City in Danger

The little Vietnamese official looked sadly across his desk in Hanoi's city hall. "The poor man will stay, and the rich man will go," he said. "I am neither, but I am a nationalist, and I therefore must go--and I have lived here all my life." The 300-lb. French restaurateur popped an olive into his mouth: "I came to Hanoi in 1945 as a sergeant-cook. I now have $30,000 invested in my restaurant, and I'm staying until I have to leave." Cried the barefoot refugee in a three-room house where 23 people live: "I left my village two years ago because there was shooting every day. Now there is no place left for me to go." The problem to the three men was common: Hanoi, their city, was in danger. "We have had many scares in the past seven years of war," said a Vietnamese pharmacist. "But this time I think we all know that something will happen."

Normalcy and fear. The danger to Hanoi was scarcely visible. The streets were still chockablock with cyclos (cycle taxis, 14-c- a ride). Shrimp and snail vendors crouched behind their tiny stalls clacking metal scissors--the noisy symbol of their trade. Almond-skinned girls in straw hats and pajamalike silk costumes strolled hand-in-hand to school, and at midnight there was the customary flood of drunken soldiers and giggling tarts as the taxi-dance joints closed down.

Yet in Hanoi there was an undertow of fear. There were more tanks, more armored cars in the streets, more Vietnamese guardsmen drilling in the Jardin Botanique. There were more bandaged soldiers in the grim De Lanessan hospital, and there were many more planes in the sky. Sometimes the French 105-mms. pounded unseen targets unusually close to the suburbs; or an alien burst of machine-gun fire slashed across one of the two city airfields; or a trigger-happy Senegalese sentry fired and shouted in the dark. French and Vietnamese housewives were finding everyday items much harder to get, much more expensive, as the businessmen started to pull out.

As recently as last March, it cost $6 to truck a one-ton load 58 miles into Hanoi from Haiphong; last week it cost $25. One Hanoi dry-goods importer last year did $90,000 worth of business; last week he reduced his 1954 estimate to $25,000. The surest barometer of Hanoi's fear: real-estate values are down some 30% since March.

Voices in the City. Not long ago, the Red advance would have made glad tidings for Hanoi. In 1946 perhaps 80% of Hanoi's 140,000 people were for the Communists, and the French had to fight to secure themselves when the war began there. Last week Vietnamese authorities estimated that the city's population was up to 340,000 and that Communist sup port was down to about 30%. From Communist-held areas, thousands of ref- ugees who could not stomach Red taxation, conscription and forced labor crowded the city.

The trend in Hanoi in the little time left was all towards Vietnamese nationalism -- a patriotism that was both antiCommunist and anti-French. There was even one surprising new group of militants called the jusqu'au boutistes, the "to-the-enders." These Vietnamese, led by the able and increasingly influential General Nguyen Van Hinh, chief of staff of Viet Nam's national army, were all for checking the Communists at Hanoi and at Geneva. They urged Vietnamese Chief of State Bao Dai to lead them to real independence. "No compromise is possible," said one to-the-ender last week. "Free elections now would mean a Communist victory--for the Communists are organized, and we are not. And partition would be treason to the nation." There were many such nationalists in threatened Hanoi last week, and Red guerrillas and Frenchmen and neutrals and the teeming attentistes, the wait-and-seeists. But perhaps most of all there were the resigned ones, who wished only that the French, the Communists, their own nationalists and the war would go away and leave them in peace. "Life is a gamble," sighed one of these resigned ones unhappily. "Perhaps we played the wrong card."

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