“What do you suggest we should do?”
“Question the prisoners!” Xuey replied.
There was nothing else I could do. If Xuey was right about the French prisoners, they had to be helped at once.
“Sergeant Schenk!” I turned sharply. “Where are the captured guerrillas?” He swung the barrel of his submachine gun toward a long, thatched hut. “Over there, Commander!”
“Bring them here!” Eisner and Riedl appeared. “What’s going on?” Bernard inquired. I briefed him on the situation and his face darkened. “Then I am afraid they are dead,” he remarked grimly. “If any French prisoners had been here, they must have heard us moving around. They would be screaming their heads off by now for help.”
“They might be underground.”
Sergeant Schenk returned with the prisoners and lined them up facing us. Without preliminaries, Sergeant Kre-bitz grabbed the district secretary by the shoulder.
“Where are the French prisoners, ratface?” he sneered at the slim, pockmarked terrorist. “Open your goddamned mouth or I’ll break every bone in your wretched carcass.”
“We have no French prisoners,” came the defiant reply.
“You are a liar!” Xuey cut in, stepping closer. “I saw their footprints.”
“You are a filthy traitor,” the propagandist hissed and spat toward Xuey. “We will get you one day, you colonialist puppet—Gia Xuey… We know you well.”
“Indeed?” Eisner stepped in front of the prisoner, drew his bayonet and held it against the man’s belly. “Do you happen to know me as well?”
“We know you all and we will get you, too, one day.”
“You will get us, too, eh? Whom have you already gotten?” He paused for a moment, then repeated his question in a low, menacing tone, “Where are the French prisoners?” Silence and a defiant, sardonic smile were all he got as an answer. With a sudden, powerful thrust, Bernard plunged the blade home. .The propagandist uttered a bubbling moan, his mouth opened, and his face contorted in pain; with a low, animal grunt he sagged toward Eisner. Bernard pulled his bayonet free and let the man drop.
“I am not a man of jokes,” he sneered at the dying terrorist. Stepping up to the party secretary he repeated his question.
“You may kill us all, you Fascist dogs,” the guerrilla breathed with hatred oozing from his lips. “Kill us all, and you may also forget about your Legionnaires for you will never find them.”
He uttered a short, hysterical snort. “They will rot away alive!”
“That’s what you think, cher ami,” Bernard grinned. “But you are going to tell us where they are. We will find them all right.”
He lifted the still dripping bayonet.
The party secretary paled but gathered himself and cried, “Go ahead and stab me, too!” But Eisner only smiled at him with narrowed eyes. He wiped the blade on the prisoner’s pajama and sheathed it.
“Your death is not going to be so easy,” he said quietly. “When I am through with you, you will be praying for death to come.”
He turned to the guards. “Strip the swine!”
“Schenk!”
“Jawohl!”
“Take him over there, behind those logs,” Bernard pointed to a place some fifty yards from where we stood, “and the others too… Sergeant Krebitz! Please get me a roll of fuse and a couple of primers.”
Moments later the naked district secretary lay prostrate on the ground, spread-eagled between four short pegs driven into the ground. His companions were lined ; up facing their leader. “Erich,” I gestured to Schulze and nodded toward the huts, where Suoi and Chi had appeared carrying a few small boxes. “Take the girls for a ride!”
When we wanted to keep the girls away from some unpleasant spectacle, some of us would take them for a “ride,” usually an “assignment” to do an “important job” elsewhere. Schulze hurried off to meet the two. Taking the girls by the shoulders and talking rapidly, he ushered them towards the far side of the camp. Krebitz returned with the detonators and a roll of fuse. Eisner cut a length of fuse and began to coil it about the prisoner’s body. “This is one of Karl Stahnke’s ideas which the Gestapo adopted,” he explained. “Stahnke swore that it would open the mouth of a stone statue.”
He coiled the fuse about the district secretary’s leg, his trunk and chest, talking all the while, “So, tovarich… you are a cool one, eh? This should warm you up a bit.”
He ran the fuse down the man’s hip, attached the detonator and slipped the charge under the prisoner’s scrotum. “It won’t kill you but you had better talk now, cher ami. By the time the primer blows your balls off, you will have turned into a pink zebra, you hero of Ho Chi Minh.”
He lit a cigarette and looked down on the prisoner. “I am asking you once more, where are the French prisoners?” The guerrilla spat in Eisner’s face. Eisner wiped his cheek with his kerchief and lighted the fuse.
The moment the white-hot fire touched the guerrilla’s skin he heaved violently and began to scream in agony. He twisted and arched to escape the searing heat. The fire slowly ate along his leg, leaving a burned, bleeding path of raw flesh in its wake. Seconds later the man’s body was bathed in sweat. Krebitz gagged him to muffle his cries.
Eisner turned toward the rest of the party leaders, some of whom already looked more dead than alive. “How do you like it, comrades? The next client will have a real nice slow-burning fuse.”
With a persistent low hiss the fire circled the prisoner’s chest, burning an inch-wide blistering trail as it advanced; the wretch had almost severed his wrists as he twisted against the restraining rope.
“Speak!” Eisner urged him, snatching the rag from the prisoner’s mouth. “In a minute you will turn into a eunuch, cher ami. What will your wife or girl friend say?”
“You will… all hang… you Fascist brigands… you…”
the district secretary gurgled. “Father Ho will… avenge… us.”
His eyes rolled up, then slowly closed. He blacked out.
“Put the fuse out!” Riedl stepped forward. “You can’t make an unconscious man talk.”
“I knew that he was not going to talk,” Bernard replied, nodding toward the others. “But they will!”
“Bernard… you are a bloody sadist. Put that fuse out.”
“Go and join the girls if you cannot stomach it, Helmut.”
Without a word, Riedl turned, shouldered his rifle, and left. The fire reached the prisoner’s thigh, then the primer exploded with a short, sharp crack. The man’s body heaved as a spurt of blood splashed across his thighs, then he fell back and lay still. Eisner pulled his automatic and coolly put a bullet between the district secretary’s eyes.
“Riedl is wrong,” he remarked, bolstering his gun. “I don’t enjoy doing this. Remember our twelve comrades in Suoi’s village. I am only giving them tit for tat. Strip the next one!” he commanded the troopers.
Before the fuse began to turn he was told what he wanted to know.
Sergeant Schenk cut the prisoner free and pulled him to his feet. The man was shaking in every limb. “I have a family to support,” he muttered almost sobbing, “wife and children… five children.”
“You still have your balls, so don’t complain,” Eisner snapped. “Show us the way to the French prisoners and I will let you go home.”
“You lie!” the guerrilla cried; the next instant he was staggering backward under the impact of Eisner’s backhand blow. Bernard stepped forward and grabbed the man by his shirt.
“Never call a German officer a liar, cher ami,” he sneered with his eyes narrowed and boring into the guerrilla’s face. “We always keep our part of a bargain.”
He pushed the man toward the woods. “Forward! Allez vitel” The prisoner led us to a small but well- concealed camp about two miles from the main base. It consisted of only five huts which contained rice, but a nearby spacious natural cave secreted five hundred cases of rifle ammo, seventeen machine guns, and fifty-two satchels of grenades. Not far from the huts the prisoner showed us the entrance of a tunnel. When Karl threw open the bolted lid a repugnant smell of human filth rose from below.
Hairy, haggard faces appeared in the opening, staring into the sudden brightness; thin, skeleton arms and
