Devil's Guard- The Complete Series Box Set

by Eric Meyer

  “Sergeant Bauer, check the surrounding area, and make sure they’re all accounted for.”

  “Will do, Jurgen. A good shoot, I think.”

  I nodded at him, a good shoot indeed. Von Kessler and Schuster were already rifling through their packs for signs of any documents we could keep for Headquarters to look at. The Arabs, Dubois, Renaud and Laurent, were rifling the possessions of the dead Viets, continuing a tradition of looting the fallen they’d probably learned at their grandfather’s knee.

  Bauer walked out of the jungle, with an astonishing sight. A woman, a beautiful, though grimy and shabbily attired, white woman. He also had a couple of dozen other civilians with him who looked to be Viets.

  “What the hell is that?” I asked him.

  “These are the survivors from the village, Jurgen. The Viets kept them locked in a compound a couple of hundred metres down the path. Apparently used them as servants and porters.”

  “And the white woman?”

  “I can speak for myself, Sergeant. I do speak French,” she cut in.

  I looked at her. She was about five feet tall, which made her no bigger than the Viet natives who tended to be short in stature. She was very slim, yet the dirty ragged clothes she wore failed to hide her curvy figure. Her dark brown hair was cut short, as was the custom in Indochina for European women. Long hair was difficult to keep clean and tidy. Her eyes, dark brown, looked at me without a trace of diffidence.

  “What’s your story, mademoiselle?” I asked her.

  “My name is Helene Baptiste, Sergeant. I’m a doctor. I work for the French government carrying out a survey of the diet of the natives in selected parts of Indochina. I was working here when the guerrillas came. They killed most of the men and took the rest of us prisoner.”

  “How long have you been here?” I asked her.

  “I think about eight months, but it’s difficult to keep track. We have no clocks or calendars.”

  It was hard to imagine the suffering of a white woman in this Viet hell. They were hard enough on their own people, so I didn’t like to ask how bad it had been for her. I looked around, and four of the men were standing guard. The rest were helping to tend to the natives, who were in a bad way after spending so long at the tender mercies of the communists.

  “We’ve limited medical supplies, but you are welcome to use some of them to take care of the villagers. They look as if they need them. Are you in need of medical attention, or can you give my men a hand?”

  “I’m a doctor, Sergeant. I will help out as much as I am able. And no, I’m not in need of anything urgent, apart from a shower and some clean clothes, that is.”

  She smiled, a smile that seemed to brighten up this dull, decrepit native village.

  “Very well, I’ll leave you to it.”

  “Thank you, Sergeant, for rescuing us. What is your name? I cannot call you Sergeant.”

  “Jurgen.”

  “Please call me Helene.”

  She smiled again. My God, she was beautiful. I made a note to warn the other sergeants to watch out for her. Any of the men would have given a year’s pay to spend the night with a woman like this.

  As I walked away, I wondered what the hell to do with her. I could hardly leave her here; she had suffered enough. Besides, this was Viet Minh territory. They’d be back, sooner or later, and this time thirsting for revenge for the deaths of their comrades. When they turned up, this village had better be empty; the reprisals heaped upon the heads of anyone still here would be beyond contemplation. The villagers could simply melt into the jungle. This was, after all, their territory before the Viet Minh came. But Helene could not, a white woman would soon become known to the communists, and they would come searching for her. I could radio for a helicopter evacuation, but the noise would bring in every Viet Minh fighter within a hundred square kilometres, sounding the death knell of our mission. I could hardly spare any men to escort her back to Hanoi, so that left only one option, and an option I was loathe to take. She would come with us. After all, she was a trained medic.

  I called my sergeants, Bauer, Schuster and Petrov, to one side. We all lit cigarettes, and I quietly explained it to them.

  “Damn, Jurgen, that’s a great idea. A beautiful doctor along with us, what more could we ask for?” Petrov exclaimed.

  “It’s not ideal, Nikolai, and she could hold us up. She’s a doctor, not a soldier.

  But I simply can’t see any alternative.”

  “True, Jurgen,” Bauer nodded thoughtfully.

  “But if that’s the only option open to us, we’ll need to make the best of it. She’s survived this long in a Viet Minh hell hole, so she’s probably a lot tougher than she looks.”

  “I thought you were Frenchmen,” a voice said behind me.

  It was Helene, who had come up quietly to our little group. We’d been speaking in German, as we often did by habit in this French-speaking country. It gave us a small degree of anonymity.

  “France is our adopted country, Helene,” I replied. “We were speaking German. Did you understand what we were saying?”

  “No, I don’t speak German. So are you all Germans?”

  “Before we joined the Legion, yes, except for Nikolai, who is Ukrainian,” I replied in French.

  “So you fought in the war. Were you Nazis?”

  “We were Waffen-SS. After the war, we joined the Legion and took French citizenship.”

  “SS, I see, so you were Nazis.”

  “It’s complicated,” I replied. “Helene, we were soldiers, and we fought for our country just like Frenchmen, Americans and Englishmen. There was no difference.”

  “Except for the atrocities you committed, millions killed, the Jews, gassed and exterminated.”

  Her eyes were fiery, and I wondered what she’d suffered at the hands of the Germans during World War II. I didn’t have to wonder for long.

  “Both of my parents were killed by the Nazis, Sergeant. For me they were a gang of brutes and thugs.”

  “I’m sorry for that, Helene, but I assure you I have never attacked anyone who wasn’t carrying a gun and ready to shoot at me. Isn’t it ironic that you have been rescued by the very Germans you hate so much?”

  She stared at me and abruptly stormed off. We could debate the rights and wrongs of war endlessly, but we were here to do a job. Hers was to heal the sick, and mine was to kill the enemy. Soldiering was a job like any other, there were good soldiers, and there were bad soldiers; as there were good and bad doctors.

  I carried on with my job, organising and checking supplies and munitions; and making sure the sentries were alert. I came across Helene. She was sitting on a tree stump, weeping.

  “I’m sorry for being so rude, Jurgen,” she murmured. “You’re right, of course you didn’t kill my parents, and I was wrong to blame you. War has been unkind to me, both the war in Europe and now this one in Indochina.”

  “War is an unkind business, I’m afraid. Soldiers just go where they’re ordered, and if you don’t like the war, you must take it up with the politicians. Now, we need to discuss what we can do with you.”

  “Can you not get me back to Hanoi?”

  I explained that we were on a high level, secret mission, and that I couldn’t spare men to escort her, or alert the enemy by calling in a helicopter evacuation.

  “So, I’m offering you a job, cherie, as unit medic. You can come with us, and we’ll see you safely back to Hanoi afterwards. Or you could stay here, but the Viet Minh will, of course, return.”

  She thought for a moment.

  “This mission, is it dangerous?”

  “We’re fighting the Viet Minh, Helene. You have seen it here for yourself. Yes, it’ll be dangerous.”

  “Very well, I understand, Sergeant Hoffman. I will come with you in my capacity as a doctor, nothing more.”

  She looked me in the eye, then abruptly turned to the villagers and began helping my men tend to their wounds and injuries. Most of them were covered in s
ores as a result of untreated cuts and grazes, together with the effects of the poor diet. We could help them, but the Viet Minh would return, and then God help them if they were still in the area.

  We eventually resumed our march. Armand and Renaud took the point as usual. Sergeant Schuster and Private Fassbinder covered our rear. I was pleasantly surprised that Helene Baptiste kept up, so clearly her imprisonment had not affected her too badly. I afterwards discovered she’d been a successful sportswoman in France, a keen skier, tennis player, marksman and at one time a middle distance athlete, narrowly missing selection for the Olympic Games.

  She walked beside me and chatted about her life. Born in Lyon in 1924, her parents had moved to Paris shortly afterwards. At school when the Germans invaded, she had returned home one day to discover her parents had been imprisoned and shot by the Gestapo; after her father, also a doctor, treated a wounded resistance fighter and was executed together with his wife. Helene had decided that all Germans were the lowest form of life, and dedicated her life to becoming the kind of daughter her parents would have wanted her to be. She graduated from medical school and immediately volunteered to serve in war-torn areas where she felt her talents would be most needed. She was twenty-eight years old and had worked in a variety of places, including Algeria, and even a brief visit to Devil’s Island, the notorious French penal colony. Eventually, she wound up in Indochina, touring remote villages to assess the health problems that needed to be addressed by the government. She’d travelled with a native guide, who’d been promptly killed for collaborating when the Viet Minh arrived in the village.

  As dusk fell over the jungle, we made camp in a clearing. A stream bubbled nearby, and we thankfully refilled all our water bottles with the cool, clear water. We shared out our rations and sat contentedly chatting and smoking after we’d eaten.

  “Tell me about yourself, Jurgen,” she said suddenly. “I’ve given you my life history, but how did you end up in Indochina?”

  The others laughed, and von Kessler said, “Yes, go on, Jurgen. Tell the young lady how a Waffen-SS killer wound up in this stinking hell.”

  “Shut up, Manfred,” I replied. “It’s not a pretty story, and I can’t think anyone would want to hear it.”

  “I want to hear it,” she said. “Please, tell me what brought you here.”

  I thought for a moment. Then I told her of the riots in Berlin, following Germany’s collapse in 1918, and the endless violence, rocks thrown, and shots fired. The Stalhlhelm, The SA, The Freikorps, mainly right wing civilian irregulars, and recruited from former soldiers, fighting the rising tide of communism that threatened the whole country. Many of my friends and family members were caught up in the violence, and two cousins had been executed by the communists, when Munich was briefly declared a Soviet Republic. The depression, the chronic inflation that wiped out people’s savings, the hunger and desperation that all seemed to be answered by the miracle of Adolf Hitler.

  Hitler rose to high office in 1923, mainly as a result of his considerable skills in oratory, organisation and promotion. He was aided, in part, by his willingness to use violence in advancing his political objectives and to recruit party members who were willing to be equally violent, or more so. The Beer Hall putsch in 1923 and the release of his book, Mein Kampf, introduced Hitler to a wider audience. In the mid-twenties, the party engaged in electoral battles in which Hitler increasingly participated as a speaker and organiser, as well as in street battles and violence between the Communists and the Nazi's Stormtroopers, the SA. Through the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Nazis gathered enough electoral support to become the largest political party in the Reichstag; and Hitler's blend of political acuity, deceptiveness and cunning converted the party's non-majority, but popular status, into effective governing power in the failing Weimar Republic of 1933. The Russian Front finally put an end to Hitler’s ambitions, as the German people realised too late that he had let them to utter defeat and catastrophe.

  I had joined the Waffen-SS and fought most of the war on the Russian Front, fighting the communists. When the war ended, I’d risen to the rank of Sturmbannfuhrer, or Major. After so many years of serving my country as a loyal soldier, I returned home to find myself a hunted criminal.

  Losing the war, and the subsequent treatment of the Waffen-SS, had left most of us embittered, poverty stricken, jobless and homeless. It was just a short step to joining the Foreign Legion, where I quickly found myself, like many other former members of the SS, once again fighting the communists. It was a different country, a different climate, and a different foe. But the rhetoric was the same, the cruelty no different, and the fighting no less bloodthirsty.

  “But surely, Jurgen, the Waffen-SS was no less cruel in the countries it occupied, especially Russia,” she commented.

  “Helene, I cannot answer for the Gestapo, or the SS-Einsatzgruppen that hunted down and murdered Jews on the Eastern Front. They disgusted me, and most of my comrades, just as much as they did you and the rest of the civilised world. But we were soldiers, and we fought against enemy soldiers. The communists will kill anyone who disagrees with them. You have seen their methods in that village.”

  “It is so confusing,” she said. “After my parents were killed, I hated all Germans, and I couldn’t bear to be near them. If I knew who’d killed them, I would have shot them myself. But now, here I am rescued and being helped by those self same Germans.”

  “Not the same, Helene, by no means. As I said, we despised the excesses of cruelty carried out in the name of Germany. Those brutes were the exception, not the rule. That’s the difference between the communists and us. Cruelty is their ‘modus operandi’, and the very foundation of their philosophy. You either agree with them, or they kill you, as you have witnessed.”

  Bauer came and joined our little group. He handed out cigarettes, topping up our mugs of coffee with a flask of schnapps he’d taken out of his pack.

  “I was in France, training the SS-Freiwillegen units, French volunteers. They were keen, those lads. Sometimes I thought they were too keen. They seemed to be trying to outdo the German SS units by displaying more bravery under fire, more cruelty, too. Did you ever see the Milice units, Miss Baptiste? French paramilitary police, nasty bunch.”

  Helene nodded. “I understand the point you’re making, Sergeant. That it’s not just Germans who are cruel, the French can be just as bad.”

  “No,” Bauer shook his head, “not at all. I think that humankind is capable of the most extreme acts of cruelty, and it’s nothing to do with nationality. It’s more to do with politics, with beliefs. We found that out in Russia, the home of communism. They would kill anyone there, soldier or civilian, man, woman or child, just for the crime of not agreeing with them. It’s a bit like religion really, like the Medieval Inquisition. One day we’ll get another religion go just as crazy, and just as bloodthirsty. Maybe they can fight the communists, or they could kill each other, and save us the trouble.”

  “Enough of the philosophy,” I called. “We need to make an early start, so let’s turn in.”

  The meeting broke up. I checked the sentries and set a watch rota. Then I climbed under a blanket and went to sleep. Helene Baptiste was in the middle of us. I had loaned her my bedroll that occasioned a stream of taunts from the men.

  In the morning, we refilled our water bottles from the stream, as it could be the last chance for some time. Then we set off. As before, Armand and Renaud took the point, and Schuster and Fassbinder were the rear guard. We left at seven o’clock and walked all morning. By midday, I was ready to call a halt for lunch when we found ourselves on a well-kept trail. It had recently been widened and was obviously well used. The men needed no orders, and everyone cocked their weapon and held it ready for instant action. We scanned the surrounding trees and foliage, but there was no sign of any enemy ambush. Then we walked out of the jungle into an amazing sight, rows and rows of neatly planted rubber trees either side of an avenue that stretched way in the di
stance to a house. No ordinary house, it was more of a mansion, and built in classic French style. As we got nearer, I could see that it was not as imposing close up as it had been from a distance. Much of it was in need of repair, but it was still a startling contrast to the mean little huts the natives built in these rural areas.

  Plantation workers were tapping the trees, and we saw five of them as we marched up to the house. They were all young men, probably between eighteen and thirty, which was enough to make us even more vigilant. At that age, in this part of Indochina controlled by the communists, and that invariably meant Viet Minh. I looked at Bauer, and he nodded. He’d come to the same conclusion. We reached the house and halted. He detailed Renaud and Armand to take post somewhere they could keep watch. The two men disappeared with their rifles, and I last saw them climbing a couple of high trees. The front door opened, and a man walked out. He was dressed in a soiled white linen suit.

  “Gentlemen, this is a surprise. Welcome to my home. Please join me for some refreshments.”

  * * * * *

  CHAPTER SIX

  I was so surprised that I didn’t reply for a few moments. The man was white, probably about fifty years old, and his accent indicated he was French. Yet for several years, this area had been under the control of the Viet Minh, and it seemed strange that they’d left one of the hated French colonialists unmolested.

  “Who the hell are you?” I asked him abruptly.

  “My name is Joseph Deville, Sergeant. And you are?”

  “Sergeant Hoffman, Monsieur. French Foreign Legion, and we are on a routine patrol of this area.”

  “They don’t send many French soldiers around here,” he commented.