when the decision was taken to fight at Dien Bien Phu, published his memoirs, which attacked the strategy and conduct of General Navarre, and General Navarre published his memoirs attacking M. Laniel and the politicians of Paris. M. Laniel’s book was called Le Drame Indo-Chinois and General Navarre’s Agonie de l’Indo-Chine, a difference in title which represents the difference between the war as seen in Paris and the war as seen in Hanoi.

  For the future historian the difference between the titles will seem smaller than the contradictions in the works themselves. Accusations are bandied back and forth between the politician who had never visited the scene of war and the general who had known it only for a matter of months when the great error was made.

  The war, which had begun in September 1946, was, in 1953, reaching a period for the troops not so much of exhaustion as of cynicism and dogged pride – they believed in no solution but were not prepared for any surrender. In the southern delta around Saigon it had been for a long while a war of ambush and attrition – in Saigon itself of sudden attacks by hand-grenades and bombs; in the north, in Tonkin, the French defence against the Viet Minh depended on the so-called lines of Hanoi established by General de Lattre. The lines were not real lines; Viet Minh regiments would appear out of the rice-fields in sudden attacks close to Hanoi itself before they vanished again into the mud. I was witness of one such attack at Phat Diem, and in Bui Chu, well within the lines, sleep was disturbed by mortar-fire until dawn. While it was the avowed purpose of the High Command to commit the Viet Minh to a major action, it became evident with the French evacuation of Hoa Binh, which de Lattre had taken with the loss, it was popularly believed, of one man, that General Giap was no less anxious to commit the French army, on ground of his own choosing.

  Salan succeeded de Lattre, and Navarre succeeded Salan, and every year the number of officers killed was equal to a whole class at Saint-Cyr (the war was a drain mainly on French officers, for National Service troops were not employed in Indo-China on the excuse that this was not a war, but a police action). Something somewhere had to give, and what gave was French intelligence in both senses of the word.

  There is a bit of a schoolmaster in an intelligence officer; he imbibes information at second hand and passes it on too often as gospel truth. Giap being an ex-professor, it was thought suitable perhaps to send against him another schoolmaster, but Giap was better acquainted with his subject – the geography of his own northern country.

  The French for years had been acutely sensitive to the Communist menace to the kingdom of Laos on their flank. The little umbrageous royal capital of Luang Prabang, on the banks of the Mekong, consisting mainly of Buddhist temples, was threatened every campaigning season by Viet Minh guerrilla regiments, but I doubt whether the threat was ever as serious as the French supposed. Ho Chi Minh can hardly have been anxious to add a Buddhist to a Catholic problem in the north, and Luang Prabang remained inviolate. But the threat served its purpose. The French left their ‘lines’.

  In November 1953, six parachute battalions dropped on Dien Bien Phu, a plateau ten miles by five, surrounded by thickly wooded hills, all in the hands of the enemy. When I visited the camp for twenty-four hours in January 1954, the huge logistic task had been accomplished; the airstrip was guarded by strongpoints on small hills, there were trenches, underground dug-outs, and miles and miles and miles of wire. (General Navarre wrote with Maginot pride of his wire.) The number of battalions had been doubled, the tanks assembled, the threat to Luang Prabang had been contained, if such a threat really existed, but at what a cost.

  It is easy to have hindsight, but what impressed me as I flew in on a transport plane from Hanoi, three hundred kilometres away, over mountains impassable to a mechanised force, was the vulnerability and the isolation of the camp. It could be reinforced – or evacuated – only by air, except by the route to Laos, and as we came down towards the landing-strip I was uneasily conscious of flying only a few hundred feet above the invisible enemy.

  General Navarre writes with naïveté and pathos, ‘There was not one civil or military authority who visited the camp (French or foreign ministers, French chiefs of staff, American generals) who was not struck by the strength of the defences … To my knowledge no one expressed any doubt before the attack about the possibilities of resistance.’ Is anyone more isolated from human contact than a commander-in-chief?

  One scene of evil augury comes back to my mind. We were drinking Colonel de Castries’ excellent wine at lunch in the mess, and the colonel, who had the nervy histrionic features of an old-time actor, overheard the commandant of his artillery discussing with another officer the evacuation of the French post of Na-San during the last campaigning season. De Castries struck his fist on the table and cried out with a kind of Shakespearian hysteria, ‘Be silent. I will not have Na-San mentioned in this mess. Na-San was a defensive post. This is an offensive one.’ There was an uneasy silence until de Castries’ second-in-command asked me whether I had seen Claudel’s Christophe Colombe as I passed through Paris. (The officer who had mentioned Na-San was to shoot himself during the siege.)

  After lunch, as I walked round the intricate entrenchments, I asked an officer, ‘What did the colonel mean? An offensive post?’ He waved at the surrounding hills: ‘We should need a thousand mules – not a squadron of tanks – to take the offensive.’

  M. Laniel writes of the unreal optimism which preceded the attack. In Hanoi optimism may have prevailed, but not in the camp itself. The defences were out of range of mortar fire from the surrounding hills, but not an officer doubted that heavy guns were on the way from the Chinese frontier (guns elaborately camouflaged, trundled in by bicycle along almost impassable ways by thousands of coolies – a feat more brilliant than the construction of the camp). Any night they expected a bombardment to open. It was no novelist’s imagination which felt the atmosphere heavy with doom, for these men were aware of what they resembled – sitting ducks.

  In the meanwhile, before the bombardment opened, the wives and sweethearts of officers visited them in the camp by transport plane for a few daylight hours: ardent little scenes took place in dug-outs – it was pathetic and forgivable, even though it was not war. The native contingents, too, had their wives – more permanently – with them, and it was a moving sight to see a woman suckling her baby beside a sentry under waiting hills. It wasn’t war, it wasn’t optimism – it was the last chance.

  The Viet Minh had chosen the ground for their battle by their menace to Laos. M. Laniel wrote that it would have been better to have lost Laos for the moment than to have lost both Laos and the French army, and he put the blame on the military command. General Navarre in return accused the French Government of insisting at all costs on the defence of Laos.

  All reason for the establishment of the camp seems to disappear in the debate – somebody somewhere misunderstood, and passing the buck became after the battle a new form of logistics. Only the Viet Minh dispositions make sense, though even there a mystery remains. With their artillery alone the Communists could have forced the surrender of Dien Bien Phu. A man cannot be evacuated by parachute, and the airstrip was out of action a few days after the assault began.

  A heavy fog, curiously not mentioned by either General Navarre or M. Laniel, filled the cup among the hills every night around ten, and it did not lift again before eleven in the morning. (How impatiently I waited for it to lift after my night in a dug-out.) During that period parachute supplies were impossible and it was equally impossible for planes from Hanoi to spot the enemy’s guns. Under these circumstances why inflict on one’s own army twenty thousand casualties by direct assault?

  But the Great Powers had decided to negotiate, the Conference of Geneva had opened in the last week of April with Korea first on the agenda, and individual lives were not considered important. It was preferable as propaganda for General Giap to capture the post by direct assault during t
he course of the Geneva Conference. The assault began on March 13, 1954, and Dien Bien Phu fell on May 7, the day before the delegates turned at last from the question of Korea to the question of Indo-China.

  But General Giap could not be confident that the politicians of the West, who showed a certain guilt towards the defenders of Dien Bien Phu while they were discussing at such length the problem of Korea, would have continued to talk long enough to give him time to reduce Dien Bien Phu by artillery alone.

  So the battle had to be fought with the maximum of human suffering and loss. M. Mendès-France, who had succeeded M. Laniel, needed his excuse for surrendering the north of Vietnam just as General Giap needed his spectacular victory by frontal assault before the forum of the Powers to commit Britain and America to a division of the country.

  The Sinister Spirit sneered:

  ‘It had to be!’

  And again the Spirit of Pity

  whispered, ‘Why?’

  3

  It was 1953 – between my winter visits to Vietnam – and from the window of the room in which I was writing my report on the Mau Mau rebellion, I was aware first, as always in Kenya, of the huge expanse of sky and the terraces of cloud. Never was there a land so wrapped in air; for in Kikuyuland one lives on a mountain-top, with Nairobi at over five thousand feet and this mission in the Kikuyu Reserve two thousand feet higher yet.

  Two miles ahead of me across the Chania River was the Mau-Mau-ridden Fort Hall Reserve from which attackers had come to the mission a year before; fifteen miles behind me was the scene of the Lari massacre, where 150 wives and children of the Kikuyu Home Guard were hacked to death; and six miles away I could see the forested slopes of the Aberdares, the stamping ground of the chief enemy, ‘General’ Dedan Kimathi. Outside, the red dust rose in little tornadoes, and the maize crackled like light continuous rain.