Saigon: A Novel Part 24

Joseph, nodding absently, slumped into the seat beside him and they traveled in silence For several minutes, heading towards OSS headquarters along the Rue Paul Blanchy. Hawke drove with ostentatious care, and when they approached the first of the log-pile road blocks which the Vietnamese had put up around the city to enforce their food blockade, he slowed to less than ten miles an hour. Since the day of the coup, the OSS men had become accustomed to zigzagging their vehicles at walking speed through the staggered barricades close to their headquarters; usually they were manned by half a dozen unarmed men, and the Vietnamese always waved them through, apparently acknowledging that they were Americans. As they approached the last barricade a quarter of a mile from the OSS mansion, Hawke's curiosity finally got the better of him.

"Since you risked my neck as well as your own getting us there, captain," he said with a smile, "do you mind if I ask what it was you were looking for at the hospital and in the looted house?"

Joseph let out a long breath. "There was somebody here in Saigon, David, who once meant a great deal to He paused as Hawke slowed the vehicle to begin negotiating the first section of the roadblock that was constructed of tree limbs and brush. Unlike the others, it appeared to be unmanned, and without taking his eyes off the road, Hawke nodded and smiled understandingly as comprehension dawned. "It all becomes clear now - an affair of the heart, eh?"

"I found her again for the first time last Sat.u.r.day- in the hospital.." As he spoke, Joseph's eye was drawn to a pile of loose brush heaped in the roadside ditch; it was the same kind of brush of which the roadblock itself was constructed, and he realized suddenly that he had seen it s.h.i.+ft.

In the same instant Hawke noticed the movement too, and turned his head to look more closely. The jeep was halfway through its maneuver, moving at walking pace, and too late, both men realized they were a sitting target.

"Nous sommes americains! Nous sommes americains!" screamed Hawke desperately as the brush was flung aside, but his shout was too late to prevent the concealed machine gun opening up on them from point-blank range.

The entire first burst from the gun struck Hawke in the head, blowing away part of his lower jaw and shattering his skull. His blood flew in all directions from the terrible wounds, spattering the winds.h.i.+eld, and after ramming into the barricade the jeep toppled slowly into the opposite ditch Joseph fell face down in the moist earth and lay paralyzed with horror, listening to the machine gun raking its cha.s.sis. When he turned over he saw Hawke's body suspended above him on the steering wheel; his face was unrecognizable and he had obviously died the moment the bullets struck him. Lifting his head above the rim of the ditch, Joseph saw three Vietnamese emerge from their hiding place and start in his direction; they carried their rifles loosely in their hands, and he guessed they had a.s.sumed he was dead too.

Each two-man OSS patrol carried a pair of Colt .455 and two M-r rifles as a matter of routine, and Joseph grabbed a rifle and a pistol from their clips before scrambling out from beneath the jeep and flinging himself through the bamboo hedge bordering the golf course. The three Vietnamese crossing the road opened fire immediately, and he felt their bullets crash through the foliage close to his head. On the other side of the hedge he dived into a depression in the ground and turned to fire back in the direction of his pursuers. To his surprise, he heard one of them scream as he fell to the ground, and the other two dashed back towards the concealed machine gun nest. Joseph took aim more carefully as they ran, but the rifle had jammed and he flung it from him with a curse.

In the lull that followed he found that be had three clips of ammunition for the Colt .45 - twenty-one rounds in all - and he hurriedly loaded it. A minute later to his horror he saw a dozen other armed Vietnamese emerge cautiously from concealed positions around the barricade and begin crawling in his direction. Glancing to the west he saw that about five hundred yards separated him from the safety of the OSS mansion. The hedge provided some cover for half that distance, but he realized that if he remained where he was, he had no chance of survival. Taking a deep breath he rose to his feet and set off at a fast run along the edge of the golf course. When they caught sight of him, the whole force of Vietnamese guerrillas rose out of the gra.s.s to give chase, firing as they ran.

As he neared the end of the protective hedge Joseph stopped. He could see that he would almost certainly he caught and killed by the guerrillas in the open unless he slowed them down, and after looking around frantically, he leaped into the ditch again. When the leading group of Vietnamese was only fifteen yards away, he lifted his head and, using both hands on the gun, emptied the Colt .45 into the running group. Two more guerrillas staggered and went down, and the rest immediately flung themselves flat on the ground. Using the fire-and-movement tactics he had been taught during his brief OSS training in Kunming, Joseph reached the end of the hedge safely the sprinted hard across the open ground. The guerrillas fired volley after volley at his back from a range of seventy yards, but he weaved and bobbed as he ran and reached the gates of the OSS house a minute later with only two bullets of his twenty-one left.

"Hawke's been killed," Joseph gasped when the major commanding Detachment 404 rushed down the front steps to help him in. "I think they mistook us for the French."

The major quickly posted guards on the roof and ordered out extra j.a.panese sentries from their nearby blockhouse. When Joseph had regained his breath, the senior officer laid a hand gently on his shoulder. "This may riot be the best time to tell you, captain, hut British headquarters have just informed me that you've been declared persona non grata. They don't like your views - or how you expressed them last night. You've got to fly out to Calcutta within twenty-four hours."

Still deeply shocked by Hawke's death and the battle for his own life in which he had probably killed three Vietnamese, Joseph stared back at his superior without really taking in what he'd said.

"And there's another thing," said the major, drawing Joseph towards the waiting room inside the front door. "There's a Vietnamese here to see you. He's been here a couple of hours. He insists on speaking to you personally and won't tell anybody else what he wants."

When Joseph entered the waiting room Tran Van Tam rose unsteadily from his seat; a bloodstained bandage was bound around his head, his clothes were torn and dirty and there was no sign in his manner of the hostility he'd shown Joseph at his parents' house a week before.

"Captain Sherman, I've brought a message from my sister, Lan," he said hesitantly. "She wishes to see you urgently. I'll take you to her, if you'll come now."

20.

The winding, thousand-mile coast road from Saigon to Hanoi, first trodden by imperial courtiers before the Christian era dawned, has always given travelers the uneasy feeling that they are pa.s.sing under sufferance through hostile, threatening terrain. For most of its length, the Mandarin Way is intimidated not only by the dense jungle that so often borders it, but also by two other great natural enemies: from the west the Annamite Cordillera occasionally thrusts down great spurs of rock to block its way, while from the east, the South China Sea seeps repeatedly across its path through the many crevices in Vietnam's winding coastline. At the beginning of October 1945 it was still little more than a narrow, single-lane track arid Allied bombers had scarred and pitted its surface during intensive raids in the closing months of the war. But the craters had been largely patched and filled, and the ancient route of Annam's mandarins bore Captain Joseph Sherman's OSS jeep steadily northward over the roots of the mountains and through the clutching fingers of the sea as it had carried peasant carts and imperial palanquins during earlier centuries.

On the third day of his journey it led him red-eyed and weary into the provinces of Quang Tri and Quang Binh, where the highway's intangible air of threat had long since been replaced by a real arid horrifying devastation. There the rain poured down from a low, leaden sky onto a desolate expanse of paddy fields that had been flooded by the repeated August typhoons. The wheels of the jeep churned through an unending sea of gray mud, and the damp chill in the air caused Lan to wrap her hooded cloak more tightly around herself in the jeep's pa.s.senger seat.

They had been puzzled when they saw the first ruined village; charred corner timbers and smoke-blackened earth walls were all that was left of a cl.u.s.ter of houses that Lan remembered as a once thriving village. Farther on, an emaciated peasant squatting listlessly at the roadside told them the villagers had pulled down their houses piece by piece and made fires with the wood to keep themselves warm; long before they'd sold all their belongings to buy rice gruel. Many people had already died, he said, and those who were strong enough had moved on to seek food elsewhere. As he spoke the rolled mat lying in the mud at his side, apparently containing a bundle of his belongings, had s.h.i.+fted. Joseph heard a faint whimpering and a.s.sumed a dog had made the noise. But when Lan questioned him he admitted without taking his eyes from the flooded field beside the road that his two-year-old son was wrapped in the mat. He was waiting for him to die, he said tonelessly, so that he might bury him.

Joseph had leaped from the jeep, broken open a package of C rations and tried to force some nourishment into the coolie's hands. But he refused doggedly even to look at the food; instead he waved Joseph away from his bundle with threatening gestures. "We've already known great suffering. My wife and three other children are already dead," he said defiantly. "It is better now that we should die." When they drove away, the starving peasant had remained crouched by the rolled mat at the roadside, staring unseeing into the rain. The open packs of food which Joseph had insisted on leaving lay untouched before him on the flooded ground. After the faint whimper they had heard no further sound from the rolled mat, The sight of the first ox cart piled high with a dozen tangled bodies had left them both numb with shock. Flopping, fleshless arms and legs stuck out in disarray as the plodding animal dragged its obscene load towards them through the muddy street of another ruined village. The shrunken beast, starving itself, moved slowly at the urging of an exhausted coolie who beat its bony rump feebly from time to time with a bamboo rod. The cart halted to allow them to pa.s.s, and to his horror Joseph saw one of the heads, its long hair matted with mud and rain, jerk convulsively. He looked sharply at Lan, but found she had closed her eyes and turned away.

Joseph stopped and ran back through the rain. He shook the coolie by the shoulder and pointed frantically to the body that had moved. Gesticulating and using a mixture of French and the few words of Vietnamese he had picked up from Hawke, he tried to make him understand that one of the "corpses" was still living. But like the dying peasant at the roadside, the man quickly became angry. He shouted and screamed abusively and pointed to the figure, now motionless like the rest. Then he turned away towards the nearby burial ground, and Joseph went slowly back to the jeep, fighting down a feeling of nausea.

They soon became accustomed to the sight of charred houses littering the gray, devastated landscapes through which they pa.s.sed. Sometimes families were still living in the sh.e.l.ls of their homes, crouched like docile animals in the one corner still left standing. They saw other ox carts too, removing the dead, some piled with twenty or thirty corpses. Once Joseph saw the wasted body of a young peasant woman slumped in death beneath a gaunt, blackened tree that looked as if it had been struck by lightning; her half-naked body and the tatters of her clothes were streaked with gray slime, and she was scarcely distinguishable from the muddy ground on which she lay. It was the twitching at her breast of a scrawny baby, only months old, that drew his eye to her; the dying infant was mewling faintly in the dead woman's arms and gnawing in vain at her shriveled teats. As he watched, another shrunken woman appeared, plucked the baby away and vanished into the blurred curtain of rain. They saw other corpses on the roadside, lying like twisted bundles of rags, from which the living, moving like sleepwalkers, kept their eyes averted.

Joseph had stopped imagining he could do anything to help after he tried to distribute another packet of C rations to a group of stick-limbed children begging at the roadside. Their despairing eyes and outstretched hands made him stop, but the sight of the jeep immediately brought other swollen-bellied youngsters limping from the winding paths leading out through the thick bamboo groves that concealed their village. When he handed out two little packets of the food, the children had begun to fight among themselves with a terrible ferocity, tearing at each other's faces and scattering the contents of the precious packages in the mud. A crowd of hollow-eyed adults, attracted by their screams, came running from the thicket, and Lan called frantically to Joseph to get back behind the wheel before the desperate villagers were tempted to attack them and loot the jeep. The children and the older Vietnamese, although obviously weakened by their hunger, chased after the vehicle, screaming pitifully as they ran, and the cries rang in Joseph's head long after they were out of earshot.

Even when they were back on the empty road, the smell of the wretched, starving people they had mingled with didn't leave them; famine seemed to produce a sickly sweet smell of smoky putrefaction, as though hunger itself were burning and rotting the flesh on the living bones of the people, and although Joseph couldn't be sure he wasn't imagining it, the odor seemed to cling to the jeep as they drove on. It seemed to penetrate even into his mind, and he felt his own personal sense of despair deepening; what chance could there be amid all the casual horror they had already seen, of finding alive the frail daughter Lan had borne him without his knowledge nearly nine years before?

Lan's previous visits with her mother had always been made by train, and approaching by road, she had been unable to find the way because all signboards had been torn down and burned. As a result, they had to make a tortured search through village after village in the coastal area north of Dong Hoi.

"These fields have always been green or gold when I came before," she said suddenly in a haunted voice, gazing out through the winds.h.i.+eld at the wasted land onto which the cold gray rain was still falling. "The people should be working now planting for the chiem harvest of the fifth month next year. Not only will there be no crop for this year's tenth month harvest, but next year will be barren too."

Joseph noticed that she had begun to hold herself rigid in her seat, and he feared that hysteria might not be far away. The lowering skies were growing blacker, and he realized that it was more important for them to find shelter for the night than to continue searching the devastated villages as darkness fell. During most of the long journey from Saigon she had been subdued and distant; they had talked hardly at all as they headed northeast out of the city past Bien Hoa and into the vast region of regimented rubber plantations. He too had been abstracted; he found his own thoughts returning to his first melancholy journeys on that road with his mother in 1925, first traveling north to Hue in a state of youthful distress then returning later, shocked and stunned at the news of Chuck's death. As they pa.s.sed through the rubber groves and on into the tropical forests where he had so long ago hunted with his father and brother, he was haunted too by memories of Ngo Van Loc's tragic family.

They had begun their journey before dawn, and by driving hard through the day and into the darkness they had covered over two hundred miles to reach Nha Trang. There they had slept a few hours in rooms they were able to take in the old French-run inn that used to serve the railway when the northbound line ended there. They had risen at four AM. and driven hard again all the next day before s.n.a.t.c.hing a few hours of sleep in a similar inn at Tourane, the port that would later be renamed Da Nang. As they pa.s.sed the road running up into the highlands at Dalat and drove on above the ma.s.sive natural harbor at Cam Ranh Bay, Lan's mood had lightened abruptly. She had begun to talk animatedly of her idyllic schooldays at the Couvent des Oiseaux at Dalat; wistfully she described the mists that had shrouded the lake every day, the fragrant pines, the heady mountain air and the timeless beauty of the sun s.h.i.+ning on the sparkling waters.

"I would wander with my friends every day through the woods around the lake reading aloud . . . Lamartine . . . Baudelaire .

Chateaubriand. . . . We would pick orchids and sing. We sang 'Les feuilles sont mortes' in the still air on the sh.o.r.e of the lake every morning, and our voices could be heard right across the other side. It was so lovely, so very romantic, Joseph." Her eyes shone with the pleasure of the memory. "I was sure then my life would be filled always with romance."

Joseph had been deeply moved by the simple beauty of her words, spoken innocently without any trace of sadness. He felt suddenly that they were on the verge of entering some new and intimate realm of understanding, but then she had withdrawn quickly into an inexplicable silence again, her manner as enigmatic and uncertain as it had been when Tam had taken him to her on the day of Hawke's death. When he arrived at the house in which she had lived since her marriage to Paul, she looked anxious and ill at ease. She told him that her parents had already left for the fortified country house with her young SOIS. Tam had been injured by drunken Frenchmen, she told him angrily, in the wild hours following the coup. In his fury he had let himself be drawn into one of the non-Communist "national resistance" movements like most other moderate pro-French Vietnamese in those days. She admitted she was frightened; with Paul wounded and in the hospital, her whole world appeared to be collapsing around her with no safe avenue of retreat. Her-conscience had troubled her, she had explained, without looking at him. She felt he had the right to know, if he wished, to which village his daughter had been taken to grow up. In an instant he had made up his mind, "We'll go together and find Tuyet," he said, seizing her by the hands. "You must show me where she is. I'll look after you, protect you!"

She hesitated and didn't agree immediately, but he had persuaded her to wait until he returned early next morning. He had promised her he would take her then wherever she decided to go, and at OSS headquarters, he had secretly loaded up a jeep with as many jerrycans of gasoline as it would hold and thrown in four crates of C rations. Risking action later for desertion, he had returned to her house at dawn on the day he should have been deported to Calcutta, and found to his delight she was mutely willing to go with him. The fake orders he had given himself with the aid of an OSS typewriter, claiming that he was journeying to inspect American missionary properties in Dalat and Hue, appeared convincing enough for the few British and Viet Minh patrols he met on the road outside Saigon, and he pa.s.sed off Lan in her hooded cloak as a sister of the order returning to the mission. Although there had been rumors that peasants outside Saigon were murdering rich landlords and corrupt village officials in a wave of revolutionary terror, during the drive through Cochin-China and southern Annam little seemed to have changed outwardly since Joseph's previous visits; the tropical sun shone brightly, the fields were green with growing crops and the roads had been filled with the familiar jogging lines of straw-hatted peasants hauling food and livestock to crowded Country markets. Although the railway track beside the road lay smashed in many places by Allied bombs, the ancient road ferries were all in action on the rivers and inlets, and their owners helped the jeep on its way without question; the invisible ferrymen were summoned still as they had been for centuries, by a blast of a bulb horn hung from a riverside tree.

But gradually as they drove northwards the weather worsened, and it was dawn on the third day as they headed on up the coast past Hue that they drove into the cold northern rain belt. The soldiers at the Chinese guard post at the sixteenth parallel had shown a healthy respect for the little American flag fluttering from the jeep's aerial, and they had displayed no curiosity at Joseph's verbal claim that he was traveling north to Hanoi with his wife to rejoin his old unit under General Wedemeyer's command. As they drove on into Quang Tri province where the towering mountain chain thrust its bulk to within a few miles of the sea, they began to notice the first manifestations of famine; terraced fields on the mountainside lay bare and uncultivated, and from the few remaining aged peasants they learned that the population had already departed southward. The signs of devastation had increased as they continued northward until the landscape was at last transformed into a wasteland.

As the darkness deepened on the third night, Joseph found himself peering with growing anxiety through the rain-spattered winds.h.i.+eld. There had been no sign of an inn for many miles, and he felt a quiver of revulsion pa.s.s through him at the thought of sleeping in one of the partly ruined houses in those dying villages. A few miles south of the town of Rao Nay, the headlights of the jeep fell onto the rain-lashed waters of a narrow river as they rolled downhill towards a ferry point. When he got out, he found the riverbank was deserted and the ferry had ceased operating; clearly they could go no farther until the next morning. An uncomfortable night in the cramped jeep seemed the only alternative, then Joseph noticed the dim outline of a building that turned out to be a European bungalow that had perhaps once been a modest auberge for travelers. Its windows and doors were padlocked, its paintwork peeling, and its French owner had obviously long since departed. Joseph inspected it with a flashlight, then using a tire iron from the jeep, broke into the building by forcing the window shutters. Inside it was bare and musty from lack of habitation, but he found some wood and built a fire in the stone fireplace of its echoing kitchen, which still smelled faintly of wine, stale cheese and dust; then he led Lan s.h.i.+vering from the jeep and sat her gently on a chair beside the flames.

He brought in a kerosene lamp and a small spirit stove from the jeep and boiled some water before the hearth. A half-empty bottle of cognac had been left abandoned in a cupboard, and in his service mug Joseph mixed a measure of the brandy with some boiling water and handed it to Lan. While she sipped the steaming drink he spread Out the contents of two C ration packs on a wooden stool by the fire-some sausages, fruit and a square of cheese. But when he urged her to eat, she shook her head and looked away into the fire. They sat mutely by the flickering flames in the dusty kitchen without moving for perhaps an hour. The horrors of the day seemed to have deadened their senses, rendered them speechless, and although the cold and the damp evaporated slowly, the awful numbness induced by the harrowing sights their eyes had witnessed seemed destined then to remain with them forever.

Neither of them knew how they arrived at the moment when they were clutching each other with the convulsive hands of drowning swimmers. They held one another blindly, aware only that the other was rea.s.suringly alive and whole, and their two bodies trembled as one with the despairing fear of having come close many times to death at its most grotesque. Recoiling from the unbearable images of slack and ravaged corpses, unable even to eat what little food they had, they were nourished, each of them, by the closeness of the other. Stark dread of the death they had seen spilling slowly across the cold, drowned countryside had frozen their tears inside them too, so they couldn't weep. Instead they clung to one another in a long shuddering silence, their lovemaking an act of helpless reverence before a dreadful, uncaring fate - The frantic joining of their bodies at last was a flight from inexpressible grief and sorrow which had seemed profound enough to destroy them while they sat apart, contemplating the awful tragedy all around them in which a daughter of their love was lost.

Later they slept deeply in each other's arms, wrapped in blankets on the floor-of the abandoned house, the meager ration of food still uneaten upon the stool before the embers of the fire. They didn't touch it until the following morning when they rose wordlessly in the blurred light of dawn to continue their agonizing quest. Then they ate mechanically, without pleasure, before hurrying out again into the freezing rain.

21.

They found the ancestral village of Lan's mother, close to the sea, soon after dawn. Like most northern settlements, it was surrounded by dense groves of bamboo, first planted centuries before when marauding pirates and hostile clans had posed a constant threat to its safety. Coconut palms and areca-nut palms hung with betel vines grew along the nearby sh.o.r.e, and once, Lan told Joseph before they arrived, the village had been prosperous for the area. Large three-roomed houses had been built around a beautiful lotus pool, guava and fig trees abounded, and during childhood visits she had played hide and seek along the sun-dappled pathways that wound through the whispering bamboo thickets.

When they finally came in sight of the village, however, it bore little resemblance to Lan's description; a freezing wind was blowing off the sea and rain squalls blotted out the frowning mountain peaks to the west They had seen no living soul on the road or in the fields that morning, and the approaches to the village were silent and deserted; only the constant hiss of the rain broke the eerie silence, and even before they entered the dripping bamboo thickets, Joseph knew what they would find.

In the lotus pond in the center of the village, the bloated body of a man was lolling half in and half out of the water; his bloodless face, the same gray color as the mud, had swollen and burst, and as they walked by, Lan stifled a sob. Half the thatched houses were derelict skeletons of charred wood, and sodden piles of ashes were all that was left of other dwellings; the walled house of the village council chairman, the office her maternal grandfather had once filled, was locked and barred. Unable to speak, Lan lifted a trembling hand to point to one of the few thatched houses still standing on stilts on the far side of the pond; part of it had been burned, but one end remained intact, and Joseph motioned her to stay where she was while he looked inside. As he slithered through the slime beneath the withered trees, his heart lurched within him; the sickly stench of putrefying flesh hung heavy in the air, and he was certain he would find n.o.body alive.

The gray light filtering through the driving rain left the interior of the house in shadow, but as he peered in through the door, Joseph caught a glimpse of a familiar face - that of the Annamese servant girl he had last seen in 1936 opening the red moon gate to him in Saigon. She lay propped in a hammock slung from the roof beams, and her lifeless head was level with his own. Her lips were drawn back hideously from her teeth as though in a silent scream, and at the moment of his arrival there was a sudden commotion in the gloom. He heard rather than saw the engorged bodies of the rats flop to the floor and scuttle away into the darkness, and when he finally switched on his flashlight and swung its beam around the room, a wave of nausea swept over him. Alongside the far wall, a man of her own age, presumably her husband, lay dead on a straw plank bed, and like hers, his body had been horribly preyed upon by the rats.

Joseph stumbled outside and leaned weakly against a dead tree; standing bareheaded, he lifted his face and let the cold rain fall on his cheeks until the feeling of nausea left him. When he returned to Lan's side, she searched his face with distraught eyes for a moment, then hit her lip fiercely and turned away without speaking. A minute or two later the bent figure of a old bearded Vietnamese, hobbling beneath an umbrella of oiled paper, emerged from the mist and approached them. His sodden, frayed gown marked him unmistakably as the village chairman. but beneath his mandarin's cap his lace was gaunt from starvation. He bowed once gravely towards Lan before speaking.

"The family you seek are all dead like the rest of the population of Ben Thoung. Neither our village nor our country has ever known such a terrible calamity in all our history." He spoke French, but his voice was a dry rattle in his throat, and he kept his head half bowed as though he was deeply ashamed of what he had to say. "Many flocked here to the countryside to avoid the bombing. We distributed our stocks with great strictness, and when the rice ran out they ate the husks. We distributed edible roots for them to grow and they swallowed the bulbs and planted only the stems. Then they tore up the stems and ate them also. They ate the roots and vines of their potatoes and they ate the seeds of next year's crops. They ate the roots of banana trees - even pennywort from the marshes. When they had nothing else they bought clay in the markets o staunch the pain of hunger in their empty bellies."

The old man swayed on his feet, supporting his thin body on a bamboo cane which he clutched tightly in a claw like hand. He had spoken to Lan as if he recognized her, although he made no open acknowledgment. When he looked up at Joseph, the American saw his rheumy eyes were br.i.m.m.i.n.g with tears."There has been much suffering, monsieur. Parents had to decide whether to starve themselves to let their children survive - or keep the food from them and watch their little ones die before their eyes. Some tied their offspring to the hut timbers to keep them from stealing food in the house." He shrugged hopelessly. "They hoped to live long enough to begin new families Now I am the only living person in the village, and soon I will die too."

Lan pointed to the house by the pond again. "Did all the children of Nguyen Thi Thao die?"

The old man turned unsteadily to look at the house. "The three children died two weeks ago," he said quietly over his shoulder. "Last week the parents died. They were the last surviving family in the village. He lost his mind at the end and tore out his own eyes. There was n.o.body left to bury them."

Lan swayed, and Joseph circled her shoulder quickly with his arm. "But they had/our children," she whispered when she had regained her composure.

The old man nodded slowly. "The fourth, the girl with the pale skin, they sent away six months ago to her sister's village- Dong Sanh, four miles to the south. They thought the prospects would be better there."

"And are they?" asked Joseph in an agonized voice. "Are people still surviving there?"

The old man didn't answer immediately, but closed his eyes for a long moment as though gathering his strength. "People are dying everywhere. n.o.body knows or cares any longer what happens in the next village."

Joseph offered the old man food from the jeep, but he refused to accept anything at all from them. When they left the village, he was still standing in the rain at the spot where they'd spoken to him, and before they went out of sight he waved his umbrella once in a final pathetic salute.

It took them an hour to reach Dong Sanh because the road was badly flooded, and neither of them spoke during the journey. To express any hope at all amidst such horrifying scenes of desolation seemed to be tempting fate, but when they arrived, to their relief, they found people still struggling to stay alive. Shortly after they reached the village the rain stopped for the first time in days and small ragged crowds of spindly-legged Vietnamese came out to throng a makes.h.i.+ft market where a few food sellers were setting out shallow dishes of rice gruel. Those without money crowded round watching with yearning eyes as others with the few necessary coins poured the steaming liquid into their throats. Gangs of begging children, wearing mats or bundles of hay tied with banana ropes, wandered lethargically among desperate vendors who were offering for sale their ancestral altars, half-burned house timbers and even the ragged clothes from their own backs to get money to buy food. Sometimes at the roadside Joseph and Lan saw a motionless figures wrapped in a rolled mat, dying or already dead, and the obviously lifeless corpses they noticed were being covered quickly with big banana leaves on the orders of a patrolman who moved among the crowds wielding a bamboo cane.

They quickly found the half-wrecked house where the sister of Nguyen Thi Thao had lived, but it turned out to be deserted, and Lan was told by a woman too weak to rise from her plank bed in the next house, that the parents of the family living there had died ten days before. The woman scarcely had strength to speak herself, but when Joseph prompted Lan to question her further, she admitted that some of the children might still be alive. They could be running wild with the other orphans of the famine in the village, she said, and together Lan and Joseph hurried back to the market square. There the gangs of starving children were still milling aimlessly among the displays of tawdry goods spread out on sodden mats, and Joseph watched Lan's face with a fast- pounding heart every time they drew near to a small girl. But each time she shook her head, and after an hour, feeling sick at heart, they reluctantly turned away and headed back towards the jeep.

It was Joseph who noticed the tiny figure kneeling alone by the steps of the muddy village pond as they prepared to drive away; hardly daring to hope, he touched Lan's arm and they got out of the vehicle again and walked quietly back towards the pond. When they drew near, they saw that the long hair of the girl was matted and tangled in muddied skeins down her back; she was pitifully thin, and the only garment covering her body was a torn mat tied about her waist with twisted banana leaves. Her head was bowed, and as they approached, they saw that she was staring listlessly into the slimy water.

Lan stopped a few feet away and peered intently at the girl, but when she looked up at Joseph again she was biting her lip and he could see that the interval of four years and the ravages of the famine left her uncertain. The little girl had not turned her head, and Joseph on an impulse stepped towards her and dropped to her knees. "Tuyet," he called softly, "Tuyet ... on dung so! - don't be afraid."

At the sound of the name, the little wasted figure tensed, and the instant she turned towards him, Joseph knew their search was over. Although she was pitifully thin and her overlarge eyes burned luminously in a haunted face, he saw in her features an unmistakable inheritance of Lan's beauty. Close to her, he could see that beneath the grime her skin was paler than the other children's, and the less-p.r.o.nounced tilt of her eyes showed him too that his blood and Lan's were mingled in her. Suddenly his temples throbbed at his release from agony and he reached out his arms to her in an imploring gesture.

- The girl, obviously terrified by the sight of his white face, backed away and almost slipped down the bank into the pond. But he made gentle, rea.s.suring noises and advanced slowly and patiently until, trapped with her back to the water and too feeble to resist further, she dropped her head and allowed him to pick her tip in his arms. Beneath the sodden mat her sticklike body was s.h.i.+vering with cold, and she seemed in his big hands to weigh nothing. He pressed her wildly against his face and the earthy smell of the wet rotting mat and that same sickly sweet odor of famine that permeated every village of the region engulfed his senses. When at last he held her out at arm's length, her big burning eyes looked blankly back at him. She stared with the same uncomprehending expression, too, at the tears that had begun flowing unashamedly down his cheeks.

PART FIVE.

Dien Bien Phu.

1954.

By the time Britain handed over its responsibility for southern Vietnam to France in early 1946, more than two thousand Vietnamese had been killed by British forces. In the north the Chinese army of occupation finally withdrew in March 1946 under an agreement with France that allowed a limited number of French troops to enter the north in return for France's giving up all claims to its concession territories in China. Ho Chi Minh's government, which had remained peacefully intact in Hanoi during that time, gave a wary welcome to the returning French forces, and Paris recognized the new Democratic Republic as a state within the French Union. Negotiations between Ho and the French leaders.h.i.+p continued until the autumn, with France stubbornly refusing to grant the Vietnamese full independence, and it became obvious that both sides were preparing for open conflict. Vietnam, however, remained an unnoticed backwater in world affairs, and during this time, with the Soviet Army straddling central and eastern Europe, President Harry Truman swung the United States firmly behind France because of that country's importance in the crucial Cold War arena of Europe. Several times Ho Chi Mirth wrote to President Truman seeking his backing, but the letters went unanswered. Support for France in fact had never wavered in the American State Department, and the intimacy that had developed between the OSS and the Viet Minh in the closing days of the war was frowned on by American diplomats. Eventually Was.h.i.+ngton formally announced its intention to respect French sovereignty in Indochina and the OSS mission was abruptly withdrawn from Hanoi in October 1945. Not until much later would American leaders wonder whether a golden opportunity had been missed to turn Ho Chi Minh into an Asian t.i.to, friendly to the West. During his year in power, however, Ho Chi Minh had gained an unshakable grip on the minds of his countrymen, and when full-scale war with France broke out throughout Vietnam on December 19, 1946, he retreated confidently once more to those same limestone caves in Tongking from which he had descended in triumph sixteen months earlier. During its brief period of office, his Viet Minh government had overcome the famine in the north by mobilizing the people to plant quick-growing crops on every spare inch of land, and it had also won fairly held elections in Annam and Tongking. The dominant Communists in the Viet Minh League, however, did not hesitate to employ terror tactics against those nationalists opposed to them, and they murdered most of their prominent opponents during those turbulent early days. But it was clear that the vast majority of the Vietnamese nevertheless approved of the Viet Minh, and as a result, after the war began, the French found that even with 150,000 troops in Vietnam they could control only the centers of the cities and the lines of communication between them, while the Viet Minh held sway over the rural villages, the rice paddies and the jungles. After a few early French victories, a military stalemate was reached and this lasted until October 1949, when the victory of Mao Tse-tung's Communists in China's civil war produced a major change in the tide of world history. Overnight China became a safe sanctuary across the northern borders of Tongking where Ho's guerrilla forces could retreat for prolonged training under Vo Nguyen Giap. In a matter of months they were transformed into full field formations armed with modern American artillery weapons salvaged from the a.r.s.enals of the defeated Chiang Kai-shek, and a French military victory became impossible. In late 1950, forty-three of these new Viet Minh battalions burst across the Chinese border and smashed through the frail line of French defense forts to inflict the most humiliating colonial defeat on France since General Montcalm was defeated and killed at Quebec by the British in 1759. Six thousand French troops were killed, and enormous quant.i.ties of weapons and transports were captured. Openly dominated at last by its Communist leaders and allied firmly with Moscow and Peking, the Viet Minh controlled Vietnam thenceforth from the Chinese border to within a hundred miles of Saigon, with the exception of the fortified perimeter held by the French around the Red River delta and Hanoi. More importantly for the world at large, Mao Tse-tung's victory had deepened the West's fear of a monolithic, expansionist Communism, and this brought the Indochina war out of the obscurity under which it had, until then, been fought. China and the Soviet Union recognized Ho Chi Minh's government in its mountain stronghold in January 1950, and this prompted the United States to recognize an alternative French-sponsored Vietnamese government headed by chief of state Bao Dai. Moscow and Peking's blessing "removed the last illusions about the nationalist character of Ho Chi Minh's aims and revealed him as a mortal enemy of native independence," said American Secretary of State Dean Acheson and Was.h.i.+ngton began pouring military and economic aid into Vietnam and the other countries of Indochina to help France block further Communist gains; at a stroke, France's colonial war had been turned into a crusade to stop Communism spreading across Asia. Western apprehensions about Indochina were intensified further in June 1950, when North Korea invaded its southern neighbor and Western forces under the United Nations flag were drawn into conflict with the Communist armies of North Korea and China. As a result, President Truman sent a military mission from Was.h.i.+ngton to Saigon that summer to liaise closely with the French, and this act marked the beginning of a fateful United States involvement in Vietnam. Support in the form of aid s...o...b..lled, and by 1954 three billion American dollars had been poured into France's military coffers in Indochina. In 1953, a cease-fire in Korea allowed the Communists to concentrate all their military efforts on Indochina, and Russian and Chinese supplies to Giap's forces increased dramatically. In response, the nineteenth government to hold office in Paris in nine crisis-wracked years made a last desperate effort to extricate France honorably from what had become a muddled, hopeless cause. It approved a plan by military leaders to lure the core of General Giap's regular forces into a decisive set-piece confrontation behind Viet Minh lines in the remote northern valley of Dien Bien Phu, where it was thought French air superiority and greater firepower could easily destroy an enemy which possessed no aircraft, no tanks and only limited means of transport. Once before, the French had pulled off the bold stroke of dropping a fortress from the air into a narrow limestone valley behind Viet Minh lines at Na San; when General Giap attacked there without sufficient preparation, he had lost a whole battalion amidst the wires and mines of the fortifications, and the French high command hoped this success could be repeated more decisively. But instead of yielding a quick, easy victory, Dien Bien Phu in the event became the setting for one of the most fateful and historic clashes ever between East and West.

1.

The tangled mantle, of green-black jungle vegetation which centuries of moist heat had woven into the dragon-backed mountainsides of Tongking showed only patchily through the banks of low cloud as the French Air Force Dakota lumbered through the gray dawn of an early February morning in 1954, heading for Dien Bien Phu. Its two-hundred-mile journey from Hanoi to the remote, northwest corner of Vietnam close to the Laotian border had taken an hour and a half, and during that time Joseph Sherman had crouched uncomfortably on a tip-up metal seat amidst a cargo of coffin planks, blood plasma, tinned food and a dozen illicit crates of French beer. On his knee he held an air reconnaissance map which showed the valley of Dien Bien Phu as a tiny, isolated island of green ink amidst the unending gray sea of Tongking's sprawling limestone ma.s.sif; ten miles long and four miles wide, the valley had sheltered a score of thatched villages before French paratroopers seized it at the end of November 1953 to turn it into a fortified camp with a defense perimeter of over thirty miles. Since then its garrison had been built up to a strength of thirteen thousand men, and heavy artillery, trucks and even tanks had been dropped in by parachute.

"Hold tight to your seat, monsieur," said the French pilot grimly over his shoulder. "To get down into this p.i.s.spot we have to make a high approach to clear the Viet Minh antiaircraft units, then dive steeply through the clouds, using the ground radio beam."

Joseph tightened his seat belt a notch and smiled at the pilot's black humor. He had used the term pot de chambre, the vulgar nickname given to the mountain-ringed basin of Dien Bien Phu by the French aircrews who for the past two months had been valiantly landing or parachuting eighty tons of supplies into the camp every day through thick mists and drizzle. In private conversation few flyers made any secret of their contempt for the strategic plans of the French army high command, and as the Dakota broke through the bottom cloud layer, the pilot let 'Out a little snort of derision.

"There's your first sight, monsieur, of what our senior officers in their wisdom conceived as 'an offensive base from which to strike against enemy rear areas.' "He motioned sarcastically through the winds.h.i.+eld with his head. "It may have looked good once on General Navarre's wall map in Saigon, but from up here you can see it for what it really is - a self-made prison"

Joseph peered down anxiously at the patchwork of yellow clay rice fields scarred with sandbagged machine gun nests and trenches; a shallow river wound across the valley bottom, its banks wreathed with endless entanglements of barbed wire, and he could see big gangs of soldiers still digging busily with their trenching tools on the slopes of the low hills that formed natural defense points within the perimeter. "You're right," breathed Joseph, scanning the high peaks which towered over the valley on all sides. "One of the oldest rules of war is 'never let your enemy get up above you,' and the peaks have all been left to the Viet Minh."

The pilot nodded. "Now you see why we call it Un pot de chambre? From those mountaintops the 'yellows' can urinate all over us. General Navarre and his staff must be living in a dream world. They think the enemy is going to rush down from the hills again like he did at Na San and impale himself obligingly on our barbed wire so that we can pulverize him with air attacks and our artillery - but I for one will be surprised if General Giap falls for that trick twice."

"It doesn't seem possible that anyone could have been so foolish," said Joseph incredulously.

The pilot snorted again. "It's all based on military cla.s.sroom theory. They've worked it out carefully on their little sand tables at headquarters and n.o.body believes the 'yellows' can move enough weapons and supplies through three hundred miles of mountain jungle to sustain a real siege here." He shrugged and glanced down again at the forested hillsides beneath the descending plane. "But if they're wrong, it'll make Custer's Last Stand book like a picnic."

Joseph continued to scan the fortifications with a professional eye, and as the Dakota lost height his frown deepened. "They seem to be putting a lot of faith in those fortified hillocks inside the perimeter," he said at last. "But if the Vietnamese get that far, there's going to be some nasty close fighting."

The pilot nodded and gestured through the winds.h.i.+eld again. 'Those three hills at the northern end of the valley are called Gabrielle, Beatrice arid Anne-Marie. That one to the south is Isabelle, and the little group cl.u.s.tered round the command center in the middle are Dominique, Elaine, Francoise, Claudine and Huguette." The pilot glanced quickly around at Joseph, his lace set in unsmiling lines. "In case you hadn't heard, I should tell you that the officer commanding, Colonel de Castries, has a wide reputation as a lady's man and his troops believe the hills are named after his current mistresses - but they're not very amused by the idea."

Through the winds.h.i.+eld Joseph noticed white puffs of smoke breaking out along the rim of the valley nearest to the landing strip, and above the roar of the Dakota's engines he recognized the distinctive bark of light 75-millimeter mountain guns. "It looks like we're going to get a warm reception from the Vietnamese People's Army," said Joseph, leaning close to the pilot's ear.

The Frenchman nodded grimly once more without turning. "They'll mortar the runway too as we go down. It's practically routine now. A soon as we stop rolling, you must make a dash for the headquarters jeep they'll be sending out to meet you."

As the Dakota swooped in to land, Joseph watched the mortar bursts kicking up fountains of yellow earth alongside the gridded airstrip that had been laid down by the j.a.panese during the Second World War. Through a side window he could see a command jeep zigzagging among the exploding mortar sh.e.l.ls, and even at a distance of a hundred yards he recognized the tall, straight-backed figure seated beside the driver, wearing camouflage battle dress and the crimson beret of the Second Battalion, Colonial Paratroops. On the ground the dull thud of the sh.e.l.ls detonating was much louder, but unlike the jeep's driver, the officer sitting beside him disdained to wear a helmet, and the vague pangs of remorse and guilt that had been growing in Joseph over the past two or three years were suddenly intensified by this display of calm courage, As soon as the Dakota halted, Joseph flung himself through the hatch and ran bent double towards the jeep. Its driver slowed the vehicle to walking pace to allow him to clamber aboard, then turned and raced back towards the fortified bunkers of the command post that had been constructed six feet below ground level.

"I thought this valley was supposed to be an impregnable fortress," yelled Joseph boisterously as he seized the hand of the French lieutenant-colonel in both his own, "It is, mon vieux, I a.s.sure you," replied Paul Devraux, grinning hugely and shouting at the top of his voice to make himself heard above the roar of the exploding sh.e.l.ls. "Don't worry! The 'Amorous American' won't get his precious b.a.l.l.s shot off here - they can't really lay down an effective barrage with those little 75- millimeter peashooters."

As the jeep screeched to a halt at the mouth of the sap leading down into Paul's fortified bunker, a squadron of M-24 tanks emerged from the swirling dust and rumbled past them. "They're off to deal with the mountain guns in those foothills over there," said Paul, pointing towards the northeast. "It won't take long to silence them. We can stay here and watch if you like."

For two or three minutes they listened to the deep boom of the tank cannons echoing across the valley, then abruptly the Viet Minh sh.e.l.ling of the airstrip ceased.

"You see," said Paul delightedly, flinging an arm affectionately around Joseph's shoulders. "Wasn't I right? Isn't this the safest place in all Indochina?"

Joseph grinned back but couldn't prevent himself from casting an occasional dubious glance in the direction of the mountain peaks above the valley.

"If you don't believe me, I'll arrange for you to talk to our artillery commander, Colonel Piroth. He'll set your mind at rest." The French officer laughed and motioned Joseph courteously into the bunker ahead of himself. "But most important of all, I have a bottle of good cognac to toast our reunion and welcome you to Dien Bien Phu." He clapped the American warmly on the shoulder once more. "It's just wonderful to see you again, Joseph, after all these years."