George Elford - Devil's Guard

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.”

“That’s meritorious… but that’s what you learned with the paratroops? Were you raping girls in Belgium too? Or in Greece, in Italy?” Steiner protested vehemently. “Never! Herr Oberleutnant must surely know…”

“I know!” I cut him short. “Because you would have been punished very severely, if that’s what you wanted to say. What makes you think that it is different here in Indochina?”

“Those guerrilla bitches, Herr Oberleutnant,” he ran a nervous hand over his face, “They aren’t human.”

“They were human enough to satisfy your lust, weren’t they?” He did not answer, only stood, wetting his lips with the tip of his tongue.

As a matter of fact we seldom executed woman guerrillas except for a few truly hardened Communist she-devils who had been guilty of hideous crimes. Sometime back in 1949 we had captured one Viet Minh amazon who had found immense pleasure in the torture-murder of captive Legionnaires. One of her victims we discovered in a horrible state of mutilation. The naked sergeant’s arms and legs had been drawn outward by stakes and burning splinters had been slivered under his skin; finally cutting away the dying man’s private parts she had forced them into his mouth. At first the sight was terrifying, then it made us sick. The wrath swelled in us so that we swore to hang every Viet Minh tigress we could lay our hands on.

“Stolz!” A lean, lanky Saxon stepped forward. With a quick jerk of his head he tossed his long blond hair from his face and froze at attention. During the war Karl Stolz; had been a panzer driver and a much-decorated one. He had to his credit vicious engagements from Poland to Paris, from Belgrade to Athens, and from Salerno to the Po valley in Italy. He had lost twenty-six panzers and survived five direct hits. He had been wounded eleven times and spent altogether seven months in various hospitals. During the offensive in northern France, Stolz had driven his panzer into a burning town which the French had barely evacuated. In front of the shell-torn town hall he had spotted a young woman. Lying in a pool of blood and crying for help, she was a pitiful spectacle; her left leg had been torn away by a shell and she was eight months pregnant.

“Save my baby… oh, God save my baby,” she implored in broken German. “I am dying… please save my baby.”

Stolz stopped his panzer. With his gunners firing furiously and with explosions still raking the street, he rushed to the woman and applied a tourniquet to her bleeding stump. Then with the help of another trooper he dragged her to the tank and lifted her onto the rear armor. With the trooper supporting the woman he had driven his panzer to the hospital half a mile away. Not wasting time at the entrance, Stolz drove his tank through the closed oak gate, stopping a yard short of the cellar entrance. He handed the woman to a frightened surgeon and two nurses, backed out of the garden, and raced off to tackle the French artillery outside the town.

He had been severely reprimanded and reduced in rank for having withdrawn from combat without permission, but the woman and her baby boy survived the war. Stolz saw her again in 1945 after he escaped from an American camp. The Frenchwoman gave him a civilian suit, food, papers, and money enough to reach Marseilles.

Now the same man was standing in front of me, after having participated in the rape and killing of five female Viet Minh.

“Why did you do it, Stolz?” I queried him looking straight into his eyes. He opened and closed his hands in a gesture of uncertainty.

“I don’t know,” he replied, “maybe the heat did it… the jungle… this whole Gottverdammte war… Maybe it was sheer madness… I am ready to take the consequences.”

In a way I could understand him and all the others. Ten years of constant war is not exactly what one can call the education of Samaritans. The men were tired and fed up. But raping and looting I never tolerated in our ranks. The men had to be punished. I stepped back to face the lot.

“You have committed a loathsome crime,” I spoke to them. “I presume that you were banking on the fact that we have neither a court-martial nor a prison here and that we cannot lose five good fighting men by simply shooting you. You should be shot but it would be a luxury our battalion cannot afford… Sergeant Krebitz!”