Читать книгу Cry Heaven, Cry Hell - Howard Gordon - Страница 14

Chapter 1

Before describing the battle that scarred a family name for centuries, I would like to paint a picture of what I saw over two hundred years later at a park site, which was erected on the battlefield that had ended a war. I saw greenery that was divided by bicycle paths, upon which I had attempted to ride a rented bike and had a flat tire. For the first time in my life, I saw a beaver. These sights were not conducive to understanding that British influence and not French influence would prevail in Canada. Yet Quebec remained an area where French influence was heavily felt. Is the argument that might makes right, indeed a truism, or does the suppression of minorities act to create people that are frozen in the dialectic of revenge, as were Craine Mikawber and Rodin La Monde.

The physical date of Rodin’s birth was 07-14-1887. However, historically he was born on 09-13-1759. On this date a battle was fought on the western edge of the wall of Quebec. It marked the date of the defeat of the French army by the British army and navy. Both opposing commanders lost their lives, and the entire battle took an hour after Britain had laid siege to the city for three months. The point of the battle was to see who had the right to exploit the Native American, as their colonizer.

Among the French soldiers were militiamen, who were not completely trained. They had not mastered maneuverability skills so that they could fire and reload rapidly enough to keep up a consistent pattern of concentrated fire. Among these was an ill prepared battalion under Charles Michel de Langlade. He was part French and part Odawa (later Ottawa) Indian. He led a battalion of Odawa under the tribal leadership of Lonely Otter. When the consistency of the firing pattern fell to the wayside, a French officer verbally assaulted Lonely Otter then cut his ear off with a sword. He subsequently led his men into a slaughter because he couldn’t hear from what direction the firing of the enemy came. The descendants of this man spoke about the incident from one generation to the next, including men, thought of as French citizens. These were the people of Rodin’s family. And the hatred was passed on.

Rodin decided to be systematic about his endeavor. He would operate in the colonies in which France was the most hated and the weakest in its stature. He started out by becoming conversant with the historical and cultural patterns.

After the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 until the restoration of the monarchy in 1830, France became a weakened state. There was a surplus of idle soldiers, an excess of artillery that was not being used. With greedy eyes the nation looked to Africa and Asia where armies were not strong because they had other ideas besides warfare on their minds. The Algerian dey was weak, and this “Cradle of Democracy” used an insult to their consul as an excuse, first to blockade Algiers for three years then launched a military expedition against the city. They raped women, desecrated mosques, looted the treasury. The struggle became long and violent, with the French exterminating one third of the population. Having had the temerity to make Algeria a part of France allowed them to export not only settlers from their own land, but also Spain, Italy, and Malta to take the land from the native farmers and cultivate it. The result was the literacy and educational upscaling of Algerians fell. The foreign migrants were granted full French citizenship, while native Algerian Muslims didn’t even have the right to vote in their own native land. In 1954 a War of Independence was declared. It took almost a decade for France to defeat The National Liberation Front, and a plebiscite was held which finally resulted in independence.

Even the Romans knew of Vietnam, as far as 166 B.C. The Portuguese and Dutch became involved in the 1500’s, backing rival families in the North and South. In 1784 a French Bishop intervened on behalf of the Southern family in return for concessions to France. The assistance was interrupted by the French Revolution and taken up after that. The attempts to impose Catholicism served as a focus to the Confucian population to resist Westernization. This was the excuse that France needed to invade the country. Throughout the 19th century the French colonized both the North and South with many resistance movements that led only to defeat of the Vietnamese. In the quest for modernization to build an army that could throw out the foreigners, exposure to Marxism occurred. In 1941, Ho Chi Minh became leader of the Viet Minh, a front to fight for Vietnamese independence. It was dominated by Vietnamese communists. Vietnam had been exploited by the Japanese during WWII. After the war the Viet Minh launched a revolution to seize the offices of government. France tried to re-establish their rule, but Ho Chi Minh received aid from communist China. War broke out in 1947 and lasted until the battle of Dien Bien Phu, in 1954. The modernly weaponed French underestimated the ability of the Viet Minh to move heavy artillery over the mountains and surrendered to them in this famous battle, while U.S. advisers watched the other “Cradle of Liberty” flounder.

One of the terms of the Geneva Agreement stated that Vietnam would be divided into two countries: North and South Vietnam. The South was ruled by a strong anti-communist, Ngo Dinh Diem. He urged the United States to back his counter revolutionary force against the communist North. Communists, Buddhists, and students in the South all joined to oppose his dictatorial rule. A National Liberation Front arose to throw Diem out. The U.S.A. was pressured to send military advisors. In 1964, an American ship was sunk in the Bay of Tonkin. The North was attacked by the air. This launched the Vietnamese War, in which the U.S.A. was evacuated from Vietnam.

Rodin absorbed these facts and their implications for his family war against the French Empire. In Algeria, he became an agitator and a trainer for guerilla soldiers in the cities and rural areas. He backed socialist movements to draw the Algerian attention to the inequities of natives of a country being denied educational opportunities or to benefit from new agricultural techniques because a foreigner had moved in their land to benefit her own lackeys and to deny them the fruits of their own labor. Along with the attacks on the thinking that questioned what benefit France had brought to this nation, came training programs. Stolen weapons were diagrammed and assembled and re-assembled; the discipline to face interrogators and tell them lies to mislead them was integrated into their personhood. The points of vulnerability on the body were practiced until they became rote; the most vulnerable point of a tank was learned. Assembly of machine guns, rocket launchers, howitzers was learned in detail so that they could be rapidly assembled or destroyed. Where modern weapons were not available, use of what was there was adapted to defense and offense.

The most difficult skill that Rodin had to learn was non-identity. When blocks of people had learned the abilities he taught them or when French victory seemed imminent, he had to be able to disappear. The people whom he taught, and for whom he agitated were not to know his name or face. Many times he wore a disguise. Sometimes he led boycotts or demonstrations, then he had to disappear on a rooftop or in the sea. The important impact was that he start the anger flowing and disappear at the point of the highest escalation.

He joined the French Foreign Legion after the war and played both ends against the middle in Algeria. He would attack the Berber villages during the day, participate in the raping, pillaging and destruction. At night, he’d dress as an Arab woman named Rebaza and complain to the men about her sons starving because all the land was given to foreigners to cultivate while the natives were left without land, or she would lament about her sons not being educated for anything, but to be cannon fodder for the French wars. Then Hitler invaded France. This was his chance to score points as a French hero and undermine her at the same time.

Much later, at Dien Bien Phu, he had to play a dual role and move between Viet Minh, as a Russian advisor and Frenchmen shouting misconstrued orders to the soldiers. To get from one side to the other, he had to build a tunnel within a tunnel and negotiate it at a rapid speed as the battle progressed. By the time the Americans took over the war, he was long gone. He brought back the principle that the Japanese had used of operating through tunnels, in case the Vietnamese were not familiar with it, which they evidently were.