We Die Alone

by David Howarth

  But during the night the singing slowly flagged and gave place to a blessed silence, and some time in the morning the tent shook and the Lapps emerged, apparently none the worse, and immediately set about striking the tent and harnessing the reindeer. They seemed as brisk as ever. He thought they must have remarkable constitutions. Soon the herd was rounded up, the sledge started, and the headlong rush of hoofs began again.

  On this second day Jan lost the last of his sense of position and direction. He did not know where he was being taken, and he could not ask what plans the Lapps had made, or try to change them whatever they might be. But simply because there was something happening, some positive action going on at last, he had roused himself out of his mental apathy, and even felt physically better than he had when all hope had seemed to have come to an end. The lurching and swaying of the sledge and its sudden stops and starts were sickening and tiring, but he summoned up every bit of strength which he still possessed, inspired if not by hope, at least by curiosity. He wanted to see what was going to happen next. This wish in itself must have helped him to keep alive.

  Everything happened very quickly. The sledge lurched to a halt, perhaps for the hundredth time. The herd, swept on by its own momentum, came milling all round him again. Then he found that both the Lapps were trying to tell him something. They were pointing with their ski-sticks. He tried to look in the direction they showed him but he could not see very much between the hundreds of legs of deer. He listened to what they were saying, but it meant nothing to him at all. And then he caught a single word, the first word they had ever said which he understood. It was “Kilpisjarvi,” and he remembered it. It is the name of a lake. He looked again, with a sudden uncontrollable excitement, and caught a glimpse of a steep slope which fell away from where the herd was standing, and down below, at the foot of the slope, an enormous expanse of smooth unsullied snow. It was the frozen lake, in sight; and he had remembered that the frontier runs across the middle of it. The low banks of snow on the other side were Sweden. Slowly there dawned the wild incredible hope that he was going to win.

  The Lapps were still talking. He shut his mind to that blinding blaze of hope, and tried to attend to them. They picked up handfuls of sodden snow and squeezed it so that the water ran down, pointed again to the lake and shook their heads. That was it: they were trying to tell him that the thaw had gone too far and the ice of the lake was rotten and unsafe. He looked down at the lake again, and then he saw here and there the greenish translucent patches which showed where the ice was melting.

  He remembered Kilpisjarvi on the map. It was miles long, seven or eight at least, and the head of it was near the summer road, where there was sure to be a guard post. At the other end there must be a river. It came back to him: there was a river, and the frontier ran down it. But if the lake was melting, the river ice would surely be broken up and the river in spate and uncrossable. They must cross the lake: they must chance it: he had to make them try. Stop the herd, let him try it alone on the sledge: one man on skis, one deer and the sledge. But he could not explain it. He started to say it in Norwegian but their faces were blank and he stopped in an agony of frustration, and began again to try to control his impatience and to think of a way to make it all clear to them by dumb show. If only he had a pencil and paper to draw maps and pictures––

  There was a crack, the unmistakable lash of a bullet overhead and then the report of a rifle. The deer froze where they stood and raised their heads, scenting danger. The Lapps froze, silent and staring. Jan struggled to raise his head. There were six skiers on the crest of another hill. One of them was kneeling with a rifle, and in the split second while Jan glanced at them another shot went over and he saw three of the men turn down off the crest and come fast towards the herd.

  After seconds of stunned silence the Lapps started talking in shrill excited voices. Jan found he was shouting, “Get on, Get on! Across the lake!” The deer moved nervously, running together in groups, stopping to sniff the wind. The Lapps glanced at him and back at the patrol, the picture of indecision. The patrol was down off the hill, racing across the flats. In an access of frenzied strength Jan half raised his head and shoulders from the sledge, forgetting that words were useless, shouting, “They’re out of range! For God’s sake move! Move!” One of the Lapps shouted back a quick meaningless answer. The other waved both hands towards the rifleman as if he was begging him not to shoot. In an inspiration Jan fumbled in his jacket and drew his useless automatic and brandished it at the Lapps. They stared at it aghast: heaven knows what they thought, whether Jan was meaning to threaten them or defend them. With a final glance at the skiers approaching, one jumped to the head of the deer which pulled the sledge. The other shouted and suddenly, like a flood released, the herd poured over the edge of the hill and down the steep slope towards the lake, the sledge rocking and careering down among them, snow flying from the pounding hoofs, rifle shots whining past and over, across the frozen beach, out in a mad stampede on to the slushy groaning ice and away full tilt towards the Swedish shore.

  EPILOGUE

  ESCAPE STORIES end when freedom and safety are reached, but this story can hardly be ended without telling what happened to the people in it after it was all over.

  Jan and Marius and the Mandal men had dreamed so long of the Swedish frontier that they had never thought much about what would happen on the other side of it. Of course they all knew it was a very long way from the border to a town or hospital, but to travel in a country where there were no Germans seemed so absurdly easy that none of them worried about the distance.

  But as it turned out it was quite a long time after the hectic dash across the lake before Jan was put to bed in a Swedish hospital. Once the tension was over, his memory went to pieces. He remembers a day which he spent in a hut with a lot of Lapps, and another day in a canoe going down a fast river of which one bank was Finland and therefore controlled by the Germans, and the other Sweden. Eventually the river led to a telegraph station, where the operator sent an urgent message to the Swedish Red Cross.

  That excellent organisation sent an ambulance seaplane, which made a perilous landing on a stretch of the river where the ice was still breaking up. Before the plane could take off again, a squad of men had to break more of the ice to give it a longer run. The take-off was the last of the experiences which Jan recollects as having scared him out of his wits. After it, he had a complete blank in his memory until a doctor told him he had been in hospital for a week.

  In hospital, he had the very unusual satisfaction of being asked what surgeon had amputated his toes, and of saying with a casual air that he had done it himself; and later he had a satisfaction which was even greater, when he was told that his operation had saved his feet. The decision about his feet remained in the balance for a long time. He very nearly lost them when the doctors first unwrapped them; but they called in a specialist who decided to try to redeem them, and after three months’ treatment they were declared to be safe.

  As soon as he woke up in hospital, he began to try to get a confidential report of what had happened through to London. It was not very easy. As Sweden was neutral, there were naturally Germans and German agents around, and if his report had got into the wrong hands, of course it would have been a death warrant for the people in Norway who had helped him. He was worried too by the recollection that the Swedes had only let him out of prison three years before on condition that he left the country, so that they had every right to put him in again. But some of his story had filtered across the border, and no doubt the Swedes who heard rumours of it felt he had earned the best treatment they could give him. They let him get into touch with a secretary in the Norwegian embassy, and to her he dictated all that he could remember of the story.

  In England, we already knew, of course, that the expedition had come to grief, and vague reports had come through of what had happened to the Brattholm. There had been a long, sarcastic and gloating story in the Deutsche Zeitung about the
brave and ever-vigilant defenders who had won the battle of Toftefjord, and this German view of the affair had even been quoted in brief in the London papers in early June, while Jan was still lying unconscious. But Jan’s report gave the first news of the unlucky chance which had betrayed the landing, and it was also the first indication we had that one of the twelve men who had sailed from Shetland had survived.

  Jan himself flew back to England in the autumn, after being away from his unit for seven months. In some ways, his return to war-time London must have been a disappointment to him after he had dreamed of it for so long. When the welcoming drinks and the official compliments were over, there was hardly anyone he wanted to talk to about what had happened to him. The Linge Company in which he had been trained was a company of adventurers, and nobody in it talked much about personal experience: for one thing, everybody in it was waiting his own call to go to Norway and knew it was best not to be burdened with other people’s secrets. The few staff officers to whom Jan could talk freely had already seen his report and were busy with other plans, and anyhow were sated with stories of desperate adventure. There was nobody who could share the pictures which were still so vivid in his own mind: pictures of the endless snow, the cold, the glaring nights, the procession of faces of people who had offered their lives for his and whose names he had never known, the sound and smells of the northern wastelands, the solitude and hopelessness and pain. In the busy, grey autumnal streets of London, these things began to seem like a private dream: a dream which was overcast and darkened by anxiety, because he did not know what had happened in those desolate valleys after he got away, so that he was haunted, for the whole of the rest of the war, by the thought that his own life might have been bought at the cost of appalling reprisals. To help himself to live with this burden of worry, he threw all his energy into the routine of army life, and into training himself to walk and run without losing his balance, and getting himself fit again in the hope that he would be allowed to go back to Norway.

  But if nobody in England could share in Jan’s anxiety, it had its counterpart in arctic Norway. For month after month, in Furuflaten and Lyngseidet and Mandal, Kaafjord and Tromsö and the islands, all the people who had helped to save him went about their daily business in the constant fear that something would still be found out which would give them away to the Germans. But time passed and nothing disastrous happened, and the fear very slowly faded; and in fact the Germans never discovered anything, and nobody was ever punished for Jan’s escape. Furuflaten and Lyngseidet survived the war intact, but Mandal, on the other side of the fjord, was the very last of the places which the Germans destroyed in a futile “scorched earth” policy when their retreat began. The people were driven out and every house was burnt to the ground. For a long time the valley was deserted. But now, it has spacious new houses and its people have returned. The valley is still as remote as ever: it still has no road: but its placid life has begun again, and Herr Nordnes has a new generation of pupils in a new school, the sons and daughters of the men who went up to the plateau.

  As I write, the midwife of Ringvassöy is still at work; the same people live in the cottage in Toftefjord; and old Bernhard Sörensen, who rowed Jan across the sound among the searchlights, still thinks nothing of getting his feet wet at 82. But his son Einar died some years ago, and the two grandsons who made Jan tell them a story are grown up and have gone to work in town, so that Bjorneskar is a lonely place for the old man and his wife.

  The village of Furuflaten is very prosperous. Marius has formed a partnership with three other local men, one of whom is Alvin Larsen, who was with him that awful night when they dragged the sledge up Revdal. They are building contractors, and they have also put up a factory in the village, just by the place where they hauled Jan across the road below the schoolhouse. In the factory they make concrete blocks, and a special kind of arctic prefabricated house, and, most unexpectedly, ready-made trousers. The business is growing: they are starting on jackets to match the trousers, and there is no end to their plans.

  Marius, I am glad to say, married Agnethe Lanes, whom he treated so roughly on the night they climbed up to the plateau. They are bringing up a family in a new house they have built beside the log cabin where Jan stumbled in at the door. Marius is beginning to worry about his figure, but he still has his quiet irresistible chuckle, and I think he always will have.

  As for Jan, he got his own way in the end and was sent over again to Norway as an agent, sailing once more from the base in the Shetland Islands. So it happened that he was on active service there when the capitulation came. In the midst of the national rejoicing and the hectic work of accepting the surrender of the Germans, he picked up the telephone and asked for his father’s number, and heard at last that his family were safe and well. When he was free to go to Oslo to meet them, his schoolgirl sister, Bitten, for whom he had worried so long, astonished him by being twenty and having grown up very well, as he saw at a glance, without the benefit of his brotherly hand to guide her.

  Jan is a married man now. His wife Evie is American. Jan and his father work together again, importing mathematical and surveying instruments from abroad. To meet Jan, absorbed in theodolites and his family affairs, in his house in the pinewoods in the outskirts of Oslo, you would never guess the story which he remembers. But you would see for yourself that it has a happy ending.

  Illustrations

  Landfall off Senja: “the coast glittered with a blinding brilliance”

  No photograph was ever taken of Brattholm. Andholmen, shown here at anchor in the harbour of Scallaway, was almost a sister ship

  Toftefjord. Brattholm lay a little farther in than this fishing boat. The crew landed on the beach on the right, and the agents at the far end of the fjord

  The snow gully up which Jan escaped at the head of Toftefjord: on the right, the beach where Jan landed and the mound which gave him cover

  Jan Baalsrud

  The post office at Bjorneskar

  Bernhard Sörensen of Bjorneskar and his wife

  Kjosen: by the buildings on the right, a party of German soldiers crossed the road

  The Lyngen Alps above Kjosen

  Lyngseidet

  Jaeggevarre and the head of Lyngdalen. The avalanche fell down the ice-fall of the glacier in the middle distance

  Marius

  Furuflaten: on the right is the school where the German garrison was billeted, and the steep bank of the river channel below it. Jan was carried across the road near the bridge on the left

  Lyngenfjord

  The hut at Revdal

  The bunk in the hut at Revdal. Daylight shows through the wall on the right, where Jan picked out the moss between the logs to make cigarettes

  The top pitch of the ascent of Revdal: a photograph taken when Jan and three of the men who hauled him up Revdal climbed it again ten years later

  The hole in the snow: Alvin Larsen at the spot above Revdal where Jan lay buried for a week

  Snowclouds over Mandal: the route to the plateau led up Kjerringdal, on the right

  Mandal from the head of Kjerringdal: the route used by the Mandal men to reach the plateau

  South towards the frontier: the plateau at the head of Mandal

  Lapp sledges, on the Swedish side of the frontier

  Jan with the King of Norway at an inspection after his return

  APPENDIX I

  CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE

  March 24 Brattholm sailed from Shetland.

  29 Landfall off Senja.

  30 The fight in Toftefjord.

  31 Jan in Ringvassöy at the midwife’s house.

  April 3 Reached Bjorneskar.

  4 Rowed across sound.

  5 To Kjosen by motor boat: through Lyngseidet at dawn.

  5–8 Lost in Lyngen Alps.

  8 Found Marius’s farm at Furuflaten.

  12 Across Lyngenfjord to Revdal.

  12–25 In the hut at Revdal.

  25 Ascent of Revdal.
/>   25 to May 2. In the snow grave.

  May 1 Marius and Agnethe climb the plateau.

  2 Mandal men arrive: first attempt on frontier.

  9 Second attempt on frontier.

  22 Carried down to cave in Mandal.

  26 Carried up to plateau again.

  June 1 Crossed the Swedish border.

  APPENDIX II

  A German newspaper account of the “Brattholm” incident

  taken from “Deutsche Zeitung”, 8th June, 1943

  FISHING BOAT WITH STRANGE CARGO

  British sabotage group rendered harmless on Norwegian Coast

  IN THE twilight of a spring evening a large seaworthy fishing-boat steams slowly out of a little harbour in the Shetland Islands. In the light breeze which blows in from the sea, flutters the Norwegian military flag – it has only been hoisted as the ship left port. No security measures were to be neglected. Even before sailing, everything had been done to prevent unwanted people approaching the boat or her crew. After all, even in England it is not every day that a fishing-boat is made ready for a trip to Norway. No wonder the greatest pains were taken to get the enterprise off to a good start.