Devil's Guard

by George R. Elford

  "Have you any money?" the colonel asked nonchalantly.

  "I have my savings."

  "I thought you wanted to buy a stereo set."

  "Well," Yvette sighed, lifting and dropping her shoulders, "poor Lin needs more important things now."

  When Lin reappeared, we all looked at her astonished. Her cheeks were pink, the weariness in her eyes was gone, and with her hair washed, dried, and tightened with a blue ribbon, her face was transformed. All the hardness had vanished from her features and she looked younger than Yvette. Her legs were beautifully shaped and the light summer dress that Yvette had given her made her look even more slender. I could have encircled her waist between my hands.

  After coffee, Lin began talking about her life—and soon our cheerfulness was gone.. The air in the room seemed to grow heavier and heavier.

  "We used to live near Hankow beside a wonderful lake," Lin began. "My father built a cottage there. He was an architect. They were building a hospital at Hankow. My father's name was Carver, John Carver. My mother was from China. She was the best mother, good and beautiful like an angel. I was their only child and they loved me more than anything on earth. My mother used to call me 'my little blue sky.' They bought me the best of everything and every summer we went to the sea near Shanghai. When the Communists approached Hankow my father refused to evacuate. He did not want to give up everything he had been working for. He wanted to finish the hospital and said that not even the Communists would prevent him from building a hospital for their own people.

  "When the siege came he took me to a friend of his, a missionary doctor who lived in a small Christian colony with his wife, also a doctor. My parents thought I'd be safer at the missionary station. There were only teachers, priests, nurses, and doctors caring for old people and children. They did not think of themselves, only of me. My father decided to stay in the partly finished hospital. There were already hundreds of crates of expensive surgical equipment stored in the cellars, gifts from the American and British people. He was afraid that the ignorant soldiers might loot the containers or destroy the machines. My father was sure that once he spoke to the Communist commander, he would be permitted to continue with his work. How wrong my poor father was... ."

  She sighed deeply and her eyes clouded. "The fathers and sisters at the missionary station worked night and day. More and more people were brought in, most of them wounded. Many of them had to sleep in the open and the doctors operated on a table in the yard. I have seen so much suffering—and as the front came nearer and nearer. . . ." She broke off again, lifting her hand to her eyes nervously. Madame Houssong urged her not to continue if she felt tired. But Lin only shook her head. "Oh, no, if I won't make you tired. . . ."

  Colonel Houssong then shook his head.

  "One morning a couple of wounded soldiers came and told us that the Communist army had already occupied the hospital compound for three hours but had been driven out again. Of my parents they knew nothing. When they told me that, I just picked up my little doll and ran out of the station. I ran like a maniac all the way. I did not hear the explosions or the bullets, I did not see the burning houses. I just ran, jumping over debris, broken furniture, and deep craters—many of them full with corpses."

  Lin flushed and her breasts heaved; her breath came in little gasps but she went on bravely. "I found our housekeeper standing at the gate of the hospital. I noticed immediately that he was wearing my father's leather jacket, but I did not pay much attention to it. I was glad to see him alive and grasped his hand. 'Huang, I am so glad to see you. Where are my parents? How are they? Please. . . .' He pulled away from me and acted so strangely cool, so hostile. But my thoughts were with my parents. 'Please,' I cried, 'where are they?' He pointed toward the main building. 'You will find them in there,' he said and smiled. But his smile frightened me. I could not imagine what was wrong with him. I rushed toward the main building and as I entered I saw ... I saw my father ... in a pool of blood. . . . When I fell on him, he was icy cold . . . then my mother . . . she lay in a nearby room with bullet holes in her breasts . .. and, and...."

  She could not continue. Her words faded into a stream of tears. Her frail body shook as she buried her face in her hands. Madame Houssong rushed to her and caught her in her arms, herself crying. Yvette was weeping too and the colonel covered his face, shaking his head slowly. "Don't talk, cherie," I heard Madame Houssong speak to Lin gently. "We have heard enough for tonight."

  Lin, with her eyes closed, her tears rolling freely, grabbed Madame Houssong's hand and pressed her face against it. "I must ... I must tell. You are so good to me ... I could never tell anyone how much I was hurt."

  Lin had to tell us the rest of her story. We could not stop her. She talked as if she wanted to cast away those tragic memories forever. "When I left the hospital, I saw Huang talking to some strange soldiers. They were the Communists. I still cannot imagine why he had turned so hostile. We were always good to him. When his son was ill, my father drove them all the way to Shanghai, to the hospital. We gave them food, clothes, toys for his children. But then I saw he was wearing a big red star—like the ones the Communists wore. I tried to run away but the soldiers caught me and . . . dragged me ... into . . ." She began to weep again. "I ... I cannot tell you what they did to me . . . until I was pushed into a wagon with many other people. . . . They took us to a camp, and we had to work in a brick factory three miles away. We walked there and back, every day. By the end of the year over a hundred of us had died. Our huts were cold and wet and the food was something we could chew and swallow but it was not food. They always told us that if we worked well we would be taken into better barracks in another camp with good food. We worked like animals to gain admittance to that other camp but they never moved us. We were taken out to bury people whom they had shot. There were thousands of people executed every week. . . . Then one night a big storm came and the wind wrecked the watch towers and a part of the fence. I fled." She glanced at me. "I walked for two weeks eating only what I could find, then I crossed the border and walked .. . until the cars came."

  Daybreak was showing through the slightly opened shutters when at last Lin fell silent.

  "You had better get some sleep now," Madame Houssong said. "Come, cherie—and try to put those things forever out of your mind."

  Lin rose and looked at me deeply. "Thank you," she said. "Thank you...."

  Lin's story had a truly happy ending. Colonel Houssong wrote a long report on her to the British Consul, who in turn forwarded the data to a competent authority in Hong Kong. Three weeks later Lin received her British passport and a letter stating that a search to find her father's relatives in England was under way.

  During the next two months we saw each other often; I took her out to a dinner or to dance and became rather attached to her. I think she too felt the same way. "What's bothering you, Hans?" she asked one evening after a long and passionate kiss. "Something's wrong?"

  I only embraced her again and held her close. There was plenty wrong, I thought. She was only eighteen. I was thirty-six and still a "death candidate." When Lin was born, I was already entering the army. We were far apart both in time and in space. It was painful but also a relief when her uncle came flying down a week before her birthday. He was a jovial, middle-aged English businessman who was completely overjoyed at having found his niece after three years of gloom. He had been informed of John Carver's death in Communist China and Lin was listed as "missing," probably dead too.

  "If you ever need anything, or if you ever come to England, please do not fail to call me," he said before their plane departed for Singapore and from there to London. He handed me a small envelope and we shook hands. I embraced Lin and she kissed me openly. Her eyes were filled as she whispered, "Please write me soon. ... Write always."

  "C'est la vie," Colonel Houssong said quietly as the plane started to take off. "Had it not turned out so well, we would have adopted Lin .. . but it is better this way."

 
In the envelope I found a very nice letter of appreciation and a check for five hundred pounds. A small card with Lin's letter read: "I love you ... I love you ... I love you."

  The cruel war went on.

  Near Hoa Binh we discovered the mutilated corpses of two German Legionnaires. Both men had been disemboweled and castrated, with their private parts cut away and placed in their hands. A macabre Viet Minh joke.

  Two days later we captured the four terrorists responsible for the murder and mutilation. They were stripped, and a thin cord was fastened around their private parts with the other end tied to the jeep. The vehicle was driven at a speed that the prisoners could pace by easy running and so avoid having their testicles torn from their bodies. In such fashion we brought them to the dead Legionnaires, about two miles down the road. Then the driver shifted gears and accelerated. The jeep sprang forward and the prisoners tumbled. Screaming in agony they rolled in the dust. We bayoneted them as they lay bleeding. The score was settled.

  Bomb for bomb! Bullet for bullet! Murder for murder!

  We were never particularly soft toward captured terrorists but for murder and mutilation we retaliated with the most brutal third degree that man or devil could conceive. Among them were methods learned from Karl Stahnke. The one-time Gestapo agent and our former companion had entertained us with stories of their use during our long sea voyage from Oran to Indochina. Stahnke used to call his methods "educational exercises." All of them sounded incredibly uncivilized and inhumane but every one of them worked. After what Stahnke had told us, we understood why our former State Secret Police could invariably obtain all the information it wanted to gather. But has there ever been an unsuccessful secret police in history? No one had ever refused to sign the "statement" for the French Deuxieme Bureau. In the dictionary of the secret police such words as "failure,"

  "blunder," or "innocent" are seldom present. All secret police prefer results and they do not willingly admit failures. How the Soviet GPU or NKVD handle their prisoners is well known. The brutality of the Gestapo had been featured in countless publications. But I have also spoken to a former German POW who had to submit to the entire range of CIC third degree, and the Americans proved themselves not much gentler than their so much publicized Nazi or Red counterparts had been.

  The POW was not beaten and he was burned only occasionally with cigarette butts. But he was kept chained to a hot radiator, naked of course, for ninety-six hours in such manner that he could neither sit nor bend. On the second day his ankles began to swell. At the end of the ordeal they were swollen to the size of grapefruits and he could not flex a muscle. During that ninety-six hours, he was given very spicy food and only one small cup of water per day. Installed twenty inches from his ears a pair of loudspeakers kept blaring distorted music without a break. Occasionally the music stopped and he could hear the desperate screams and pleas of a German woman, coming from a nearby cell; she was obviously being tortured and abused in the most brutal fashion. Every now and then a CIC agent would enter the POW's cell to inform him about the mental or physical state of his wife confined next door. The agent also made a few acid remarks related to the woman's private parts or sexual behavior. The prisoner could often overhear the tormentors calling the woman "Sigrid," which was indeed the name of his wife. Only months later did he learn that his wife had been at home all the time and no one had ever questioned her about anything. There had been no woman at all in the next cell and the brutal torture scenes had been only cleverly recorded sequences. The cruel ruse had caused the prisoner weeks of mental anguish and in order to save his wife from further "torments," he confessed to everything the American Counter-intelligence wanted him to confess to.

  Who knows how many "war criminals" went to the gallows because their "confessions" had been obtained in a similar fashion. Sometimes a man is ready to die if his death will save the lives of his loved ones.

  The Americans proved that results can be obtained without beating a prisoner into an insensible pulp of swollen flesh. Instead of squeezing a prisoner's balls, they would squeeze his soul. Some American parents should see what their clean-cut sons are doing in some CIC interrogation chambers. But whatever they do, it is done behind yard-thick concrete walls and steel doors. No books were ever printed about the American Counter-intelligence except maybe a few glamorous adventure stories in the tradition of James Bond.

  To dictate his statement, the naked POW was taken upstairs and made to stand at the wall while the two CIC investigators and an extremely pretty American secretary took down his confession, smoked cigarettes, and drank coffee. A few months later the man managed to escape and beat his pursuers to the Foreign Legion. He was serving in my battalion.

  The only people I cannot picture committing similar brutalities were the British. But the MI-2 or the MI-5 had all the time on earth to investigate and conclude an affair. (Besides, their clients could always count on at least half an hour of relaxation daily, during the fifteen minute tea breaks, which no Britisher would ever forego unless the room were on fire.) There were scores of Germans among us who had been imprisoned by the British military in Germany. A few of them did receive a couple of kicks in the ass just to remind them that they were "bloody-goddamn Nazi bastards" but no one had been mistreated. Brutality and British temperament just do not seem to go together.

  In a captured Viet Minh village we unmasked a long-sought terrorist, "Hai Si," a corporal. His name was Trang Ghi Muong and he was responsible for the massacre of eight French prisoners and a German comrade. We were always mad enough when we came across the bodies of French comrades, but the discovery of a German corpse, minus nose, ears, tongue, and testicles always sent us "off our rockers." The moment Muong was identified I knew that there were more terrorists whom we did not personally know, but who were, nevertheless, responsible for similar atrocities by the Viet Minh in the area.

  The presence of a guerrilla battalion less than ten miles from the village prevented us from embarking on a complicated investigation, so we had to resort to some of Karl Stahnke's methods. We wanted to wipe out as many terrorists as possible before leaving the locality. Certain that the captive terrorists could tell us all the names we wanted, I decided to give Muong the well-deserved Third Degree.

  He was stripped. A naked man always feels inferior and more defenseless in the presence of persons fully clothed. Especially Orientals, who are, by nature, shy about exposure. Whenever someone had to be "worked over," he was first stripped.

  "Well, Muong, this is the end of the road for you," Sergeant Schenk remarked, pushing the prisoner through the cloth-covered entrance of a vacant hut. "In you go . . . and whether you will come out again depends on you." The prisoner staggered inside and stood blinking in the semidarkness, his hands covering his loins protectively and his eyes flitting back and forth among Karl, Eisner, and Krebitz.

  "Can't you at least say 'chieu ho'? when you come visiting?" Sergeant Krebitz bellowed, greeting the terrorist with a stinging, openhanded blow which sent the man reeling against Pfirstenhammer who was still busy rolling up his shirt-sleeves. The two crashed into the mud wall, with the naked Viet Minh embracing Karl.

  "Watch out, Karl! He is about to rape you," Eisner chuckled.

  Pushing the prisoner away, Karl drew his right knee up, feinting a kick. As the man doubled up instinctively, Karl's fist lashed out. With a cry of anguish, Muong went flying back toward Krebitz, who in turn dispatched him to Eisner. Bracing his back against the wall, Eisner received the prisoner with his boot lifted high. A powerful kick returned the terrorist to Karl's feet. For some time the ball game continued without causing the delinquent any serious injury; only the corner of his mouth split and his nose began to bleed profusely. Sergeant Schenk, too, had joined the game and though the terrorist did not understand a word of what was being yelled at him in German, the men entertained themselves with filthy oaths and wisecracks just to keep up spirit: Finally the prisoner tumbled and fell on the hard ground and remained folded up wit
h his hands protecting his loins and his head between his knees. Schenk grabbed Muong by the hair and pulled him to his feet.

  Whack!

  Crashing into the straw-and-mud wall with an impact that almost brought the roof down, Muong dropped again and sat moaning. Krebitz kicked a low stool to the center of the room. "Stand up!" he commanded, pushing the sobbing wretch toward the stool. "You may be sitting a lot after we break your legs. ... On the stool!"

  Trembling and already half paralyzed with fear, the man climbed onto the stool. "Which one of you is a Dang Vien?" Eisner shouted. "Who is the Agitprop secretary?" Karl cut in, stepping closer and swinging his belt. "Who is your commissar, Muong? . . . Who is the resident cadre of the Lao Dong?"

  Wielding four-foot-long bamboo clubs Krebitz and Schenk began to hammer away at the terrorist. Eisner drew his bayonet and held its point gently against Muong's belly. "Steady, steady. . . . Watch out which way you jump."

  "Mercy . .. mercy. .. ."

  "Sure, Muong . . . You've given plenty of mercy to the Legionnaires, haven't you?"

  More beating followed, then more questions.

  "Who is your commissar?"

  "Who are the Dang Vien?"

  "Who participated in the July massacre at Bo Hac?" "Where is the Lao Dong agitator? . . . Who is the resident cadre?"

  Eisner grabbed him by his hair. "Are you going to sing, or do you prefer some more beating?"

  "Sing!" Sergeant Schenk yelled. "Sing 'Father Ho is a filthy swine.'"

  His cane came crashing down on Muong's buttock, leaving an inch-wide red strip of burning flesh. "Sing!"

  Sergeant Krebitz jerked the terrorist around. "You had better start talking, my friend, or your ass will soon look as red as a First of May parade in Moscow."

  "Father Ho is a filthy swine," Schenk repeated.