Casca 11: The Legionnaire Read Free Page B

were you with?"
    Langer responded quickly: "Avec le Corps de Panzer."
    He caught a look at the face of his captor, a thin man with a large Gallic nose and hot eyes who ordered him, "Come with us and no tricks, or I'll put a bullet in the back of your head, Heini." Langer promised not to give them any trouble.
    He was shuffled along for several kilometers until they came to a paved road leading to Stuttgart. There he was handed over to a bored military policeman who checked him in and asked for his papers, which of course he didn't have on him. Then he was moved to a building being used as a temporary stockade. Inside were nearly fifty others. They all had the look of fighters about them. Some were still in uniform and there was a fair representation of the German armed forces mixed in with them, including several members of General Student's Fallschirmjagers (paratroopers) who kept to themselves as did several men who Langer thought were probably SS men, though they wore a mixture of Wehrmacht and civilian dress. Each stuck to his own kind.
    They were fed and in the morning loaded into trucks and taken the short distance west from Stuttgart and Germany to the borders of France, which suited him well enough. The farther he could get away from Germany, the better he liked it. He noticed that all the men with him in the British lorry were very fit looking. The French were taking with them only those who looked to be in good condition and who had been members of fighting units. There were no civilians.
    The ride was long and monotonous, passing through Nancy then heading south to Lyon. The men with him in the truck said little, now and then asking the guard if he had any cigarettes on him. A pack of Gauloises was tossed to them to be shared. Langer took one from the pack and passed it on.
    At Lyon, they were off-loaded and herded into a barbed wire enclosure after they had been strip-searched once more. The shakedown produced a small .25 caliber Mauser, a trench knife and, from the Fallschirmjagers, two of the gravity knives of the kind where the blade came straight out of the handle with a flick of the wrist.
    After all were checked out completely, including their bodily orifices, they were sent in to join several hundred others in the compound. All the POWs were like themselves, fighting men. They were hustled into rough shacks and tents, where their own former comrades in arms gave them a thorough delousing, then had their heads shaved to get rid of any of the little pests that might remain. Their clothes were fumigated.
    Only then were they brought in one at a time to stand before a member of the field gendarmerie. He questioned them about their activities in the German armed forces and compared their features to a stack of photographs. If they resembled any of the pictures, they were quickly hustled off through a rear door and not seen or heard from again. Only a very few were given this special treatment.

CHAPTER TWO
    Langer knew they were looking for war criminals and escaping Nazi leaders, many of whom had put on the uniforms of common soldiers to try and lose themselves in the crowd much as he had.
    Once the separation of those suspected of major war crimes had been made, those remaining were formed into several groups of ten to twenty. On the tenth day after his capture, he and his group were brought to attention by a Polish sargent wearing the insignia of the 13th Demi Brigade Etrangeres on his American fatigue uniform. He left no doubt in anyone's mind where his sympathies lay. The Legion was all! Countries and nationalities were nothing; only the Legion mattered. He made his offer to the assembled men in plain clear words. Volunteer for the Legion or go to the POW camps where they might not be released for years. If they volunteered, they would be given new papers, then, after completing their enlistment, most important, a French passport and citizenship if they wished. In the Legion they would be safe from their