) In the camp, the demolition work was already under way; thuds, cracks, small explosions could be heard everywhere as Sergeant Krebitz and Gruppe Drei proceeded to destroy guerrilla equipment. The crates of medical supplies had been carefully opened. Zeisl removed what we needed; the rest of the drugs were then intermixed, the containers resealed, and left in place as though we had entirely overlooked the small underground depot. The Viet Minh was always hard up for drugs and in most instances our undoubtedly mean but deadly ruse would liquidate a large number of terrorists by “delayed action,” as Sergeant Krebitz put it. Malaria was always a problem for the Viet Minh and the terrorists readily consumed any drug bearing the label “quinine bisulphate.”
Entire Viet Minh battalions had been wiped out in this fashion. Sometimes, when we heard that a guerrilla detachment was hard up for food, we permitted a truckload of foodstuffs to fall into their hands. The enemy carried away everything, unaware that we had mixed rat poison, containing strychnine, into the flour and the sugar.
Should one call our ruse “chemical warfare”? After all, twenty-nine of my men had died of wounds caused by poisoned Viet Minh arrows, spears, and stakes.
Lieutenant Marceau indeed arranged a “dinner” for the captive Viet Minh. He forced them to swallow their leaflets and printed propaganda manuals, page by page. When one of them stopped chewing, Marceau poked the man with a bayonet and occasionally topped the meal with a spoonful of printing paint, commenting, “Have some pudding too.”
Then tearing up and distributing the propaganda material, he shouted, “Chew, you canaille… It is surely better tasting than shit.”
The “dinner” lasted for the better part of two hours. The apres-souper wine was machine oil. When a prisoner resisted, a narrow rubber hose was forced into his mouth and he would either swallow or choke to death. Soon the last of them collapsed. Others still writhed in the grass or were already dead, lying in pools of vomit, black paint oozing from their lips and nostrils.
But we did keep our part of the bargain: the guerrilla who had led us to the underground prison was set free. Eisner even gave him a large sack of foodstuffs with a grunt. “That’s for your wife and children. Instead of roaming the countryside with a gun you should stick to the hoe and take care of your family.”
He gave the terrorist a kick, sending him head over heels toward the trail, then he called Schulze on the walkie-talkie: “There’s a pig heading your way. Let him pass.”
Lieutenant Marceau was standing over the last dying terrorists. “Eh, bren,” he said, dropping the container with the remaining paint. “They are black enough to join their fellow devils in hell.”
“How about this show?” Eisner said when it was all over. “Only a few more Communist brutalities and we are going to celebrate the birth of the first French SS division in Indochina—composed entirely of grudging democrats.”
He chuckled. “They might call it AB or BC but it is going to be SS from A to Zed.”
He extended his arm in a mocking Nazi salute. “Vive la France! Sieg Heil!”
“Merde!” Lieutenant Marceau commented. “One does not have to be an SS man to slaughter these pigs. They aren’t human.”
“You are right! They aren’t human. That is precisely what we have been saying for five years.”
Early in the afternoon the copters emerged from behind the hills. Pfirstenhammer fired Very lights to guide them. There was no place to land and the copters had to keep hovering above the trees. The crew lowered the supplies for us, along with a bundle of letters, then hauled the Legionnaires aboard. I received a long letter from Lin Carver. In the envelope I found a color picture of her with a small poodle. She still addressed me “My dear Hans” and complained that I wrote so seldom…
Dear little Lin, I thought, wondering if I would ever see her again. Sitting on an ammo case, I wrote her a quick note, promising a long letter when we returned to Hanoi.
It was very nice to receive a letter in the middle of nowhere. Colonel Houssong had arranged for our mail to be taken aboard. I asked the lieutenant to mail the letter for me.
“I certainly wish I could stay with you,” Marceau said when we shook hands. “You are still giving Ho Chi Minh his money’s worth—a heartening thought… You know, in a way you have convinced me that France could still win this bloody war.”
“Not with a million Red deputies sitting in your parliament, Lieutenant Marceau,” I replied jokingly. “Sooner or later they are going to bust the Republique.”
“Not if they push the army too far in the process,” he remarked gloomily. “We might give up our colonies but we are not going to give up metropolitan France, cher ami… By God we won’t. It would be better to die than to see the savages ruling France.”
He reached for the rope ladder. “Give them hell, they deserve it…”
“Ciao!”
“A bientdt.”
The copters clattered away and we were alone. “Now let’s get out of here,” Riedl said, lifting his rucksack and rifle. “The Reds must have spotted those copters from miles around.”
I was about to order assembly when ! saw Karl emerging from the woods down the trail. “Hans!” he called and gestured toward me with his gun. “Would you come over here for a moment?”
“What’s up, Karl?” I asked, somewhat puzzled, but I joined him as he turned back toward the woods.
He replied curtly, “There are a couple of wenches down in a ravine—raped and bayoneted.”
“Who did it?”
“I have the ones responsible.”
Karl led me to a ravine not far from the huts. Passing some shrubs I saw Sergeant Krebitz holding a submachine gun; a few steps from where he stood sat a small group of troopers. They were already disarmed and their belts taken away. When we appeared they rose and stood in sullen silence.
“There they are!” Karl said pointing toward the nude bodies of five young women who lay in a large pool of blood. I turned to face the culprits.
“All right. Whose idea was it?” They stood in silence. Five unshaven ragged men, gazing down at the sodden earth, fingering their buttons; none of them looked at Sergeant Krebitz and his party of guards as they began to carry away the ravished corpses. None of them looked at either me or Karl.
“Mueller!” I addressed a small, chubby trooper. “Step out!” He stepped forward and stood at attention. “Were you the perpetrator of this outrage?” I spoke.
“I… I… found them, Herr Oberleutnant,” he stuttered, “The girls—”
“You mean when you found them they were already dead?”
“No, Herr Oberleutnant… they were… alive,” he replied, barely audible. Then he looked up and added, “They had guns… all of them…”
“Go on, Mueller!”
“So we killed them,” he went on hesitantly, “we killed them just like the others… all the others.”
He uttered a short nervous snort and glanced at his companions, looking for a sign of support, as he added. “We always execute the armed terrorists, don’t we?”
“You raped them, Mueller!”
“What difference does it make, Herr Oberleutnant? They were to die anyway.”
“Steiner!” A second man stepped out. “Do you agree with Mueller that it does not make any difference whether you raped the girls before killing them or not?” I waited for a moment but no answer came. “Speak!” He made a feeble gesture with his hands. “I guess it was wrong.”
“You guess? Where did you serve during the war, Steiner?”
“I was a paratrooper, Herr Oberleutnant… Belgium, Greece, Italy… I’ve been many places and been wounded five times.”