In the interior, nearest the mostly scoured town, closest to the largest concentrations of gnawed civilian bones, marched those condemned and about to be executed. Brasche had chosen Dieter Schultz to be the representative/guard from the 501st for this group. Krueger had insisted that he also be included and, despising the man or not, out of deference to his service Brasche has sent the old SS man as well.
Just a few hundred meters further from the town, in line with those about to die slow deaths, equally guarded, marched the decimated rest of the condemned. These men’s death sentences were momentarily in abeyance, in the hope that more useful deaths might be found for them.
Furthest away were the rest, sightseers of a sort. Men who wanted to see men they despised die.
“Please, no,” begged a twenty-four-year-old unteroffizier as Krueger placed a loop of thin rope around his neck. “Please,” the doomed man repeated, “I have a wife and a small child. Please?”
“You should have thought not just of them, but of others like them you were abandoning, before you ran, you wart on a circumcised cock,” answered Krueger without heat, without any noticeable emotion at all, really. He motioned for the rope party to pull the rope taut, stretching it across the lamppost and forcing the condemned to mount the fifty-five-gallon drum before him.
“Make the rope fast,” demanded the sneering Krueger once the now openly weeping unteroffizier was mounted atop the drum. Instantly, the four men on the rope party complied. The free end of the rope was lashed to a fire hydrant the Posleen had decided to leave in place until they might understand it better. “Don’t leave the swine any slack, you crawling shits.”
“Schultz? Post!” Krueger ordered. Feeling awash in emotions he could but dimly understand, Dieter complied. They both ignored the unteroffizier’s wheezing, throat already constricted, “I have a family!”
Laying a, for once, comradely arm across young Schultz’s shoulder, Krueger began speaking in a most calm and reasonable tone.
“See this little weeping bastard shaking atop this drum, Stabsunteroffizier Schultz?” The question was plainly rhetorical and so Krueger continued without pause, without waiting for an answer. “He’s worried for himself, worried for his own family and circle of loved ones. He never gave a thought, not a single thought, to anyone outside that circle. You know that is true, don’t you, Schultz? That this piece of shit knows nothing of duty, of comradeship?”
That too, was rhetorical. Krueger plowed on, his every word a sneer made manifest. “He never cared for her… for a million others like her. He only cared for himself and his own. He neither cared nor imagined how your little honey might have shaken in fear before the aliens butchered and ate her.” Krueger emitted an evil laugh. “More than you ever got to do with her, isn’t it, boy? And it’s all the fault of this cowardly, trembling bastard and the others like him.”
Dieter himself trembled. Whether it was disgust at Krueger’s unwelcome touch, hate for the barrel-mounted piece of human filth in front of him, or the knowledge of his permanent loss, Schultz could not have said. But when Krueger removed his unwelcome arm and said, “Kick the barrel, Schultz,” Dieter didn’t hesitate.
The condemned gave a short, and quickly stifled, moan as Dieter’s leg came up, his foot resting on the barrel’s rim. It only took a little nudge before the barrel began to tip over on its own. Frantically — but futilely — the man’s feet scrambled to keep the barrel upright. It tipped over and rolled several feet, leaving the feet of the condemned to dance on air.
Dieter watched the man die from beginning to end. At first, before the rope had tightened much, one could hear labored, raspy breathing, interrupted by frequent pleas for mercy. The feet kicked continuously as the dying man sought salvation automatically. Dieter observed that each kick, each twist of the body, actually caused the rope to tighten. Soon the noose itself had moved far enough with the tightening loop to begin to cause great pain to the neck. For a brief time the feet kicked even more frantically, causing the rope to tighten further.
And then the air supply was fully cut off. Some quirk of physiology or of rope placement must have allowed blood, some portion of it anyway, to continue to flow to the brain. Dieter could see in the man’s bulging hideous eyes that he was conscious nearly to the last, conscious and in agony both physical and mental. The tongue swelled, turned color and thrust outward past the lips. The face turned blue… then black.
At length, the kicks grew fainter… and then ceased altogether. The dead man swayed in the light spring breeze, eyes focused on infinity. Dieter watched until the last spark of life had gone out. He felt…well, he couldn’t really say how he felt. But he also could not deny that he had no regret and no pity for the lifeless meat hanging before him.
He turned to Krueger and said, “Let’s finish the job then, shall we, Sergeant Major?”
And an SS man is born, thought Krueger.
Not far away, riding atop Anna’s turret, Hans Brasche watched the dispatching of the cowards with a certain detachment. He had seen it all before… so many times: a veritable orchard of hanged men, and not a few women — Russian, German, Czech, Baltic… Vietnamese. He was quite desensitized, really.
And had the Legion caught me, I too would have had my neck stretched, he mused.
As jungle wounds often will, so had Hans’ battle wounds festered. For many weeks after his evacuation his doctors at the French army hospital at Haiphong would not have given very good odds on his survival.
But the man had heart, had been young and in good health prior, and had a strong will to live. Gradually his body, aided by that marvel penicillin, had begun to triumph over the alien organisms infesting it. Health returned, and with it color. Soon he was nearly whole.
Nearly, however, is a far cry from being quite ready to return to the fetid jungle. The doctors insisted upon a longer period of recuperation than the French Army, less still the Legion Etrangere, would have really liked.
Hans didn’t mind though. He managed to enjoy quite a romp through Haiphong and Hanoi’s best brothels and bars. He was actually beginning to grow tired of the frolic when one day he stopped to read a French language newspaper at a quaint sidewalk café not far from Haiphong’s wharfs. It seemed that Israel, a Jewish state, had recently come into existence and was currently fighting for that very existence.
I wonder, thought the former SS officer, I wonder if there might be some expiation there…
Paying his tab, leaving a small tip and folding the newspaper, Hans headed for the wharf to enquire into departures.
There were other infestations, course. Yet the enemy was plainly on the defensive over a swath running from the old Maginot line (where the remnants of the French Army had used the hastily restored fortifications to stop the enemy cold, in the process saving several million French civilians who huddled within it and behind its “walls”) to the River Vistula (where German and Pole had fought like brothers together, as few would argue they should have fought together — almost seventy years earlier against the menace to the east).