by Evelyn Waugh
They constituted a little world of officers – some young and seedy, some old and spruce – sequestered from the responsibilities and vexations of command. Such men of other rank as were sometimes seen in the arcaded streets were drivers, orderlies, policemen, clerks, servants, and sentries.
In this limbo Guy fretted for more than a week while February blossomed into March. He had left Italy four and a half years ago. He had then taken leave of the crusader whom the people called ‘il santo inglese’. He had laid his hand on the sword that had never struck the infidel. He wore the medal which had hung round the neck of his brother, Gervase, when the sniper had picked him off on his way up to the line in Flanders. In his heart he felt stirring the despair in which his brother, Ivo, had starved himself to death. Half an hour’s scramble on the beach near Dakar; an ignominious rout in Crete. That had been his war.
Every day he reported to headquarters. ‘No news yet,’ they said. ‘Communications have not been satisfactory for the last few days. The Air Force aren’t playing until they know what’s going on over there.’
‘Enjoy yourself,’ Brigadier Cape had said. That would not have been the order of Ritchie-Hook. There was no biffing in Bari.
Guy wandered as a tourist about the streets of the old town. He sat in the club and the hotel. He met old acquaintances and made new ones. Leisure, bonhomie, and futility had him in thrall.
After a brief absence Lieutenant Padfield reappeared in the company of a large and celebrated English composer whom UNRRA had mysteriously imported. On the Sunday they drove Guy out on the road south to visit the beehive dwellings where the descendants of Athenian colonists still lived their independent lives. Near by was a small, ancient town where an Italian family had set up an illicit restaurant. They did not deal in paper currency but accepted petrol, cigarettes, and medical supplies in exchange for dishes of fresh fish cooked with olive oil and white truffles and garlic.
The Lieutenant left his car in the piazza before the locked church. There were other service vehicles there, and when they reached the house on the water-front they found it full of English and Americans; among them Brigadier Cape and his homely hospital nurse.
‘I haven’t seen you,’ said the Brigadier, ‘and you haven’t seen me,’ but the nurse knew all about the musician, and after luncheon insisted on being introduced. They all walked together along the quay. Guy and the Brigadier a pace behind the other three. This place had been left untouched by the advancing and retreating armies. The inhabitants were taking their siestas. To seaward the calm Adriatic lapped against the old stones; in the harbour the boats lay motionless. Guy remarked, tritely enough, that the war seemed far away.
The Brigadier was in ruminative mood. He had eaten largely; other pleasures lay ahead. ‘War,’ he said. ‘When I was at Sandhurst no one talked about war. We learned about it, of course – a school subject like Latin or geography; something to write exam papers about. No bearing on life. I went into the army because I liked horses, and I’ve spent four years in and out of a stinking, noisy tank. Now I’ve got a couple of gongs and a game leg and all I want is quiet. Not peace, mind. There’s nothing wrong with war except the fighting. I don’t mind betting that after five years of peace we shall all look back on Bari as the best days of our life.’
Suddenly the musician turned and said: ‘Crouchback has the death wish.’
‘Have you?’ asked the Brigadier with a show of disapproval.
‘Have I?’ said Guy.
‘I recognized it the moment we met,’ said the musician. ‘I should not mention it now except that Padfield was so liberal with the wine.’
‘Death wish?’ said the Brigadier. ‘I don’t like the sound of that. Time we were off, Betty.’
He took the nurse’s arm and limped back towards the piazza. Guy saluted as Halberdiers did. The Lieutenant tipped his cap in a gesture that was part benediction, part a wave of farewell. The musician bowed to the nurse.
Then he turned towards the open sea and performed a little parody of himself conducting an orchestra, saying: ‘The death wish. The death wish. On a day like this.’
Two days later, when Guy reported, the Brigadier asked: ‘How’s the death wish today? There’s an aeroplane to take you into Croatia tonight. Joe will give you the details.’
Guy had made no preparations for this journey except to prepare himself. He walked to the old town where he found a dilapidated romanesque church where a priest was hearing confessions. Guy waited, took his turn and at length said: ‘Father, I wish to die.’
‘Yes. How many times?’
‘Almost all the time.’
The obscure figure behind the grill leant nearer. ‘What was it you wished to do?’
‘To die.’
‘Yes. You have attempted suicide?’
‘No.’
‘Of what, then, are you accusing yourself? To wish to die is quite usual today. It may even be a very good disposition. You do not accuse yourself of despair?’
‘No, father; presumption. I am not fit to die.’
‘There is no sin there. This is a mere scruple. Make an act of contrition for all the unrepented sins of your past life.’
After the Absolution he said: ‘Are you a foreigner?’
‘Yes.’
‘Can you spare a few cigarettes?’
In Westminster Cathedral at almost the same time Virginia made her first confession. She told everything; fully, accurately, without extenuation or elaboration. The recital of half a lifetime’s mischief took less than five minutes ‘Thank God for your good and humble confession,’ the priest said. She was shriven. The same words were said to her as were said to Guy. The same grace was offered. Little Trimmer stirred as she knelt at the side-altar and pronounced the required penance; then she returned to her needle-work.
That evening she said to Uncle Peregrine, as she had said before: ‘Why do people make such a fuss? It’s all so easy. But it is rather satisfactory to feel that I shall never again have anything serious to confess as long as I live.’
Uncle Peregrine made no comment. He did not credit himself with any peculiar gift of discernment of spirits. Most things which most people did or said puzzled him, if he gave them any thought. He preferred to leave such problems in higher hands.
2
SUMMER came swiftly and sweetly over the wooded hills and rich valleys of Northern Croatia. Bridges were down and the rails up on the little single-track railway-line that had once led from Begoy to Zagreb. The trunk road to the Balkans ran east. There the German lorries streamed night and day without interruption and the German garrisons squatted waiting the order to retire. Here, in an island of ‘liberated territory’ twenty miles by ten, the peasants worked their fields as they had always done, subject only to the requisitions of the partisans; the priests said Mass in their churches subject only to the partisan security police who lounged at the back and listened for political implications in their sermons. In one Mohammedan village the mosque had been burned by Ustachi in the first days of Croatian independence. In Begoy itself the same gang, Hungarian trained, had blown up the Orthodox church and desecrated the cemetery. But there had been little fighting. As the Italians withdrew the Ustachi followed and the partisans crept in from the hills and imposed their rule. More of their fellows joined them, slipping in small, ragged bodies through the German lines; there were shortages of food but no famine. There was a tithe levied but no looting. Partisans obeyed orders and it was vital to them to keep the good-will of the peasants.
The bourgeois had all left Begoy with the retreating garrison. The shops in the little high street were empty or used as billets. The avenues of lime had been roughly felled for firewood. But there were still visible the hall-marks of the Habsburg Empire. There were thermal springs, and at the end of the preceding century the town had been laid out modestly as a spa. Hot water still ran in the bath house. Two old gardeners still kept some order in the ornamental grounds. The graded paths, each with a ‘view-point�
��, the ruins of a seat and of a kiosk, where once invalids had taken their prescribed exercise, still ran through boskage between the partisan bivouacs. The circle of villas in the outskirts of the town abandoned precipitately by their owners had been allotted by the partisans to various official purposes. In the largest of these the Russian mission lurked invisibly.
Two miles from the town lay the tract of flat grazing land which was used as an airfield. Four English airmen had charge of it. They occupied one side of the quadrangle of timbered buildings which comprised a neighbouring farm-house. The military mission lived opposite, separated by a dung heap. Both bodies were tirelessly cared for by three Montenegran war-widows; they were guarded by partisan sentries and attended by an ‘interpreter’ named Bakic, who had been a political exile in New York in the thirties and picked up some English there. Both missions had their wireless-sets with which to communicate with their several headquarters. A sergeant signaller and an orderly comprised Guy’s staff.
The officer whom Guy succeeded had fallen into a melancholy and was recalled for medical attention; he had left by the aeroplane that brought Guy. They had had ten minutes’ conversation in the light of the flare-path while a party of girls unloaded the stores.
‘The comrades are a bloody-minded lot of bastards,’ he had said. ‘Don’t keep any copies of signals in clear. Bakic reads everything. And don’t say anything in front of him you don’t want repeated.’
The Squadron Leader remarked that this officer had been ‘an infernal nuisance lately. Suffering from persecution mania if you ask me. Wrong sort of chap to send to a place like this.’
Joe Cattermole had fully instructed Guy in his duties. They were not exacting. At this season aeroplanes were coming in to land at Begoy almost every week, bringing, besides supplies, cargoes of unidentified Slavs in uniform, who disappeared on landing and joined their comrades of the higher command. They took back seriously wounded partisans and allied airmen who had ‘baled out’ of their damaged bombers returning from Germany to Italy. There were also ‘drops’ of stores, some in parachutes – petrol and weapons; the less vulnerable loads, clothing and rations – falling free as bombs at various points in the territory. All this traffic was the business of the Squadron Leader. He fixed the times of the sorties. He guided the machines in. Guy’s duty was to transmit reports on the military situation. For these he was entirely dependent on the partisan ‘general staff’. This body, together with an old lawyer from Split who bore the title of ‘Minister of the Interior’, consisted of the General and the Commissar, veterans of the International Brigade in Spain, and a second-in-command who was a regular officer of the Royal Jugoslavian Army. They had their own fluent interpreter, a lecturer in English, he claimed, from Zagreb University. The bulletins dealt only in success; a village had been raided; a fascist supply wagon had been waylaid; mostly they enumerated the partisan bands who had found their way into the Begoy area and put themselves under the command of the ‘Army of Croatia’. These were always lacking in essential equipment and Guy was asked to supply them. Thus the General and the Commissar steered a delicate course between the alternating and conflicting claims that the partisans were destitute and that they maintained in the field a large, efficient modern army. The reinforcements excused the demands.
The general staff were nocturnal by habit. All the morning they slept. In the afternoon they ate and smoked and idled; at sunset they came to life. There was a field telephone between them and the airfield. Once or twice a week it would ring and Bakic would announce: ‘General wants us right away.’ Then he and Guy would stumble along the rutted lane to a conference which took place sometimes by oil-lamp, sometimes under an electric bulb which flickered and expired as often as in the headquarters at Bari. An exorbitant list of requirements would be presented; sometimes medical stores, the furniture of a whole hospital with detailed lists of drugs and instruments which would take days to encipher and transmit; field artillery; light tanks; typewriters; they particularly wanted an aeroplane of their own. Guy would not attempt to dispute them. He would point out that the allied armies in Italy were themselves engaged in a war. He would promise to transmit their wishes. He would then edit them and ask for what seemed reasonable. The response would be unpredictable. Sometimes there would be a drop of ancient rifles captured in Abyssinia, sometimes boots for half a company, sometimes there was a jack-pot and the night sky rained machine guns, ammunition, petrol, dehydrated food, socks, and books of popular education. The partisans made a precise account of everything received, which Guy transmitted. Nothing was ever pilfered. The discrepancy between what was asked and what was given deprived Guy of any sense he might have felt of vicarious benefaction. The cordiality or strict formality of his reception depended on the size of the last drop. Once, after a jack-pot, he was offered a glass of Slivovic.
In mid-April a new element appeared.
Guy had finished breakfast and was attempting to memorize a Serbo-Croat vocabulary with which he had been provided, when Bakic announced:
‘Dere’s de Jews outside.’
‘What Jews?’
‘Dey been dere two hour, maybe more. I said to wait.’
‘What do they want?’
‘Dey’re Jews. I reckon dey always want sometin’. Dey want see de British captain. I said to wait.’
‘Well, ask them to come in.’
‘Dey can’t come in. Why, dere’s more’n a hundred of dem.’
Guy went out and found the farmyard and the lane beyond thronged. There were some children in the crowd, but most seemed old, too old to be parents, for they were unnaturally aged by their condition. Everyone in Begoy, except the peasant women, was in rags, but the partisans kept regimental barbers and there was a kind of dignity about their tattered uniforms. The Jews were grotesque in their remnants of bourgeois civility. They showed little trace of racial kinship. There were Semites among them, but the majority were fair, snub-nosed, high cheek-boned, the descendants of Slav tribes judaized long after the Dispersal. Few of them, probably, now worshipped the God of Israel in the manner of their ancestors.
A low chatter broke out as Guy appeared. Then three leaders came forward, a youngish woman of better appearance than the rest and two crumpled old men. The woman asked him if he spoke Italian, and when he nodded introduced her companions – a grocer from Mostar, a lawyer from Zagreb – and herself, a woman of Fiume married to a Hungarian engineer.
Here Bakic roughly interrupted in Serbo-Croat and the three fell humbly and hopelessly silent. He said to Guy: ‘I tell dese people dey better talk Slav. I will speak for dem.’
The woman said: ‘I only speak German and Italian.’
Guy said: ‘We will speak Italian. I can’t ask you all in. You three had better come and leave the others outside.’
Bakic scowled. A chatter broke out in the crowd. Then the three with timid little bows crossed the threshold, carefully wiping their dilapidated boots before treading the rough board floor of the interior.
‘I shan’t want you, Bakic.’
The spy went out to bully the crowd, hustling them out of the farmyard into the lane.
There were only two chairs in Guy’s living-room. He took one and invited the woman to use the other. The men huddled behind her and then began to prompt her. They spoke to one another in a mixture of German and Serbo-Croat; the lawyer knew a little Italian; enough to make him listen anxiously to all the woman said, and to interrupt. The grocer gazed steadily at the floor and seemed to take no interest in the proceedings. He was there because he commanded respect and trust among the waiting crowd. He had been in a big way of business with branch stores throughout all the villages of Bosnia.
With a sudden vehemence the woman, Mme Kanyi, shook off her advisers and began her story. The people outside, she explained, were the survivors of an Italian concentration camp on the island of Rab. Most were Jugo-Slav nationals, but some, like herself, were refugees from Central Europe. She and her husband were on their way to
Australia in 1939; their papers were in order; he had a job waiting for him in Brisbane. Then they had been caught by the war.
When the King fled, the Ustachi began massacring Jews. The Italians rounded them up and took them to the Adriatic. When Italy surrendered, the partisans for a few weeks held the coast. They brought the Jews to the mainland, conscribed all who seemed capable of useful work, and imprisoned the rest. Her husband had been attached to the army headquarters as electrician. Then the Germans moved in; the partisans fled, taking the Jews with them. And here they were, a hundred and eight of them, half starving in Begoy.