EXILES OF THE OUTLANDS
From Pnom-Penh, the capital of Cambodia, to Saigon, the capital of
Cochin-China, is in the neighborhood of two hundred miles and two
routes are open to the traveler. The most comfortable and considerably
the cheapest is by the bi-weekly steamer down the Mekong. The
alternative route, which is far more interesting, consists in
descending the river to Banam, a village some twenty miles below
Pnom-Penh, on the opposite bank of the Mekong, where, if a car has been
arranged for, it is possible to motor across the fertile plains of
Cochin-China to Saigon in a single day. That was the way that we went.
Though separated only by the Mekong, that mighty waterway which, rising
in the mountains of Tibet, bisects the whole peninsula, Cochin-China is
as dissimilar from Cambodia as the ordered farmlands of Ohio are from
the Florida Everglades. In Cambodia, stretches of sand covered with
low, scraggy, discouraged-looking scrub alternate with tangled and
impenetrable jungles. It is a savage, untamed land. Cochin-China, on
the other hand, is one great sweep of plain, green with growing rice
and dotted with the bamboo poles of well-sweeps, for water can be found
everywhere at thirty to forty feet. These striking contrasts in
contiguous states are due in some measure, no doubt, to differences in
their soils and climates and to the industry of their inhabitants, but
more largely, I imagine, to the fact that while the Frenchman has been
at work in Cochin-China for upwards of sixty years, Cambodia is still
on the frontier of civilization.
The roads which the French have built in Indo-China deserve a paragraph
of mention, for, barring the rivers and the three short unconnected
sections of railway on the East coast of the peninsula, they form the
country's only means of communication. The national highways consist of
two great systems. The Route Coloniale, which was the one I followed,
has its beginning at Kep, on the Gulf of Siam, runs north-eastward
through the jungles of Cambodia to Pnom-Penh, and, recommencing at
Banam, swings southward across the Cochin-China plain to Saigon. The
Route Mandarine, beginning at Saigon, hugs the shores of the China Sea
and, after traversing twelve hundred miles of jungle, forest and
mountain land in Annam and Tongking, comes to an end at Hanoi, the
capital of Indo-China. The entire length of the Route Mandarine may now
be traversed by auto-bus--an excellent way to see the country provided
you are inured to fatigue, do not mind the heat, and are not
over-particular as to your fellow passengers. A motor car is, of
course, more comfortable and more expensive; a small one can be rented
for ninety dollars a day.
Nowhere has the colonizing white man encountered greater obstacles
than those which have confronted the French road-builders in
Indo-China; nowhere has Nature turned toward him a sterner and more
forbidding face. But, though their coolies have died by the thousands
from cholera and fever, though their laboriously constructed bridges
have been swept away in a night by rivers swollen from the torrential
rains, though the fast-growing jungle persistently encroaches on the
hard-won right-of-way, though they have had to combat savage beasts and
still more savage men, they have prosecuted with indomitable courage
and tenacity the task of building a road "to Tomorrow from the Land of
Yesterday."
Saigon, the capital of Cochin-China and the most important place in
France's Asiatic possessions, is a European city set down on the edge
of Asia. So far as its appearance goes, it might be on the Seine
instead of the Saigon. The original town was burned by the French
during the fighting by which they obtained possession of the place and
they rebuilt it on European lines, with boulevards, shops, cafés, a
Hôtel de Ville, a Théâtre Municipal, a Musée, a Jardin Botanique, all
complete. The general plan of the city, with its regular streets and
intersecting boulevards, has evidently been modeled on that of the
French capital and the Saigonnese proudly speak of it as "the Paris of
the East." In certain respects this is taking a considerable liberty
with the truth, but they are very lonely and homesick and one does not
blame them. Most of the streets, which are paved after a fashion, are
lined with tamarinds, thus providing the shade so imperatively
necessary where the mercury hovers between 90 and 110, winter and
summer, day and night. At almost every street intersection stands a
statue of some one who bore a hand in the conquest of the country, from
the cassocked figure of Pigneau de Behaine, Bishop of Adran, the first
French missionary to Indo-China, to the effigy of the dashing Admiral
Rigault de Genouilly, flanked by charging marines, who took Saigon for
France.
The most characteristic feature of Saigon is its café life. During the
heat of the day the Europeans keep within doors, but toward nightfall
they all come out and, gathering about the little tables which crowd
the sidewalks before the cafés in the Boulevard Bonnard and the Rue
Catinat, they gossip and sip their absinthes and smoke numberless
cigarettes and mop their florid faces and argue noisily and with much
gesticulation over the news in the _Courrier de Saigon_ or the
six-weeks-old _Figaro_ and _Le Temps_ which arrive fortnightly by the
mail-boat from France. They wear stiffly starched white linen--though
the jackets are all too often left unfastened at the neck--and enormous
mushroom-shaped topées which come down almost to their shoulders and
are many sizes too large for them, and they consume vast quantities of
drink, the evening usually ending in a series of violent altercations.
When the disputants take to backing up their arguments with blows from
canes and bottles, the café proprietor unceremoniously bundles them
into _pousse-pousses_, as rickshaws are called in Saigon, and sends
them home.
Along the Rue Catinat in the evenings saunters a picturesque and
colorful procession--haggard, slovenly officers of the _troupes
coloniales_ and of the Foreign Legion, the rows of parti-colored
ribbons on their breasts telling of service in little wars in the
world's forgotten corners; dreary, white-faced Government employees,
their cheeks gaunt from fever, their eyes bloodshot from heavy
drinking; sun-bronzed, swaggering, loud-voiced rubber planters in
riding breeches and double Terais, down from their plantations in the
far interior for a periodic spree; women gowned in the height of Paris
fashion, but with too pink cheeks and too red lips and too ready smiles
for strangers, equally at home on the Bund of Shanghai or the
boulevards of Paris; shaven-headed Hindu money-lenders from British
India, the lengths of cotton sheeting which form their only garments
revealing bodies as hairy and repulsive as those of apes; barefooted
Annamite tirailleurs in uniforms of faded khaki, their great round hats
of woven straw tipped with brass spikes like those on German helmets;
slender Chinese women, tripping by on tiny, thick-soled shoes in
pajama-like coats and trousers of clinging, sleazy silk; naked
_pousse-pousse_ coolies, streaming with sweat, graceful as the bronzes
in a museum; friars of the religious orders in shovel-hats and linen
robes; sailors of the fleet and of the merchant vessels in the harbor,
swaggering along with the roll of the sea in their gait; Armenian
peddlers with piles of rugs and embroideries slung across their
shoulders; Arabs, Indians, Malays, Cambodians, Laos, Siamese, Burmese,
Chinese, world without end, Amen.
But, beneath it all, a paralysis is on everything--the paralysis of the
excessive administration with which the French have ruined Indo-China.
There are too many people in front of the cafés and too few in the
offices and shops. There is too much drinking and too little work. The
officials are alternately melancholy and overbearing; the natives
cringing and sullen. It is not a wholesome atmosphere. Corruption, if
not universal, is appallingly common. Foreigners engaged in business in
Saigon told me that it is necessary to "grease the palms" of everyone
who holds a Government position. As a result of this practise,
officials who are poor men when they arrive in the colony retire after
four or five years' service with comfortable fortunes--and France does
not pay her public servants highly either. And there are other vices.
The manager of a great American corporation doing business in Saigon
told me that ninety per cent of the city's European population are
confirmed users of opium. And, judging from their unhealthy pallor and
lacklustre eyes, I can well believe it. But what else could you expect
in a country where the drug is sold to anyone who has money to pay for
it; where it is one of the Government's chief sources of revenue?
On the native population the hand of the French lies heavily. In 1916
there was an attempted jail delivery of political prisoners in Saigon,
but the plot was discovered before it could be put into execution, the
ring-leaders arrested, and thirty-eight of them condemned to death.
They were executed in batches of four, kneeling, blind-folded, lashed
to stakes. The firing party consisted of a platoon of Annamite
tirailleurs. Behind them, with machine guns trained, was drawn up a
battalion of French infantry. The occasion was celebrated in Saigon as
a public holiday, hundreds of Frenchmen, accompanied by their wives and
children, driving out to see the sight. The next day picture postcards
of the execution were hawked about the streets. But the authorities in
Paris evidently disapproved of the proceeding, for the governor of the
colony and the commander of the military forces were promptly recalled
in disgrace. The terrible object-lesson doubtless had the desired
effect, for the natives cringe like whipped dogs when a Frenchman
speaks to them. But there is that in their manner which bodes ill for
their masters if a crisis ever arises in Indo-China. I should not like
to see our own brown wards, the Filipinos, look at Americans with the
murderous hate with which the Annamites regard the French. In Africa,
by moderation and tolerance and justice, France has built up a mighty
colonial empire whose inhabitants are as loyal and contented as though
they had been born under the Tricolor. But in far-off Indo-China French
administration seems, even to as staunch a friend of France as myself,
to be very far from an unqualified success.
During the ten days that I spent in Saigon I stayed at the Hôtel
Continental. I shall remember it as the place where they charged a
dollar and a half for a highball and fifty cents for a lemonade. It was
insufferably hot. I can sympathize now with the recalcitrant convict
who is punished by being sent to the sweat-box. Battalions of ferocious
mosquitoes launched their assaults against my unprotected person with
the persistence that the Germans displayed at Verdun. In the next room
the tenor of the itinerant grand opera company that was giving a series
of performances at the Théâtre Municipal squabbled unceasingly with his
woman companion. Both were generally much the worse for drink. One
particularly sultry afternoon, when the whole world seemed like the
steam room of a Turkish bath, their voices rose to an unprecedented
pitch of violence. Through the thin panels of the door came the sound
of scuffling feet. Some heavy article of furniture went over with a
crash. Then came the thud of a falling body.
"Thou accurst one!" I heard the tenor groan. Then "Help me!... I'm
dying!"
"She's done it now!" I exclaimed, springing from my bed.
"Are you stifling with blood?" the woman hissed, fierce exultation in
her tone.
"Help me!... I'm dying!" moaned the man. "And done to death by a
woman!"
It was murder--no doubt about that. Clad only in my pajamas though I
was, I prepared to throw myself against the door.
"Die, thou accurst one! Perish!" shrieked the woman.
I was on the point of bursting into the room when I was arrested by the
sound of the tenor's voice speaking in normal tones. There followed a
woman's laugh. I paused to listen. It was well that I did so. They were
rehearsing for the evening's performance the murder scene from _La
Tosca_!
On another occasion, long after midnight, I was aroused from sleep by a
terrific racket which suddenly burst forth in the streets below. I
heard the crash of splintering bottles followed by the steps of the
native gendarmes beating a hasty retreat. Then, from throats that spoke
my own tongue, rose the rollicking words of a long-familiar chorus:
"I was drunk last night,
I was drunk the night before,
I'll get drunk tomorrow night
If I never get drunk any more;
For when I'm drunk
I'm as happy as can be,
For I am a member of the Souse Fam-i-lee!"
Leaning from my casement, I hailed a passing Frenchman.
"Who are they?" I asked him.
"Les touristes Americains sont arrivés, M'sieu," he answered dryly.
By the light of the street-lamps as he turned away I could see him
shrug his shoulders.
Thinking it over, it struck me that I had been overharsh in my judgment
of the homesick exiles who in this far corner of the earth are
clinching the rivets of France's colonial empire.
The next morning I set sail from Saigon for China. Leaving the mouth of
the river in our wake, we rounded the mighty promontory of Cap St.
Jacques and headed for the open sea. The palm-fringed shore line of
Cochin-China dropped away; the blue mountains of Annam turned pale and
ghostly in the evening mists. A sun-scorched, pestilential land.... I
was glad to leave it. But already I am longing to return. I want once
more to sit at a café table beneath the awnings of the Rue Catinat,
before me a tall glass with ice tinkling in it. I want to hear the
_pousse-pousse_ coolies padding softly by in the gathering twilight. I
want to see the little Annamite women in their sleazy silken garments
and the boisterous, swaggering _legionnaires_ in their white helmets. I
want to stroll once more beneath the tamarinds beside the Mekong, to
smell the odors of the hot lands, to hear again the throbbing of the
tom-toms and the soft music of the wind-blown temple bells. For
"When you've 'eard the East a-callin'
You won't never 'eed naught else."
Transcriber's Notes:
Inconsistencies in the hyphenation of words preserved. (blind-folded,
blindfolded; body-guard, bodyguard; coast-guard, coastguard;
co-operation, cooperation; co-terminous, coterminous; cock-fighting,
cockfighting; harbour-master, harbourmaster; head-dresses, headdresses;
light-houses, lighthouses; net-work, network; off-shore, offshore;
old-time, oldtime; three-score, threescore; to-day, today; to-morrow,
tomorrow; water-front, waterfront; white-washed, whitewashed;
wide-spread, widespread)
Table of Contents, heading for Chapter IX says "PROSPECT RULERS AND
COMIC OPERA COURTS" while the chapter heading in the main text says
"PUPPET RULERS AND COMIC OPERA COURTS". "PUPPET" is more likely to have
been the word intended by the author but the original words have been
preserved in both cases.
Pg. 73, opening double quote mark at beginning of paragraph removed as
text here does not appear to be quoted speech and there is no closing
quote at the end. (There is held each year)
Pg. 79, "Portgual" changed to "Portugal". (King of Portugal, had
shifted)
Pg. 148, "ampitheatre" is more commonly spelled "amphitheatre".
Author's original text preserved.
Pg. 209, "Turquoise Mosque in Samarland". "Samarland" is more likely to
be "Samarkand" but the author's original text is preserved.
Pg. 221, "Chulalungkorn" is spelled elsewhere in the text
"Chulalongkorn". Author's original text preserved.
Pg. 237, inserted closing double quote mark. (know how to make it.")
Pg. 265, inserted opening double quote mark. (he greeted me. "The)