Then, on January 18th, Mr. Churchill defined the British Government’s attitude in a speech in the House of Commons. ‘It is,’ he said, ‘a matter of days within which an agreement must be reached upon this matter and, if we are so unfortunate as not to obtain the consent of King Peter, the matter will have to go ahead, his assent being presumed.’ At the same time he once again made it clear that we were not concerned to see one kind of regime rather than another set up in Jugoslavia. ‘We have,’ he said, ‘no special interest in the political regime which prevails in Jugoslavia. Few people in Britain, I imagine, are going to be more cheerful or more downcast because of the future constitution of Jugoslavia.’
This reassured Tito, who until then had suspected that we might be going to try to restore the King by force and now knew that he had little more to worry about. At our interviews his manner became increasingly jocular.
But there was a surprise in store. On January 22nd, with no warning to anyone, the King informed the Press that he had lost confidence in Dr. Šubašić and had decided to dismiss him and his Government. He was, he hinted, thinking of getting into touch with Tito direct.
‘Do what you can to keep Tito calm,’ telegraphed the Foreign Office, now thoroughly alarmed. But there was no need. Tito had never been calmer. The whole thing he said, was ‘as good as a play’.
For over a month the affair remained in this indeterminate state. Relations between the King and Dr. Šubašić were resumed and gradually the points at issue were narrowed down to the choice of the three Regents, whose function it was discreetly to keep alive the monarchic principle in Jugoslavia until elections could be held.
On this purely academic question — for it had been clear from the first that the Regents would be no more than figureheads — endless telegrams passed between London and Belgrade; it was clearly essential that all three Regents should be real, eighteen-carat, brass-bottomed democrats. But, as usual, it all depended on what you meant by democrat. The rival claims of a number of elderly and experienced Serb, Croat and Slovene politicians were advanced and discussed, and accusations and counter-accusations bandied backwards and forwards in true Balkan style. In the ensuing confusion at least one candidate was rejected by the party which had originally proposed him, on its being discovered that he had already been proposed by the other, while another old gentleman, described to me as being ‘universally respected’ was found, after his name had gone forward and seemed likely for once to meet with general approval, to have been dead for some time. It looked as if this bargaining might go on for ever.
Then, early in February, while the snow still lay in the streets of Belgrade, we learned that the Big Three, Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt, were meeting in the sunshine at Yalta, by the shores of the Black Sea. Jugoslavia, we knew, would be on the agenda, and, in some suspense, we waited for the thunder to issue from the Crimean Olympus. In due course the combined oracles spoke. There was the traditional reference to democratic principles. Shorn of these adornments, the utterance amounted to an exhortation to Tito and Šubašić to get on with it. There was no mention of King Peter.
This clinched it. King Peter gave in. The proceedings in London were brought to an abrupt end. Within a week Dr. Šubašić and his Government had arrived in Belgrade, with a mandate to come to terms with Tito as quickly as possible.
The end was now in sight. It had been decided that Ralph Stevenson, who for nearly two years had been our Ambassador to successive Royal Jugoslav Governments in exile, should, as soon as a united Government (also technically Royal) was formed, simply transfer himself to Belgrade, thus tacitly emphasizing the continuity of the monarchic principle. Preparations were made to fly him in as soon as the new Government was in being, and I got ready to leave.
Shortly before I left Belgrade, Field-Marshal Alexander, who had recently succeeded Field-Marshal Wilson as Supreme Allied Commander, came over on a visit. It was a great success. Tito, who knew something of Alexander’s record in both wars, had taken a liking to him when they first met at 15th Army Group Headquarters, while the Field-Marshal, for his part, genuinely admired Tito as a guerrilla leader and recognized his undoubted services to the Allied cause. The visit was made the occasion of a series of entertainments of unparalleled magnificence culminating in a ball given by Tito at the White Palace, which incidentally also served as a farewell party for myself.
From Belgrade the Field-Marshal, taking me with him, went on to visit his Soviet opposite number, Marshal Tolbukhin, commanding the Third Ukrainian Front, which was then thrusting a victorious spearhead far into eastern Europe. For three days we lived in a haze of vodka in a nameless village in Hungary from which all the inhabitants appeared to have been removed and their place taken by high-ranking officers of the Red Army. But, although a great deal of very intensive banqueting and toast drinking was done, very little military information was exchanged, the Russians remaining cordial but evasive.
One small incident sticks in my memory, a reminder of earlier years. Sweet Crimean champagne had succeeded the vodka and had in turn been replaced by sticky brandy from the Caucasus. Enormous sturgeon, roast turkeys and whole stuffed sucking-pigs, gaping hideously, followed closely on a great bowl of iced caviar and a formidable array of hot and cold zakuski. Now an elaborate iced cake, surmounted by allegorical statuettes and patriotic symbols worked in pink sugar, had made its appearance and yet more bottles and glasses. Practically no one in the room except the clumsy white-coated waiters was under the rank of General. Everyone was feeling happy and relaxed and expansive. Toasts were being bandied back and forth, and the high-ranking officers present, fresh from their victories, were beginning to laugh out loud and shout merrily to each other across the long, heavily laden table. How different, I reflected, from Moscow before the war.
My neighbour, a solid-looking man of indeterminate age, with a sallow complexion and square, grey, closely cropped head, wearing on his stiff gold epaulettes the four stars of a full General of the Red Army, turned affably towards me. As he turned, the glittering rows of medals and decorations on his tunic clinked impressively. I noticed that he was wearing the insignia of the Order of the Bath, negligently clamped to his stomach.
‘And where, Comrade General,’ he asked amiably, ‘did you acquire your present grasp of the Russian language?’ I told him: in the Soviet Union, before the war. This surprised him. He repeated his question; I repeated my answer. There was no getting away from it. He paused to consider the strange phenomenon of a foreigner who had actually lived in the Soviet Union. Then he asked, for how long? In which years? I told him 1937, 1938, 1939.
Suddenly a constrained look clouded his large, friendly face, a look that I remembered seeing on faces in Moscow in the old days. Even now, in the midst of all this jollity, the memory of the great purge was very much of a reality.
‘They must,’ he said, ‘have been difficult years for a foreigner to understand,’ and turned hastily to his neighbour on the other side.
On my return to Belgrade, everything was in the air again. Tito, King Peter and Šubašić were back at their old game of arguing about the Regents. Unhappily I resigned myself to further delays. Again I spent long hours closeted alternately with Tito in the White Palace and with Šubašić in the Hotel Majestic. Again I exchanged frantic telegrams with London. Then, suddenly, at the beginning of March, something happened in London; the King’s latest objections to Tito’s latest candidate were withdrawn; it was announced that agreement had been reached. Everything was over bar the shouting. It only remained to swear in the Regents and to form and swear in the new united Government.
It took less than a week to complete these formalities. The swearing in of the Regents was done in style, the Orthodox Metropolitan administering the oath to the Serb Regent and the Roman Catholic Archbishop to the Croat and the Slovene. The dignitaries of the two rival Churches vied with each other in the splendour of their vestments. Their respective acolytes bobbed and crossed themselves, and intoned the respo
nses. Fragrant clouds of incense billowed up to the elaborate plasterwork of the ceiling. All three Regents, I noticed, swore loyalty to King Peter without batting an eyelid. Afterwards Šubašić and Kardelj asked me what I had thought of the ceremony. I replied that, as a ceremony, it left nothing to be desired.
Two days later, on March 7th, Tito, having resigned his post as Chairman of the National Committee, announced that he had been successful in forming a new united Government, with Dr. Šubašić as his Minister for Foreign Affairs, and six other members of the former Royal Government holding office in it.
As soon as the news was out, I dispatched a telegram to the Foreign Office, and Ralph Stevenson, who had been standing by to leave for weeks, started for Belgrade, where he arrived on March 12th. It had been decided that my military functions should be taken over by an airman, Air Vice-Marshal Lee, who arrived in Belgrade at about the same time.
On the day after the Ambassador’s arrival, a couple of days after my thirty-fourth birthday, I left Jugoslavia.
On my way to the aerodrome, I drove to the White Palace to say goodbye to Tito. It was a friendly meeting, as nearly all our meetings had been since the evening a year and a half before, when we had first met under the trees in the ruined castle in Bosnia. He thanked me for what I had done to help the Partisans during the war and said that he was sorry I was going. I thanked him for the high decoration which he had awarded me a few days before. Then we said goodbye.
I was glad to be going. Glad to be going while relations were still cordial, while the comradeship at arms built up during the war had not yet been swept away in the jealousies and misunderstandings of the peace, in the clash of conflicting ideologies.
At the aerodrome the Ambassador and the Air Vice-Marshal, various Jugoslav notabilities and what remained of my own staff had come to see me off. It was a fine sunny day. A strong wind drove big white clouds across the blue sky. By my aeroplane a guard of honour of the new Jugoslav Army was drawn up for me to inspect, resplendent in Soviet-type uniforms, with Soviet badges and carrying Soviet sub-machine guns.
The face of the right-hand man seemed familiar. I looked at him again. He grinned, still holding himself very upright. It was the Economist. I had not seen him since Bosnia. I noticed that he was now a warrant officer. ‘You see, Comrade General,’ he said as I greeted him,’ I have become a real soldier at last.’
There was no doubt about it. He had.
But a Jugoslav soldier, or a Russian soldier? Externally, the transformation was complete. In appearance he was practically indistinguishable from the N.C.O.s of the Red Army who were still to be seen in the streets of Belgrade. But did that mean that he had lost that natural Balkan turbulence and independence, that insurgent spirit which for centuries had made his countrymen such a thorn in the flesh for any foreign invader? I wondered.
Then, followed by Sergeant Duncan, I climbed up into the aeroplane. The friends who had come to see us off waved. The guard of honour presented arms. I saluted. Sergeant Duncan grinned. The doors were shut. The engine roared, and we jolted away towards the take off.
Soon we were circling high above Belgrade. Looking out, I could see the road stretching away southwards to Avala and to the green, rolling country round Valjevo and Arandjelovac. Then we turned in the direction of the coast. Below, the snow was still lying on the mountains of Bosnia. The little paths wound in and out along the ridges. Dense forests reached down into the valleys. Here and there smoke went up from a cluster of huts. Then came the barren crags of Dalmatia, and the islands, bathed in sunshine; and before long we were flying far out over the Adriatic. Westwards.
Illustrations
1. THE KREMLEN
2. THE SILK ROAD
3. THE MIDDLE EAST: SAS PATROL
4. LEAVING SIVA
5. LONG-RANGE DESERT GROUP
6. TITO
7. BOSNIA: IN THE WOODS
8. BOSNIA: ALL ROUND, THE SNOW LAY DEEP
9. DALMATIA
10. SIR FITZROY WITH TITO (on left)
11. BOKHARA — FIRST LIGHT
Acknowledgements
FOR their kindness in reading and commenting on part or all of the text my thanks are due to the Right Honourable Winston S. Churchill, O.M., C.H., M.P.; to Sir Orme Sargent, G.C.M.G., K.C.B.; Sir Charles Peake, K.C.M.G., M.C.; the Warden of All Souls (Mr. Humphrey Sumner); Lieut.-Col. Peter Fleming; Mr. Aubrey Halford; Lieut.-Col. Vivian Street, D.S.O., O.B.E., M.C.; Lieut-Col. Peter Moore, D.S.O., M.C.; Lieut-Col. W. Deakin, D.S.O.; Major J. Henniker-Major, M.C.
They are also due to the Imperial War Museum, the chief of the Jugoslav General Staff, Brigadier R. Firebrace, Lieut.-Cdr. M. Minshall and John Phillips for permission to make use of photographs belonging to them.
I also wish to record my gratitude to Miss Jeanne Thomlinson for her invaluable help in preparing and revising the text.
F.M.
THE BEGINNING
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First published by Jonathan Cape 1949
Published in Penguin Books 1991
Reissued in this edition 2009
Copyright 1949 by Fitzroy Maclean:
copyright © Fitzroy Maclean, 1991
Cover design: Estuary English
Cover photograph: Imperial War Museum
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-0-241-97325-7
1 That is, arrested and shot as enemies of the people.
1 Daughter of Lord Orford.
1 They were known as Lewis Bombs after their inventor, Jock Lewis, who had helped raise the S.A.S. and was killed in one of the first operations.
1 Arso Jovanović — shot in 1948 by Tito’s frontier guards on similar grounds.
1 ‘So this’, wrote the Donauzeitung of February 4th, 1944, with heavy Teutonic irony, ‘is Tito’s Grey Eminence.’ ‘It was in May 1943. Somewhere in the Bosnian Mountains, in the neighbourhood of Tito’s H.Q. there was great excitement. The liaison officer of His Majesty the King of England was expected. He was to land by parachute. An Anglophile Swiss review describes the surprise of the bandits to see the landing of the following human being: ‘A young man, in a grey overcoat, armed to the teeth, with a Kodak and a bush-knife, having as luggage a pipe and an Anglo-Croatian dictionary …’ Apparently it took the bandits some time to get used to this ‘extravagant Englishman’, to this ‘curious man with high military and social ranks’, to this ‘adventurer’ and to respect him as Tito’s ‘Grey Eminence’. Who is this romantic parachutist, who landed with a Kodak and a bush-knife am
ong the savages of the Bosnian jungle? Some time ago, Anthony Eden lifted the veil of the mystery: Fitzroy Maclean, member of the House of Commons and deputy of the town of Lancaster, newly appointed brigadier, thirty-year-old chief of the British mission at Tito’s H.Q. is depicted to us, as a robust red-haired adventurer of a Scottish officer family. His career developed according to the schemes of the British plutocratic tradition: Eton and Cambridge, Embassy Attaché in Paris and Moscow, Eastern European Department of the Foreign Office, Lieutenant of the Highlanders. Bribed elections in his native town of Lancaster gave him the possibility of imposing a by-election, in which he was elected. When the war broke out this smart young man felt himself as a hero. Apparently he cannot keep quiet, he is dreaming of adventures in foreign countries and of military glory, he remembers that he is an officer who renounced the exemption from military service to which he is entitled as a member of the House of Commons, and joins the Highlanders, fighting in North Africa against Rommel. In short he is: an adventurer, who in the middle of the war remembers he is an officer. But, he does not stay a long time with his Highlanders. He joins the Parachute troops, and is awarded the rank of colonel, for a landing behind the lines of the Italians, who were already demoralized at that time. He named his parachute company ‘Mystery column’. This energetic youth was chosen by England, when the need was felt by His Britannic Majesty to send a mission to Tito’s bands. An adventurer, who dreams of glory and heroical deeds, in remote countries and who intends teaching Tito’s bandits with a Kodak and a bush-knife the meaning of English culture. …’
Eastern Approaches Page 60