"Forgive me for taking Miss Phuong from you," Pyle's said.
"Oh. I'm no dancer, but I like watching her dance." One always spoke of her like that in the third person as though she were not there. Sometimes she seemed invisible like peace. The first cabaret* of the evening began: a singer, a jug-gler, a comedian-he was very obscene, but when I looked at Pyle he obviously couldn't follow the argot. He smiled when Phuong smiled and laughed uneasily when I laughed. "I wonder where Granger is now," I said, and Pyle looked at me reproachfully.
Then came the turn of the evening:* a troupe of female impersonators. I had seen many of them during the day in the rue Catinat walking up and down, in old slacks and sweaters, a bit blue about the chin, swaying their hips. Now in low-cut evening dresses, with false jewellery and false breasts and husky voices, they appeared at least as desirable as most of the European women in Saigon. A group of young Air Force officers whistled to them and they smiled glamorously back. I was astonished by the sudden violence of Pyle's protest. "Fowler," he said, "let's go. We've had enough, haven't we? This isn't a bit suitable for her."
CHAPTER IV
From the bell tower of the Cathedral, the battle was only picturesque, fixed like a panorama of the Boer War* in an old Illustrated London News. An aeroplane was pa-rachuting supplies to an isolated post in the calcaire* those strange weather-eroded mountains on the Annam* border that look like piles of pumice, and because it always returned to the same place for its glide, it might never have moved, and the parachute was always there in the same spot, half-way to earth. From the plain the mortar-bursts rose unchangingly, the smoke as solid as stone, and in the market the flames burnt palely in the sunlight. The tiny figures of the parachutists moved in single file along the canals, but at this height they appeared stationary. Even the priest who sat in a corner of the tower never changed his position as he read in his breviary.* The war was very tidy and clean at that distance.
I had come in before dawn in a landing-craft from Nam Dinh. We couldn't land at the naval station because it was cut off by the enemy who completely surrounded the town at a range of six hundred yards, so the boat ran in beside the flaming market. We were an easy target in the light of the flames, but for some reason no one fired. Everything was quiet, except for the flop and crackle of the burning stalls. I could hear a Senegalese sentry* on the river's edge shift his stance.*
I had known Phat Diem well in the days before the attack-the one long narrow street of wooden stalls, cut up every hundred yards by a canal, a church and a bridge. At night it had been lit only by candles or small oil lamps (there was no electricity in Phat Diem except in the French officers' quarters), and day or night the street was packed and noisy. In its strange medieval way, under the shadow and protection of the Prince Bishop,* it had been the most living town in all the country, and now when I landed and walked up to the officers' quarters it was the most dead. Rubble and broken glass and the smell of burnt paint and plaster, the long street empty as far as the sight could reach, reminded me of a London thoroughfare in the early morn-after an all-clear: one expected to see a placard, "Un-exploded Bomb."
The front wall of the officers' house had been blown out, and the houses across the street were in ruins. Coming down the river from Nam Dinh I had learnt from Lieutenant Peraud what had happened. He was a serious young man, Freemason, and to him it was like a judgement on the supstitions of his fellows. The Bishop of Phat Diem had once visited Europe and acquired there adevotion to Our Lady of Fatima-that vision of the Virgin which appeared, so Roman Catholics believe, to a group of children inPortugal.When he came home, he built a grollO in her honour in the Cathedral precincts, and he celebrated her feast day every year with a procession. Relations with the colonel in charge of the French and Vietnamese troops* had always been strained since the day when the authorities had dis-lfiaed the Bishop's private army.* This year the colonel-who had some sympathy with the Bishop, for to each of them his country was more important than Catholicism-made a gesture of amity and walked with his senior officers in the front of the procession. Never had agreater crowd gathered in Phat Diem to do honour to Our Lady of Fatima. Even many of the Buddhists-who formed about half the population-could not bear to miss the fun, and those who had belief in neither God believed that somehow all these banners and incense-burners and the golden monstrance would keep war from their homes. All that was left of tbe
Bishop's army-fais brass band-led the procession, and the French officers, pious by order of the colonel, followed like choirrboys through the gateway into the Cathedral precincts, past the white statue of the Sacred Heart* that stood on an island in the little lake before the Cathedral, under the bell tower with spreading oriental wings and into the carved wooden cathedral with its gigantic pillars formed out of single trees and the scarlet lacquer work of the altar, more Buddhist than Christian. From all the villages between the canals, from that Low Country landscape where young green rice-shoots and golden harvests take the place of tulips and churches of windmills, the people poured in. Nobody noticed the Vietminh agents who had joined the procession too, and that night as the main Communist battalion moved through the passes in the calcaire, into the Tonkin plain, watched helplessly by the French outpost in the mountains above, the advance agents struck in Phat Diem.
Now after four days, with the help of parachutists, the enemy had been pushed back half a mile around the town. This was a defeat: no journalists were allowed, no cables could be sent, for the papers must carry only victories. The authorities would have stopped me in Hanoi if they had known of my purpose, but the further you get from headquarters, the looser becomes the control until, when you come within range of the enemy's fire, you are a welcome guest--what has been a menace for the Etat Major* in Hanoi, a worry for the full colonel in Nam Dinh, to the lieutenant in the field is a joke, a distraction, a mark of interest from the outer world, so that for a few blessed hours he can dramatise himself a little and see in a false heroic light even his own wounded and dead. The priest shut his breviary and said, "Well, that's finished." He was a European, but not a Frenchman, for the Bishop would not have tolerated a French priest in his dio-ces.* He said apologetically, "I have to come up here, you understand, for a bit of quiet from all those poor people." The sound of the mortar-fire seemed to be closing in, or perhaps it was the enemy at last replying. The strange difficulty was to find them: there were a dozen narrow fronts,
and between the canals, among the farm buildings and the paddy fields, innumerable opportunities for ambush. Immediately below us stood, sat and lay the whole pop-ulation of Phat Diem. Catholics, Buddhists, pagans, they had all packed their most valued possessions--a cooking-stove, a lamp, a mirror, a wardrobe, some mats, a holy picture--and moved into the Cathedral precincts. Here in the north it would be bitterly cold when darkness came, and already the Cathedral was fulclass="underline" there was no more shelter; even on the stairs to the bell-tower every step was occupied, and all the time more people crowded through the gates, carrying their babies and household goods. They believed, whatever their religion, that here they would be safe. While we watched, a young man with a rifle in Vietnamese uni-form pushed his way through: he was stopped by a priest, who took his rifle from him. The father at my side said in explanation, "We are neutral here. This is God's terri-tory." I thought. It's a strange poor population God has in his kingdom, frightened, cold, starving ("I don't know how we are going to feed these people," the priest told me): you'd think a great King would do better than that.' But then I thought. It's always the same wherever one goes-it's not the most powerful rulers who have the happiest populations.' • Little shops had already been set up below. I said, "It's like an enormous fair, isn't it, but without one smiling face." The priest said, "They were terribly cold last night. We