Free Tsing-Boum by Nicolas Freeling Page A

men would be responsible.
    It had stopped raining but the wind still tore harsh andimplacable through streets overhung by inky ragged cloud which parted now and again to show a livid moon, three-quarters full, waning. This was Holland, not the jungle. He was not a paratroop lieutenant, but a colonel, an administrator. He limped and carried a stick, like Castries. The commission of inquiry held to inquire into the catastrophe had been flabbergasted to learn that Langlais, a mere lieutenant-colonel with no field training, had been the sole responsible field commander of the French garrison, and that Bigeard, a lowly major commanding a parachute battalion, had been his ‘operations’ second.
    â€˜What was then the function of Colonel de Castries?’ asked a puzzled general.
    â€˜He transmitted our messages to Hanoi,’ replied Langlais, simply.
    Van der Valk had better be careful. He had been parachuted into a wasps’ nest, a
merdier
, and he must be as careful of his career as of his skin! Avoid massacre, boy. Perhaps he was like Gilles, the paratroop general who was the first commander of Dien Bien Phu, Papa Gilles of the bad heart and the glass eye, who made his first jump at forty and who had seen what was waiting, wise old man, and grumbled to Cogny ‘Get me out of here – I have lived long enough like a rat’. It would be wiser to be Gilles than to be Castries the cavalryman, swaggering
sabreur
, champion at jumping horses, bedding the girls and charging the enemy, who left his career for ever as the transmitter of messages to Hanoi.
    So Esther was mixed up with this legend, this traumatic disaster that had bewitched the course of events in Algeria as well as in Vietnam, whose echoes had not ceased rumbling round the world. They had lost Beatrice, Gabrielle, Anne-Marie and Dominique with hardly a fight, and it had been too late for the incredible courage shown on Huguette and the Elianes. Van der Valk walked steadily through the harsh streets. Like all great catastrophes this one was encrusted with myth, that nobody could now disentangle. Tenacious, however stupid. The myth, for example, that the
pitons
of Dien Bien Phu had been named after Colonel de Castries’s mistresses. Why, the original dropping zones for the first paratroop strikehad had girls’ names, long before Castries took over. Bigeard and Gilles had landed on Natasha. He – he had landed on Esther! A Dutch peasant, son of an Amsterdam carpenter. Well, Langlais had been a Breton peasant, Bigeard son of a Toul railwayman, and the nobleman had been Christian Marie Ferdinand de la Croix de Castries, a family of dukes, great seigneurs, Marshals of France. No; he had been parachuted in, and he would stand and fight, and if he lost his career there was the little cottage waiting, in the forest, in France.
    Had Ruth’s father been at Dien Bien Phu? There had been everything there – it was another legend (sedulously fostered by the Dutch) that the defenders had all been ex-Waffen SS Légionnaires of German blood. Well, of course there had been Legion units; they had occupied Beatrice and Isabelle. Now that he thought of it, the unit on Beatrice had been the Third Thirteenth – the very same that wore Ruth’s badge. Did it have a meaning? There had been Germans of course – far too young, naturally, to have been in any SS – and Spaniards, and Jugoslavs! And French officers, and Russians, and lord-knew-who else …
    One part of the crossword was solved. Esther had been involved with troops that had fought at Dien Bien Phu – those troops who formed a freemasonry. Whatever happened, even now years later, soldiers who had been at this Vietnamese Agincourt which they had not won – but neither had they lost – knew, recognized and supported one another. And he rather thought that his telephone call from France had less to do with the Secret Army than with that magic bond, the private