“Merde alors, kameraden,” he greeted us cordially, shaking hands, slapping shoulders, pulling over some more chairs. “Don’t look at me as if I were a ghost… Sit down. How are you doing?”
“How are you doing, Karl?” Schulze countered. “We thought you had had it.”
“Had it? What?”
“With the Deuxieme Bureau.”
“Oh, you are talking about those boys,” he boomed. He rose. Drawing his chest full of air he fingered the lapels of his expensive suit. “What do you say to this, eh?”
“Don’t tell me that you have only been discharged,” Eisner said.
“Discharged? It is not that easy to get out of the Legion.”
He downed his beer and ordered a round for everyone. “No, fellows. Old Uncle Stahnke is doing his familiar and beloved job. They had a dozen captured terrorists at Hue who seemed to know much but wanted to talk little. The French thought that with my experience I might be of better use.”
“Hell, man!” Schulze blurted. “Are you telling us that the French know all about your Gestapo business and let you get away with it?”
“I have no idea what the French may know or may not know,” Stahnke exploded. “But they sure as hell know something, otherwise they would never have taken me to Hue. Boys,” he chuckled, “They have everything that belongs to the trade at Hue. Only the Fuehrer’s picture is missing from the walls.”
“How about the Frenchmen you worked over in Calais, Karl?” Stahnke uttered a short derisive snort. “Frenchmen? For the guys I am working with, they weren’t Frenchmen but bloody Communists.”
“Don’t say!”
“And don’t you be naive.”
Stahnke laughed. “Le Grand Chef has a complete list of the fellows I used to entertain at Calais. Do you know what was his comment? “You’ve saved us a lot of work and plenty of bullets, Stahnke.”
That’s what he said. “Now you make the Commies talk.”
“Did you make them talk?” Stahnke laughed drunkenly. “No one has ever refused to talk to good old Uncle Stahnke. I had a very fruitful panel discussion with the Communists the French were holding at Hue. I mean it was fruitful for me. One of the toughs had been at the Agitprop school in Russia. Was he ever stubborn! It took me six hours of convincing to make him sing. But it was entirely his fault. I told him at the very beginning, “Your game is up so you had better tell Uncle Stahnke everything he wants to know. You will have a quick, painless death. You won’t feel a thing.
If you keep your mouth shut, your death is going to be a long, endless cry of agony.”
Do you think he appreciated my offer? Like hell he did. He made me work all night, but when I was through with him he sang all the same. He sang like a nightingale, even though I was squeezing his bloody balls with a nutcracker. Then all of a sudden he broke free and came at me with a glowing steel rod which he grabbed from the fire. I had to shoot him in the head.”
Stahnke emptied his glass and looked around. “Boys, you had better get ready. Soon there’ll be plenty trouble here. The Legion Etrangere will need every German bastard—otherwise the world may wake up one morning to see the hammer and sickle flying from every damned pole from Hanoi to London and from Stockholm to Rome.”
Karl Stahnke was well informed both on the coming trouble and the Legion’s need for German bastards. In the summer of 1948, all former German troops were carefully screened (this time properly, with a bespectacled French captain quoting the various details of our real backgrounds, from a bulging pile of green, yellow, and red files) and interrogated again. One-time paratroopers, partisan hunters, Brandenburgers, field gendarmes, mountaineers, commandos, Wehrmacht, and SS, were all regrouped into a new battalion. The battalion consisted of about nine hundred men forming three companies. Its future existence or nonexistence was of little Importance to the French High Command. We became a sort of special task force which was to be given minimum support yet expected to accomplish the impossible. The North Africans nicknamed us “The Kamikaze Battalion” and the men would greet us with raised fists crying, “Banzaaai!” Colonel Houssong succeeded in concentrating us in a single fighting unit and even “recovered” some of our former ranks. More he could not do for us. For Paris and the French High Command we were the battalion of the damned. So we set out to earn their respect.
4. “THE CONVOY MUST GET THROUGH!”
Some North African and other mixed troops of the Foreign Legion were magnificent soldiers, incredibly brave in the attack and tenacious in the defense. What they lacked was proper food and medical care, ample ammunition, timely reinforcements; but most of all they lacked the knowledge of how to combat insurgents. They had been given comprehensive training in conventional combat strategy and tactics in the North African deserts and the barren, rocky mountains such as the Atlas. Then they had been sent to Indochina to wage an unconventional war in the jungles and swamps of a country that was totally alien to them. They had fought bravely and suffered fifty percent casualties. The survivors were regrouped, attacked again, and once more their ranks were decimated by the Viet Minh. They could man a fort or a distant stronghold purely on the defensive, but in the jungles the North African troops were useless. To them the impenetrable green sea of bamboo and lianas seemed utterly hostile, full of unexpected traps, tigers, scorpions, venomous snakes, diseases, and other invisible enemies—among them human enemies whom they could not see, let alone destroy.
With us it was different. We could and did adapt to our new environment and I enforced our new “rules of the game” with vigorous discipline. Being on the average far more intelligent, the former German veterans could put up with more misery yet suffer less than the other troops suffered. I have never regarded my men as only subordinates but as my veteran German comrades in peril. Officers and ranks had been calling each other by Christian names but our intimacy never jeopardized common discipline. When it came to military discipline the otherwise casual “Hello, Hans” or “Damn you, Karl” quickly turned into a “Jawohl, Herr Oberleutnant” or “Yes, sir!” We used to talk things over and my men understood the importance of keeping themselves clean, healthy, and fit for action. We boiled or purified our drinking water, even in the most adverse circumstances. When we could not do so, we suffered from thirst. Except for climbing steep mountains, one can always move on and make another step forward. The capabilities of a healthy human body are virtually unlimited. One can always go without water for two days even in a land of extreme humidity. In my battalion everyone duly consumed his daily ration of vitamin pills that more often than not we had to purchase from private pharmacists at our own expense. On the road our principal nourishment was rice, sometimes curried, sometimes only boiled, and dried fish, or whatever the jungle could provide. We had purchased large quantities of camphor and menthol creams from which excellent mosquito and leech repellents could be prepared. We had learned that in Russia. Every one of us carried a small mosquito net, good enough to cover one’s face and hands while resting in a swamp or near rice paddies after dark. In order to keep fit, sufficient rest was of paramount importance in Indochina. Men with swollen eyes and legs covered with festering sores, men devoid of sleep and tormented by belly cramps could not be expected to fight and defeat the Viet Minh. After the day’s march and no matter how worn they may have been, my men had to remove their boots, dry them if wet, clean them inside and outside, and grease the leather to keep the footwear watertight. Also all the weapons had to be cleaned and oiled every evening.