Penguins on Parade: The Centurions!
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Some Penguin Classics maintain a gruesome kind of relevance, which is surely part of what’s behind the publisher’s decision to bring Jean Larteguy’s 1960 French bestseller Les Centurions back into print, here ushering the book into the Classics line with the Xan Fielding translation (as The Centurions) and a Foreward by Balkan Ghosts author Robert Kaplan, who’s also something of a go-to expert in the deadly rag-tag counter-insurgency methods and mind frames highlighted throughout the novel. Given 2015’s 40th anniversary of the fall of Saigon – and given the wars of insurgency currently embroiling half of Africa and half of the Middle East – that gruesome relevance couldn’t be more evident.
The Centurions taps into the seeping disillusionments of the French experience in Indochina by setting up a very satisfying straw man scenario in which stereotypically valiant 20th century soldiers – here epitomized by heroic French Lieutenant Colonel Pierre Raspeguy, who survives a brutal Viet Minh POW camp and thereby learns first-hand the brutal efficiency of unstructured guerrilla tactics – first hate and then embrace a new kind of warfare made up of irregular fighting, improvised tactics, and unsparing ruthlessness.
The tension between conventional and guerrilla warfare was never as simply reduced as that, and Larteguy – the pen-name for a soldier who served in both Korea and North Africa – knew that quite well. In his sprawling, seedy, violent novel, he plays a very sophisticated game of shifting illusions, as his core cast of French paratroopers taken prisoner in Vietnam learn and unlearn everything they thought they knew about their profession. And Kaplan, after his Foreward’s bumpy start (in which he writes, “Conventional modern war, which Napoleon did so much to define and institutionalize, with its formalized set-piece battles and vertical chains of command, has mainly been with us for little more than two centuries” – a statement that would have bewildered professional warriors from Alexander the Great through William the Conqueror and right up to Field Marshal Montgomery), targets the novel’s appeal:
Vietnam, like Iraq, represented a war of frustrating half measures, fought against an enemy that respected no limits. More than any writer I know, Larteguy communicates the intensity of such frustrations, which, in turn, create the psychological gulf that separates warriors from both a conscript army and a civilian home front.
Some of Larteguy’s warriors fancy themselves directly connected to their illustrious past, as when idealistic Captain Philippe Esclavier, escaping the drunken revelry of his colleagues, refreshes himself in the cool desert night of North Africa while leaning against an old Roman Legion landmark and dreaming of the past. “The centurion Philippe Esclavier of the 10th Parachute Regiment tried to think why he, too, had lit bonfires in order to contain the barbarians and save the West,” Larteguy writes. “’We centurions,’ he reflected, ‘are the last defenders of man’s innocence against all those who want to enslave it in the name of original sin …’”
Less noble and cinematic but far truer to the book’s essentially ugly ethos are the nighttime ravings of Lieutenant Lescure after the defeat of the French army at Dien-Bien-Phu, when in his madness he glimpses the new reality in which he and his
comrades find themselves:
It was a great procession of the damned who were making their way to the seat of the Last Judgement; angels had lit their torches so that no one should escape in the dark. Enthroned high above them sat the god with the huge belly and eyes as round as millstones. In his claw-like hands he grabbed the humans up by the fistful and tore them apart in his teeth, the just and the unjust, the pure and impure, the believers and the unbelievers alike. All were acceptable to him, for he hungered after flesh and blood. Every now and then he gave a solemn belch and the angels applauded with a shout: “Long live President Ho!” But he was still ravenous so he also devoured them; and even as he snapped their bones between his teeth, they kept on shouting: “Long may he live!”
Kaplan points out in his Foreward that The Centurions has been a cult classic of serving military men since its initial appearance, and it’s not hard to see why, although the knowledge is intensely uncomfortable. It’s a dubious thing, being a classic of war-fiction.