We Die Alone

by David Howarth

  All the time Jan was talking, the two women were busy with the practical help which he needed so badly. They gave him food and a hot drink, and helped him to take off his sodden clothes. They found him new dry underclothes and socks and a sea-boot Herr Pedersen had left behind, and they hung up his uniform to dry, and rubbed his feet and legs till the feeling began to come back to them, and bandaged the stump of his wounded toe.

  Twice while they worked to revive him, the sentries came running in to say that a boat was coming. Each time Jan pulled on his steaming jacket and trousers and the sea-boots, one his own and one Herr Pedersen’s, and gathered together everything which belonged to him and ran out of the house and up into the hills. But each time the boat passed by.

  Between these alarms, he rested and relaxed. That humble Norwegian kitchen, with the children gathered round him speaking his native tongue, was more homely than any place he had seen in the three years he had been abroad. The warmth, and the sense of homecoming, and the contrast of family life after the fearful tension of the day, made him drowsy. It was difficult to remember that outside in the darkness there still were ruthless men who would shoot him on sight, and wreck that home if they found him there, and carry the children off to captivity and the mothers to unmentionable torment. Such violence had the quality of a dream. And when he dragged his mind back to grapple with reality, Jan found himself faced with a doubt which often came back to him later: ought he to let such people help him? Was his own life worth it? Was he right as a soldier, to let women and children put their lives in such terrible danger? To save them from the consequence of their own goodness, ought he not go out, and fight his own battle alone? But for the moment, these questions went unanswered, because he was not fit to make any such decision. Fru Pedersen and Fru Idrupsen had taken him in hand, and they treated him as an extra child.

  When he had been there half an hour or so, the eldest son of the Pedersen family came home. He had heard the explosion in Toftefjord, but did not know what had happened. They told him the story, and as soon as he had heard it he took it as a matter of course that a wounded survivor should be sitting in his mother’s kitchen while the Germans scoured the islands round about. As his father was not at home, it was up to him to get Jan away to safety. He began to debate the question of how to do it.

  The first thing was to rest. For one thing, there was no knowing when Jan might get another chance, and for another it would be madness to go out in a boat while the Germans were still there. And after that, the boy said, when he had rested, he ought to get away from the islands altogether, to the mainland. Any island, however big it was, might be a trap, not only because you might find your retreat cut off, but also because everyone on an island knew everyone else’s business. If he stayed another day in Hersöy, everyone would know he was there. But on the mainland, if they did come after you, you could always go on a stage farther; and gossip did not spread there quite so fast. Altogether, he would be safer there. Besides, that was the way to Sweden.

  This was the first time Jan had paused to think of an ultimate escape. Up till then, it had only been a matter of dodging for the next few hours, and he had still thought of north Norway as his destination. That was where he had set out for, and he had arrived; and although he had lost his companions and all his equipment, he had not admitted to himself that the whole expedition was a failure. He still hoped to do part of his job there, at least, as soon as he had got his strength back and shaken off the Germans. But the people who lived there, as he now began to see, all thought at once of Sweden for a man in such serious trouble. It was a difficult journey, but not a very long one; about eighty miles, in a straight line; if you could travel in straight lines.

  The trouble was, the boy went on, he only had a rowing-boat himself, and they could never row to the mainland. Just south of them was the sound called Skagösund, which was two miles wide. On the other side of that was Ringvassöy, an island about twenty miles square, and south of that again you had to cross Grötsund itself, which was the main channel into Tromsö from the north and was four miles wide and full of patrol boats. The best he could do himself was to row Jan across to Ringvassöy before the morning. But he knew a man there called Jensen who was all right, and he had a motor-boat and was meaning to go into Tromsö some day soon. His wife was the midwife over there, and he had a permit and was always moving about with his boat. He could easily put Jan ashore on the mainland.

  Jan listened gratefully as this plan unfolded. He was glad for the moment to have everything thought out for him, and was ready to fall in with any idea which would take him away from Toftefjord.

  When it was all decided, and he was resting, the eldest son of the Toftefjord family went out in his boat to see what had happened at his home, and to find out for Jan if there was any sign of the rest of his party. He was away for a couple of hours. When he came back, Jan knew for certain that of all the twelve men, he was the only one who was not either killed or captured. Toftefjord itself was quiet. There were still parties of Germans searching the distant hills. The slopes of the fjord were littered with scraps of planking. The boy had found the remains of a petrol barrel, and seen an ammunition belt hanging in a tree. But there was no one, alive or dead, on the beaches. The German ship had left. It was steaming slowly up the north side of the island, using a searchlight. Jan’s friends, or their bodies, must have been taken aboard it. Eskeland and Per Blindheim and all the others were gone, and he could never expect to see them again. There was nothing he could do except to go on alone.

  He left the house on Hersöy very early in the morning, well before it was light. Fru Pedersen and Fru Idrupsen watched him go and brushed aside his thanks, which could certainly not have been adequate for what they had done. The boy took him down to his boat and they got aboard and pushed her off into the sound. Jan felt fit again and ready for anything. They turned to the southward and began to row, past the place where he had landed from his swim, past the shop, and then out across the open water, heading for Ringvassöy, with Toftefjord astern. Everything was peaceful.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  SEA-BOOTS IN THE SNOW

  IN MOMENTS of calm, Jan often thought about his family, as all soldiers of all armies think in war. So far as he knew, they were still in Oslo: his father, and his young brother Nils, and his sister. His sister’s name was Julie, but none of them ever called her that because they thought it was old-fashioned; they had always gone on calling her Bitten, which was the nickname he had invented for her when he was eight and she was a baby. When his mother died, he had been sixteen, Nils ten, and Bitten only eight; and so he had suddenly had to be very much more grown up than he really was; he had had to take care of the children when his father was at work, and even shop and cook and wash for them for a time till his aunt could come to the rescue.

  They had always been a closely united family, both before and after that disaster, until the morning just after the invasion when his orders had come and he had left home on an hour’s notice. But somehow a special affection had grown up through the years between himself and Bitten. Young Nils was a boy and an independent spirit who had always been able to stand on his own feet; but Bitten had turned to him more and more for advice, and he had become very fond of her, and proud of her, and deeply interested in her growing-up.

  Perhaps this big-brotherly affection had been the deepest emotion in Jan’s life, when fortune landed him in Toftefjord when he was twenty-six. At any rate, leaving Bitten had hurt more than anything when the time came. He had tried to make the break as quick and painless as it could be when he knew he had to do it. He had waited around that morning till he knew she would be coming home from school, and he had met her in the street on his way to the station just to tell her he was going. She was fifteen then, and he had never seen her since. For the first few months, while he was in Norway and Sweden, he had been able to write to her sometimes, using a false name so that if the letters got into the wrong hands she would not get into troubl
e for having a brother who was still opposing the Germans after the capitulation. In his letters he had begged her to stay on at high school, not to be in a hurry to get a job; but he had never known if she had taken that advice. While he was in prison in Sweden he had a few letters from her, sending him press cuttings about netball games she had played in. It had made him smile to think that she wanted him to be interested in netball when he was just beginning a prison sentence; but it had also made him very homesick. Since he had left Sweden and started his journey to England, he had never heard of her at all. That was nearly three years ago. She would be eighteen now: grown up, he supposed. He sorely wished that he knew if she was happy.

  Sitting in the boat that early morning, as the boy from Hersöy rowed him across the sound, Jan had every reason to think of his family. It had always been on his mind since he started to train as an agent that he would have to be careful to protect them from reprisals if anything went wrong. Now that capture and death were so close to him, he had to remind himself of the one and only way he could protect them: to refuse to be captured, and to die, if he had to die, anonymously. He had nothing on him to identify him or his body as Jan Baalsrud, and that was as it should be: if the worst came to the worst, the Germans would throw him into a grave without a name. His father and Nils and Bitten would never know what had happened to him. He would have liked them to know he had done his best; but to leave them in ignorance was the price of their safety.

  Something the boy said brought this forcibly to his mind. The boy meant to take him to Jensen’s house and introduce him and make sure that he was safe; but Jan had to ask him to put him ashore out of sight of the house and leave him. He explained the first principle of any illegal plan: that nobody should know more than he needs. It was a pity that the boy and his family knew Jan was going to Jensen, but there was no need for Jensen to know where he came from. You might trust a man like your brother, he said, but it was no kindness to burden him with unnecessary secrets, because no man alive could be certain he would not talk if he was caught and questioned. What your tongue said when your brain was paralysed by drugs or torture was not a mere matter of courage; it was unpredictable, and beyond any self-control. Jan himself would be the only one who knew everyone who helped him; but he had his pistol, and he solemnly promised this boy, as he promised more people later, that he would not let them catch him alive. So the two of them parted on the shore of Ringvassöy, and the boy backed his boat off and turned away into the darkness, leaving Jan alone.

  Jan owned nothing in the world just then except the clothes he was wearing, and a handkerchief and a knife and some bits of rubbish in his pockets, and his pistol. He had navy blue trousers and a sweater and Herr Pedersen’s underclothes, and a Norwegian naval jacket, a warm double-breasted one with brass buttons and a seaman’s badges, though he had never been a seaman, and was not even very sure if he could row. The jacket had the Norwegian flag sewn on its shoulders, with the word NORWAY in English above it. He had lost his hat. He was amused at the odd footprints which his two rubber boots left in the snow, one English and one Norwegian. There was something symbolic there, if you cared about symbols.

  There were a dozen houses in that part of Ringvassöy, but he easily picked out Jensen’s. The lights were on, and there were voices inside. He hoped that might mean that Jensen was making an early start on his trip to Tromsö. He went to the back door, and hesitated a moment, and knocked. A woman opened the door at once, and he asked if Jensen was at home. No, she said, he had left for Tromsö the morning before, and would not be back for two or three days.

  At this disappointing news Jan paused for a moment uncertainly, because he did not want to show himself to people who could not help him. He would have liked to make an excuse and go away; but he saw surprise and alarm in her face as she noticed his uniform in the light of the lamp from the doorway.

  “I’m in a bit of trouble with the Germans,” he said. “Have you got people in the house?”

  “Why, of course,” she said. “I have my patients. But they’re upstairs. You’d better come inside.”

  That explained the lights and the voices so early in the morning. He had not made allowances for what a midwife’s life involves. He went in, and began to tell her a little of what had happened, and what he wanted, and of the danger of helping him.

  Fru Jensen was not in the least deterred by danger. She had heard the explosion in Toftefjord, and already rumours had sprung up in Ringvassöy. The only question she asked was who had sent Jan to her house, and when he refused to tell her and explained the reason why, she saw the point at once. She said he was welcome to stay. She was very sorry her husband was away, and she herself could not leave the house at present, even for a moment. But there was plenty of room, and they were used to people coming and going. He could stay till the evening, or wait till Jensen came home if he liked. He would be glad to take him to the mainland. But she could not be sure how long he would be away, and perhaps it would be risky to try to ring him up in Tromsö and tell him to hurry back.

  “But you must be hungry,” she said. “Just excuse me a moment, and then I’ll make your breakfast.” And she hurried upstairs to attend to a woman in labour.

  Jan felt sure he would be as safe in her hands as anyone’s. He could even imagine her dealing firmly and capably with Germans who wanted to search her house. If you were trying to think of a hiding-place, there could hardly be anywhere better than a labour ward, because even the Germans might hesitate to search there. And yet it would be so impossibly shameful to use it. It might fail; it might not deter the Germans. Jan had all a young bachelor’s awe and ignorance of childbirth; but he had a clear enough vision of German soldiers storming through that house, and himself forced to fight them there, and failing perhaps, and having to blow out his brains. If it came to that, he was ready to face it himself; one always knew it might happen, one could think of it calmly. But to involve a woman in something like that at the very moment of the birth of her baby, or perhaps to see a new-born infant shot or trampled underfoot––that was too appallingly incongruous; it could not bear to be thought about at all.

  Besides this, there was another practical, strategic consideration. He was still much too close to Toftefjord. If the Germans really wanted to get him, it would not take them long to turn Ribbenesöy inside out: they had probably finished that already. And the obvious place for them to look, when they were sure he had left the island, was where he was now, on the shore of Ringvassöy which faced it. Their search would gradually widen, like a ripple on a pond, until they admitted they had lost him; and until then, at all costs, he must travel faster than the ripple.

  When Fru Jensen came back and began to lay the table, he told her he had decided to move on. She did not express any feeling about it, except to repeat that he was welcome to stay if he wanted to; if not, she would give him some food to take with him. She began to tell him about useful and dangerous people all over her island. There were several ways he could go: either by sea, if he happened to find a boat, or along either shore of the island, or up a valley which divides it in the middle. But if he went up the valley, she warned him, he would have to be careful. People in those remote and isolated places were inclined to take their politics from the clergyman or the justice of the peace, or the chairman of the local council, or some other such leader in their own community; they had too little knowledge of the outside world to form opinions of their own. In the valley there happened to be one man who was a Nazi, or so she had heard; and she was afraid a lot of people might have come under his influence. If a stranger was seen there, he was certain to hear of it; and although she could not be sure, she thought he might tell the police. Of course, most of Ringvassöy, she said, was quite all right. He could go into almost any house and be sure of a welcome. And she told him the names of a lot of people who she knew would be happy to help him.

  It was still early when Jan left the midwife, fortified by a good breakfast and by her friendlines
s and fearless common sense. He wanted to get away from the houses before too many people were about; but it was daylight, and it was more than likely someone would see him from a window. It was a good opportunity to be misleading. He started along the shore towards the west. In that direction, he might have gone up the valley or followed the coastline round the west side of the island. But when he was out of sight of the last of the houses, he changed his direction and struck off into the hills, and made a detour behind the houses to reach the shore again farther east. He had made his plans now a little way ahead. The next lap was to walk thirty miles to the south end of the island.

  It looked simple. He remembered it pretty clearly from the map, and during his training it would have been an easy day. He knew that maps of mountains are often misleading, because even the best of them do not show whether a hill can be climbed or not; but he was not prepared for quite such a misleading map as the one of that part of Norway. In the normal course of events, nobody ever walks far in the northern islands. The natural route from one place to another is by sea. The sea charts are therefore perfect; but the most detailed land map which existed then was on a scale of about a quarter of an inch to a mile, and it made Ringvassöy look green and smoothly rounded. No heights were marked on it. There were contours, but they had a vague appearance, as if there had been more hope than science in their drawing. One might have deduced something from the facts that the only houses shown were clustered along the shores, and that there was no sign of a single road; but nothing on the map suggested one tenth of the difficulty of walking across the island in the winter.