Devil's Guard- The Complete Series Box Set

by Eric Meyer

  “Really,” I commented innocently. “This is a French colony, so why should there not be French soldiers here?”

  He realised instantly that he’d made a mistake and immediately tried to cover it.

  “Of course, as a citizen of France, I’m always happy to welcome our soldiers to my home. Please, come to the veranda at the back of the house. It is cooler.

  “Trinh,” he shouted. A Viet girl came out of the house. She was about eighteen, and her pretty face marred with a set of buck teeth. She looked at us coldly, and clearly unhappy at the presence of soldiers here.

  “Trinh, would you serve cold lemonade and some sandwiches on the veranda, please,” Deville said.

  She murmured something and disappeared back into the house.

  “Come, gentlemen,” Deville indicated a path at the side of the house.

  We followed him to a shaded patio, arranged with tables and chairs, and sat down. Trinh came out after a few minutes with a large tray of glasses and jugs of lemonade. Deville served us all with cold drinks while Trinh went back into the house for food. We sat down enjoying our unexpected refreshments, while I tried to find out more about this puzzling set up in the middle of the communist dominated jungle of Northern Indochina.

  “How on earth were the materials brought here to build this house, Monsieur Deville?”

  “Ah, we have a waterway on the northern side of the plantation,” he replied. “It was a small river but was widened during the twenties when the rubber trade was expanding. Since the war, of course, it’s beginning to revert to its individual state. But it was wide enough then to allow small boats to come up river, bringing the masonry and materials to construct the house and some of the surrounding buildings.”

  “So the rubber business is still profitable?” I asked him.

  “A shadow of its former self, I’m afraid, but I get by. You haven’t introduced yourselves or the young lady, Sergeant. You are all French? Your accent is unusual.”

  “Ah, yes, this is Doctor Helene Baptiste.” Helene shook hands with him.

  “Enchante, Mam’selle,” he said.

  “Monsieur Deville, thank you for your hospitality,” she replied.

  “The rest of us are not French,” I interrupted. “We are mainly Germans, some North Africans.” I was interested to see his reaction.

  “Germans? But I thought that the SS…”

  He stopped speaking, realising that he was about to give himself away.

  “How did you know we were SS? French policy is that SS are not recruited into the Legion.”

  “I heard it somewhere, but I can’t remember who told me that former SS men were serving in the Legion,” he stammered.

  “That’s interesting. You can’t get much news in this remote part of the country,” I replied.

  “No, that’s true, but I have a short wave radio, and I do keep up with most things. Let me get you some cakes, Sergeant. I know that Trinh has just baked some.”

  He got up and almost ran into the house. I nodded to von Kessler.

  “Follow him, Manfred. I don’t trust him at all.”

  “No, I can smell Viet Minh all over this place. I’ll go check him out,” he said, disappearing quietly into the house.

  I signalled to the men to be ready, but the atmosphere was sufficiently tense that they were already checking their weapons ready for action. As Manfred had said, the whole place reeked of Viet Minh.

  A few minutes later, we heard shouting, and a loud commotion coming from inside the house. Before we could check it out, Manfred re-emerged, holding Trinh by the throat, and his other arm pointing his pistol; the Luger he’d carried all through the Eastern Front campaign, at Deville.

  “Poison, Jurgen. The bitch was sprinkling it all over the pretty little cakes she was preparing for us.”

  Trinh was struggling but was no match for von Kessler’s strength. Her eyes blazed with hate. She spat at me, and I moved to one side to let it fly past my face.

  “You colonialist scum! We will drive you and your masters back into the sea, every last one of you. If you stay here, you will die.”

  “Is that so?” I answered her.

  “Corporal Dubois, take her back into the house, and find out how many Viet Minh are in the immediate locality. It’s pointless just asking her, so you can use your usual methods. Laurent, go with him, and give him a hand. I think she’s a bit of a firebrand.”

  They took hold of the girl and dragged her back into the house. We heard her screaming her message of hate and death as they went. Then there was silence.

  “What are they doing to her?” Helene asked me.

  “Asking her some questions, that’s all,” I replied.

  “Do you think she’ll tell them anything?”

  “Yes, I do,” I said.

  There was a scream, long, agonised and chilling.

  “Jurgen, for God’s sake, they’re torturing her. Stop them!”

  “Do you want to leave here and walk into a Viet Minh ambush,” I asked her, “get captured and raped by a horde of communist savages, and then beaten to death for the crime of being white and French?”

  She shook her head.

  “Fine!” I snapped.

  “In order to avoid that happening to any of us, we need to know their strength, disposition of forces, communications and anything else that will help us. I suggest you leave us to do our job, which in part is keeping you alive, Mademoiselle Baptiste.”

  She glared at me then stormed off.

  “Friedrich,” I said to Sergeant Bauer, “follow her, and make sure she doesn’t get into trouble.”

  He nodded and strolled after the very angry, but beautiful young Frenchwoman. I turned to Deville.

  “I think you have some explaining to do, Deville.”

  He smiled and spread his hands ingratiatingly.

  “You must understand, Sergeant…”

  He was interrupted by more piercing screams of agony from inside the house. Clearly, Trinh was making Bruno Dubois work hard for the information.

  “No, you must understand,” I told him. “I know that you’re collaborating with the Viet Minh, and I know you were helping Trinh to poison my men. Now, quickly, how many Viet Minh are there in this area?”

  “Sergeant, how would I know? They don’t tell me anything.”

  “Manfred, go and tell them to bring out the girl.”

  “Yes, Jurgen. Right away.”

  A few minutes later, he came back with Laurent and Renaud, carrying the girl Trinh between them. She was not a pretty sight, covered in blood, and one arm hanging limply from its socket and several of her teeth missing. One of her eyes was closed, and her face black and blue. Deville went even whiter than before.

  “Any luck?” I asked Dubois. He shook his head, “No, Jurgen, she’s a stubborn one.”

  “Right then, shoot her,” I told him.

  He pulled out his pistol, a MAC Mle 1950. It was a gun he had acquired recently and was very proud of.

  The MAC-50, also known as the MAC 1950, PA modèle 1950, was a standard semi-automatic pistol popular in the French army and the Legion. Adopted in 1950, it replaced the previous series of French pistols, the Modèle 1935A & Modèle 1935S, and was produced between 1950 and 1970. It used the Browning system with an integral barrel feed ramp, a single-action trigger with slide mounted safety that locks the firing pin so that the hammer could be lowered by pressing the trigger with safety engaged.

  A useful gun, I thought, as I looked on. I doubted that Trinh was much interested in the details of our standard issue sidearm.

  He held it to Trinh’s head and looked at me. I nodded. He pulled the trigger; there was a loud report, and a spout of blood shot out of the girl’s head. She crashed to the ground, lying in a mess of brains and blood. I turned back to Deville.

  “Now, my friend, you were telling me about the Viet Minh in this area. How many are there working on this plantation, first of all?”

  Within minutes, we had al
l the information that he knew. There were ten Viets working on the rubber plantation, as well as the newly deceased Trinh. They were all working on the trees, seven men and three women. Normally, they didn’t carry weapons while they were at work, but they would all be well aware of our arrival and may have armed themselves in the meantime.

  I sent Schuster out with four men to notify our sentries, Armand and Renaud, to hunt them down. The rest of us moved into the house and took up position by the windows.

  “Sergeant, I’ve done everything I could to help you, but you know how difficult my position is here, living and working with these savages,” Deville said to me.

  “Indeed I do understand,” I replied.

  “Dubois,” I nodded at the Arab then gazed at Deville. “Finish him.”

  “No,” he screamed. His scream was cut off as Dubois’s pistol blew half his head away.

  “I think that’ll ease his difficulties,” I said to them.

  I saw Bauer rushing towards the house, propelling Helene along. There was a fusillade of shots from within the trees, and the steady crack, crack, as the sniper rifles opened up. Bauer dashed in with the girl, who gasped at the sight of Deville’s body.

  “Viet Minh, Jurgen, ten of them. They’ve armed themselves with Mosin Nagants and were taking pot shots at us, but Armand and Renaud have already knocked down half of them. Schuster’s got them pinned down in a wooden hut, but I think they can take care of them. The last thing I saw was them setting up an MG 42.”

  “That should do it, Friedrich. Would you take care of Mam’selle Baptiste. The rest of you, come with me.”

  We went quickly towards the sound of the firing. Through a group of trees there were several wooden huts, undoubtedly accommodation for the plantation workers. Bullets buzzed around us as the Viets were shooting at anything they thought might be a target, but they weren’t trained soldiers, not a single shot came even close. Schuster’s men were in cover behind what looked like a storage shed. Nearer the hut occupied by the enemy was a stone wall, and I could see two of our people, Fuchs and Fassbinder, setting up the MG 42 ready to go into action. They snapped in the belt, Fassbinder lay at the side of the gun ready to feed in the ammunition and Fuchs lay behind it, looking around for the order. They were ready, and Schuster shouted to them.

  “Kill the bastards, Klaus, every last one of them!”

  I was surprised at his vehemence. Normally, he wasn’t so emotional. He noticed my expression.

  “They nearly had us, Jurgen, the bastards were waiting in ambush. If they were any good, they could have done a lot of damage.”

  “You must be getting old, Paul,” I laughed. Then the machine gun opened up, and the familiar ‘buzz saw’ sound shattered the last vestiges of peace from the day. Birds flew into the air as the rounds poured out of the gun. The hut was shredded by thousands of the steel jacketed bullets so that we began to see sunlight streaming through the holes. One by one, the enemy ceased fire until there was only silence from inside the hut. I shouted for the ceasefire, and we walked forward to inspect the damage, but there was no need to enter the hut. The MG 42 had torn huge holes in the woodwork through which we could see inside. There were ten bodies, seven men and three women as Deville had said. It was difficult to separate the sexes as the bodies were so destroyed by the massive firepower of the German-made medium machine gun.

  “They may as well have sheltered behind a table cloth,” Schuster said drily.

  “True,” I replied. “Did we take any casualties?”

  “None,” he told me. “But it was a close thing.”

  He was still shaken, and I wondered was he perhaps truly getting too old for this game, or maybe we were too old. We’d been fighting since 1939, nearly fourteen years. For twelve of those years, we’d been fighting the communists. We were no longer the optimistic young men we once were, ready to leap into action at the least provocation, and ever ready to defend the honour of our unit as well as our comrades’ lives. We were getting older, and most soldiers would have been retired from active service long before now.

  It was ironic; the Third Reich had treated the Jews as non-persons, untermensch. Now we were the pariahs of Europe, and exiled to this jungle hell to endlessly fight the communists. We were almost like the ghost crew of the fabled Flying Dutchman, condemned to roam the world’s battlegrounds for all eternity. But we were not ghosts. We were men. In truth, most of us were getting tired, and tired men made mistakes. I wondered how long we would be able to continue this lethal game of death before eventually the game itself took us as its prize. I shrugged off the morbid thought; I was a soldier, and I had a job to do.

  We regrouped at the house, and all of us still intact, together with Helene Baptiste who continued smarting at the bloodshed. She’d seen the Viet Minh at first hand in the village where we found her. I wondered what it would take to open her eyes to the realities of war, or perhaps she preferred to remain blind to the brutal excesses of the battlefield. She refused to meet my eyes, but just stood waiting in the middle of the column. I sent out Armand and Renaud to the point. After ten minutes, I gave the signal, and we moved off. Petrov came up to me.

  “Jurgen, I found some plastique in one of the store rooms, and it looked like the Viets were in the business of making explosive booby traps. I moved a box of the stuff into the house and rigged it to go up when someone goes in to investigate.”

  “Excellent, Nikolai. That should take care of a few of them. Well done.”

  We pressed on towards Dong Khe, a major town that had been held by the Viet Minh for more than two years. Our intelligence reported that one of the Chu Luc units was stationed there.

  The Chu Luc were the Viet Minh main force units. According to our reports, they were becoming larger and better trained. Their combined strength comprised roughly a hundred thousand combatants in seventy battalions, with another thirty-three battalions of regional forces. This totalled forty thousand men as well as sixty thousand local support personnel. Giap had been using these Chu Luc main force units to harass French positions along the main routes in northern Indochina, together with mines and ambushes.

  We weren’t equipped to take on a Viet Minh company, let alone a Chu Luc main force. Our only chance was to keep our heads down and veer to the west of the town to avoid being seen. Already, we had made too much noise with the destruction of the unit on the Thai Nguyen road, as well as the plantation we’d just left. I could only hope the enemy would put it all down to a search and destroy mission, and attach no special importance to it. By nightfall, we were already skirting the town and keeping ten kilometres to the west. There was no sign of the enemy, and we made camp in the middle of a dense patch of jungle.

  The humidity was very high, and in the morning we were soaking wet; and then discovered the leeches. We were covered in them. Their presence was made known by a shriek from Helene.

  “Help, please, I’m covered in them! They’re disgusting, Jurgen. Get them off of me!”

  SS to the rescue once more, I thought; but wisely didn’t voice my sentiment. I lit up a cigarette and began burning off the leeches as she cringed with horror and disgust.

  “Aren’t you covered in them?” she asked me.

  “Certainly I am.”

  “Well, why not get yours removed?”

  “Ladies first,” I smiled.

  She smiled back. Thank God she was beginning to thaw. Her next words confirmed it.

  “Jurgen, I’m sorry, I behaved like a stupid girl back there. You’ve saved my life on more than one occasion. I will try and understand that warfare is not a pleasant business. Why are the communists so brutal?”

  I thought for a moment.

  “Their warlord, Ho Chi Minh, was quoted as saying ‘You can kill ten of my men for every one I kill of yours, but even at those odds, you will lose and I will win.’. That’s the problem, you see. Their philosophy is that communism is everything, and people are nothing. The communists brutally execute hundreds of French of
ficials, teachers, Buddhist monks and Catholic priests in their drive to bring the people around to their way of thinking. Clearly marked hospitals have been blown away by Viet Minh artillery fire, in the name of the cause. Massacre after massacre; they use rockets against densely populated areas, including refugee centres. Their execution procedure is nauseating. A Viet Minh unit rounds up citizens of a village for a "people's court" trial. Village chiefs, their deputies and anyone determined as connected with the French government, are shot.”

  I looked at her, saw the horror in her eyes and decided to drive home the realities of war in Indochina.

  “Other prisoners are labelled with tags, just as the Jews were marked with the Star of David in Hitler's concentration camps. Those Viets considered friendly to the communist cause get green tags; neutrals, yellow; and pro-French, red. Some of the red-tagged are given dirty jobs to perform, and if they get out of line, they’re immediately shot. Next of kin can also be executed. The wife of a deputy subsector commander was condemned for "crimes against the people". She was publicly butchered, and her body cut into three pieces by the Communists. They have become the Nazis of Indochina, killing and butchering as they wage war and retreat. And no, before you mention it, I was never in fact a Nazi.”

  She made no reply, and I decided enough was enough. I finished removing her leeches then went and found a discreet bush where I could strip and remove my own. The other men were doing the same. I smiled at their discretion where a pretty girl was concerned. Then we were ready. Armand and Renaud moved off, and shortly afterwards, we formed up and followed. Within two hours, Renaud came running back down the path.

  “Viet Minh, Sergeant, Armand is watching them. It seems to be some sort of a prison camp.”

  “Right, I’ll come and take a look. Friedrich, take over. Renaud, come with me. The rest of you wait here, and keep out of sight.”

  We went quietly up the path for about a kilometre, turned into a smaller path and the camp came into view. It was a dismal collection of wooden huts, hidden beneath the jungle canopy, and about a hundred metres off of the main path. It was so well concealed that if Armand and Renaud hadn’t heard voices coming from the camp, they could have walked straight past it.