Opening Moves

Smiling, the two moved forwards, smiles that immediately disappeared as high pitched screaming reached their ears.

Neither was prepared for the sights before them.

Butchered Soviet paratroopers lay everywhere, the absence of ears bloodily apparent on each corpse.

At the fountain trough, a paratrooper, face down and bent double over the stonework, his backside exposed and bleeding, his most recent violator preparing for a second assault, oblivious to the two officers stood staring in disbelief at him.

To the left, female legs, held wide open by two grinning tribesmen, her arms pinned by two more as a fifth Goumier plunged himself vigorously into the screaming woman. She too was face down as the unnatural violation ripped her painfully.

A sixth Goumier was displaying her bloody breasts, one in each hand, held out to any of his comrades who wished to inspect them.

What happened next was a blur, decent honourable men acting without thought, either for their own lives or for the consequences of their actions.

Lavalle and Haefeli moved forward as one, producing their handguns.

As they ran, both officers shouted an age-old cry for assistance.

“A moi La Légion!”

Such a call could not be refused by any legionnaire who heard it.

The Colonel nearly blew the arm off the sodomiser of the unfortunate woman, his first bullet striking the shoulder. A second bullet took the man in the stomach as he lay on the floor. Haefeli took the life of the other rapist who collapsed over his victim, his ruined face spilling blood on the young Russian’s corpse.

Lavalle’s next shots struck the man holding the bloody trophies, his throat and chest exploding as he flew backwards into the stonewall.

The four men pinning the woman looked on in terror, knowing death was about to visit them. Haefeli’s Sergent-Chef emptied his Garand into them, two bullets each, the heavy impacts throwing them into disarray. One man moaned, only wounded. Haefeli shot him in the crotch.

The legionnaires turned towards the larger group of Goumier’s, comrades of those they had just mercilessly dispatched, expecting to die in turn.

The tribesmen seemed momentarily unsure of what to do until one of their older NCO’s spoke up, directing them to gather up their things and move on after the enemy.

The arrival of more legionnaires from the 3e may well have aided his decision.

The woman’s screams had subsided to a low, continuous moan of pain and anguish, expressing suffering way beyond the thresholds of human tolerance.

The apparition pushed herself up on her arms, the bloody stumps of her breasts exposed, a knife in her side now apparent to the transfixed watchers.

Every essence of their being implored them to help her but there was something about her struggle, something tangible to each of them, that instructed them to leave her, to let her make her efforts.

She slowly stood, the blood running freely from her mouth, chest, side, and violated lower body. She took hold of the knife and pulled it slowly from her flesh, the pain making her eyes roll in her head.

Still the Legionnaires stood immobile, knowing that the woman needed to do this herself.

She dropped to her knees, her rapist groaning and bubbling, as red fluid gently seeped into his lungs.

She spoke soft words in her native tongue to the Goumier, but they were not words of comfort, the venom and hate that they carried obvious to all.

Gathering herself for the effort, Stefka Kolybareva grabbed the man’s genitals and twisted, the new pain washing over him in a wave. But it was as nothing compared to the extreme of suffering she visited upon him as she sliced away at his manhood, removing every tangible sign of his gender before pushing open his scarlet thighs and using his rectum as a scabbard for the bloody blade.

Exhausted, and with huge blood loss, the hideously wounded woman toppled on top of her rapist, falling into merciful unconsciousness.

Haefeli’s medic moved forward and the work to save her life began.

No one noticed the single Goumier turn and walk briskly forward, his target, the back of the senior officer; the man who had shot his brother.

The arm raised, knife about to plunge between Lavalle’s shoulder blades, his revenge was imminent.

When the shot rang out all eyes immediately went to the source of the sound. A bloody hand on the battlements sagged, and the automatic pistol fell from its grasp, bouncing on the stone floor of the Lower Courtyard.

Some intuitive sense made Haefeli check his men’s fire, the wounded Russian clearly no longer armed or a threat.

Lavalle turned at the sound of a fall behind him, the headless corpse having dropped like a rag doll onto the dead Russian prisoner’s.