Life was hard for the escaped German veterans. Soldiers of a defeated army seldom fare well, especially when they have no homes to return to. Relentless persecution and prolonged confinement was the share of those who had thrown themselves at the mercy of the victors. Interrogations, degradations, denazification trials… Vae victis!… “Woe to the vanquished!” The victors had even coined a new definition to outlaw the former nuclei of the German military might: “War Criminals.”
No victor in history had ever hanged defeated enemy generals, not even Attila the Hun or the Visigoths. The Allied revenge resembled the medieval auto-da-fe of the Holy Inquisition, brought forward into the twentieth century. Every general or staff officer, every functionary automatically fell under this damning definition. Every officer who had served in the SS, whether in the Dachau death camp or in the “Viking SS Panzer” division, had been judged en masse and denounced as a criminal. In the Allied occupation zones a hunt was on to put the SS behind bars or on the gallows. The French had better ideas. They would offer an arrested SS officer a choice: Join the Foreign Legion or be hanged! France could not afford to ignore a rich well from which experienced veterans had been flowing ever since the day of the armistice. They required little training and even less explanation about their coming jobs. They could learn soon enough the few dozen French words of military importance.
Guns speak only one language.
After a few months in our new uniforms we no longer cared what the French may or may not have known about our past. It was becoming difficult to pretend military ignorance and play the stupid recruit, when we could have given a real Kriegspiel to our sergeants and corporals and shown them how to properly handle army hardware. We were seasoned veterans of countless battles and whatever the French were trying to teach us seemed utterly ridiculous to me. Erich Schulze, for instance, had won the Iron Cross twice in four years for his sharp-shooting in Russia. He had enlisted in the Legion with the bogus papers of a Swiss clerk from the city electric board of Zurich. At the beginning of our new careers we were still careful to avoid any conflict between our filed background stories and our practical military behavior and always feigned the awkwardness that a greenhorn should display. “For God’s sake don’t try to perform here,” we warned Schulze on our first shooting exercise. “You are supposed to be a Swiss clerk and not Wilhelm Tell.”
“Oh, damn it all,” Erich snapped, grabbing his rifle. “Few people are playing more army games than the Swiss. Every month they are probably shooting more bullets than the Sixth Army ever fired in the battle of Stalingrad. How long are we going to play the amateur? Do you think the French will kick you out because you hit the mark? At three hundred yards I could not miss that blasted board, not even if I wanted to.”
And without batting an eye he proceeded to put his bullets through the bull’s-eye.
“What did you do in civilian life?” Sergeant Maurier queried Schulze.
“In the civilian life, Sergeant? I was in the army tool”
“Which army?” (As if he did not know.) “The wrong one!” Erich grunted.
Maurier grinned. “I hate your guts, you German bastards,” he commented. It was Maurier’s pet expression while talking to us. He seemed to use that term even when he wanted to say “well done” or something similar. He must have found immense pleasure in showering us with insulting remarks and acid comments but I cannot really recall his ever having been deliberately mean or unjust. He just hated Germans, and made sure that we always kept that in mind. We were not in love with the French either. Our union was not even a marriage of convenience. It was a shotgun marriage.
Christmas was only five days away when we were sent to practice with heavy machine guns. Firing from eight hundred yards, Bernard Eisner shot his moving target, a mock-up troop carrier, to bits. Watching the display through his binoculars, Sergeant Maurier only grunted a quiet “I hate your guts, you German bastards.”
He spat and spoke to Eisner. “What were you doing before signing up?”
“Poultry farming!” Bernard replied, snapping- home a fresh magazine.
“I hate your guts,” Maurier complimented him again, “but you can shoot It is no wonder that the Allies could not kill you all. I would like to see you shooting it out with the Viet Minh… the man-eaters.”
He chuckled. “Do you know what those yellow apes are shooting with? Poisoned arrows! You get it and the Holy Ghost cannot save you. You are dead in fifteen minutes. For you it might take a bit longer for you are tough. You should have bitten the dust a long time ago but are still around… merde!” He spat again. “How I hate your guts, you goddamned German bastards… Rompez!” He walked away toward a small mound where he had been directing the target practice. As the sergeant moved, Eisner’s machine gun slowly arched after him. Bernard’s lips were set in a thin line and I saw murder in his eyes.
“Don’t shoot, you idiot!” Schulze yelled jumping forward. “Bernard is going to blast Maurier” flashed through my mind. The next instant the fifty-caliber gun was blazing away, spitting a hail of tracers, mercifully past the mound but barely twenty inches from the slightly protruding belly of Sergeant Maurier. The edges of his tunic flipped violently under the tremendous pressure of air as the heavy slugs tore past him. Let it be said to his credit the sergeant did not duck, only paled and stood petrified. The bullets hit a small pine far out in the field, cutting it neatly in half. Eisner rose. He walked to the broken pine, brought it back, and stuck it into the soft earth in front of Maurier.
“Christmas is coming, Sergeant Maurier. The day of love. I know you have a large family to support on a small income. Here is a Christmas tree for your kids… You don’t have to buy one!” Never again would Sergeant Maurier call us German bastards.
Oran, Colomb-Bechar in the African desert… one can’t say that the soldiers of the Foreign Legion have not received the most grueling training that army recruits could ever experience. The combat readiness of the Legionnaires surely matched the standard of any front line German troops during the war. But one should remember that the majority of the recruits were already experienced veterans when they signed up.
For months we did nothing but train eight to ten hours every day. In a way it was quite understandable. In the desert there was nothing else to do and our corporals and sergeants would rather conduct field exercises than bore themselves to death sweating in the hot oppressive barracks. It never occurred to any staff officer that training in the desert would do little good to troops destined to serve in Madagascar, the Congo, or Indochina. I have to admit that the French were not entirely prejudiced, for even the most hardened German-hater in the High Command would probably agree that a former German officer should know a. great deal more about warfare than, for instance, a North African corporal. Promotion of German veterans on merit was not entirely out of question and before long we were sub-officers ourselves.
We were quite enthusiastic about leaving Africa for Indochina. For most of us the Far East meant only a wonderful pleasure trip at the state’s expense: golden pagodas, exotic girls, ample shade against the ever-blazing sun, and maybe diamonds scattered about jungle ravines ready to be collected. Fighting? What could a few thousand wretched rebels do against the cream of the army? We might be compelled to fight a few rapid police actions but no one expected real fights. Besides, who was scared of real fights? We had survived a hundred of them. A couple of forays into the hills, and the rest would be only sightseeing. The sarcastic remark of Major Barbier, “Death will be your constant companion in Indochina,” scared no one. The good major obviously hated Germans so immensely that he found pleasure in trying to intimidate us. As for Sergeant Maurier and his “savages with their poisoned arrows,” Maurier was an old windbag who considered himself a veteran although the only peril he had ever faced, as Eisner put it, was probably chronic indigestion due to lack of exercise. We knew that he had sat for seven months in the Maginot Line near Strasbourg, fifty feet underground, and then spent the rest of the war in a prison camp in Saxony.