French book review – The Centurions by Jean Lartéguy

A Digital Postcard From The South Of France

This book describes a battalion of French paratroopers captured at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 during the First Indochina War, the prelude to the Vietnam War. Originally published in 1960, we meet our heroes as they are captured by the Viet Minh and marched to Camp One, to spend four years in captivity.  

The Centurions has three parts: the paratroopers Dien Bien Phu defeat and captivity, their liberation and return to France, and their new assignment in Algeria.

I enjoyed all three parts. Often, the saggy middle of a book sends you to the fridge door, where you try to justify another dessert. Not here. This was a white knuckled ride and as un-put-downable as they come. Unusual in a 500-page book—this pace is normally reserved for 200 pages.

Upon capture, I expected the paratroopers to face ill-treatment and torture. However, President Ho had a policy of ‘leniency’ against the imperialist invaders. They were not to be beaten. Instead, the paratroopers were to receive the same rations as the Viet Minh and be re-educated “by means of manual labour, which will enable you to emend your bourgeois education and redeem your life of idleness.” In other words, the prisoners would be worked to death.

The book was made into a film starring Anthony Quinn.

When one wonders how the Vietnamese won the war against the French, the Americans, and the West, the following passage from a Viet Minh soldier explains not an absolute resolve (that’s a choice) but a terrifying indoctrination at the limit of endurance:

So as to avoid being encircled, we often used to march for twenty-five nights at a stretch and our only food was a bowl of rice, a few wild herbs and, occasionally, a little dried fish. In the end I felt my body was a machine which moved, stopped, started up again of its own accord and I myself was outside it, half dreaming, half asleep…

Perhaps the most interesting part of The Centurions is how the incarcerated paratroopers were able to turn the Viet Minh’s brainwashing against them. The character of Yves Marindelle manages to convince his captors that he has capitulated to their communist ideology, thus earning extra privileges and food. This psychological jujitsu gave the prisoners great strength as they now had one over their captors.

The book is famous among modern soldiers as the counter insurgency handbook. The French learned a hard lesson at Dien Bien Phu: they could not fight an orthodox war but must adopt the guerilla warfare of the Vietnamese. The paratroopers take the lessons of Dien Bien Phu and Camp One and apply these with brutal efficiency in the last section of the book to contain the anti-colonialist uprising in Algeria.

---

What I’m reading: I’ve just finished Limonov by Emmanuel Carrère. I’m about to start The Praetorians the sequel to The Centurions.