The company advanced in a long line, the men keeping about ten paces apart: pajama-clad dark shapes, wearing coolie hats and crude rubber sandals fashioned from old automobile tires. Everything had been blacked with soot, our faces, our hands, the weapons; nothing glinted in the bright moonlight.
Although we carried only the absolute minimum, the load on each man weighed about fifteen kilos. That included a submachine gun with ten spare mags, food, burlap, a small medical kit, magnetic compass, flashlight, bush knife, mosquito net, and hand grenades. The field gear of Gruppe Drei was divided among the troops.
Gruppe Drei was our advance guard, the “trailblazers,” the unit on which our existence depended. It consisted of only thirty men but they were specially trained. Every member of the group had completed a rigorous six-month training schedule that included bomb detection and demolition, trap detection, tracking, and general woodsmanship. Their tutors were some of the foremost experts of antiguerrilla warfare, both French and foreign: an ex-British army captain who had fought the Communist insurgents for three years in Malaya and a former Japanese colonel, the one-time commander of a counterintelligence unit of the Kempe Tai (former Japanese Secret Police) during the war. Both men wore the uniform of a colonel of the Colonial army but they did not formally belong to the armed forces and received civilian wages, as per contract.
A hundred meters ahead of us marched the advance guard led by Krebitz. Still ahead of them marched four Nationalist Chinese officers, one of them a former guide to the forces of Chiang Kai-shek. They knew the area well. Some of the last Nationalist battles had been fought in the province before the vanquished party was compelled to withdraw into the jungles of northern Burma. Colonel Houssong did not inform me how and where he had gotten hold of the Nationalist Chinese. “You may trust them,” was all he said, “a well-known American general has vouched for them.”
Being well aware of the utter corruption which then dominated the Nationalist army, and which contributed greatly to the final collapse of Nationalist China, I reserved my opinion on the matter. As a rule we trusted no Chinese or Indochinese and we also had some misgivings about the judgment of American generals. The Americans had poured into China money and weapons enough to conquer the earth yet they were unable to preserve a single square kilometer of the “Heavenly Empire” that was now gradually turning into a perfect hell.
I had asked Colonel Houssong if our Chinese companions had been informed about “Longhand” in detail.
“I understand what you mean,” he had said, “but rest assured. I did not consider it necessary to reveal all. You may tell them as much as possible under the circumstances.”
My sigh of relief must have been audible for he had added reassuringly, “I am sure they will be all right.”
“They had better be indeed.”
He had laughed and” slapped me on the shoulder in a friendly manner. “I know you wouldn’t trust Chiang Kai-shek himself, Wagemueller.”
“I wouldn’t trust Jesus Christ on a mission like this, mon colonel. The slightest indiscretion and—”
“Would you prefer to go on your own?”
“Without reservation.”
“It would be much more difficult.”
“We may have to climb more hills but we won’t be jittery all the way.”
“Will you be jittery because of them?”
“By your leave, mon colonel, I shall make my own security arrangements.”
“Alors, make them, but return safely.”
So we kept our Chinese quintet under close surveillance, and I made sure that they knew as little as possible of our general plan. The Nationalist Chinese officers could study our immediate objective but nothing else. One of them who spoke good French must have noticed our polite but reserved attitude, for he spoke to me shortly after we had crossed the border.
“You are not sure about our capability to lead this expedition, are you?” he asked me with a hint of sadness in his voice.
“Major Kwang,” I replied in a firm voice, “I am going to be frank with you. We met only five days ago. We don’t know you or where you come from.”
“Colonel Houssong knows,” he ventured. “The colonel is in Hanoi, Major. We are on the way to hell—and back, let us hope. But let me ask you something. Have you known your companions for a long time?”
“I know only Major Cheng,” he replied. “We used to serve in the same battalion. The others we met in the colonel’s office.”
“You see, Major. They are aliens even to you—”
“But the colonel surely knows them.”
“The colonel is only a human being, Major Kwang. Human beings are fallible.”
“The colonel, the generals, the prime minister,” Eisner cut in. “We have been around here for a long time, Major Kwang. We have outlived the average life expectancy of Legionnaires, and I think we are still around because we took nothing for granted—never!” The major smiled politely. “Then you regard every stranger guilty until proven innocent?”
“We regard only one thing, Major—our own survival factors,” I said. “We learned that a long time ago: to think, to plan, to calculate, to evaluate and act—everything related to survival factors. Friendship, relations, rank, sentiments are all only of secondary importance. We are living on borrowed time and abiding by the law of probability, which is the only law we carefully observe. Had we done otherwise, we would now be dead heroes instead of surviving experts. For that’s what we really are, Major Kwang: neither invincible daredevils nor supermen nor heroes—only survival experts. But survival is the most important thing in any war.”
“I will do my best to see that all of us survive during the next few days,” Kwang said.
“You do that, Major,” I nodded. “But keep an eye on those whom you do not know.”
“With regard to my own survival factor?” he asked with a smile.
“You might call it that,” I conceded.
It was nine P.M. Tuesday when we crossed the Chinese frontier eighteen kilometers west of the one time Cao Bang-Tien-pao road. Between us and the road, we knew, ran a guerrilla trail that joined a dirt road three kilometers inland. Here the Chinese maintained a small guardhouse for the militia which patrolled the border section. Farther to the northwest and past the place where we intended to cross the dirt road was a village with a garrison of two hundred troops—whom we wanted to avoid.
Thanks to the moonlight we made good progress but even so the terrain was difficult and it took us almost six hours to cover the eight kilometers to the road. We arrived there shortly before three A.M. Wednesday. I wanted to proceed farther inland without stopping but Sergeant Krebitz called my attention to the numerous truck tire marks, which indicated frequent military traffic along the road. In those days no one but the army possessed heavy vehicles in China but even so the army was very hard pressed on motorized transport, and the troops were often compelled to march extremely long distances because of the lack of trucks. The loss of a few vehicles along the road could be extremely painful for them, especially if some of the trucks were transporting irreplaceable cargo. Krebitz suggested that we should mine the road, which we did at five different points, approximately three hundred paces apart. The pressure switches were set to permit the passage of anything up to one ton, which was about the limit even heavily laden peasant carts would weigh. We had no intention of hurting innocent civilians walking by or carting home their grains.