Making no attempt to hide my feelings I told him plainly how Tito’s conduct was viewed by the Allies and added that I would be grateful if he would at once convey to him a personal message from me. This he agreed to do, explaining that he was in wireless touch with the Marshal, who was at present in the Vojvodina. I accordingly sat down and drafted a stiff signal to Tito, emphasizing the effect which his absence was having on our mutual relations and asking for an early interview. To this there came back within a few hours a friendly answer from Tito, saying that he hoped we should meet in a few days. The deadlock it seemed, had been broken, though the resentment was to linger for some time.
Not long after reaching Valjevo, I received signals announcing the arrival of Vivian Street and Charlie Thayer. Vivian, whom I had at last reluctantly agreed to release in deference to repeated representations from his regiment, was due to join a battalion of the Rifle Brigade in Italy in a few days’ time, and this was in the nature of a farewell visit. Charlie, an old friend from Moscow days, who after numerous vicissitudes, had been seconded from the U.S. Foreign Service, now reappeared, with crossed sabres on his collar and an eagle on his shoulder, in the guise of a Colonel of Cavalry, thus harking back to a remote past when he had played polo for West Point and served, very briefly, under the command of the distinguished but irascible officer later to become famous as General Patton. His official designation was second in command to Colonel Ellery C. Huntington, who had succeeded poor Slim Farish, killed a few weeks before in Greece, as Commander of the U.S. Military Mission to the Partisans. I had hardly seen Charlie since the war. I looked forward to having with me someone who had shared my experience of Russia and who, like me, would be able to detect the reflections of Moscow so readily discernible in the Jugoslav scene.
The military situation was now rapidly approaching a climax. The Red Army, having crossed the Danube, was advancing on Belgrade from the north and the east, and Crni confirmed that Peko Dapčević’s troops were to furnish the Partisan contingent for the great battle which was now imminent. A large-scale daylight supply drop by Halifaxes of the R.A.F. brought the Partisans arms and ammunition for the coming offensive. Watching the great white nylon parachutes billow out and come floating down, I reflected that in Serbia, at any rate, this method of supply would soon be outdated. The fall of Belgrade could no longer be far removed.
At Valjevo, as in so many other places, in the desert, in Bosnia, in Italy, Dalmatia and Serbia, we would turn our wireless set in the evenings to Radio Belgrade, and night after night, always at the same time, would come, throbbing lingeringly over the ether, the cheap, sugary and yet almost painfully nostalgic melody, the sex-laden, intimate, heart-rending accents of Lili Marlene. ‘Not gone yet,’ we would say to each other. ‘I wonder if we’ll find her when we get there.’ Then one evening at the accustomed time there was silence. ‘Gone away,’ we said.
Vivian and Charlie had scarcely arrived at Valjevo when we moved eastwards to Arandjelovac, some forty miles due south of Belgrade. Now that we had jeeps and that many of the roads were in Partisan hands, travelling was easy, and we reached Arandjelovac in an hour or two. Once a well-known watering place, frequented by fashionable invalids from Belgrade, it was now in a sorry state, with its smart hotels blasted and scarred by shell-fire and the neatly laid out public gardens trampled under foot during the recent heavy fighting. From a broken pipe near the Kurhaus, mineral water was bubbling on to the grass, and we were able to fill our water-bottles with what was reputed to be a sovereign remedy for digestive disorders.
This was just as well. We had been given a rousing reception by the people of Arandjelovac, who, after filling the jeep with bouquets of flowers, forced upon us food and drink of every kind and description. On top of all this, I was warmly greeted by a bibulous-looking individual who announced that he had once been chef to the British Legation in Belgrade and was most anxious to resume his connection with the representative of His Britannic Majesty.
We needed a cook and so I took him on; after which we enjoyed, for the rest of our brief stay in Arandjelovac, almost the best food I have ever tasted, perfect alike in its admirable materials and skilful preparation. Pork, for which Serbia is rightly famous, dominated our diet, the juiciest, tenderest, most succulent pork imaginable. There was roast pork, and grilled pork chops, and pig’s trotters and sucking-pig and bacon and ham and innumerable kinds of pork sausages, all swimming in the very best butter and lard. It may sound monotonous; it may even sound slightly disgusting. But at that time and in that place, after years during which such things had existed only in one’s dreams, it was highly enjoyable. We felt that we were at last enjoying the fruits of victory.
Nor was the preparation of pork by any means the only branch of his art at which this admirable man excelled. The richest soups; the most delicious omelettes; the most luscious preserves; layer upon layer of the lightest pastry mingled with the freshest cream cheese; all these delicacies, washed down by a variety of excellent wines, were lavished on us daily. Although we did not spend more than two or three days in Arandjelovac it was only by generous use of the local mineral water that any of us managed to avoid the effects of this constant overeating.
Our cook had but one failing and that, as I had suspected from the first, was a taste for drink. When, after each meal, he appeared to receive our felicitations, there would be a marked unsteadiness about his legs, a tendency to sit or even lie down suddenly, coupled with a no less disconcerting tendency to burst loudly and abruptly into song. It was this weakness that brought our happy association to a premature end. When the time came for us to leave Arandjelovac, he was in no state to travel and had to be left behind.
As it turned out, our departure from Arandjelovac was a sudden one. On the night of October 19th, as we sat at dinner, we received the news that the final phase of the battle for Belgrade had begun. On learning this, we made arrangements to leave for the front at first light.
October 20th dawned fine and fairly clear. It had rained during the night and the lanes were muddy. With the Americans, we had three jeeps between us. Charlie Thayer, Ellery Huntington and an American Sergeant set out in one, Vivian Street and I in another, and Freddie Cole and his two wireless operators in a third.
At first we followed country lanes and cart-tracks, between high green hedgerows glistening with raindrops. The fresh, moist landscape, a mixture of greys and browns and greens, had the softness of a water-colour.
Entering a village, we found it full of the Red Army. Even in this Slav country the Soviet troops looked strangely outlandish, with their high cheekbones, deeply sunburnt faces and unfamiliar uniforms. But they seemed to be getting on well enough with the local population, laughing and joking with the village boys and girls in a kind of composite Slav language, midway between Serb and Russian. Red flags hung from some of the windows, and at the entrance to the village a triumphal arch of cardboard had been erected in honour of the liberators.
Thereafter we came upon Russians at every turn, in large bodies and in small, on foot, on horseback, in carts, trucks, armoured cars and tanks, all moving up to the front. They were certainly not smart. Their loosely fitting drab-coloured uniforms were torn and stained and bleached by the sun and rain. The clothing of many had been supplemented or replaced by articles of equipment captured from the enemy. Their boots, as often as not, were completely worn out. The individual soldiers were an extraordinary medley of racial types, from the flaxen hair and blue eyes of the Norseman to the high cheekbones, slit eyes and yellow complexion of the Mongol.
But they looked as though they meant business. Ragged and unkempt though they might be, their powers of endurance and their physical toughness were self-evident. Their weapons, too, were clean and bright. They gave an indefinable impression of being immensely experienced, self-reliant, seasoned troops, accustomed to being left to fend for themselves and well able to do it.
And all this, no doubt, they were, and more, for they had fought their way here
from Stalingrad and the frontiers of Asia, and that fighting, we knew, had been no light matter. Most of them wore two or three campaign medals or decorations, not just ribbons or miniatures, but the full-sized bronze, silver or enamelled medals and stars themselves, clinking and jangling on their tunics. Somewhere in my kit I had the large silver and platinum star of the Soviet Order of Kutusov, which had been awarded me some months before, and, seeing that this was an occasion on which decorations were being worn, I dug it out and screwed it on to my battle-dress tunic. This, and the fact that both Charlie and I could talk to them in their own language, had an immediate effect on the Russians, who came crowding round the jeep whenever we stopped, fingering our weapons and equipment admiringly and proudly exhibiting their own.
Scattered over the fields through which we were passing, large numbers of derelict tanks and guns, some blasted by direct hits, others seemingly intact, testified to the violence of the battle which had been raging for the last twenty-four hours and was still in progress. Soviet heavy tanks predominated. In the space of a mile we counted a dozen along the side of the track, their shattered hulks still smoking. Evidently there was still some fight left in the German anti-tank gunners.
Twenty miles or so south of Belgrade we emerged on to the main road and joined a continuous stream of Red Army trucks, tanks and guns flowing northwards into battle. One thing in particular struck us now, as it had struck us from the first, namely, that every Soviet truck we saw contained one of two things: petrol or ammunition. Of rations, blankets, spare boots or clothing there was no trace. The presumption was that such articles, if they were required at all, were provided at the expense of the enemy or of the local population. Almost every man we saw was a fighting soldier. What they carried with them were materials of war in the narrowest sense. We were witnessing a return to the administrative methods of Attila and Genghis Khan, and the results seemed to deserve careful attention. For there could be no doubt that here lay one reason for the amazing speed of the Red Army’s advance across Europe. Thinking it over, and recalling the numbers of dentists’ chairs and filing cabinets which were said to have been landed in Normandy at an early stage of the Allied invasion, I wondered whether we ourselves could not perhaps profit to some extent by the Russian example.
Every now and then the stream of traffic was checked. Further on, the enemy were shelling the road and progress was slowed up. Looking at the long defenceless crocodile of tanks and guns and vehicles stretching away into the distance, one felt thankful that the Luftwaffe was no longer in a position to take advantage of the tempting target which it offered.
In one of the frequent traffic blocks we found ourselves jammed against a Russian ammunition truck, liberally decorated with Soviet emblems. Its occupants, cheerful, fair-haired lads scarcely out of their teens, were inordinately proud of it. ‘You can’t produce this sort of thing in capitalist countries,’ they said smugly. From his jeep, meanwhile, Charlie’s Top-Sergeant, oblivious of what was being said, had been examining the Russians’ truck closely, and discovered what he had suspected all along, namely that, despite the red stars, hammers and sickles, which now adorned it, it was a Chevrolet, produced by General Motors at Detroit, Michigan. ‘It makes you sick,’ he observed, ‘to think of these God-damned Russian bastards having all this good American equipment.’ In the interests of inter-Allied friendship, it seemed wiser to leave both remarks untranslated.
For some time past we had heard the noise of gun-fire in the distance. Now, as we moved forward, the sounds of battle came closer. There was a whirring and wailing in the air, and from the muddy fields and tangled thickets on either side of the road came the rattle of machine-gun fire and the thud of mortars.
Before us the sugar-loaf hill of Avala, crowned by Mestrović’s monument to the fallen of the first war, loomed above the road. On its steep slopes fighting seemed to be in progress. We could not now be more than ten miles from Belgrade. We decided that, before going any further, we had better secure a more exact estimate of the military position than we had been able to obtain hitherto. The Russians had established an artillery command-post in a tumble-down cottage near the road and here we turned aside to seek information.
We found the post occupied by a Lieutenant and a couple of Sergeants, friendly souls, who, finding that we spoke their language, at once made us welcome. Soon all of us, including the family of peasants who owned the cottage, were sitting on the only bed, drinking hot milk and some kind of raw alcohol and eating black bread and listening to a detailed account, not only of the immediate military situation, but of the Lieutenant’s own war experiences and of his early life and childhood in far-away Vologda. In a flash I was back in the Soviet Union: the taste of the food and drink; the stuffiness of the little wooden shack; the cold outside; the heat inside; the droning voices; the soft inflexions of spoken Russian; the stereotyped Soviet jargon; and, above all, the smell: that indefinable composite aroma of petrol, sheepskin and vodka, black bread and cabbage soup, Soviet scent and unwashed human bodies, which permeates every square inch of the Soviet Union and which Russians somehow manage to take with them wherever they go.
From our new-found friend we learned that in the night a large force of the enemy, which in the confusion of the retreat had become isolated from the main body, had sought to cross the road at about this point in a desperate attempt to fight their way through to join the German garrison in Belgrade before they were finally cut off. The result had been a battle of exceptional ferocity which had raged over this part of the road all night long in the rain and the darkness. Now, the issue was no longer in doubt. Practically the entire enemy force, numbering many thousands had been annihilated. The road was again more or less clear. It only remained to liquidate isolated pockets of resistance.
The thought of this victory and of the accompanying slaughter of the enemy had clearly put the Lieutenant in the best of humours. As he drank his hot milk, a broad grin spread over his broad, faintly Mongoloid countenance. He had, he confided, come to hate the Germans more than anything else on earth. He himself had fought against them for three years and found them brutal, inhuman enemies. They had overrun and destroyed his village and massacred his mother and sisters. His only brother had been killed fighting against them. He was glad now to sec them finally routed and crushed. In this last battle, he said, they had not taken many Germans alive. I asked him what they did with their prisoners. ‘If they surrender in large groups,’ he said, ‘we send them back to base; but if,’ he added, ‘there are only a few of them, we don’t bother,’ and he winked. I wondered how many prisoners it took to constitute a large group.
In the knowledge that the road before us was more or less clear, we now continued our journey. Hitherto we had only come upon an occasional dead body, sprawled in the mud beside the wreckage of the tanks and guns. Now corpses littered the sides of the road, piled one on another, some in the field-grey of the Wehrmacht, others stripped of their boots and uniform and left lying half-naked; hundreds and hundreds of them, their pale faces disfigured with mud stains, greenish grey upon the greenish-grey skin. As we passed, the sickly stench of death struck our nostrils, hanging heavy on the air.
The troops who had tried to fight their way out were a composite force, hurriedly thrown together from elements of half a dozen different divisions, and, looking at the dead, we recognized many familiar badges: the Edelweiss of the First Alpine and the double thunderbolt of the Prinz Eugen. The tables had indeed been turned since we stood opposite these same formations in those early, precarious days in the mountains of Bosnia.
Further along, we passed a great throng of prisoners going in the opposite direction. Many had been left with only their shirts and underpants, and they shivered as they hobbled along in the chilly autumn air, their faces as grey from cold and fear as those of their dead comrades. As we watched, one of the guards appropriated a pair of boots which had somehow passed unnoticed and put them on, leaving their former owner to continue on his way bar
efoot.
Soon after, Vivian pointed to the side of the road. Looking in the direction in which he was pointing, I saw a hundred or more corpses, lying in rows, one upon the other, like ninepins knocked over by the same ball. They had clearly not died in battle. ‘A small batch,’ said Vivian. The smell, sweet and all-pervading, was stronger than ever.
Already we were approaching the outskirts of Belgrade. The road, which until now had twisted in and out round the contours of the hills, became straight and broad, with an impeccable surface in the best autobahn style. It was the first tarmac road I had seen in Jugoslavia. Our little convoy of three jeeps bowled merrily along. The thunder of the heavy guns grew louder and more distinct. Over the city a dive-bomber, black against the watery blue of the sky, got into position and, as we watched, went hurtling down towards its target.
Meeting a Partisan, we asked where General Peko had his Headquarters, and were directed to a villa in a residential suburb outside the town. But when we got there it was only to find that Peko had moved elsewhere. A rear party were busy packing themselves and their belongings into a truck. The position ‘proved somewhat inconvenient’, one of them explained, a series of deafening explosions from nearby gardens lending force to his remark, as the enemy, wherever they were, settled down to shell the neighbourhood in earnest. Taking advantage of his offer to pilot us to the General’s new Headquarters, we climbed back into our jeeps with as much nonchalance as we could muster and followed him gratefully back to the comparative quiet of the outer boulevards.
We found Peko installed in a house on the outskirts of the town. He was about to have lunch and invited us to join him. The house in which he had set up his Headquarters had belonged to a millionaire and was furnished with extreme richness, and the meal which we now ate was of excellent quality and luxuriously served. Having washed it down with plenty of good local red wine, we felt much refreshed and ready for anything. Taking Peko’s Chief of Staff with us, we set out in our jeeps to see for ourselves how things were going.
Eastern Approaches Page 57