The Centurions by Jean Lartéguy Page A

friendship—which isn’t easy—and you’ll find that he’s intelligent, sensitive, extremely cultured . . . but he doesn’t like to show it.”
    Lieutenant Mahmoudi had shut his eyes and was dreaming of his homeland, of the arid soil, the grey stones, the pungent smells of the Sahara, of the sheep cooked whole on a spit, of the hand that is dipped into the animal’s insides and withdrawn dripping with spicy grease. In the deep blue night a shepherd boy was playing a poignant and monotonous melody on a shrill reed pipe. Somewhere in the distance a jackal howled.
    â€œIt’s very decent of the Vietminh, don’t you think?” Captain Lacombe asked him. “They might have taken it out on us for Esclavier’s escape and put him in solitary confinement . . .”
    â€œCaptain Esclavier is the sort of man we admire in my country, even if we do have to fight him some day.”
    And Mahmoudi recalled a proverb of the black tents: “The courage of your enemy does you honour.” But Esclavier was not his enemy . . . not yet . . .
    As he entered the hut, Esclavier declared that he felt hungry, that his escapade and his little session of self-examination had sharpened his appetite. Without another word he took a tin of baked beans out of Lacombe’s haversack, opened it and fell to.
    He offered the tin to Glatigny:
    â€œHave some?”
    Lacombe felt powerless, he was on the point of tears. It was his very life this savage was devouring in his great champing jaws. Everyone else laughed, even Mahmoudi whose face glistened with cruel delight.
    Then Esclavier went and lay down on his bunk in front of the fire.

3
LIEUTENANT PINIÈRES’S REMORSE
    In the afternoon of the 15 th of May, during the course of an “Instruction Period,” the man whom Esclavier called “The Voice” notified the prisoners that they would be leaving next morning for Camp One. They were split up into four groups, the first being made up of the senior officers and the wounded. The stores and equipment—some huge rice urns attached to bamboo poles, a few picks and shovels—were distributed among the junior officers of the three remaining groups. They were also given a three-day ration of rice. But since they had no sacks to carry it in, a number of them sacrificed their trousers which were transformed into sacks by tying the ends of the legs together.
    Lacombe wanted them to get rid of the madman and send him on with the first group. But he came up against violent opposition not only from Esclavier and Glatigny but from all the rest. They clung to Lescure as to a sort of fetish; they looked after him, took good care of him and forced him to eat his rice, thus forgetting their own wretchedness.
    Lescure’s cry of “Chickens! Ducks!” had become a rallying signal; in their own minds it no longer applied to code names for mortar shells, but to actual chickens and ducks which they hoped to scrounge in the process of moving camp.
    â€œFor a prisoner, everything is justified,” Esclavier had declared, “stealing, lying . . . From the moment they deprive him of his freedom he is given every right.”
    Boisfeuras had asked him:
    â€œAnd what if a régime, a political ideology deprived the whole world of its freedom?”
    â€œThen there are no holds barred.”
    Each team was to elect a leader. Glatigny proposed the “victualling officer” Lacombe. He had made himself his campaign manager.
    â€œLacombe has all the necessary qualifications,” he explained. “He’s sly. He knows how to fend for himself and provides for the future . . . Look at those six tins of beans . . .”
    Pinières, the former maquisard, had cottoned on at once:
    â€œHe’s got the ugly face of a quisling, too. He’ll play the part of Laval with the Viets . . . and we’ll be