"When the mother was told of what had befallen her babe—for it had been taken from her whilst she was sleeping, and she knew not where it had gone—she was stricken with much sorrow, and went away from us, weeping and complaining, into the forest, where she slew herself in the agony of her grief.
"On the morrow, when the troops had moved off a little, we succeeded in getting away further into the jungle...."
The 9th June, 1902, I happened to be with a scouting party, and came upon the body of the dead woman. It was still warm, and a native knife, embedded right up to the hilt, had pierced the heart. Like the rest of my comrades, I imagined at the time that this unfortunate creature had been murdered by the rebels; and it was only several weeks later, when assisting at the examination of the deserter mentioned above, that I learned what had really happened.
On my return to Nha-Nam in May, I had been glad to renew relations with my friend Doy-Tho; and whenever I found time to do so, I passed my evenings in his caigna, and, seated beside him as he smoked, talked over the situation.
He was always very well informed on all that was going on, though he most certainly owed much of his knowledge to his former enemy, but now devoted friend, Linh-Nghi, who, since the termination of the main operations, had been nominated to the important post of lu-thuong (headman) of the village of Long-Thuong; and, in return for the services he had rendered to the authorities, important stretches of cultivated land, formerly owned by some of the rebels, had been made over to him.
It was from Tho that I learned of the lasting impression which the rapid capture of all De-Tam's fortifications had produced upon the population of the Yen-Thé. The majority of the people, he said, were no longer moved to enthusiasm by this chiefs appeals to their patriotism, and they now possessed no confidence in the ultimate success of the movement in favour of their exiled monarch. However, my friend was never weary of repeating that, until the French succeeded in killing or capturing De-Tam, the chief would be a source of constant trouble in the region, because most of the peasants possessed such a real dread of him, that but few of the villages would dare to refuse his demands for money or rice, so long as he remained an outlaw, and had at his disposal a band of cruel and determined partisans.
Though I think that Tho was glad of my company, it was evident to me that he was chagrined at my continued refusal to become a votary of the soothing drug, which, like the majority of his compatriots, he regarded as one of the necessities of existence. His disgust at my persistence was all the more intense because it was an open secret that several of the French officers and sergeants, serving in the native regiments, smoked opium, and took but little pains to conceal the fact. He would give me as examples the names of his superiors who indulged in the pleasure procured by the subtle poison, hoping to induce me to follow their example; though, curiously enough, he would generally conclude his exhortations with quaint reflections full of irony, concerning the excess to which most of the Europeans who indulged in this passion would go; and he would then, in grandiloquent terms, replete with Oriental conceit, inform me that he was himself complete master of his own desires. He would swell with pride and delight when, to humour him, I would praise his powers of self-control, though, for the matter of that, I was convinced the length of his purse and the veto of Ba, his wife, had more to do with the number of pipes he smoked, than any check he was himself capable of imposing on his cravings.
He would speak at length on this subject, bringing out his words with a slow, drawling, sing-song cadence in which there was no indication of emotion, though now and again, when he had given an opinion he considered was possessed of more than ordinary value, he would pause somewhat longer than necessary, watching me intently the while, to see if I had fully grasped the sense of his argument and appreciated the beauty of his flowery metaphor.
"Yes, friend," he would say. "Tell me, I beg you, has not Heaven given to us men the different pleasures of life so that we shall draw from them delight wherewith to lighten our troubles and to forget our hardships? Indeed you do know, since I myself told it to you, that our wise men have long since decided that these numerous and varied pleasures can be classified according to their merits, which consist in the degree of bliss they can procure us. Each of these emotions finds its proper place in its proper section, which last is itself one of 'The Seven Joys,' even as a soldier has his appointed position in one of the four battalions of his regiment. The ancients represented 'The Seven Joys' by as many bats, because, like our pleasures, these animals flit around us in eccentric curves; though it requires but a little patience and a light blow to bring them to our feet. That is why in our pagodas, our houses and upon the altars to our ancestors you will always see, sculptured or painted, the seven bats which are 'The Seven Joys.'