Father Destier’s anger was a priestly passion, the bursting ire of the missionary identified with his flock, forgetful of their sins in the tragedy of their punishment. ‘Les imbéciles …’ he was muttering. ‘Mais quels idiots. Sainte Vierge … mais regardez moi donc ça.’

The Church militant, of which the French missionaries in the East are an exuberant expression, abounds in short-statured human dynamos. Father Destier painfully reached five foot one. His large head, Napoleonic profile, and darting brown eyes were inadequately supported by short legs, round which a cassock gone russet wrapped itself tumultuously. His fingers were black with nicotine. Behind him, framed by the cloud-inhabited sky, rose a structure like a barn made of nailed planks, with a perilous crooked outer staircase leading to a veranda above, the whole edifice surmounted by a hunched attap roof and a wooden cross. Nailed above the front door a wooden board proclaimed in Chinese characters that this was the Catholic Church of Todak Resettlement Camp.

Father Destier had written to me a few days previously. ‘You, as a Catholic and a doctor, would perhaps be interested to come to Todak. Here, and in the resettlement areas around, are more than ten thousand people without a doctor. It would be good if you could come sometimes. I ask not only for the faithful, but also and much more for the others, so many of these unfortunates have relatives in the jungle.’

I drove to Todak, one sultry Sunday morning, only to fall in the middle of a clampdown curfew, with police and army units doing house-to-house searches, armoured cars heavy with men and guns turned outwards patrolling the mud tracks between the rows of huts. Cars and lorries going through Todak were being turned back, except for military or official vehicles. Father Destier was waiting for me at the police searching post of the village gate. ‘Don’t for heaven’s sake think it’s as bad as this every day,’ said the tired young army officer who checked me and my car (Father Destier in voluble half-French guaranteed I was une doctoresse). ‘But I’m afraid the r.o. here has just been bumped off. Stinking business.’

‘The Resettlement Officer,’ explained Father Destier. ‘He was found last night hanging on the barbed wire in the swamp over there with three bullet holes in his back.’