"The problem with a massacre…" Reprisal, Carrera reminded himself, REPRISAL. "The problem with a reprisal is that it can take just as much out of the men as a battle."
"Sir?" Soult queried.
"Look around, Jamey," and Carrera's hand swept over the hill to encompass hundred of listless, weary legionaries, many of them with horrified looks on their faces. "These guys aren't happy about what they've done here, many of them. They'll be useless for at least a day."
"Then why'd you order it, Boss? I'm not bitching; I'm just curious."
"Two reasons," Carrera answered. "One is that the boys were pissed and were going to do it anyway, no matter what anyone said. If that had happened, discipline would have been shot permanently. Instead, by giving them the order to do it, discipline is maintained. Thus, on some other occasion where maybe the enemy doesn't deserve this kind of butchery, we'll be able to hold the men in check because they know that if a reprisal had been warranted we would have ordered one."
"You said two reasons, Boss."
"Yeah," Carrera answered. "The other reason is that the law requires it. I'll explain later. In the meantime, give me the radio."
Soult handed the mike over. Carrera made a call to the commander of his mechanized cohort. Brown answered, "Sancho Panzer speaking."
Carrera pulled the mike away and looked at it quizzically for a moment. When he returned it to his ear and mouth, he said, "Sancho, my armor!"
"Where you want it, Boss?"
"The pass between the two fortresses. Legate Jimenez will be taking you, plus Third and Fourth Cohorts, plus the artillery and half the engineers forward. You lead. I'll join you later. Xavier, did you copy that?"
"Roger, Patricio," Jimenez answered. "Set up a defense or keep pushing?"
"Relieve the Cazadors, then hold in place. I want to see about bringing up the rest. That, and one other thing."
"I'll need more trucks," Jimenez observed.
"You can have the helicopters for one lift. Trucks we are scrounging up."
"Fair enough. Meet you there. Er… what about my prisoners?"
"Base of the hill. The MP century is coming up to take charge of them."
"Wilco, then, Patricio."
Good old Xavier. On him I can rely.
Carrera handed the microphone back to Soult. "Jamey, get ahold of every one of our units on this hill. Tell them I'll speak to them on this side of the bridge in… oh… two hours. And tell the sergeant major to bring any of the pressies he's rounded up there at the same time. And I'll need the priest. Oh, and send the PSYOP chief and Fahad the Chaldean up to me. We need to make a little announcement."
It was actually closer to two and a half hours before everyone and everything needed were assembled.
Carrera walked out and stood on a little knoll between the bridge and the base of Hill 1647. The officers, centurions and legionaries stood at attention until he called, "At ease. Break ranks. Cluster around." He held up his arms straight to his sides, to show that he wanted the men grouped to where he could speak directly to them all at once. All told, there were nearly seven hundred uniformed men.
Behind the uniforms, still under armed guard but otherwise unrestrained, were approximately thirty-four members of the press, about seven of them bearing video camcorders. As soon as the legionaries were seated one of the pressies raised a hand and opened his mouth as if to speak.
"Shut up," Carrera said, pointing directly at the man. "You have no rights here. You have no say here. You ask no questions here until you are allowed to. Shut up and learn."
Turning his gaze slightly left and then right to take in all the clustered media types, Carrera continued, "Let there be no bullshit among us. You are my enemy and I am yours. Whatever I say you will lie about. Whatever you, in your incarnate ignorance, hear you will not understand and will misreport. If by some strange twist of fate one of you does understand it you will certainly misreport it even more. That is one reason why I have my own camera crew here." Carrera's finger pointed to a small uniformed group with their own video cameras from the PSYOP crew.
"I intend to speak to the men in Spanish," he told the journalists. "If you can speak Spanish, you can follow along. If you cannot, fuck you, I am not going to bother to translate though a translation of the gist of it will be provided sometime later."
Switching to Spanish, Carrera continued, addressing his men. "This is a tale of two hills and one law. The hills you see behind me. One of them you just conquered. The other was taken by the Third and Fourth Cohorts in an action every bit as gallant as your own.
"On your hill you found evidence of a crime committed by the enemy upon our comrades. On the other hill, there was no such evidence. The result is plain to see." Again Carrera pointed, this time at the several hundred Sumeris sitting-either dejectedly or with relief as the mood took them-under guard by the MP century. "There are many prisoners from the unoffending hill; none from the hill and unit responsible for the murder of our men.
"Some of you are looking very dejected. Whether that is because you lost friends in the assault-and let me assure you here and now that our casualties were very light, certainly in comparison to the magnitude of the task-or because you feel dirty at shooting men who were trying to surrender, or because you are worried about some future criminal action against you, FORGET IT! Your friends are in good hands, you no more committed a crime than an executioner does when he sets the rope around the neck of the condemned. I gave the order to shoot those men." Never mind that you would have done it, anyway, if I hadn't. That isn't important right now. Besides. It's my doing that you're here, my doing the way you've been trained. So if there is fault or blame, they are mine.
"I know you have all had instruction in the law of war. I directed that that instruction take place. I monitored it. Let me tell you now that that instruction was incomplete. Almost in the nature of things, for it to be complete would have taken weeks, and we did not have extra weeks. So, like every other worthwhile soldier on the planet, you were trained in a truncated version of the law of war, enough to keep you out of trouble. There was more."
Carrera rather hoped that the men wouldn't begin to nod off once it became apparent he intended to teach a class. He needn't have worried; the men were desperate enough for absolution and benediction that he had their full and complete attention.
"You learned that there are two bodies of law with regard to the law of war, the statutory law-treaties and such-and the customary law. There is a third which one might call 'the common law' of war. The common law of war is that which, like other bodies of common law around the world, was developed by practical men for practical problems. It was not developed by ignorant shits trying to score points with the equally ignorant ' international community of the very, very sensitive.' The third body of the law of war holds, for example, that men who refuse to surrender and keep on fighting after you have closed to close combat range are to be killed.
"This sounds harsh, I know. Indeed it sounds illegal since surrender is held in many circles to be an absolute right. It is neither. In the first place, every man who ever went into a close assault with a fixed bayonet has an absolutely pat insanity defense. Thus, you cannot deter him from killing because you cannot, as a practical matter, legally punish him. Some would say that it is unwise to kill an enemy who fights too long, lest he fight to the death and drive up your own casualties. I, and the common law of war, the practical law of war, answer that without exacting a price for continued resistance, you invite the enemy to drive up your casualties by fighting almost to the death."