I said, “It seems to be empty: I’d better climb up and see.” The yellow flag with red stripes faded to orange showed that we were out of the territory of the Hoa-Haos and in the territory of the Vietnamese army.
Pyle said, “Don’t you think if we waited here a car might come?” “It might, but they might come first.” “Shall I go back and turn on the lights? For a signal.” “Good God, no. Let it be.” It was dark enough now to stumble, looking for the ladder. Something cracked under foot; I could imagine the sound travelling across the fields of paddy, listened to by whom? Pyle had lost his outline and was a blur at the side of the road. Darkness, when once it fell, fell like a stone. I said, “Stay there until I call.” I wondered whether the guard would have drawn up his ladder, but there it stood-though an enemy might climb it, it was their only way of escape. I began to mount. Il have read so often of people’s thoughts in the moment of fear: of God, or family, or a woman. I admire their control. I thought of nothing, not even of the trapdoor above me: I ceased, for those seconds to exist: I was fear taken neat. At the top of the ladder I banged my head because fear couldn’t count steps, hear, or see. Then my head came over the earth floor and nobody shot at me and fear seeped away.
A small oil lamp burned on the floor and two men crouched against the wall, watching me. One had a sten gun and one a rifle, but they were as scared as I’d been. They looked like schoolboys, but with the Vietnamese age drops suddenly like the sun-they are boys and then they are old men. I was glad that the colour of my skin and the shape of my eyes were a passport-they wouldn’t shoot now even from fear.
I came up out of the floor, talking to reassure them, telling them that my car was outside, that I had run out of petrol. Perhaps they had a little I could buy-somewhere: it didn’t seem likely as I Stared around. There was nothing in the little round room except a box of ammunition for the sten gun, a small wooden bed, and two packs hanging
on a nail. A couple of pans with the remains of rice and some wooden chopsticks showed they had been eating without much appetite.
“Just enough to get us to the next fort?” I asked. One of the men sitting against the wall-the one with the rifle-shook his head.
“If you can’t we’ll have to stay the night here.” “C’est defendu.” “Whoby?” “You are a civilian.”
“Nobody’s going to make me sit out there on the road and have my throat cut.” “Aren’t you French?”
Only one man had spoken. The other sat with his head turned sideways, watching the slit in the wall. He could have seen nothing but a postcard of sky: he seemed to be listening and I began to listen too. The silence became full of sound: noises you couldn’t put a name to-a crack, a creak, a rustle something like a cough, and a whisper. Then I heard Pyle: he must have come to the foot of the ladder. “You all right, Thomas?”
“Come up,” I called back. He began to climb the ladder and the silent soldier shifted his sten gun-I don’t believe he’d heard a word of what we’d said: it was an awkward, jumpy movement. I realised that fear had paralysed him. I rapped out at him like a sergeant-major, “Put that gun down!” and I used the kind of French obscenity I thought he would recognise. He obeyed me automatically. Pyle came lip into the room. I said, “We’ve been offered the safety of the tower till morning.”
“Fine,” Pyle said. His voice was a little puzzled. He said, “Oughtn’t one of those mugs to be on sentry?”
“They prefer not to be shot at. I wish you’d brought something stronger than lime-juice.”
“I guess I will next time,” Pyle said. “We’ve got a long night ahead.” Now that Pyle was with me, I didn’t hear the noises. Even the two soldiers seemed do have relaxed a little.
“What happens if the Viets attack them?” Pyle asked. “They’ll fire a shot and run. You read it every morning in the Extreme-Orient ‘A post south-west of Saigon was temporarily occupied last night by the Vietminh.’”
“It’s a bad prospect.”
“There are forty towers like this between us and Saigon. The chances always are that it’s the other chap who’s hurt.” “We could have done with those sandwiches,” Pyle said. “I do think one of them should keep a look-out.” “He’s afraid a bullet might look in.” Now that we too had settled on the floor, the Vietnamese relaxed a little. I felt some sympathy for them: if wasn’t an easy job for a couple of ill-trained men to sit up here night after night, never sure of when the Viets might creep up on the road through the fields of paddy. I said to Pyle, “Do you think they know they are fighting for Democracy? We ought to have York Harding here to explain it to them.” “You always laugh at York,” Pyle said.
“I laugh at anyone who spends so much time writing about what doesn’t exist—mental concepts.” “They exist for him. Haven’t you got any mental concepts? God, for instance?” “I’ve no reason to believe in a God. Do you?” “Yes. I’m a Unitarian.”
“How many hundred million Gods do people believe in? Why, even a Roman Catholic believes in quite a different God when he’s scared or happy or hungry.” “Maybe, if there is a God, he’d be so vast he’d look different to everyone.”
“Like the great Buddha in Bangkok,” I said. “You can’t see all of him at once. Anyway he keeps still.”
“I guess you’re just trying to be tough,” Pyle said. “There’s something you must believe in. Nobody can go on living without some belief.”
“Oh, I’m not a Berkeleian. I believe my back’s against this wall. I believe there’s a sten gun over there.” “I didn’t mean that.”
“I even believe what I report, which is more than most of your correspondents do.” “Cigarette?”
“I don’t smoke-except opium. Give one to the guards. We’d better stay friends with them.” Pyle got up and lit their cigarettes and came back. I said, “I wish cigarettes had a symbolic significance like salt.” “Don’t you trust them?”
“No French officer,” I said, “would care to spend the night alone with two scared guards in one of these towers. Why, even a platoon have been known to hand over their officers. Sometimes the Viets have a better success with a megaphone than a bazooka. I don’t blame them. They don’t believe in anything either. You and your like are trying to make a war with the help of people who just aren’t interested.”
“They don’t want Communism.”
“They want enough rice,” I said. “They don’t want to be shot at. They want one day to be much the same as another. They don’t want our white skins around telling them what they want.” “If Indo-China goes. . .”
“I know that record. Siam goes. Malaya goes. Indonesia goes. What does ‘go’ mean? If I believed in your God and another life, I’d bet my future harp against your golden crown that in five hundred years there may be no New
York or London, but they’ll be growing paddy in these fields, they’ll be carrying their produce to market on long poles wearing their pointed hats. The small boys will be sitting on the buffaloes. I like the buffaloes, they don’t like our smell, the smell or Europeans. And remember-from a buffalo’s point of view you are a European too.”
“They’ll be forced to believe what they are told, they won’t be allowed to think for themselves.”
“Thought’s a luxury. Do you think the peasant sits and thinks of God and Democracy when he gets inside his mud hut at night?”
“You talk as if the whole country were peasant. What about the educated? Are they going to be happy?”
“Oh no,” I said, “we’ve brought them up in our ideas. We’ve taught them dangerous games, and that’s why we are waiting here, hoping we don’t get our throats cut. We deserve to have them cut. I wish your friend York was here too. I wonder how he’d relish it.”
“York Harding’s a very courageous man. Why, in Korea. . “
“He wasn’t an enlisted man, was he? He had a return ticket. With a return ticket courage becomes an intellectual exercise, like a monk’s flagellation. How much can I stick? Those poor devils can’t catch a plane home. Hi,” I called to them, “what are your names?” I thought that knowledge somehow would bring them into the circle of our conversation. They didn’t answer: just lowered back at us behind the stumps of their cigarettes. “They think we are French,” I said.
“That’s just it,” Pyle said. “You shouldn’t be against York, you should be against the French. Their colonialism.” “Isms and ocracies. Give me facts. A rubber planter beats his labourer-all right, I’m against him. He hasn’t been instructed to do it by the Minister of the Colonies. In France I expect he’d beat his wife. I’ve seen a priest, so poor he hasn’t a change of trousers, working fifteen hours a day from hut to hut in a cholera epidemic, eating nothing but rice and salt fish, saying his Mass with an old cup-a wooden platter. I don’t believe in God and yet I’m for that priest. Why don’t you call that colonialism?”
“It is colonialism. York says it’s often the good administrators who make it hard to change a bad system.”
“Anyway the French are dying every day-that’s not a mental concept. They aren’t leading these people on with half-lies like your politicians-and ours. I’ve been in India, Pyle, and I know the harm liberals do. We haven’t a liberal party any more-liberalism’s infected all the other parties. We are all either liberal conservatives or liberal socialists: we all have a good conscience. I’d rather be an exploiter who fights for what he exploits, and dies with it. Look at the history of Burma. We go and invade the country: the local tribes support us: we are victorious: but like you Americans we weren’t colonialists in those days. Oh no, we made peace with the king and we handed him back his province and left our allies to be crucified and sawn in two. They were innocent. They thought we’d stay. But we were liberals and we didn’t want a bad conscience.” “That was a long time ago.”
“We shall do the same thing here. Encourage them and leave them with a little equipment and a toy industry.” “Toy industry?” “Your plastic.” “Oh yes, I see.”
“I don’t know what I’m talking politics for. They don’t interest me and I’m a reporter. I’m not engaged’”
“Aren’t you?” Pyle said.
“For the sake of an argument-to pass this bloody night, that’s all. I don’t take sides. I’ll be still reporting, whoever Wins.””
“If they win, you’ll be reporting lies.” “There’s usually a way round, and I haven’t noticed much regard for truth in our papers either.” I think the fact of our sitting there talking encouraged
the two soldiers: perhaps they thought the sound of our white voices-for voices have a colour too, yellow voices sing and black voices gargle, while ours just speak-would give an impression of numbers and keep the Viets away. They picked up their pans and began to eat again, scraping with their chopsticks, eyes watching Pyle and me over the rim of the pan.
“So you think we’ve lost?”
“That’s not the point,” I said. “I’ve no particular desire to see you win. I’d like those two poor buggers there to be happy-that’s all. I wish they didn’t have to sit in the dark at night scared.” “You have to fight for liberty.”
“I haven’t seen any Americans fighting around here. And as for liberty, I don’t know what it means. Ask them.” I called across the floor in French to them. “La Liberte- qu’est-ce que c’est la liberte?” They sucked in the rice and stared back and said nothing.
Pyle said, “Do you want everybody to be made in the same mould? You’re arguing for the sake of arguing. You’re an intellectual. You stand for the importance of the individual as much as I do-or York.”
“Why have we only just discovered it?” I said. “Forty years ago no one talked that way.”
“It wasn’t threatened then.” “Ours wasn’t threatened, oh no, but who cared about the individuality of the man in the paddy field-and who does now? The only man to treat him as a man is the political commissar. He’ll sit in his hut and ask his name and listen to his complaints; he’ll give up an hour a day to teaching him-it doesn’t matter what, he’s being treated like a man, like someone of value. Don’t go on in the East with that parrot cry about a threat to the individual soul. Here you’d find yourself on the wrong side-it’s they who stand for the individual and we just stand for Private 23987, unit in the global strategy.”
“You don’t mean half what you are saying,” Pyle said uneasily.
“Probably three quarters. I’ve been here a long time. You know, it’s lucky I’m not engage, there are things I might be tempted to do-because here in the East-well, I don’t like Ike. I like-well, these two. This is their country. What’s the time? My watch has stopped.” “It’s turned eight-thirty.” “Ten hours and we can move.”
“It’s going to be quite chilly,” Pyle said and shivered. “I never expected that.”
“There’s water all round. I’ve got a blanket in the car. That will be enough.” “Is it safe?” “It’s early for the Viets.” “Let me go.” “I’m more used to the dark.”