JANUARY 8: At 9:50 I took a plane from Hanoi to Nam Dinh. Here, two years ago, I had stayed with Colonel Sezaire. From here I had slipped into burning besieged Phat Diem in a French landing craft carrying an officer named Vandenburg and his black clothed Commando of ex-Viet Minh prisoners—Vandenburg with his animal face and dangling hangman’s hands (a few weeks later he was murdered by his own Commando before they deserted). Nothing in the delta ever seems to change—not even the gunfire.
I was on my way to Bui Chu, the Annamite bishopric on the edge of Phat Diem—the first region to be handed over by the French to the Viet Nam forces, a premature decision for two battalions deserted to the enemy with their new American weapons and the French had temporarily to return to clean up the mess.
Some hours had to be passed before my plane to Bui Chu and these I spent with a French colonel who took me to a performance of “Le Cid” in French, given by the equivalent of ENSA to the students and teachers of the Nam Dinh schools. It was not such an odd choice as might appear, for the Vietnamese theater too is heroic and the costumes were less alien to the Vietnamese idea of theater than contemporary ones would have been. All the same there was a continuous ripple of laughter—perhaps some of it was caused by the dialogue which it is difficult for even an Englishman to appreciate (honneur and gloire sounding regularly like the tolling of a bell), but probably more was caused by the presence of real women on the stage (as unknown in the Eastern theater as it was in Elizabethan England) and by the abrupt and exaggerated changes of gesture and tone. When a man actually knelt at a woman’s feet the laughter rose higher than ever.
At 3:50 I caught my plane on to Bui Chu—ten minutes by plane but six hours by road if the road had been open, because of the loops of the Red River. The Bishop of Bui Chu was a very different character from the neighboring Bishop of Phat Diem, younger, with a greater knowledge of the world outside than the former Trappist monk. The Bishop of Phat Diem was only interested in building more and more churches (for which he hadn’t the priests): the conditions of the market, the lack of a hospital—this meant little to him, and he was interested in education only in so far as it produced priests. I did not find him a vain man, but his position was that of a medieval bishop—the temporal ruler of his diocese. When he drove in his jeep down the long narrow street of Phat Diem, his fingers raised in benediction, impassive as a statue, he reminded me of an ancient mural, in which only the significant lines have escaped the destruction of time, the raised fingers, the tassel on the episcopal hat. The Bishop of Bui Chu belonged to our day and world—and our day and world includes the pockmark of bullets on the seminary wall which the Viet Minh attacked in June. They broke in at night and carried away four priests (two of them Belgian whom I remembered meeting in 1952 and with whom I discussed English literature). They fired too into the sisters’ chapel and killed four sisters—one falling dead under the statue of Our Lady (the wall still bore the mark of the bullets).
The guns rumbled across the fields of rice in the soft gold evening light. An old priest said to me, “After that I began to learn French.”
There is a terrible squalor about war in these days: men emerging from holes, bearded, dirty, wearing the chevrons of their rank wherever is most convenient, the little forgotten hospitals like those of Bui Chu, served by a few priests and sisters, without enough bandages; the wounded women, the men with their feet gashed on the bamboo points of the Viet Minh defenses. Four wounded had come in today and two had died. It was part of the day’s work, but there was no clean room for doctor and nurse to retire to, no bath, no easy chair, no change from the smell of wounds.
One of the priests, a young man with a squint, pale gums and several gold teeth took me to his room and gave me tiny glasses of sweet altar wine. He had been learning English from one of the Belgian fathers who was kidnapped and he was anxious to practice. He was suffering, he said, from “faiblesse générale” and could do little work. He was my constant companion for two days, giggling and trying to copy my English pronunciation, carrying on his lessons up to the last possible moment, in the jeep on the landing ground.
JANUARY 9: Mass in the cathedral at 6:45 after being woken by gunfire before daybreak. It was strange and moving, in the big cathedral, to be the only European. The grace of the Annamite priest and his vestments, everything the same and yet all the faces so different. The Church seemed to give a model for the politicians—Christianity can survive without Europe. Why not trust the people?
After Mass I was pulled away before I could get my breakfast by two priests who wished to be given a small lesson in English.
During the morning visited the refugee camp—six hundred people who had been evacuated from the villages captured in June by the Viet Minh. In one hut were five families separated by hangings. In one tiny compartment hung a picture of Our Lady, with a bleeding heart, and Bao Dai.
The commandant in charge of the troops in the Bui Chu area. A Vietnamese with a tough sympathetic face, full of confidence, a Buddhist. Under his leadership to all intents Bui Chu was independent. Only one French artillery post remained, otherwise not only the troops but the church was Vietnamian. Could they fight? To answer that question they brought me to the fortified village of Thui-nai.
One approached it by a jeep along the narrow causeways between the canals. The Commandant thought of sending ahead of us a mine-detecting patrol, and a few minutes before we arrived, they found a mine, enclosed in a wooden box with a piece of wood over the detonator to try to make it undetectable. A mine of Chinese manufacture with the instructions printed in Chinese. Why is it one is not more thankful for life? The commander of the patrol went later to the Bishop’s residence to receive his thanks for saving the life of his guest, but it is to difficult to thank God with any sincerity for this gift of life.
The fortified village of Thui-nai was the most impressive thing I have seen in the Indochina war. Here was a popular Dienbienphu made with the spades and pickaxes of local men: a maze of mud walls and firing emplacements that extended right into the church itself, mud ramps standing in the aisle for the last stand. Since August the village with no aid from proper troops had beaten off nine night attacks by the Viet Mirth, the last on December 30. Everyone who could walk was in the militia. The church was gay with yellow Viet Nam flags and in the square for my inspection in orderly ranks stood the whole village: small girls of twelve carded knives and wore hand-grenades in their belts. One home-made mortar, a Bren gun, a few Stens—for the rest they had to fight with old rifles and knives and grenades—there were plenty of these. The commandant was young, smart, imaginative. He had organized his own information office: the village Roll of Honor, charts of organization, photographs. As we sat with him at tea, the squinting priest said to me, “He is a commandant without rank or pay, who eats his mother’s rice in return for fighting his father’s enemies.” If all villages were as homogeneous as this and as well organized there would be no problem in the delta, but here was the enormous advantage that every soul in the village was Catholic. They felt a personal threat.
I think that the loss of the two battalions had been good for Bui Chu. It brought the threat home and killed complacency. Catholicism had not been enough. Now they were being encouraged again. The commandant of the Forty-sixth Viet Mirth Regiment had come in the day before to surrender, carrying with him plans for the capture of Bui Chu. He was surprised to find himself received by a Viet Nam commandant and a Viet Nam captain (a young intelligence officer with a kind of fanatical smartness who had once been a Franciscan). The major was following one of his own captains who had surrendered three weeks before. Both men were Communists—not nationalists caught up in the Viet Minh camp and disillusioned. Something was badly wrong with the Forty-sixth Regiment, and nobody knew what. Had these men offended the political commissars attached to each battalion? We are too apt to forget the strain in the enemy’s camp, seeing only our own tensions and doubts.
After lunch I flew round the Bui Chu defenses in a Morain plane piloted by a young medical student called up from Hanoi University. Only one post of artillery flew a French flag with the Vietnamese—a bird’s eye view of independence. When I returned the Bishop put his head into my room and asked whether I would like “a small promenade.” The promenade turned out to be the consecration of a new church in a village which had become entirely Catholic a year ago. As the Bishop moved around the walls scattering holy water, while the guns grumbled like an aching tooth, one was aware that the political or material motive here for becoming Catholic was very small.
After that, tea with the Chef de Provence, and the awful tiredness that comes from hospitality—the strain of politeness and friendliness in the absence of companionship. Then one longs most to be with the people one loves, the people with whom it is possible to be silent.
JANUARY 10: The conversions certainly go on. Before Mass this morning in the Bishop’s chapel there were fifteen baptisms, thirteen of them in one family. It was the patronal feast and a Mass more gay than any I have seen outside Vienna. The Bishop was robed to the music of violins, gay tinkly music like an eighteenth century gavotte. The altar boys carried the vestments with a ballet grace: even the candles on the altar seemed to dance. One was worlds away from the dull bourgeois Masses of France and England, the best clothes and the beadle and the joyless faces and the gregorian chants. This was a Mass to be enjoyed, and why not? The sacrament is too serious for us to compete in seriousness. Under the enormous shadow of the cross it is better to be gay.
Later the school children performed a long heroic play in verse as incomprehensible to me as the Cid had been to the Vietnamese, and then there was a banquet for all the priests and schoolmasters and officers. I had to leave in the middle of it to catch my plane back to Hanoi, and the squinting priest went with me, learning English to the last.
