Dragon Apparent E-Book

Norman Lewis

• Herausgeber: Eland Publishing
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Seitenzahl: 556

Beschreibung

Travelling through Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in the twilight of the French colonial regime, Norman Lewis witnesses these ancient civilisations as they were before the terrible devastation of the Vietnam War. He creates a portrait of traditional societies struggling to retain their integrity in the embrace of the West. He meets emperors and slaves, brutal plantation owners and sympathetic French officers trapped by the economic imperatives of the colonial experiment. From tribal animists to Viet-Minh guerillas, he witnesses this heart-breaking struggle over and over, leaving a vital portrait of a society on the brink of catastrophic change.

Leseprobe

Contents

Title Page

Preface to the 1982 edition

Background

1 Saigon and the Vietnamese

2 The Universal Religion

3 Sunday Diversions

4 A Convoy to Dalat

5 Région Inconnue

6 Ban Méthuot

7 The Moïs

8 Darlac

9 The Rhadés

10 The Vanishing Tribes

11 Central Annam

12 Cholon and Cochin-China

13 Into Cambodia

14 King Norodom’s Capital

15 Angkor

16 Bandit Country

17 Laos

18 The Road to Xien Khouang

19 Into the Meo Country

20 The Viet-Minh

Index

About the author

Copyright

Preface to the 1982 edition

THE ANCIENT CIVILISATIONS of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos were already falling into decay when I travelled through South-East Asia prior to writing this book. Inevitably degeneration had followed contact with the West, and the invasion and subsequent colonisation by the French; yet much of the charm and the grandeur of the past had survived in these countries, protected by their remoteness and the dense rainforests and mountain ranges covering half their area.

The central plateau of Vietnam was peopled largely by tribes of Malayo-Polynesian origin, living in spectacular long-houses, whose existence had barely been noticed until the coming of the Japanese. These Moïs, as they were called, were living as their ancestors had probably lived for thousands of years when I visited them, and although the French had carried off some hundreds for forced labour in the tea-plantations, they had otherwise been left alone, to live their complicated, highly ceremonial and – to an outsider like myself – idyllic lives. The long-houses accommodating a whole village, shown in this book, no longer exist. They were bombed to nothingness by the B25s in the Vietnam war, and such of the population who survived were forced into the armies fighting the Nationalist Viet Cong, who were revenged on them in due course when the US abandonment of the country took place.

With the exception of these gracious and endearing people, the population of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos were Buddhist, and therefore in essence gentle, tolerant, and addicted to pleasures and satisfactions of a discriminating kind. Just as in Japan, popular excursions would be made in certain seasons to admire trees in blossom. There were night-scapes in Saigon to be visited only when the moon was in a certain phase, and rich mandarins – still existing in those days in what remained culturally a province of China – would pay for white herons to be released across the sky when the party was seated in readiness for this aesthetic experience. At five in the evening, when one took the breeze on the waterfront in Saigon, stalls were put out with soft drinks of many colours, and one chose refreshment as much for its auspicious colouring as its taste. There was a right way in Vietnam to do everything, a gentle but persuasive protocol, full of subtle allusions, and nuances in gesture and speech that evaded the foreign barbarian. The Europeans corrupted but failed to barbarise Indo-China, and many of them who lived there long enough were happy enough to go native and cultivate what they could of the patina of the old civilisation. Laos was considered the earthly paradise of South-East Asia, although Cambodia ran it a close second. So much was this realised by French officialdom that the competition for a posting to either country was strenuous. Many a wily administrator manoeuvred his way to a position in Ventiane or Luang Prabang, where he instantly married a Laotian wife, set up a shrine with joss-sticks to the lares of his house, and spent much of his leisure decking out Buddha caves with fresh flowers.

Both of these oases of decorum and charm were to be devastated and debauched in the Vietnam war, when as many bombs were showered among the shrines and the pagodas of these small countries as were expended in all the bombings put together of the World War in Europe.

Protocol demanded that visits be made to the rulers of these countries. I was warned to present myself at the palace of King Norodom Sihanouk, who later demoted himself to prince, and succeeded in holding the French, and after them the Americans, at bay for so many years. He was a gentle, softly-spoken young man, and we sat side by side on a sofa, deploring the inroads made by the West on the traditions of his country. In that year, despite his protests, a cinema had opened in Pnom Penh, and his subjects who flocked thither to see Arsenic and Old Lace forsook the ancient shadow play forever, while temple dancers ceased to have appeal for those who had been entertained by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in action.

Some dignitaries were more formal in style. The Emperor Bao Dai liked visitors to crawl into his presence, or at least make a token obeisance by falling on one knee, but these were experiences I managed to evade. Many surprises awaited the traveller. A reputedly ferocious war lord could find nothing to talk about but the cultivation of chrysanthemums. An ex-governor of South Vietnam received me with what was regarded as charming informality while seated upon a close-stool ornamented with dragons. The Pope of the Cao Daï, the universal religion which included Joan of Arc, Victor Hugo and the Duc de la Rochefoucauld among its saints, appeared briefly in an entourage of white robed twelve-year-old girls, said to have formed his harem.

General des Essars was in command of French troops in Cambodia, and I had two meetings with him, the first a formal one at his headquarters, and the second totally informal in the romantic and justly famous opium den run by Madame Shum, where he was accustomed to settle his nerves by smoking two pipes of an evening. Whereas on the first occasion the General had been brimming with confidence and euphoria, on the second, sedated and perhaps somewhat dispirited by his two pipes, he saw a vision of the future that left him no better than resigned in his frame of mind. He had 2,500 Cambodian troops under his command, and he accepted the fact that nothing would ever turn them into fighters. Their religion, he said, had knocked all the aggression out of them. What could you expect in a country where every man-jack of them had done a year in a monastery, where they taught you that ‘thou shalt not kill’ had to be taken literally?

At the root of the trouble, said the General, lay the fact that Buddhism deprived the people of South-East Asia of the motives we Westerners understood and admired. If the aim in life was nothing more than to acquire virtue, what was the point of any form of competitive endeavour? If people only bothered to gather possessions for the spiritual benefit of giving them away, why then work hard? Why go to war?

And this was largely true. There were pagodas everywhere, full of monks who lived by begging, each of them holding a five-day festival once a year. A festival was always going on somewhere to provide villages in search of virtuous poverty with an opportunity for showering gifts on all comers, and shedding their burden of surplus wealth. Pnom Penh must have been the world’s only city where a man taking a taxi sometimes found himself offered a tip by the driver.

It was of course, improper to take life in any form, however lowly. Devout Cambodians allowed mosquitoes to feast on their blood, and handled leeches tenderly when they fastened on them in the rice-paddies. A monk once reproved me for crushing a cockroach underfoot, with the warning that this might have been my grandfather in reincarnation. Villages obliged to live by fishing got round moral objections by ‘rescuing the fish from drowning’, and it was agreed that if they subsequently happened to die there could be no harm in consuming their flesh. All along the banks of the Mekong one saw the live fish laid out for sale, tied with decorative ribbons, often fanned by conscientious sellers, occasionally even solaced by the music of a bamboo flute.

Even in the gently melancholic Autumn of those days there were guerrillas in the jungles and mountains, who had gone there to take up arms against the French, but they caused little inconvenience to the pacific traveller. The Issarak (freedom fighters), as they were called, went into action with guitars slung on their back, involving themselves in not particularly bloody clashes, reminiscent of the ceremonial wars between Italian city states, when a day of battle might produce a single casualty. Travelling along jungle trails in areas known to be under Issarak control, I was careful to restrict such movement to the hours of the afternoon, when they could be relied upon to be taking their siesta. At the lengthy festival of the New Year, the fight was called off, and everybody went home for a week or so to worship at the ancestral shrines, engage in ritual gambling, feed the monks, and to sleep.

Later the real war was unleashed, to be conducted in secret by radio through the US Embassy in Pnom Penh. South Vietnam was already a wasteland, deluged by high-explosives, poisons and fire. Mr Kissinger had said that the dominoes were falling, so now it was the turn of Cambodia and Laos, delivered to the greatest holocaust ever to be visited on the East. It consumed not only the present, but the past; an obliteration of cultures and values as much as physical things. From the ashes that remained no phoenix would ever rise. Not enough survived even to recreate the memory of what the world had lost.

What could these people have suffered to have transformed the sons and brothers of General des Essars’ reluctant conscripts, formed in the ambulatories of monasteries rather than on the barracks’ square, into those terrible and implacable warriors who flocked to the standards of the Khmer Rouge?

© Norman Lewis 1982

Background

INDO-CHINA lies immediately to the south of China proper and to the east of Burma and Siam. On a world-map it is no more than a coastal strip, swelling out at its base – the rump of Eastern Asia. It is purely a political entity; originally the French colonial possessions corresponding to the conquered Empire of Annam, and its tributaries. This temporary union is in the process of dissolution.

The Indo-Chinese countries contain the scattered remnants of as many races as those of Europe, but they are inextricably jumbled up in a jigsaw of racial islands and enclaves, from which only three nations emerge: Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Of the total population of twenty-five million, seventeen million are Vietnamese. The Cambodians and Laotians are peoples in monastic retirement; non-participants, as followers of a contemplative and renunciatory religion, in the march of progress. The population of the whole of Indo-China is concentrated in a few fertile valleys and deltas, leaving the greater part of the country unpopulated, jungle-covered, and looking much the same as China itself must have looked several thousand years ago, before the deforestation began. The interior is neither completely mapped, nor completely explored. It abounds with game: elephants, tigers, deer and many kinds of cattle, which, having known only hunters armed with crossbows, may be closely approached and slaughtered with the greatest ease from cars on the jungle tracks.

Pacification of the Moïs of Central and Southern Vietnam – those bow and arrow tribes which in the early part of the last century were believed to be the only human beings with tails – was only undertaken in 1934. Certain tribes of the remote interior have not yet submitted to French authority.

The early history of Indo-China is that of primitive aboriginals – Mongolians in the north and Malayo-Polynesians in the south – coming respectively under the influences of their great civilised neighbours, the Chinese and the Indians. From the latter union two brilliant and neurotic civilisations were created: those of the Khmers and the Chams. Both of them, after much precocious accomplishment, overtaxed their strength in wars, and collapsed. The Chams were first compressed and then absorbed by the southward movement of conquerors from China – the Vietnamese; while the remnants of the Khmers, listless and degenerate, were crowded back by the same people to the Siamese frontier. Scrupulous Vietnamese peasants still burn paper rent for the benefit of the spirits of long-vanished peoples, whose land they now possess.

The first Europeans to arrive in Indo-China – the missionaries and traders officially classified by the Vietnamese authorities as ‘red-haired barbarians’ – were dazzled by the people’s virtues and enchanted by their hospitality. ‘Whereas all the other Eastern Nations,’ said the Jesuit Borri, writing in 1622, ‘looking upon the Europeans as a profane people, do naturally abhor them, and therefore fly from us when first we come among them: In Cochin-China it falls out just contrary: for they strive who shall be nearest us, ask a thousand Questions, invite us to eat with them, and in short use all manner of Courtesie with much Familiarity and Respect … This loving and easie Disposition is the Cause of much Concord among them, they all treating one another as familiarly as if they were Brothers, or of the same Family … and it would be look’d upon as a most vile action, if one Man eating any thing, tho’ never so little, should not share it with all about him, giving every one about him a bit.’

Borri and his successors, however, soon found causes for criticism. As a sign apparently that something was Rotten in the State, the devil frequently manifested himself, under horrific forms. Once called out with crosses, Agnus Deis and relics to confront him, Borri was only a matter of instants too late and saw three prints of his feet ‘above two spans long, with the Marks of a Cock’s Talons and Spurs’. The laws, too, were shockingly severe. Men and women received sound thrashings in the streets for slight breaches of good manners and then knelt to thank the mandarin who had ordered the punishment. A high official found guilty of delaying the presentation of a petition to the Divine Emperor was beheaded on the spot. But in other ways there was a barbarous penal insufficiency, of which the newcomers were equally unable to approve. The maximum prison sentence was three years, which, if the prisoner had aged parents to look after, could be served under some kind of parole system at home; while thieves who pleaded dire necessity were sometimes pardoned.

It was to correct these moral weaknesses that proselytising pressure was brought to bear, and when the Vietnamese showed themselves intractable, the principle of religious tolerance was imposed by force of arms. In 1858, after a gradual extension of their influence over fifty years, the French began the outright conquest of the country. The annexation of Vietnam – at that time known as Annam – was followed by requests from Cambodia and Laos to be taken under French protection. The Cambodians’ decision is said to have been much influenced by the French assurance that they would be allowed in future to keep for themselves all the white elephants they captured – animals of peculiar sanctity which previously they had been obliged to surrender to the Vietnamese Emperor.

During the last war the Japanese were allowed to occupy Indo-China without opposition, and the French collaborated with them until March 1945. At that time, after observing the success of allied arms in the West, the Japanese decided to intern the French authorities and to set up a puppet Vietnamese state headed by the Emperor Bao-Dai. This government collapsed with the defeat of Japan and was replaced by a purely nationalist one, the Viet-Minh, headed by Ho-Chi-Minh. The Emperor Bao-Dai abdicated and, after remaining for a short time as ‘adviser’ to the Ho-Chi-Minh Government, finally left the country. Shortly after, a French expeditionary corps disembarked at Saigon, and the present war began.

After five years of fighting the French have re-occupied most of the large towns, the major part of the Tonkinese rice-growing delta in the north, and about half that of Cochin-China, in the south. The Viet-Minh control about four-fifths of Vietnam and the coastline of Cambodia, by which the free passage of arms is assured between Siam and their Southern Army, in Cochin-China. Although the strength of the army of the Viet-Minh is unknown it is believed to amount approximately to 100,000 men, and to be slightly numerically inferior to the French forces which oppose it. It is increased by an incalculable number of partisans who are to all intents and purposes inoffensive peasants during the daytime hours. The Viet-Minh is well supplied with small arms and automatic weapons, mostly purchased in Siam and the Philippines and has recently obtained up-to-date artillery from China.

In 1949 ‘independence within the French Union’ was granted to the three countries of Indo-China, and the ex-Emperor Bao-Dai, recalled from self-imposed exile, was created head of the French-sponsored Vietnamese State. It is now apparent that this move has not been successful in its intended effect, which was to rally Vietnamese dissidents under the banner of the Emperor, and thus put an end to the war.

After four years of virtual stalemate, the military situation is again fluid. Viet-Minh leaders assured me in the spring of 1950 that by the autumn of that year they would launch an all-out offensive in an attempt to drive the French from the country before the rains broke in June 1951. When, in January 1951, the proofs of this book were being corrected, the promised offensive was already four months old, and in the north the Viet-Minh, having occupied most of Tonkin, were closing in on Hanoi. It seems certain that before the book appears further important changes will have taken place.

CHAPTER 1

Saigon and the Vietnamese

IN 1949, a curtain which had been raised for the first time hardly more than fifty years ago in China, came down again for a change of scene. Low-grade clerks in air and shipping offices all over the world were given piles of leaflets and told to stamp the word ‘suspended’ over such place names as Shanghai, Canton and Kunming. Later they used the ‘service discontinued’ stamp. If you had wanted to go to China it was too late. You would have to content yourself with reading books about it, and that was as much of the old, unregenerate China as you would ever know. At this moment the scene shifters were busy, and they might be a long time over their job. When the curtain went up again it would be upon something as unrecognisable to an old China hand as to Marco Polo. And when this day came you had a feeling that curious travellers might find themselves restricted to state-conducted tours, admiring the marvels of reconstruction – the phoenix in concrete.

Now that China had passed into the transforming fire, it seemed that the experience of Far-Eastern travel, if ever to be enjoyed, could no longer be safely postponed. What then remained? Which would be the next country to undergo this process of change which was spreading so rapidly across Asia, and which would have to be seen now, or never again in its present form? I thought that Indo-China was the answer, and it was all the more interesting because, compared to the other Far-Eastern countries, so little had been written about it.

In the middle of January 1950, deciding to risk no further delays, I caught an Air France plane at Paris, bound for Saigon.

* * *

On the morning of the fourth day the dawn light daubed our faces as we came down through the skies of Cochin-China. The passengers were squirming in their seats, not sleeping and not waking, and the air hostess’s trained smile came stiffly. With engines throttled back the plane dropped from sur-Alpine heights in a tremorless glide, settling in the new, morning air of the plains like a dragonfly on the surface of a calm lake. As the first rays of the sun burst through the magenta mists that lay along the horizon, the empty sketching of the child’s painting book open beneath us received a wash of green. Now lines were ruled lightly across it. A yellow pencilling of roads and blue of canals.

A colonel of the Foreign Legion awoke uneasily, struggling with numbed, set facial muscles to regain that easy expression of good-fellowship of a man devoted to the service of violence. Becoming interested in something he saw below, he roused a friend, and they rubbed at the window and peered down. We were passing over a road that seemed to be strangely notched at intervals. ‘The defence towers,’ murmured the colonel, smiling with gentle appreciation. A few minutes later there was another moment of interest as we passed above that gauzily-traced chequer-board of fields and ditches. Down there in the abyss, unreal in their remoteness, were a few huts, gathered where the ruler-drawn lines of roads crossed each other. From them a wisp of incense curled towards us. To have been seen so clearly from this height it must have been a great, billowing cloud of smoke. There was a circle of specks in the yellow fields round the village. ‘Une opération,’ the colonel said. Somehow, as he spoke, he seemed linked psychically to what was going on below. Authority flowed back into the travel-weary figure. With the accession of this priestly essence he dominated the rest of the passengers.

Beneath our eyes violence was being done, but we were as detached from it almost as from history. Space, like time, anaesthetises the imagination. One could understand what an aid to untroubled killing the bombing plane must be.

It was a highly symbolical introduction to South-East Asia.

* * *

In air travel, first impressions are stifled in banality. At Saigon, the airport – a foretaste of the world-state, and as functional as a mortuary – was followed by a bus-trip down Napoleonic boulevards to an internationalised air terminal. Then came the hotel; an unpalatial palace of the kind that looms across the road from French railway stations. So far the East was kept at bay. Grudgingly conceded a room, I flung open the shutters for a first impression of the town from a high vantage point, flushing as I did a covey of typical London house-sparrows.

Saigon is a French town in a hot country. It is as sensible to call it – as is usually done – the Paris of the Far East as it would be to call Kingston, Jamaica, the Oxford of the West Indies. Its inspiration has been purely commercial and it is therefore without folly, fervour or much ostentation. There has been no audacity of architecture, no great harmonious conception of planning. Saigon is a pleasant, colourless and characterless French provincial city, squeezed on to a strip of delta-land in the South China Seas. From it exude strangely into the surrounding creeks and rivers ten thousand sampans, harbouring an uncounted native population. To the south, the once separated China-town of Cholon has swollen so enormously as to become its grotesque Siamese twin. There are holes in the urban fabric roughly filled in with a few thousand branch and straw shacks, which are occasionally cleared by accidental fires. The better part of the city contains many shops, cafés and cinemas, and one small, plain cathedral in red brick. Twenty thousand Europeans keep as much as possible to themselves in a few tamarind-shaded central streets and they are surrounded by about a million Vietnamese and Chinese.

I breakfasted, absurdly, but after a twenty-hour fast, on a long, saffron-coloured sole; pleased that the tea served with it should have a slightly earthy, hot-house flavour. This finished I went out into the mild, yellow light and immediately witnessed a sight which compensated one for Saigon’s disappointingly Westernised welcome. There was a rapid, silently swirling traffic in the streets of bicycle rickshaws mixed up with cycles; a bus, sweeping out of a side-street into the main torrent, caught a cyclist, knocked him off and crushed his machine. Both the bus driver and the cyclist were Chinese or Vietnamese, and the bus driver, jumping down from his seat, rushed over to congratulate the cyclist on his lucky escape. Both men were delighted, and the cyclist departed, carrying the wreckage of his machine and still grinning broadly. No other incidents of my travels in Indo-China showed up more clearly the fundamental difference of attitude towards life and fortune of the East and the West.

But still impatient with Saigon’s centre, I plunged quickly into the side-streets. I was immediately arrested by an agent of the customs and excise, well dressed in a kind of tropical knickerbockers, who told me politely that from my suspicious movements he believed me to be trafficking in foreign currency. Marched discreetly to the Customs House I was searched and then, when no gold or dollars were found, shown registers by the disappointed and apologetic officials to prove by the great hoards recently recovered that they rarely misjudged their man.

From this happening it was clear that Europeans rarely leave the wide boulevards where they belong, that if they sometimes take short cuts they do so purposefully, and that to wander at haphazard looked very much to the official eye like loitering with intent. For all that, it was my intention to spend my first day or two in the Far East in just such aimless roamings, collecting sharp first impressions while the mind was still freshly receptive; before the days came when so much would no longer surprise, would be overlooked, would be taken for granted. The business of organising the journey through the country could be attended to later.

* * *

It was clear from the first moment of picking my way through these crowded, torrid streets that the lives of the people of the Far East are lived in public. In this they are different from people in almost any other part of the world. The street is the extension of the house and there is no sharp dividing line between the two. At dawn, or, in the case of Saigon, at the hour when the curfew is lifted, people roll out of bed and make for the pavement, where there is more space, to perform most of their toilet. Thereafter they eat, play cards, doze, wash themselves, have their teeth seen to, are cupped and massaged by physicians, visit fortune-tellers; all in the street. There is none of the desire for privacy that is so strong in Europe and stronger still in the Islamic countries. Even the better houses seemed to consist on the ground floor of one large room in which the family lived communally while visitors drifted in and out through the open doors.

People took small snacks at frequent intervals, seating themselves at wayside booths decorated with painted glass screens that had perhaps been imported from Japan, as the subjects were Japanese: scowling Samurai and winged tigers. Great store was set by the decorative presentation of food. Diaphanous baby octopuses were suspended before acetylene lamps. There were tasteful groupings of sliced coxcomb about cured pigs’ snouts on excellent china plates. Roast chickens and ducks, lacquered bright red, were displayed in heraldic attitudes, with gracefully arched necks, or completely flattened-out, like kippers. There were segments of pigs, sundered with geometrical precision which, after the denaturalising art to which they had been submitted, seemed with their brilliant, glossy surfaces as unreal as the furnishings of a toy butcher’s shop. Here the appetites were solicited under frivolous rather than brutal forms.

One wondered about the origin of some of the delicacies; the ducks’ heads fried in batter and the webbed feet of some wading bird or other. Were they the fruit of a laborious empirical process, appealing to palates of extraordinary refinement, since in either case fleshy sustenance was practically nonexistent? Or were they, as a Vietnamese suggested, along with such traditional Chinese dishes as edible birds’ nests and sharks’ fins, the last resort of famine-stricken populations who gradually developed a taste for what, in the original emergency, they probably ate with the greatest repugnance? If this hypothesis is correct some of the results show an ironic twist. Bears’ paws, once probably thrown to the beggars by the hunter, are now only within the reach of millionaires in the most exclusive Chinese restaurants. Saigon merchants have to pay about £50 per kilogram for first quality sharks’ fins, imported from West Africa, and the birds’ nests harvested from the islands of the Vietnamese coast contribute notably to the cost of the arms bought by the Viet-Minh, within whose territory this source of wealth is located.

Many people when making their purchases preferred to gamble for them with the merchants, and for this reason a bowl of dice was at the disposal of customers on most stalls. A double-or-quits basis was employed, with the odds arranged slightly in the merchant’s favour. Housewives are said to gamble consistently for their shopping on days shown as favourable in their horoscopes, which means that on slightly more than fifty per cent of such occasions they return home empty handed and with the housekeeping money gone. Even the children gambled for their sweets, using miniature dice in charmingly decorated bowls. Before making a throw the child usually invoked good luck in a musical phrase, consisting, as it happened, of the first four notes of the Volga Boat Song.

Gambling is the besetting sin of the Vietnamese. It is a national mania, assuming at the great feast of the New Year almost a ritual aspect, since a day is set aside upon which the Vietnamese of all ages and ways of life gather together to stake their possessions on the fall of the dice. The underlying motive seems to be religious in character; an act of submission to destiny and with it a sacrifice; a propitiation and an expression of faith.

Since the belief in the uncontrollable gods of Fortune seems uppermost among Vietnamese credences, there is a universal demand for revelation of the future. There was an amazing variety of arrangements by which this demand was catered for. After the bashful and hesitant European tribute to the sciences of prediction, with its association of afternoon tea and church fêtes, this display of the seemingly innumerable methods of augury was an astonishing spectacle. There were any number of splendid mountebanks, unbelievably endowed to play their parts, with wise, ancient faces and the straggling, white beards of Chinese sages. Before them on the pavement were set out the instruments of their art, the cards, the curiously shaped stones, the bowl of sand, the mirrors of catoptromancy, the divining bird. Behind them the walls were spread with backcloths covered with astrological charts, diagrams of the fateful parts of the human body, the bald heads and childishly drawn faces of phrenologists the world over, the signs of the Zodiac, and the equally picturesque Chinese years which are symbolised by animals.

But to these legitimate methods of advertisement a new and, to me, improper element had, in many cases, been added; one that involved a confusion of function and an inexcusable distortion of the very essence of prognostication. This was the implication, in pictorial form, that fate can be cheated. There were warning sketches of the misfortunes that awaited those who failed to patronise the fortune-teller. Calamity had been brought up to date, for these wretched persons were being blown to pieces by a significantly mushroom-shaped explosion. Those on the other hand who had taken the precaution to keep informed of what the fates had in store for them, seemed to have been able to do something about it, since they were to be seen clasping members of the other sex under a token moonlight, or riding in what were recognisably American cars. It all seemed most illogical. If the future has been decided, then we will be atomised or achieve life’s crowning success in the shape of an American car. One can’t have it both ways. But perhaps a soothsayer dealing in such immutabilities would lose his business through his competitor, installed no more than three or four yards away along the street, who could show that there was some way of rubbing out the writing of destiny and that one could avoid the bombs and have the car, even if one’s horoscope had arranged for it to be the other way round.

The Vietnamese are fascinated by dentistry, and I should imagine that the dentist’s is one of the most crowded professions. Hard by the charts of the fortune-tellers, and at first sight easy to confuse with them, were those of the dentists; heads shown in cross-section, macabre and highly coloured, with suggested arrangements of gold teeth. Few races can resist embellishing the jaw with gold, and to the Vietnamese a good number of gold teeth, arranged according to accepted standards, are a discreet evidence of prosperity as well as showing a proper pride in one’s appearance. The fact is that teeth left in their natural, white state have always shocked Vietnamese susceptibilities by their resemblance to the fangs of animals. Until quite recently – and even now in some country districts – they were camouflaged with black enamel. One of the old Emperors, receiving in audience a European ambassador, is said to have exclaimed in ungovernable horror, ‘Who is this man with the teeth of a dog?’ This mild phobia provides innumerable citizens with an artistic means of livelihood. Sometimes the teeth of both jaws are completely framed in gold, and neat shapes, often playing card symbols, are cut in the front of the framing of each tooth, thus laying bare a minimum expanse of the original bone.

In order of popularity after the dentists come the portrait photographers. It is interesting to observe that the beautiful Vietnamese ladies, shown as specimens of the photographer’s art, are less oriental than Caucasian. By local standards their lips are thin and that slightly prognathous appearance, so noticeable throughout the Far East, is avoided. Only the narrow, shallow-set eyes with the Mongolian fold of the lids reveal the origin of these faces. One wonders whether those features of the oriental appearance which we regard as most typical, and perhaps least attractive, are also least attractive to them … or whether this is yet another instance of the all-powerful effect of the cinema for standardisation.

There is no doubt that here, as elsewhere throughout the world, the films have been devastating in their influence. In these streets cinema posters had been plastered up wherever a space could be found. The subjects were bloody and horrific; a torture scene with the victim’s bowels being wound out on a windlass; soldiers being hacked to death on the battlefield or blown to pieces by bombs. Always blood. Rivers of blood. When a more domestic setting was depicted, it was with a sexual motive, the male being shown in full evening dress, the woman or women in camiknickers. These were the products of Eastern studios. The imported products, as I learned later, were nearly all Wild Westerns and their description has so much affected popular imagination as to have become almost synonymous with the movies themselves. The tendency now is not to say, ‘I’m going to see a film,’ but, ‘I’m going to see a Far Western’ or, as it becomes in Vietnamese or Chinese, a Pá-Wé. Buffalo Bill and his successors have been exhumed, or perhaps remade, to satisfy this local taste. One’s eye is constantly assaulted by scenes of Far Western pseudo-history, interpreted by a Far Eastern imagination, in which ferocious cowboys, armed with the tommy-guns the white man is always supposed to have possessed, do terrible slaughter among small, slant-eyed and rather Vietnamese-looking Indians.

* * *

The variety of the scene was endless, and in the end exhausting. Retiring to a Chinese café, I was received by a waitress who advanced with a damp towel, held in a pair of forceps. This I took and following the example of the other patrons, wiped my face and hands with it. I ordered beer and was served a bottle with a snarling tiger on the label. It was very weak and slightly perfumed. The young lady left the change, a small pile of filthy notes, on the table. I learned later that particularly dirty notes are given to encourage customers to leave them as a tip. She then returned and joined the rest of the staff who were listening respectfully to the radio playing ‘When Irish Eyes are Smiling’. This was sometimes overwhelmed by the penetrating soprano of a Chinese crooner, broadcast from the gramophone shop over the way. Looking in its window a few moments before I had noticed among the portable gramophones and the saxophones several neatly fitted crocodile cases containing silver-mounted opium sets for the chic smoker. Many small pink lizards, with black, bulging eyes, dodged about among this splendid window display.

While I sat in the café a funeral passed. It was preceded by a man with a flute and another with a drum. The hearse was so enormous that it passed with difficulty through this narrow street. The children of the family played happily about the coffin and the principal mourners in white robes were half carried and half dragged along behind. Among the officiants was a man carrying a bowl of cigarettes for the benefit of passing spirits. Apart from the funeral the traffic in this street was limited to ponies and traps on their way to market, with bundles of ducks hanging from their axles, their heads gently stroking the surface of the road.

A yard or so from the café door a herbalist had set up a stall and was selling the small, ugly, dried-up corpses of such animals as lizards, anonymous organs hideously pickled in bottles, desiccated insects, a great selection of animals’ teeth, and horns of all shapes and sizes. He also had bottles of mixture, cough cures and elixirs. The advantages of taking these were illustrated in series of pictures, on the comic-strip principle. Patients with chronic coughs were shown as deserted by all. Romance in Vietnam seemed to be as insecurely founded as the makers of dentifrice believe it to be in Europe. And only with his cough cured was the sufferer seen once again in the arms of his loved one. There was a medicine too that seemed to cure mediocrity, because a course of this turned the investor from a loafer into a public speaker at the microphone.

* * *

It was all very entertaining to a stranger completely fresh from the West, but from the experiences of these few hours I had learned one disturbing thing. This was that as a European I had been invisible. My eyes never met those of a Vietnamese. There was no curious staring, no gesture or half-smile of recognition. I was ignored even by the children. The Vietnamese people, described by early travellers as gay, sociable and showing a lively curiosity where strangers were concerned, have now withdrawn into themselves. They are too civilised to spit at the sight of a white man, as the Indians of Central America do sometimes, but they are utterly indifferent. It is as if a general agreement has been reached among them that this is the best way of dealing with an intolerable presence. Even the rickshaw coolie, given, to be on the safe side, double his normal fee, takes the money in grim silence and immediately looks away. It is most uncomfortable to feel oneself an object of this universal detestation, a mere foreign-devil in fact.

CHAPTER 2

The Universal Religion

THE FIRST IMPORTANT TASK of the visitor to Saigon on a journalistic or literary mission is to present his credentials at the Office of Information and Propaganda. The reason for this is that only through the sponsorship of this office will he be able to move about the country, as tourist accommodation rarely exists in the hinterland and, in any case, a circulation permit is required before any journey can be made.

On the second day after my arrival I therefore presented myself at the office in question and was received by the director, Monsieur de la Fournière. I was prepared for a certain amount of official discouragement of a project which involved travelling over as much as I could of a country where a war was in progress. At best I hoped for permission to visit one or two of the larger towns, travelling possibly by plane. At worst I feared that I might be told quite flatly that I could not leave Saigon. I was therefore amazed to find this interview going entirely contrary to my expectations. The consistent contrariness of travel is one of its fascinations, but usually it is the other way round. The difficulties and frustrations turn out to be worse than one had feared.

The director was young, expansive and enthusiastic. I had hardly begun to outline my hopes before he took over. Far from being surprised that anyone should want to travel about the country at such a time, he seemed to find the idea both reasonable and praiseworthy. Taking up a firm stance before a wall map, he began to demolish distances and dangers with bold, sweeping gestures and in rapid, idiomatic English. The outlines of the journey were sketched in, in a few firm strokes.

‘Laos first, I suggest,’ said the director. ‘An earthly paradise. Can’t imagine it, if you haven’t been there. I say, first, because you want to get there before the rains wash the place away. Probably be just in time. Otherwise you might find yourself stranded.’

‘Mean travelling by plane,’ I suggested.

‘No,’ the director said. ‘Planes can’t take off. More likely to find yourself cut off until they rebuilt the bridges at the end of the year. That is, unless you could get to the Mekong. That’s why it’s better to go now. No point in taking unnecessary chances.’

The director drew a short, firm line on the map with his pencil. ‘First stage – Dalat. Centre of the elephant-hunting country. Go and see the Emperor. Might get him to take you on a trip. Better to go by convoy though. You’re sure to find it more interesting than by air. Attacks getting infrequent these days. Anyway, nothing venture, nothing have.’

I agreed, enchanted with the breathtaking novelty of this attitude in an official. The director plunged on confidently through half-explored jungles towards the central plateaux. ‘You aren’t looking for a luxury tour I suppose? That is, you don’t mind pigging it with soldiers occasionally?’

We hovered over Kontum. ‘Malarial,’ the director said. ‘Rather nasty type too. Nothing to worry about though, if you keep moving. Normal hazards, that is … The Viet-Minh? – Well naturally you’ll inform yourself on the spot. No sense in putting your head into the lion’s mouth.’

We now turned our faces to the west. The director thought that it wasn’t advisable to go further north, as some of the tribes hadn’t made an official submission, and, in any case, the country wasn’t accurately mapped. Of course, one might jolly one of the local administrators into getting up a little expedition on the side. He hesitated, evidently toying wistfully with the prospect, before putting it, reluctantly, from his mind and turning a Balboan eye to survey the few hundred miles of jungle and swamps separating us from the border of Siam.

‘We want to get to the Mekong River somehow or other. Probably find a soldier or professional hunter going somewhere, in a Jeep. What we call a moyen de fortune … Paksí, now, that’s an idea.’ With a wave of the hand the director vanquished the many bands of vulgar pirates, as the French call them, which infest that area. ‘… or if not Paksí, Savannakhet?’ Soaring above the degrees of latitude separating these alternatives, the director whisked us back to our crossroads in Central Annam and set us off in another direction, clearing with an intrepid finger a track subsequently described as digéri by the jungle. ‘Once you get to Mekong …’ the director shrugged his shoulders. The adventure was practically at an end, for only a thousand miles or so in a pirogue had to be covered before reaching Saigon again. ‘… unless you happen to hit on a moyen de fortune going north to Vientiane. Then, of course, if you felt like it, and the opportunity came along, you could get across country to Xien Khouang in the Meo country … perhaps from there up towards the frontier of Burma or of Yunnan.’

It was evident that the director was loth to return from these exciting prospects to the drab dependabilities of Saigon, where the moyen de fortune had no place.

Moyen de fortune. The phrase was beginning to touch the imagination. It was one that rang continually in my ears from that time on. It became the keynote of my journeyings.

It was the duty of a subordinate, a Monsieur Ferry, to clothe the director’s flights of creative fancy with the sober trappings of organisation. Ferry’s first glance at the suggested itinerary produced a pursing of the lips. As for the terra incognita to the north and west, he couldn’t say. No doubt the director knew what he was talking about. It was his job to see that I got to Dalat, where a Madame Schneider would take charge of me and pass me on to a Monsieur Doustin at Ban Méthuot. After that – well – it would all depend upon the direction I chose, and, of course, local conditions.

Monsieur Doustin, a very knowledgeable man would see to all that. Ferry presented me with the three maps of the country, physical, ethnographical and geological, that are given to all official visitors and journalists. These were followed by a collection of publications; special numbers of French magazines devoted to Indo-China and government papers on the contemporary economic and political situation. It was a highly intelligent and efficient method of presenting the French point of view, and I was mildly surprised to find that such a breadth of interests was taken for granted in the visitor.

Above all it was reassuring to gather that any aspects of this journey that might have savoured of the conducted tour looked like disappearing as soon as one was a reasonable distance from Saigon, to be replaced by the fickle and planless dispositions of fortune.

Ferry went with me to the office of the bus company that ran the service to Dalat. He was disappointed to find from the seating plan that all the best places had been sold. The choice seats were those that flanked the interior aisle, because, if the convoy happened to be attacked, you were protected in this position, to some slight measure, by the bodies of those who sat between you and the windows. I had a corner seat at the front of the bus, which afforded an excellent field of vision, accompanied, of course, with the maximum vulnerability on two sides.

Since I would have a few spare days in Saigon, Ferry had an attractive suggestion to put forward. On the following day, M. Pignon, the High Commissioner and foremost French personality in Indo-China, was to pay an official visit to the Pope of the Cao-Daïst religion, at his seat at Tay-Ninh, some fifty miles away. For this occasion, a strong military escort would be provided, and as it was a great opportunity to escape the boredom of life, hemmed-in in Saigon, anyone who could possibly do so would get themselves invited. For a journalist, it was only a matter of applying.

From Ferry’s description, Cao-Daïsm sounded extraordinary enough to merit investigation. There was a cathedral, he said, that looked like a fantasy from the brain of Disney, and all the faiths of the Orient had been ransacked to create the pompous ritual, which had been grafted on an organisation copied from the Roman Catholic Church. What was more to the point at the present time, was that the Cao-Daïsts had a formidable private army with which they controlled a portion of Cochin-China. The French tolerated them because they were anti-Viet-Minh, and therefore helped, in their way, to split up the nationalist front. There were also militant Buddhist and Catholic minorities among the Vietnamese, all of whom scrapped with each other as well as the Viet-Minh, but these lacked the florid exuberance – and the power – of the Cao Daïsts. Ferry thought that it might help in extracting the maximum benefit from the experience, if I spent a few hours reading the subject up. He, therefore, presented me, on behalf of his office, with a work entitled Histoire et Philosophie du Cao-Daïsme (Bouddhisme rénové, spiritisme Vietnamien, religion nouvelle en Eurasie), by a certain Gabriel Gobron, whose description as European representative of the faith, sounded, to my mind, a faintly commercial note. Gobron was also described as having ‘quitted his fleshly envelope of suffering in 1941’.

* * *

I returned to the hotel at about seven-thirty, switched on the enormous ceiling fan and went to open the window. The square below was brightly lit and the sky was still luminous with the aftermath of sunset. As I pushed open the window, there was a momentary, slight resistance, and a violent explosion thumped in my eardrums. Across the square an indolent wreath of smoke lifted from the café tables and dissolved. Two figures got up from a table, arms about one another’s shoulders and reeled away like drunkards who have decided to call it a night. Other patrons seemed to have dropped off to sleep with their heads on the tables, except for one, who stood up and went through a slow repertoire of calisthenics. A passer-by fell to his knees. Now, after several seconds, the evening strollers changed direction and from all quarters they began to move, without excitement, towards the café. I went down to see if there was anything to be done, but already the wounded were being tended in their cramped attitudes and the discipline of routine was taking charge. Waiters snatched the seemingly wine-stained cloths off the tables. A boy with a stiff broom and pail came out and began scrubbing at the spotted pavement. An officer, one hand bound up in a napkin, sat clicking imperiously for service with the fingers of the other. Within ten minutes every table was full again. This hand-grenade, one of eight reported to have been thrown that evening, caused fifteen casualties – a Saigon record to date. The mortar-fire in the suburbs did not start until after ten o’clock.

* * *

Before going to sleep, I set myself to the task of extracting the doctrinal kernel in Gobron’s book from its formidable husk of metaphysical jargon. I learned that Cao-Daïsm was officially founded in 1926, originating among one of the many groups of Cochin-Chinese spiritualists. The favoured congregation were informed, through the agency of an instrument known in English as the planchette, or in French as la Corbeille-à-bec – a platform-like device carrying a pencil upon which the hand is rested – that they were in touch with Li-taï-Pé sometimes known as the Chinese Homer, who, in the Tang Dynasty, after ‘the burning of the books’, re-established Chinese literature.

Li-taï-Pé began by announcing that he was the bearer of a most important message to mankind from the Lord of the Universe. He explained that he, Li-taï-Pé, in his capacity of minister to the Supreme Spirit had at various epochs and in different parts of the globe founded Confucianism, The Cult of the Ancestors, Christianity, Taoism and Buddhism. (In later messages Islam was added to this list.) The establishment of these religions, the Sage said – each of which took into consideration the customs and psychology of the races for which they were separately designed – took place at a time when the peoples of the world had little contact with each other owing to the deficient means of transport. In these days things were very different. The whole world had been explored and communications had reached a stage when any part of the globe was only a few days removed from any other part. The time had clearly come, through his intervention, to bring about an intelligent reorganisation, a syncretism of all these only superficially diverse creeds in a harmonious and cosmopolitan whole. The divinely inspired amalgam was to be called after the name Cao-Daï, by which the Founder of the Universe had stated that he now wished to be known.

At this early period the objects of the religion, as summarised by Li-taï-Pé, were ‘to combat heresy, to sow among the peoples the love of good and the practice of virtue, to learn to love justice and resignation, to reveal to men the posthumous consequences of the acts by which they assassinate their souls’. It seems later to have been realised that the combating of heresy was an anomaly in a religion aiming at a fusion of existing doctrines, and it was abandoned.

A calendar of saints, while in the process of formation, is still meagre. It includes Victor Hugo, Allan Kerdec, Joan of Arc, de la Rochefoucauld, St Bernard, St John the Baptist and the Jade Emperor. These frequently communicate by spiritualistic means with the Cao-Daïst leaders, giving their rulings on such important matters of ritual as the offering of votive papers on ancestral altars. It would seem that in oriental spiritualism a curious prestige attaches to ‘guides’ of Western origin, paralleled, of course, by the Indian chiefs, the Buddhist monks and the Chinese sages, that play so prominent a part in equivalent practices in Europe.

From the philosophical point of view, Cao-Daïsm seems to be encountering some difficulty in its efforts to reconcile such contradictory tenets as Original Sin and Redemption with the doctrine of the soul’s evolution through reincarnation. The prescribed rites are strongly oriental in character: regular prostrations before an altar, which must include ritual candlesticks, an incense burner, offerings of fruit and a painting showing an eye (the sign of the Cao-Daï) surrounded by clouds. Occidental converts are excused by the Pope from ritual prostrations, which ‘for the moment may be replaced by profound reverences’.

In Cochin-China it is a respected convention that all organised movements of persons shall start well before dawn. The intelligent intention behind this practice, which has been remarked upon by all travellers in the past, is to permit as much of the journey as possible to be covered in the coolest hours. What happens in practice, at least in these days, is that various members of the party cannot find transport to take them to the agreed place of assembly and have to be fetched; while others are not awakened by the hotel-boy, who may not have understood the arrangement, or may, on the other hand, be employing this means of passive resistance towards the hated European. In one way or another, the precious minutes of coolness are frittered away and it is dawn before one finally leaves Saigon. In this case further delays were introduced by the many security measures, the halts at roadblocks, the slow winding of the convoy round obstacles, the waiting for telephoned reports of conditions ahead from major defence-posts on the route. While we dawdled thus the sun bulged over the horizon, silhouetting with exaggerated picturesqueness a group of junks moored in some unsuspected canal. For a short time the effect of the heat was directional, as if an electric fire had been switched on in a cool room. But the air soon warmed up and within half an hour one might have been sitting in a London traffic block in a July day heat-wave.

The convoy was made up of about twenty civilian cars and was escorted by three armoured vehicles and several lorries carrying white-turbaned Algerians. The foreign visitors had been carefully separated. I rode in a Citroen and was in the charge of an English-speaking functionary, a Monsieur Beauvais, whose task it was, I gathered, to provide a running commentary of the trip, throwing in, occasionally, in accordance with the official line of the moment, a few words in praise of Cao-Daïsm. In this he was somewhat frustrated by a colleague sitting in the front seat, who, being unable to speak English and assuming that I did not understand French, contributed an explosion of disgust, salted with such expressions as merde and dégolasse, whenever he overheard a mention of the words Cao-Daï. However, even from the French point of view it did not really matter, as the official attitude was just then in the process of switching round once more. Beauvais, too, soon stopped worrying about his official job. What he was really interested in was English literature and in particular English civilisation as presented by John Galsworthy, which contrasted so nostalgically with the barbarous life of a government employee in Cochin-China.

As soon as the convoy was really under way it began to travel at high speed. Except where we were forced to slow down for roadblocks the Citroen was doing a steady sixty m.p.h. The deserted paddy-fields through which our road ran were the colour of putty and the sunshine reflected blearily from the muddy water. As we passed, congregations of egrets launched themselves into the air, rising straight up in a kind of leap, assisted with a few indolent wing-beats and then settling down uneasily in the same place again. There were distant villages, raised on hillocks above the water, and solitary villas – Mediterranean-looking, with their verandas and flaking stucco, except for the china lions in the garden, grinning at us absurdly, and the roof with its facetious dragon or sky-blue ceramic dolphins. Sometimes such houses had been burned out. There were no signs of human life. The populace had evidently received orders, as for the passage of the Son of Heaven, or of one of the Divine Emperors, to keep indoors. Sometimes, at what I suppose were considered danger points, lines of Vietnamese auxiliaries stood with their backs to the road, rifles at the ready. At short intervals we passed beneath the watchtowers; squat structures, made of small Roman-looking bricks, shaded with Provençal roofs, and surrounded with concentric palisades of sharpened bamboo staves. In theory, the whole length of the road can be swept by machine-gun fire from the towers, whose defenders are also supposed to patrol the surrounding area. These pigmy forts lent a rather pleasant accent, a faintly Tuscan flavour, to the flat monotony of the landscape.

After about thirty-five miles we entered Cao-Daï territory, in which, according to my official guide, complete tranquillity had been restored. His friend said something about bandits and rats, and spat out of the window. I asked why the towers were even closer together and why machine-gunners squatted behind their weapons which were pointed up every side-road. Monsieur Beauvais said there was no harm in making sure, sighed, and brought the subject back again to the amenities of upper-class, rural England.

Our first Cao-Daïst town was Trang-Bang, where a reception had been arranged. There seemed to be thousands of children. For miles around, the countryside must have been combed for them. They had been washed, dressed in their best and lined up beside the road, clutching in one hand their bunches of flowers of the six symbolical colours and giving the fascist salute with the other. The spontaneous acclamations were tremendous and the children, who all looked like jolly, china dolls, were, I am sure, enjoying themselves enormously, without having the faintest idea what it was all about. Monsieur Beauvais seemed much embarrassed by the fascist salute, from which his friend, however, derived grim pleasure.

* * *