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 with 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.
“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.
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.
Читать дальше