It was necessary to leave a label. The tracks of the carrier could show where it had left the road, and the white bullet marks on stone that it had given chase to something which had to be me; but I did not want the area commander to think that total submersion in the bog was pure accident. So I carried some of the thick black mud up to a smooth face of stone a little above the bog and drew a passable swastika with an arrow pointing at the centre. It was not wholly gratuitous insolence. As before, I wanted partly to protect the villagers and partly to add force to the morale-shaking myth which must be gathering about me.
The craggy, rugged top of the range was going to be too hot to hold me, so I decided to make for the gorge of the Aliakmon which I had inspected after my attack on the blockhouse, considering it a suitable hideout although too far away to take advantage of the alarm I must have caused in Kozani. I crossed the road intending to travel with caution during the remaining hours of daylight and after dark to make all possible speed along made paths. Hunger had returned after the anodyne of action. I looked forward to a bit of peace in which to eat my snake.
I reckoned that I had plenty of time to escape before any force set out from base to find out what had happened to the missing carrier. For a second time I had inexcusably forgotten radio. I suppose body and mind had become too thoroughly the timeless and predatory carnivore. I was only half a mile away when I saw a platoon of infantry deploying at the side of the road and rushing the slope to answer the desperate appeal of the vanished carrier. They could be certain that I had not gone far since I had wasted time painting in mud my contemptuous swastika.
In any case, I thought, they were bound to cordon the tops till every cleft and rabbit hole was searched. They could not know yet that I had crossed the road. Another wrong assumption. While I was trotting along a mule path at the bottom of a twisting valley with no cover on either side, a light plane swooped round the bend behind, unheard until it was nearly over me.
I could see woodland ahead but it was too late for sheltering pines to be of any use to me now. The enemy could have no doubt that I was heading for the gorge – not an easy crossing in any case and nearly impossible if parties were out on the banks and on the heights above. My position, trapped within the right-angled bend of the Aliakmon, was desperate. The only way out was round the head of the river by night marches and without a map. So far as I knew, that move would take me into Albania and more desolate ranges than any I had seen, where I could choose between capture or starvation. Even supposing I could reach the sea in one piece only the Italian coast was across the water. The best bet was to go to ground and allow the hounds to overrun me if I could manage it. I might then be able to see what dispositions they had made and cross the river in spite of them.
The immediate necessity was to reach the woodland, light a fire under cover of the thickest branches, and eat. In a mood of fatalism this I did. I dared not sleep but in fact the hunt never followed the valley where I had been spotted: a sure sign that they knew a better and more deadly route. Before dawn I set out to discover where they had gone and found myself in country quite different from the slopes of scrub above Kozani or the marshes and crags further north. Here the hills were rounded, bare and speckled with solitary bushes, like open umbrellas left out to dry on shingle, which would give cover from the air but none at all from the ground.
Since I had to reach an observation post, I climbed to a crest regardless of enemy eyes and got away with it. Once on the top, curled round the trunk of one of these bushes, I could gain some idea of the lie of the land. To the west the hills were lower and cut by steep ravines down which the water must flow to the gorge of the Aliakmon. There were glimpses of military activity on the far side of the wood where I had spent the night. They had reached it by another parallel valley, which meant that after receiving the report from the air they had hoped to cut me off as soon as I left the trees, instead of chasing me directly. It was fortunate that they had taken this second valley into which I now looked down and it explained why I had never been seen. Apparently I could stay under my umbrella as long as I liked, but I could leave it only at twilight. That being fated, I put in hours of much-needed sleep in the shade.
When the sun had gone down, I followed the crest westwards, for it ran evenly on and saved me from descending into the network of shallow ravines where my right way by the stars might be the wrong way by these lanes of the land. As the long ridge began to fall away, I proceeded very slowly and carefully, expecting that the enemy would be blocking this obvious route as well as the valleys. Eventually I found their post – five men tucked away in a hollow with two sentries on the edge. I was pleased to see the post so strongly held. This normally unimportant district of Kozani must have been calling for more troops. I suspect that the incentive was not my raid on the blockhouse nor the bogged carrier but the impudent assassination of the Gestapo doorman. Only the SD in blazing anger could have had enough influence to extract troops from Salonica and Thessaly.
I tested their nerves by silently shaking a bush. When the sentries spotted the foliage wavering against the moon, they dropped flat and alerted the post. In fact they were well protected against a sniper. If he could see the target so could they, and the inaccuracy of their hosepipe fire would be fully compensated by the quantity of it. But they had evidently heard all the myths about this half-human Untermensch who would stop and label his victims under the very noses of their comrades. I slipped peacefully past all the excitement and continued the descent.
It was now my turn to be frightened of a bullet in the back, mazed in this country which the enemy had seen in daylight and I had not. I did not dare to follow a watercourse, for that was what a fugitive bound for the river would be expected to do. I was forced to scramble and trip and make far too much noise while the soles of Hauptmann Haase’s admirable boots were taking the worst pounding they had suffered since the retreat of the Voevod.
It was pointless to go on, and though the approaches to that damned gorge must be full of nooks and crannies I was unwilling to choose one without knowing whether it was next door to the bivouac of a detachment of troops. This was not a fantasy born of panic. A faint smell of cooking was coming down wind and so near that I could identify onion soup. The tantalizing scent came not in wafts but on a steady light wind. Over the ridge, though so much higher, there had been only a bit of a night breeze; so I guessed that I must have reached some sort of terrace actually within the walls of the gorge or so close to them that I was feeling the wind which followed the water.
First light showed that I had indeed passed through a crumbling upper wall, hardly perceptible in the dark, and was in a lizard’s paradise of fissured stone, its cracks filled with low, green growth. Beyond this terrace was the sheer drop to the river. I had chosen a quite hopeless place in which to stop where I could be seen as soon as anyone walked near me. The sentries whose supper I had smelled were less than a hundred yards away, must have heard me and were, I assumed, only waiting for full dawn to take action. Far away on top of the first wall I could see two more posts. The officer commanding the pursuit had a fine appreciation of geography. Whether I was following the crest or either of the two valleys, this stretch of the gorge was where I must come out.
There was no chance of examining the brink and seeing how far I must fall before I hit the water. In any case, if I survived, I should be a floating target. I could of course put up a fight – short, useless and with no guarantee of being killed. Their orders would certainly be to take me alive if possible to provide sport for the Gestapo. I unslung my rifle, intending to put a toe on the trigger and save them the trouble, yet I was ashamed of it. She, my love, had never been allowed a chance to kill herself.
I remember how conscious I was of her presence beyond the other great gorge of death. I remember the daydream in which I seemed to hear her say, ‘Not till I am ready.’ I could not understand the message if there was any. That in some sense I live
d in her, that in some sense I was sacrificing to her, like any pious pagan, the blood of her executioners – all that was true, but we remain one person and so there can be no toe on the trigger then or now.
So much for the shadow world of a cornered, weary animal. Whether I ran or whether I humped like a caterpillar over dips and corrugations I could not avoid being seen. If only I could reach the brink, slip over and hit the water still alive, a sharpish bend in the gorge offered a wild, vague hope. When the current swept my body round the bend it would be a matter of minutes before anyone could get into position for a clear shot at me, especially if I remained close under the cliff.
Unaccountably I had not yet been heard. I supposed the slight rustle of my progress, which sounded like an earthquake to my anxious ears, might seem to anyone at a distance only a lizard and a falling pebble. But it turned out that there was another source of rustles. None of the post seemed inclined to walk my way even for a morning piddle. They were laughing, chatting and pleased with some diversion from the dull duties of watching the approaches. They had apparently confined something in a pit. Being plain, honest Württembergers, to judge by the accent, it was unlikely they would be mocking some imprisoned human being.
In the utter rock-bound silence I heard one of them say, ‘We’ll send it to the Führer with the compliments of the regiment.’
It would indeed have delighted the Führer if it had been ‘him’ not ‘it’. What I could hear of the conversation then went more or less like this:
‘He’s in Russia, they say.’
‘Well, there’s always second-line transport from Salonica.’
‘How are we going to get him out?’
‘Same way as we dropped him in. Chuck a cape over him.’
‘Beautiful chap, isn’t he? Think it will heal?’
‘I know the vet in Kozani if we go back that way.’
‘I can’t think how the sergeant had the heart to shoot him.’
‘That damned townsman! He would!’
I was completely puzzled. A rock dove perhaps or a wildcat kitten? Soldiers of every nation are always ready to adopt a pet on which to expend the tenderness which the trade has compelled them to leave at home. And then I heard the unmistakable scream of a golden eagle. Well, not unmistakable, for this was a very angry eagle and only a nest robber would be familiar with that particular cry. It was too much to hope that the gift would reach the Führer and that he would uncrate it himself.
Evidently that trigger-happy townsman of a sergeant had winged the eagle, which had then walked some distance to the gorge, instinct perhaps leading it to try to take off from the cliff, and in the evening had come within reach of the post, more appreciative than the sergeant. They had captured it and dropped it into a crack from which it could not climb out.
‘What about his breakfast? Throw him down some sausage!’
‘Bet you he won’t touch it!’
The whole party of four bent in a circle over that unseen hole in the ground. I crawled into a cleft just wide enough to take my body which I had been longing to reach ever since dawn. The next move, opening up a chance of temporary safety, was into a little sandy ravine which I had followed and then abandoned when I thought it was leading me in the wrong direction. I realized now that its lower course must go straight for the brink.
Apparently the eagle was out for vengeance not sausage. So several times had I been. One of the bolder spirits offered a tasty slice of hand. This called for application of a field dressing, prophecies of how many stitches would be wanted, whether the charge of a self-inflicted wound would stand up, and general confusion. I rolled into the ravine.
It did not end in a sheer drop. Winter rains had worn away the last few feet of the watercourse into a steep slope which I had to descend head-first in order to see what was below me and out to the sides. I was terrified of sliding over into the unknown and when, anchored by a foot in a crack, I was at last able to look into the gorge I was more terrified still. The river was low, and far beneath me was not water but a shelf of rock. After somehow managing to withdraw backwards I was shaking all over. The primeval fear of falling to death. Yet in front of a firing squad I should be calm and heroic, refusing to be blindfolded, etc. I have been near enough to know. I wonder if it works the other way round. Would these mountaineers who positively enjoy hanging on to nothing by fingers and toes be equally cool under a hail of machine-gun fire?
I reminded myself that at any rate nobody was at all likely to look for me where I was and stopped trembling. I could stay in the ravine till I rotted or the pursuit decided that I had slipped off north into Albania.
Heavy, determined footsteps crossed the ravine. The sergeant doing his rounds perhaps. An inspired guess. I could faintly hear the sound of raised voices, and then a pistol shot. Heavy footsteps and more of them returned across the ravine, and it was safe to raise a head. My four nature-loving Württembergers were under arrest. The sergeant – if it was he – carried under one arm the good Greek eagle, now a German corpse. For the moment it appeared that the post was not manned at all.
It was worth while to take a crawl round the vicinity though the temporary absence of any guard at that particular point was not going to help me to cross the Aliakmon. The sergeant and the four culprits were well on their way to one of the posts on the skyline, and relief sentries would probably appear very soon. I found the eagle had been confined at the bottom of a pot-hole just about deep enough to prevent it clambering out. I thanked its free spirit for the gift of the rejected sausage. They had also tried him with bits of bread, which were equally welcome.
Up to the present my view of my environment had been limited to some gravel and a clump of heather and all I had learned from a glance right and left out of that vile ravine was that the cliffs were sheer. I still dared not stand up but I had a few minutes of sunlit peace in which to consider my surroundings and think. Why had the posts been set where they were? The reason for two which I had spotted was obvious: simply higher ground. This one, however, did not on the face of it serve any useful purpose. I tried to put myself in the position of their intelligence officer in this desolate, sparsely inhabited district of Greece where till now there had been no need for a single German soldier; he would grab two or three villagers and ask them whether anyone ever crossed the gorge to attend christenings, weddings and funerals on the other side. The absence of any bridge showed that the general public had no interest. He would get the reply that of course there was a crossing which had been there since the days of Homer, Alexander, Lord Byron, or whoever the local hero was.
My intelligence officer would then put a neat circle on his map to mark the otherwise indistinguishable point where this murderous fugitive coming down from the hills could be expected to approach the gorge. However, it was far from easy to discover any route worth guarding on rock and gravel where no footmark showed and I dared not walk upright for a more comprehensive view. A mule dropping under my nose at last gave a clue to the path which ran across the terrace and then along the brink of the gorge.
Now all the beast needed was good cover where he could lie up till nightfall. A cavity in the rock, much like the eagle prison, was kind enough to allow one of the umbrella bushes to grow. Concealed beneath it, I watched through the leaves the arrival of the relieving sentries and when they had settled down to their duties felt safe enough to sleep. At least I was through the cordon. I did not look forward to traversing a sheer cliff in the dark but presumed that if a mule could manage it I could.
I set off by starlight. The path was just distinguishable and so was the emptiness on my left from which I was continually leaning away. It dipped down, passed over earth behind a neutral buttress standing out from the cliff and took to a ledge which had been widened by pick and chisel; even so, I felt that the mule which had tripped along it must have been somewhat undersized. There I waited till the rising moon revealed more
of the chasm. I found that I was more than halfway down and that below me the river ran between a flat rock on my side and a stepped slope on the other. Myself I should have placed the guard post at the bottom and been wrong. From the ledge I could have picked the lot off with ease.
I cannot remember the rest of the path, which means that it must have been easier or that I do not want to remember. At any rate I arrived at the ford. A rope was slung between iron stanchions from bank to bank, for though the river was wider and shallower the speed of the current was still enough to sweep the wader off his feet. The other side – I thought of it as another land – was in no way alarming. The top of the cliff had at some time collapsed and the path zigzagged up among crags and debris.
I strode out along a well-worn path, determined to put as many miles as possible between the gorge and myself by dawn and feeling quite illogically a free man. As soon as heights could be discerned against the sky, I climbed the usual bare hillside and sat down to consider the next move. The country was broken but much lower, forming a cultivated vale between the range I had crossed and the forested foothills of the Pindus mountains.
It was another land into which I had come. I looked directly down on the village to which the path had been leading me, and could watch its normal morning life. There was something odd about the midday scene. Outside the tavern, civilians apparently on good terms with uniforms. They were not German uniforms. Only then did I remember that in the collapse of 1941 Albania and Epirus had been surrendered to the Italians, who could be expected to provide the military government and the occupying forces. Where the line between the two allies was drawn – if there was a definite line – I did not know. The only certainty was that the Herrenvolk had been left in complete control of all the vital communications between Athens and the Greater Reich.
Rogue Justice Page 15