"Pull his beard and he will cry." Pfirstenhammer improvised a rhyme. The quartet broke into laughter. Muong tumbled from the stool but was dragged back onto it instantly.
"Steady!" Eisner pushed his bayonet between Muong's thighs. "If you keep jumping, you will lose your balls, Liebchen."
The guerrilla cried out in pain. "Don't howl, only sing," Karl urged him. "Sing!" He smashed the guerrilla in the nose. Muong fell from the stool with blood splattered all over his face and chest. He screamed. As he slipped from the stool the bayonet slashed him between the thighs.
"I told you to keep steady," Eisner snapped. "What will you do if you lose your pecker?"
"Yes . . . Father Ho is going to be mad at you, Muong." Schenk chuckled. "He needs lots of little Viet Minh. In the future, that is if you have a future, Muong, no girl will look at you. So you had better wise up."
"I have nothing to tell you," the guerrilla sobbed." "Nothing."
The joking stopped and the real work began. Calling in a couple of troopers, the terrorist was bound and beaten again while questions were shouted from every direction. "Where are your weapons? . . . Where is the rice for the section? ... Where are the tunnels?"
"Aren't you going to talk?"
"Haven't you had enough?"
After fifteen minutes of intensive beating the man fainted. A bucket of water was thrown over him; the quartet waited a while, then resumed the treatment. The resistance of the terrorist was truly astonishing. Ever since the "going over" started, except for screams and moans, he had uttered not a syllable.
"Merde!" Pfirstenhammer swore. "Does he feel no pain?"
"Maybe he is a fakir," Krebitz suggested.
The beating continued. Suddenly Muong emptied his bowels and began to urinate. Schenk drew aside swearing. The guerrilla's face was a swollen, contorted mass of battered flesh. Eisner brought in a pair of pliers and shoved it into Muong's face.
"Look here, you canaille, either you talk now or I am going to yank your teeth out one by one, squash your balls, then break every bone in your fingers. You can still recover from what you have gotten up till now, but by the time we are through with you, you will be crippled for life."
"If you talk, I will set you free," I interposed, allowing the prisoner a ray of hope to survive, an important tactical move. By then-, Muong was all set to die and thought we were going to kill him whether he talked or not.
"You... will... let me ... go?" he muttered.
"I will let you go," I repeated firmly.
He was ready to talk. In short, high-pitched, hysterical gasps his words came. Eisner rose and put away the pliers. "Give him something to drink," he told Schenk, and taking a bar of soap from his kit, he began to wash his hands. The smell of blood, urine, and excreta in the hut became overwhelming. The rag cover of the door was flung back and Riedl appeared.
"Phoooi," he exclaimed twisting his nose. "It stinks in here. How can you stand it?" Turning to Eisner he asked, "How's the dirty work coming along?"
"Shut up and get out of here!" Bernard snapped. "Someone has to do this. Be glad it's not you."
Riedl grinned. "I am glad. I never saw so many shitty bastards in my life." Holding his nose mockingly, he turned and left for the open.
"Get some more water and call in a few villagers to wash up the wretch." I gestured toward the guerrilla.
"What for?" Schenk queried. "We can shoot him shit and all."
"We are not going to shoot him," I said quietly.
"My good God, Hans, you are getting soft."
"We made a bargain with him which I intend to keep. . . . Besides, he is a brave man, Victor. How long do you think you would have stood up to what he was getting?"
"Me? I would have pissed you between the eyes in the first five minutes," he replied. "I am a small, weak creature ... very delicate and—"
Karl gave Schenk a friendly kick in the bottom. "You would have given us away all right."
"Given you away?" Schenk cried. "I not only would have told them everything but would have helped them to put the rope around your neck, Karl."
"Set him free!" I ordered the troopers as we left the hut. "After what he told us he won't be playing the liberating hero much longer. The Viet Minh will kill him."
We rounded up the party members and the Viet Minh activists whom Muong had named, some twenty men altogether. We bayoneted them in a small ravine behind the village.
The cruel war continued.
7. THE MAN-HAO INCIDENT
The village elder had refused to accommodate the Communist agitators; now he lay in his own doorway with a shattered skull. A frail little woman had tried to prevent the terrorists from recruiting her son. She too was dead among the smoldering ruins of what had been her house. The son, his hand still clutching the ax with which he had tried to rescue his mother, lay in a ditch filled with filth. In a small bamboo hut we discovered seven bodies; father, mother, grandfather, and four children—everybody stabbed, cut open, beaten to death, including the smallest of the victims, a baby in her crib. A girl, slim and pretty, lay across a low fence over which she was trying to flee when the bullet struck her. Her hand still clutched a broken doll and her lips were blue with death. Nearby a scraggy mongrel whined at the corpse of a man.
Along a low palisade we found the naked corpses of eleven Legionnaires. Their flesh was beaten into a swollen bluish pulp devoid of all human semblance and mutilated beyond description. They were all Germans, our veteran comrades for many years. Receiving the village elder's urgent request for evacuation, I had sent them forward to reassure the terrified people. Having refused to cooperate with the Viet Minh, the inhabitants had expelled the guerrilla agitators and had beaten one of them up in the heat of an argument. They had not done it because they were pro-French or hated Communists but for the simple reason that the war had so far avoided their hamlet and they had desired to preserve peace in their dwellings.
The Viet Minh revenge had been swift and ferocious. The Communists, who can exist only where terror prevails, decided to give a lasting example of what happens to the enemies of Father Ho's "soldiers," the guerrillas. The small platoon could not stem the human tide that descended on the community. It had been crushed by the sheer weight of enemy flesh.
We recovered ample evidence of their desperate last stand. The piles of spent shells around the palisade told us the whole sad story. There were no enemy corpses in evidence. When not pursued immediately, the terrorists would always carry away their dead to bury them secretly near their homes or in the hills. From the blood-soiled ground where they had fallen we computed the possible number of enemy casualties: one hundred and six altogether.
Walther Grobauer from Munich, Adolf Greilinger from Kiel, Kurt Heinzl, a veteran of the battle for Leningrad, Hans Aigner, Erich Stumme, Erich Windischmann from Berlin, Rupert Winkler, Max Hartmann, Hans Weber, the one-time panzer driver of the Afrika Korps, Friedrich Zimmermann and Alois Krupka, the two veterans of the last great battle on the Vistula. They had fought Communism for over a decade and had come a long way to fight it again and die. They will be forgotten heroes.
The survivors of the community, about sixty families, were leaving the village that could no longer offer them either food or shelter, let alone security—weeping, sagging people who had lost everything and everyone in a brief fury of hatred that had obliterated their past, present, and future. We stood in silent sympathy as our three tanks took positions at the foot of the hills. Our convoy of thirty American trucks looked strangely new and powerful as they loomed over the collapsed, blackened huts —a bit of the present dominating the ancient, the Stone Age. Yet all that those people had ever wanted was to be left alone to live their Stone-Age lives and never encounter anything "civilized." To them civilization meant tanks, machine guns, warplanes, death! But the entire world of "civilized" nations with all their humanitarian institutions and their United Nations could not fulfill the modest desire of these simple people: to be left alone, not to be bothered, n
ot to be given anything except peace.
The civilized world is very generous. It provides even for those who neither sought nor wanted to receive its gifts.
Wherever we turned, corpses sprawled on the ground for acres around; here one, there in groups of five or more. Those who had escaped the massacre were trying to gather what was left of their possessions, pushing and pulling at the burned debris, still in a state of semi-stupor. Men, women, and children wailed over their dead or just stood petrified, gazing at the corpses in silent perplexity.
In and around a small Buddhist temple the survivors gathered. Erich and Helmut were busy opening tin cans to distribute corned beef, condensed milk, rice, and drinking water. The wells of the village could not be used. The terrorists had dumped corpses into them. Behind the temple, Eisner set up a first-aid station to care for the wounded. Some of the people had been hurt badly and for them Sergeant Zeisl, our chief medic, could do little beyond easing their pain with morphine. Others, only slightly injured, sat sullenly on the ground, holding a hand or a dirty rag over their wounds, waiting their turn.
Around eleven o'clock the sun was blazing furiously. Perspiration could not evaporate in the ninety percent humidity. We were all soaking wet and a great stink enveloped the crowd around the ambulance. The air was pregnant with the scent of sweat, blood, and human filth. From the ruins little groups of people dragged forward. Fathers pushed carts, the women hauled them with ropes. The children and old people rode in the carts, some wailing, others just staring with vacant eyes.
I was thinking of the villages which we had had to destroy in the past It was always the civilians who suffered, whichever side they adhered to. Even if they wanted to take no sides and remain out of trouble, the war struck them down. If they refused to accommodate the Viet Minh, the terrorists liquidated them without mercy. If they went "Red," the Foreign Legion exterminated them directly or indirectly. The people were trapped between the cogwheels of a murder mechanism which turned inexorably, churning up and crushing everyone it caught. It was easy to say, "C'est la guerre." We were not any better than the Viet Minh and we knew it. But we did want to fight a clean war and we were not the ones who started the atrocities.
We only retaliated in kind. We could do nothing else. The French tried to remain humane and their troops were dying like flies. We had no desire to die in Indochina. We knew that if anything could ever induce the Communists to recognize military conventions or even the fundamental principles of human law, it would be only their own terror. That might convince them that- they had better fight a man's war instead of a war of the wolves. The Viet Minh had to suffer immensely before they would do as much as recognize a Red Cross emblem. The Communists understand no language other than the cries of agony, to which they are accustomed. Kindness and sympathy or a humane approach will only make them suspicious. They know the world hates them, and that they can exist only by the force of arms, blackmail, fire, rebellion, destruction, death! We were resolved to make their lives a long cry of agony.
Still there was a slight difference between our opposing groups. We did feel remorse whereas they felt none. We could shed tears over a single fallen comrade. The Viet Minh were throwing away men the way we discarded cigarette butts. For us, spreading terror was the sole means of survival. The Viet Minh killed and mutilated for the sheer pleasure of seeing suffering and shedding blood.
I watched Schulze and Riedl as they distributed food, smiled and joked to cheer up the apathetic children. I recalled some past events when those very hands, my hands included, had gunned down similar children at another place without batting an eye. It was all so senseless, like a schizophrenic vision that would haunt us forever.
It was difficult to stay within reason when one beheld the abused corpse of a comrade for whom, the enemy thought, death alone had not been enough punishment. Nothing except our own survival could justify what we did and no sublime Communist slogans about "liberation" and "independence" could ever justify the ruthless genocide committed by the patriots of Ho Chi Minh. But in the end they will get the worst of the deal. Because one day we will depart. The assassins of the Viet Minh will have to stay to face their victims again and again, bracing against those who seek revenge. And there will be tens of thousands of people who will, one day, seek revenge; fathers, sons, or even mothers whose loved ones had been murdered by the "liberators." People can always be subdued by terror but nothing can make people forget. Neither the bayonets nor the secret police.
Corporal Altreiter and a platoon gathered the sad remains of our comrades. We buried them in a common grave over which Schulze planted a crude wooden cross which bore no names, only the short notice:
"Eleven comrades. Deutschland—Russland—Nord Afrika—Indochina" and the date. We will always remember their names. Others won't care who they were anyway.
The killers had to be punished but there was no need for us to hurry. The village lay only eight miles from the Chinese border and the assassins were low on ammunition; they wouldn't stay in the vicinity. Most of the victims had been stabbed or clubbed to death. The terrorist unit was on its way home to a base near Man-hao, China. They must have already crossed the border. The survivors insisted that there were many Chinese "officers" with the Viet Minh. The village had been attacked by at least three hundred guerrillas.
"I think this is Ming Chen-po's handiwork," Eisner remarked and I agreed. The people spoke of a "one-armed Chinese" who seemed to be in command of the terrorist group. Ming was known to have lost an arm to the Japanese artillery in 1939, and I had seen some of the hamlets overrun by the troops of this one-time bandit and now People's Commissar.
It was a known fact that Chinese "experts" and even militiamen were actively engaged in terrorist ventures within French Indochina. I had sent several reports to Hanoi drawing attention to their activities in the border provinces but the High Command could do little to retaliate. "Kill as many of them as possible," said Colonel Houssong, "but take no Chinese prisoners. Mao couldn't care less about losing a million volunteers in Indochina but if we displayed a single Chinese prisoner, he would be pushed into saying something to the world. And Mao would never admit that he was guilty of armed intrusion into French territory. He would demand the release of a Chinese officer whom the French had kidnapped from Chinese territory (where he was probably engaged in the peaceful activity of planting potatoes in the garden behind the guardhouse)." The Communists are superb liars. They are quite capable of delivering a fat lie so convincingly, or at least vehemently, that even their victim will later apologize for having erred.
Ming had a base across the frontier and was wary enough never to venture too deep into Indochina. We suspected that the terrorists had established a base, a sort of advance command post, somewhere within a fifty-mile radius of Man-hao. The Chinese advisers remained there, while the native Viet Minh embarked on more distant missions. Whenever the Legion pursued them, they quickly retreated into their sanctuary where no French troops could follow them. Ming was an old quarry of ours. Twice in seven months we had been compelled to abandon pursuit because of the border.
Now I felt it was time to get even with the terrorists of Ming, wherever they might be. I decided to demolish their home base some twenty-odd miles inside China. Should we succeed we could keep our mouths shut and enjoy being rid of Ming. Should we lose, none of us would give a damn what Hanoi or Peking might say or do. With a bullet in the head one has no worries. Both Hanoi and Peking were far away. Our enemy was temptingly close.
I turned the thought over and over in my mind, checked our stores, the maps, and found the idea feasible. The battalion had refrained from crossing the frontier before. The enemy would not suspect us now. I summoned my companions and motioned them to sit down around a table in the ambulance tent.
"What's up, Hans?" Schulze queried. "Anything wrong?"
"Nothing's wrong," Eisner spoke before I could answer. "I think we are going to leave here soon." He jerked a thumb toward the Chinese fronti
er. "That way!"
I nodded and announced without preliminaries, "We are going to blast the camp of Ming Chen-po!"
Pfirstenhammer gaped. "At Man-hao?"
"That's right."
Riedl whistled and Karl pursed his lips in a grin. Schulze began to rub his scalp. "Well?" I asked them. "What do you think of it?"
Riedl shrugged. "I always wanted to see China."
"You won't be seeing much of it," Schulze chuckled, "but if we want to say good-night to Ming this is the time to say it. We don't have to walk far."
"That's right," Karl agreed as Eisner remarked, "Headquarters will be mad as hell."
"Who cares?" Schulze hitched his chair closer. "Let's have a look at the maps." He glanced at me. "I presume this is going to be a strictly private enterprise, Hans?"
"Naturally. We cannot request a permit to enter China and we can never admit having done so."
"How about Colonel Houssong?" Karl inquired. "I am sure he would love it. Provided, of course, that we return without leaving corpses behind . . . our own corpses."
Eisner thought the raid was within our "means," and Riedl said that for him it was alles Wursl. He suggested that with the Man-hao business done we might as well take the train to Peking and free the Republic. "After all, Mao has only about seven thousand divisions and of these only seven carry guns, the rest clubs," he said.
We quickly decided to leave our uniforms behind, along with identity tags and personal papers. Pfirstenhammer swore because we selected him to remain with the convoy and take care of the villagers. "We need a competent man to maintain the perimeter. I cannot leave the convoy to a corporal," I stated flatly. "Some of us will have to stay, Karl."
"How about Riedl?" Pfirstenhammer exclaimed indignantly. "He is just as competent as I am." He turned toward Riedl. "Aren't you, Helmut?"
"Why pick on me? I haven't got a sore leg. Besides I can shoot a lot better than you ever will."
"Let's bet on it," Karl exploded.
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