I don't think he knew what he was saying. He was seeing a real war for the first time: he had punted down into Phat Diem in a kind of schoolboy dream, and anyway in his eyes soldiers didn't count.

"You see what a drum of Diolacton can do," I said, "in the wrong hands." I forced him, with my hand on his shoulder, to look around. I said, "This is the hour when the place is always full of women and children - it's the shopping hour. Why choose that of all hours?"

He said weakly, "There was to have been a parade."

"And you hoped to catch a few colonels. But the parade was cancelled yesterday, Pyle."

"I didn't know."

"Didn't know!" I pushed him into a patch of blood where a stretcher had lain. "You ought to be better informed."

"I was out of town," he said, looking down at his shoes. "They should have called it off."

"And missed the fun?" I asked him. "Do you expect General The to lose his demonstration? This is better than a parade. Women and children are news, and soldiers aren't, in a war. This will hit the world's press. You've put General The on the map all right, Pyle. You've got the Third Force and National Democracy all over your right shoe. Go home to Phuong and tell her about your heroic deed - there are a few dozen less of her country people to worry about."

A small fat priest scampered by, carrying something on a dish under a napkin. Pyle had been silent a long while, and I had nothing more to say. Indeed I had said too much. He looked white and beaten and ready to faint, and I thought, 'What's the good? he'll always be innocent, you can't blame the innocent, they are always guiltless. All you can do is control them or eliminate them. Innocence is a kind of insanity.'

He said, "The wouldn't have done this. I'm sure he wouldn't. Somebody deceived him. The Communists..."

He was impregnably armoured by his good intentions and his ignorance, I left him standing in the square and went on up the rue Catinat to where the hideous pink Cathedral blocked the way. Already people were flocking in: it must have been a comfort to them to be able to pray for the dead to the dead.

Unlike them, I had reason for thankfulness, for wasn't Phuong alive? Hadn't Phuong been 'warned'? But what I remembered was the torso in the square, the baby on its mother's lap. They had not been warned: they had not been sufficiently important. And if the parade had taken place would they not have been there just the same, out of curiosity, to see the soldiers, and hear the speakers, and throw the flowers? A two-hundred-pound bomb does not discriminate. How many dead colonels justify a child's or a trishawdriver's death when you are building a national democratic front? I stopped a motor-trishaw and told the driver to take me to the Quai Mytho.

Words and word-combinations

lock, stock and barrel

Comment on the following

How inopportunely the unexpected can occur.

"Pyle, don't trust too much to York Harding."

I thought of Phuong just because of her complete absence.

…I realised by the heavy clouds of smoke that this was no joke.

"I warned her not to go."

He said, "I must get them cleaned before I see the Minister."

Indeed I had said too much.

Speak on the events of the chapter and explain why it is considered the most important one in the book.

PART FOUR

CHAPTER I

I had given Phuong money to take her sister to the cinema so that she would be safely out of the way. I went out to dinner myself with Dominguez and was back in my room waiting when Vigot called sharp on ten. He apologised for not taking a drink - he said he was too tired and a drink might send him to sleep. It had been a very long day.

"Murder and sudden death?"

"No. Petty thefts. And a few suicides. These people love to gamble and when they have lost everything they kill themselves. Perhaps I would not have become a policeman if I had known how much time I would have to spend in mortuaries. I do not like the smell of ammonia. Perhaps after all I will have a beer."

"I haven't a refrigerator, I'm afraid."

"Unlike the mortuary. A little English whisky, then?" I remembered the night I had gone down to the mortuary with him and they had slid out Pyle's body like a tray of ice-cubes.

"So you are not going home?" he asked.

"You've been checking up?"

"Yes."