The Centurions Read Online Free Page A

escape?”
    â€œI haven’t been captured yet; nor have you. But after tomorrow we’ll both be prisoners . . . or corpses; it’s all in the game.”
    â€œYou could join the guerrillas who are around Dien-Bien-Phu.”
    â€œThere are no guerrillas around Dien-Bien-Phu, or if there are they’re hand in glove with the Viets. There again we failed, like everywhere else . . . because we didn’t wage the right sort of war.”
    â€œI was still with the C.-in-C. a month ago. He didn’t keep anything hidden from me. I took part in the formation of all those bands, and I never heard about any on the Chinese border.”
    â€œThey didn’t always keep to the border; occasionally they even went across into China. I took my orders direct from Paris, from a service attached to the Présidence du Conseil. No one knew of my existence; like that I could always be disowned if anything happened.”
    â€œIf we’re taken prisoner you’re liable to get it in the neck from the Viets.”
    â€œThey don’t know anything about me. I was operating against the Chinese, not against the Viets. My war, if you like, was less localized than yours. Whether in the West, the East or the Far East, Communism forms a whole, and it’s childish to think that by attacking one of the members of this community you can localize the conflict. A few men in Paris had realized this.”
    â€œYou don’t know me from Adam yet you seem to be trusting me already to the extent of telling me things that I might have preferred not to know.”
    â€œWe’re going to have to live together, Captain de Glatigny, maybe for a long time. I liked your attitude when you learned that it was all up with Dien-Bien-Phu and left the C.-in-C., a man of your class and your tradition, to get yourself dropped here.
    â€œI interpreted that attitude in a sense which perhaps you had never intended. In my eyes, you had abandoned the moribund establishment to rejoin the soldiers and the common herd, those who do the actual fighting, the foundation-stone of any army.”
    That was how Glatigny made the acquaintance of Boisfeuras who now lay a few feet away from him, a prisoner like himself.
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    During the night Boisfeuras shifted closer to Glatigny.
    â€œThe age of heroics is over,” he said, “at least the age of cinema heroics. The new armies will have neither regimental standards nor military bands. They will have to be first and foremost efficient. That’s what we’re going to learn and that’s the reason I didn’t try and escape.”
    He held his two hands out to Glatigny, and the latter saw that he had slipped out of his fetters. But he had no reaction; he was even rather bored by Boisfeuras. Everything came to him from a great distance, like an echo.
    Glatigny was lying like a gun dog, his jutting shoulder bearing the weight of his body.
    The crests of the mountains surrounding the basin stood out clearly against the dark background of the night. Clouds drifted across the sky and from time to time the close or distant sound of an aircraft could be heard in the silence.
    He felt no particular urge other than a very remote and very vague desire for warmth. His physical exhaustion was such that he had the impression of being withdrawn from the world, pushed beyond his limits and enabled to contemplate himself from outside. Perhaps this was what Le-Thuong meant by Nirvana.
    At Saigon the Buddhist monk Le-Thuong had tried to initiate him into the mysteries of fasting.
    â€œThe first few days,” he had told him, “you think of nothing but food. However fervent your prayers and your longing for union with God, all your spiritual exercises, all your meditations are tainted by material desires. The liberation of the mind occurs between the eighth and the tenth day. In a few hours it detaches itself from the body. Independent of