Strix
And We Are For The Dark
FOR fifty-seven days in the spring of 1954 the eyes of the world were focused on Dien Bien Phu. This was a place where, for somewhat inscrutable reasons, the French High Command had established what Wingate used to call a stronghold. The main position was an elaborate, oblong system of entrenchments and redoubts, running for about a mile and a half along both banks of a small river. It was covered by outposts of great strength on the crests of the small but jagged hills which flanked the valley on both sides. Roughly in the centre of the perimeter there was an air-strip.
It was from this air-strip that the wounded were to be evacuated if Dien Bien Phu was seriously attacked. In fact, as might surely have been foreseen, it was rendered unservice- able by the Viet-minh artillery in the first few days of the battle; and a harrowing account of the consequences is given, in a book which appears this week, by Major Grauwin, the French Medical Officer in charge of the field hospital at Dien Bien Phu. The book is called Doctor at Dien-Bien-Phu and is published at 18s. by Hutchinsons in a very slipshod manner; they tell us nothing about the author (not even his initials). they do not disclose the identity of his translator, and the two inadequate sketch maps are not provided with a scale.
Major Grauwin is not a good writer. His addiction to the historic present, so frequent a feature of French narrative style, will not endear him to the English reader; and the descriptions of abdominal and other operations are both too numerous and too vivid for even the least gentle reader. But if you wade on, as I have, through the blood and pus and amputated limbs you do get an extraordinary picture—drawn, despite the conventional flourishes, with great honesty—of human suffering and human fortitude.
Major Grauwin volunteered to go to Dien Bien Phu shortly before the trouble started there. Bored with the prospects of an idle month while he waited for the ship which was to take him back to France, and knowing that many of his friends were serving in the stronghold, he offered to take, for two or three weeks, the place of a medical officer who had gone sick. The battle began soon after he arrived.
It was almost immediately apparent that the wounded were going to present an appalling problem. In the first days an occasional transport aircraft could still land on the air-strip, and as it did so ambulances, already loaded, would dash off to meet it. But the Viet-minh gunners were ready. The aircraft had to take off again in a hurry (or was sometimes destroyed), and the wretched wounded were jolted back again to their ever more overcrowded subterranean quarters.
For a time a few planes managed to land at night, a decoy flying over as though about to make its run-in while a second aircraft glided in with its engines throttled back. This relieved pressure until the ruse was discovered. After that no more planes came into Dien Bien Phu.
The field hospital consisted of a complex of dug-outs. Its maximum capacity when Major Grauwin arrived was some- thing over one hundred beds (the number of troops in the position—not counting a large labour force of coolies—seems to have been in the neighbourhood of 12,000); within the crowded, honeycombed perimeter there was little room to expand, and, even at their best, conditions were nightmarish.
They became, of course, steadily worse. Apart from the normal wear and tear of bombardment there was the occa- sional delayed-action shell which penetrated deep into the ochre earth before exploding; one of them totally destroyed the X-ray room and most of its occupants. Then, as April followed March, the weather grew hot, and men could hardly breathe in their stifling, ill-ventilated burrows; plaster would not set in the humid atmosphere. With the heat came the flies, emerging in their thousands from the so-called Morgue. a great charnel-pit into which the dead were thrown. Maggots were soon swarming in the universal filth, and at first there was revulsion bordering on panic. But Major Grauwin pointed out that there was a lot to be said for the maggots, which ate up oddments of rotting tissue and dead bone and left the wounds they infested cleaner than they found them; and after that the maggots were regarded as a joke in possibly rather questionable taste.
Then it began to rain. The dug-outs leaked, the stretcher- bearers foundered in an endless quagmire, the supply drops were interrupted; only the ambulances were unaffected, for they were now scrap-iron, and all non-walking wounded had to be carried to the hospital by their comrades, themselves half-dead with exhaustion. Men were beginning to go mad. and to die for no discoverable reason.
One by one the„..guardian Huguettes. Dominiques, Elianes—had been stormed by waves of Viet- minh, noisy, suicidal, almost bestially brave. The perimeter was forcibly contracted. Yet into this doomed cockpit there jumped every night, with admirable chivalry, some hundretls of volun- teers who had never worn paraChute harness before.
The miracle is that the hospital seems to have continued to function until the final surrender. Somehow water was fetched under fire and sterilised, somehow the dropped containers of blood plasma and ice (the former useless, in that climate, without the latter) were collected, anesthetics administered, operations carried out, last rites administered—all this in a clammy, blood-soaked, only partially shell-proof rabbit• warren, crowded with Frenchmen, Germans, Vietnamese, Moroccans, Chinese, Senegalese and God knows what, all suf- fering from pain, exhaustion and fear. What a pity that Major Grauwin, who tells us so much about intestines, should be only indirectly enlightening about guts! 'I had to ask myself,' he writes at one point, 'why God had imposed this trial upon us and where it was that the men found strength to resist it.' The first question none of us can answer, the second Major Grauwin was better qualified than most to have a shot at.
Here and there he gives us a clue to the composition of the iron rations on which the human spirit can, against all odds, sustain itself. Mademoiselle de Galard must have supplied some of these rations. .A nursing orderly on an evacuation plane which was destroyed, she worked selflessly in the field hospital throughout the battle. Her story has been told, and Major Grauwin retells it in a straightforward, decent, tuppence• coloured sort of way. One gets the impression that the solace which her ministrations gave the men was of the same quality and supplied the same sort of desolate needs, as their con' fidence in his dedicated skill as a surgeon. But ultimately France was responsible for the defence of Dien Bien Phu; and, France, I think, deserves some credit for the heroism and resource with which half a dozen nationalities, with as many gods between them, faced in those oozy and escapeless catr combs things difficult enough to face at the best of times.
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