At approximately 6:20 p.m. on May 7, 1954, the shooting had stopped everywhere but at one last outpost, called strongpoint Lily, where a handful of Moroccan soldiers under a French major, Jean Nicolas, still held out.
In his landmark 1966 work on Dien Bien Phu, "Hell in a Very Small Place," the late French historian Bernard B. Fall described how the end came:
. . . as Nicholas looked out . . . from a slit trench near his command post, a small white flag, probably a handkerchief, appeared on top of a rifle hardly 50 feet [16 meters] away from his, followed by the flat-helmeted head of a Viet-Minh soldier.
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