Graham Greene in Vietnam

One of The Spectator's most illustrious contributors, Graham Greene, becomes a "voyeur of violence" during the struggle for Dien Bien Phu, Vietnam, 1954:

Before the attack
Graham Greene, 16 April, 1954
At the military airport at Hanoi at 7am to wait for a plane on the shuttle service to Dien Bien Phu, the great entrenched camp on the Laos border, which is meant to guard the road to Luang Prabang, the capital of Laos. There is daily fog over the camp which lies in a plain surrounded by Viet-held mountains. At 11am we got away. Among the passengers two photographers in camouflaged uniforms. They seem to me comparable to those men who go big game hunting with cameras alone.

I always have a sense of guilt when I am a civilian tourist in the regions of death: after all one does not visit a disaster except to give aid - one feels a voyeur of violence, as I felt during the attack two years ago on Phat Diem. There violence had already arrived: it was there in the burning market, the smashed houses, the long street empty for fear of snipers. It was very present in the canal so laden with bodies that they overlapped and a punt of parachutists stuck on a reef of them: and it came suddenly home on patrol when two shots killed a mother and child who found themselves between opposing forces. What panic had they felt? I felt a little of it myself when for a few moments I lost my companions and found myself stumbling between the Viet Minh and the Foreign Legion. I told myself that I hated war, and yet here I was back - an old voyeur at his tricks again.

Violence had not yet come to Dien Bien Phu, except in the smashed and bulldozed plain which three weeks ago had been a Thai village and a forest of trees and rice fields among the stilted houses. Giap's men were known to be all around, perhaps two divisions strong, and heavier artillery and anti-aircraft than they had yet emplyed were on the way. With coolie labour it was being brought down from the Chinese frontier. The French are waiting and hoping for an attack, the air is noisy with planes buliding up supplies, and primrose parachutes come wavering down like seeds of some wild plant on a windy day.

In the mess at lunch there was a big blonde woman over for the day to see whether the social services could be of assistance to the camp. Colonel de Castries (his neat dark histrionic features reminded me of Mr Ernest Milton in King John) teased her unmercifully. The time, he told her, had not yet come for sweets. He had 'autres objectifs'. She became angry and rather pitiful, this big woman with her desire to help among a lot of amused and uninterested men who did not want her feminine care.

The the Colonel in turn lost his temper with two of his brother officers who insisted on discussing Na-Sam, the strong defensive post in the north evacuated last year by the French. He said he would not have another word spoken about Na-Sam. Na-Sam had nothing to do with Dien Bien Phu. 'This is not a defensive post, this is a post from which to counterattack. I will not have Na-Sam mentioned in the mess.' His chief of staff hastily asked me if I had seen Claudel's Christophe Colombe when I was last in Paris.

Before dark fell the mortars tried out their range. The evening star came out to the noise of the shells. I had a sense of unreality. There the Viet Minh were, able to observe the arrival of every plane, every movement in the camp from the encircling hills. They knew our strength better than we knew their. We were like actors in an arena.

The French had so planned their defences that if the Viet attacked - and the most likely hours were between four and ten in the morning when the heavy morning fog began to lift - they would have to pass down between three small fortified hills that looked like sentries at the entrance to the plain. They would be enfiladed here, they would be enfiladed there, but I just couldn't believe that anything was ever going to happen.

Slept after an admirable dinner in a dug-out shared with the Intelligence officer.

January 6
Before lunch visited the camp of the Thai partisans. A delightful domestic scene. Up to the present day they had been allowed to keep their families with them. Small boys were playing in and out of the emplacements and dug-outs. A woman suckled her baby while her husband in a a steel helmet stood admiringly by; a small girl returned with green vegetables from market; a group of women gathered around a cooking pot. War, momentarily seemed charming and domestic, but if a shell were to fall here, how far worse than any man's war.

After the camp a Thai village outside the lines. The Thai women, from the moment they walk, wear the same elegant close-buttoned costume, the same hat like an elaborately folded napkin; in the same dress they toddle beside the mother and stumble as an old woman towards the grave. They have more open faces that the Vietnamese: in old age their features are almost European, so that you could easily mistake them for weather-worn Breton women in their national costume. In one village lived the mission priest in a hut that was chapel and dispensary as well as home. He had a long sharp nose and a long narrow beard and eyes full of amusement of life. One hand was bent and crooked - he had been tortured by the Japanese, and he carried also the scar of a Viet Minh wound. His business was not conversion, there were practically no Catholics among the Thais; he was there to serve the Mass for himself and to serve the Thais with medicine and friendship.

In the afternoon I caught a military plane back to Hanoi in time to wash and dine with an old friend. It was good to lie down and relax after dinner and smoke and talk as two years ago. His opium was the best I had smoked since I was in Hanoi last.