Free Tsing-Boum by Nicolas Freeling

tomorrow morning, and the telegram was signed DST.
    And Arlette has proposed adopting Esther’s child. Knowing her, she will now be more determined than ever.
    â€˜Arlette.’
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜I have understood some things.’
    â€˜In that case,’ with a sideways smile, ‘I can go to bed.’
    â€˜But I think we’d better reconsider this business with the child.
Que Zomerlust se débrouille, non?’
    â€˜By no means,’ said Arlette standing up – there, he had known it! – ‘If Zomerlust is agreeable, and I gather he is, I keep Ruth. Say it’s my bit for the war effort.’
    â€˜We don’t know who her father is.’ He could see flame run through her, see her opening her mouth to say ‘He could be General Salan for all I care’ but all she said, mildly, was, ‘Perfectly true, we don’t.’
    â€˜Very well, then that’s settled.’
    â€˜By the way, I don’t suppose that badge means anything to you?’
    â€˜Badge?’
    â€˜On Ruth’s beret.’ He looked at her, and went and got the beret to look at more closely. A blue cross of Lorraine, on a grenade.
    â€˜Isn’t the grenade the Legion?’
    â€˜It is. Specifically, it is the badge of the Thirteenth Half-Brigade – the same unit that was at Bir Hakeim.’
    â€˜Oh.’
    â€˜You weren’t to know. You weren’t brought up in Toulon. Are you coming to bed?’
    â€˜Not for a little while.’
    â€˜You’ll forgive me if I go to sleep?’
    â€˜Of course. Goodnight – and don’t worry.’ He heard her go upstairs. Now what was the meaning of the Bee Dee – no, the Dee Bee Pee? It sounded like I came – I saw – I conquered.
    Di Bi Pi. Sounded like Vietnamese. Could it be a person – ora place – in Indochina? But the man had said it was English. When he saw it, suddenly, it was so ludicrously simple he could have kicked himself. Of course, the English alphabet: it went Ay Bee Cee. Translate into French and you got Day Bay Pay – Dien Bien Phu.
    He went and looked in the cupboard and found that there was a bottle of whisky. Bravo Arlette – twice. He poured out a large glass and went for a hunt in the bookshelves. The plastic binding of
The Battle of Dien Bien Phu
was broken, and large blocks of brownish cheap print were falling out, covered with annotations in Arlette’s handwriting. Tucked in were a lot of newspaper clippings and photographs. On the flyleaf was Arlette’s maiden name. He understood – it had not been the woman married to a Dutch police officer who had read this book. It had been the little girl from Toulon.
    A sad tale, this tale of political hedging, of halfhearted indecision and compromise. Of military vanity and obstinacy. Who had spoken for the world? Not Eisenhower or Congress. Not Churchill. Giap had had the last word; nothing new under the sun.
    Yet the tale had nobility too, that of sacrifice and beauty and catastrophe. The suffering on the hillocks named Huguette and Eliane balanced the suffering on the hills, where the People’s Army had hauled artillery by manpower.
    Halfway through he could read no further, even helped by whisky. He glanced at the photographs; there were all the star actors, so vividly contrasted – Giap and Navarre. And the colonels – the courtly mannered Castries and those two harsh-handed, hard-mouthed peasant noblemen, Langlais and Bigeard.
    Arlette had fallen asleep with the light still on, a thing only a woman can do. A man could never fall asleep with the light on; wryly he realised that his own light was turned on: so be it, he would not sleep. He got his jacket, and a beret; he was limping from fatigue and he got his stick, and hobbled out on to the silent streets of two in the morning in a provincial town. One hundred thousand persons, an area for which a paratroop lieutenant with under a hundred