In the Light of Morning

by Tim Pears

  ‘Many of the women developed pneumonia,’ Jovan tells them. ‘But what could they do? The ice brought them a few coins.’

  The courier leads them to the seventh unit. It is a small band, barely larger than their own. Its members resemble one another: they are surely brothers, cousins, uncles. They nod to the members of Jovan’s odred. Very little is said. Perhaps what happened yesterday is written clear upon them, for the other group feed them a little zganci, and do not ask questions or swap stories as they usually do. Even Pero is quiet.

  Sid Dixon goes off on his own, he sits alone by a stream. Tom leaves him be. It is no wonder a melancholia comes over men in war: there is too much to take in, yet it hardly seems real; then reality rears up, throws itself in their faces; men became unmoored from the stable ground in themselves.

  He realises that the plane strike has stopped him worrying about Marija. What happened between them took place on the other side of that event. A moment of silly innocence.

  The drop comes in on time. Again they leave immediately, the same courier who brought them to the unit taking them away from it, south.

  The Eighth Unit

  July 25

  THEY MOVE BY day, the couriers assuring them that, this high, they are safe from Slovene or German patrols. Still, Jovan has Pero and Nikola walk at the front, well ahead of the rest of them, the two boys with their eyes skinned, ears cocked.

  The track steepens and they enter scattered patches of pine. Above and ahead of them they can see Pero, Nikola and the courier pause, and evidently greet someone. Then they see, coming over the pass out of the forest, a peasant followed by a train of horses laden with hay. A woman walks behind them. As Tom watches them, there is a drone in the air that causes an immediate sick feeling in the stomach, and loosens the joints of his knees: down from the sky the Stuka comes. It drops towards its target, at speed from high altitude, then is slowed down by letting air flow through loud sirens, the noise adding to the terror of the dive. Sighting the peasants and their animals, in a second it is firing and dropping bombs among the horses. Tom and the rest of their party run under the trees, lie down and watch. The horse train is in confusion. Tom can hear an animal yowl and whinny. It has been hit, and rolls down into a hollow. The plane has swerved away across the mountain, silence descends. Yet seconds later, the whine of the Stuka is heard again. Several of the horses have thrown off their loads, and when the peasants see the plane swooping around to return, they frantically start to lead the horses back into the forest. But the plane is over in a moment. Tom hears the shrieking of the guns and sees another horse roll down the hillside. Marko, meanwhile, unable to restrain himself, has run out from the trees with his Sten gun and is firing up at the now fast disappearing plane.

  Then silence. The sun shines. They hurry up the slope and reach the scene. Two horses lie dead, and a Slovene woman sits sobbing in the grass beside her horribly still husband.

  Later, after they have carried the man’s body to his home, a wooden cabin a short walk away, they leave the woman grieving, and move on.

  They are a band of surly and miserable vagrants, Tom thinks, cadging what they can, adding only sorrow to those who live here. They pass through and move on; the enemy chases them and they run away, but perhaps in reality they avoid each other, and both are parasites.

  Marija walks beside him. She puts her hand on his shoulder. ‘I know what you are thinking,’ she says. ‘I am glad it bothers you. There is only one answer.’

  ‘What is that?’ Tom asks.

  ‘It is simple: we must win,’ she says.

  They walk into the evening. Jovan tells Tom what a shock the capitulation was to the Serbs. In 1918 they had inflicted bloody defeats on the Austrian and Bulgarian armies, and had crowned their military achievements with the epic winter retreat across Albania, and then the final advance back from Salonika to Belgrade. Yet in 1941 – when part of the much larger state of Yugoslavia – they had been blown aside by the German blitzkrieg like an army of toy soldiers.

  A low-pitched penetrating sound. It could be coming from anywhere, or everywhere, around them. It grows steadily in intensity, then the bomber formations begin to appear, high in the blue sky.

  Long-range fighters accompany the bombers, weave back and forth above them like little sheepdogs, their S-shaped white vapour trails stitching patterns against the arrow-straight trails of the large bombers.

  In less than an hour, Tom reckons, their bombs will fall on the industrial yards beyond Vienna. The roar fills the sky until the last wave disappears to the north. If only the great bombers could swat away the single planes wreaking havoc here.

  July 26

  NIGHT. THEY PASS through a village. The sweet pungent smell of rotting fruit, and manure. Dogs bark, but no one stirs. The inhabitants surely lie awake, aware that people they do not want to know about are passing through.

  After another long night march, they prepare to sleep in the open, under a parachute canopy. Stipe and Marko tie its corners to tree trunks. Pero draws a map for Jovan and Tom, of where he thinks they are. Marija gathers wood for a fire. Sid checks the wireless. When Tom goes into the wood to relieve himself, he notices Francika in the distance, leaning with her head against a tree. She is mumbling to herself.

  Franjo and Nikola return from a foraging expedition with a bag full of frogs. Francika heats up the skillet while father and son kill and slice up the amphibians’ squat bodies, and long muscular legs. The old man fries the meat, his son passes it round.

  Hunger overcomes Sid Dixon’s reluctance to try it. He chews suspiciously, grimacing, then turns to Tom. ‘They taste like chicken, sir.’

  ‘I saw you earlier, praying,’ Tom tells Francika. ‘Do you mind me asking what you pray for?’

  Francika shakes her head. ‘The Mountain Ash is the last tree that still understands human speech,’ she tells him. She shrugs, nonchalantly. ‘This is what my mother told me. I don’t know if it is true.’

  ‘No, it may not be,’ Tom agrees. ‘Perhaps it is the oak.’

  ‘You are right to tease me,’ Francika says, smiling. ‘I would prefer that Jovan did not see me as you have.’

  ‘And what did you tell the tree?’ Tom asks her.

  Francika blushes, and looks down at the ground. The competent soldier is replaced by a young peasant woman. ‘I was wondering,’ she says, ‘if I have been a widow for long enough.’

  ‘And did the Mountain Ash give you an answer?’

  ‘The tree cannot speak, Tom,’ Francika tells him in a schoolmistress manner, regaining her balance in their conversation. ‘It listens, and understands. Only I can answer this question for myself.’

  Their courier passes them on to a fresh one, a wiry youth with a fuzzy moustache. The eighth unit is only four hours’ march away. Sid contacts base.

  July 27

  THEY WALK IN daylight. The courier is nervous and keeps stopping, listening. They pass a man on a grey mule, heading downhill; perhaps following a long night guarding his flock of sheep in the high pastures. Might he inform Germans or Home Guard of their presence? Tom wonders. What should they do to protect themselves, and their mission? Shoot him and have done with it? The man rides on, slowly, hunched to make himself as small as possible, his body jolting like a sack of bones with every step the mule takes. Tom is appalled. Where did the idea come from? Did it come from outside him, like a burr snagged on his passing body, or from inside his own weak and frightened mind?

  They walk around a hill covered with waist-high bracken. It smells like almonds. Marko assures them they’ll each pick up some new ticks for themselves in the green sea of waving fronds. In the late morning they reach a wooded hill. Pero and the courier have stopped. Jovan, and then Tom, move up to join them. The courier announces that they have arrived. It is hard to know what he means. Then he puts his hands together in front of his mouth and blows into them, and out comes the sound of a bird. Then he starts to stroll through the wood. The others follow. They see a man
emerge, to their left, then another, up ahead. It is hard to make sense of. More men appear, as if out of the ground, like the soldiers who grew from the teeth of the dragon that Cadmus slay. No, not the ground, Tom realises. It is caves they emerge from.

  Their dozen members are gaunt and pale. Francika and their cook compare supplies. It seems the other group is better off. Tom is given a crust of corn bread and a piece of bacon fat.

  They also have with them a New Zealand rear-gunner who bailed out on his way home from a bombing raid. He is a big, raw-boned boy. He reckons his pals bailed out too but were blown by the wind away from each other. He was picked up by a peasant who passed him on to a courier. They made him understand that he has to walk all the way out, and he has been shifted from one unit to the next in a gradual meander south. He is very glad to meet Tom and Sid and talks rapidly as he tells them of his travails. ‘The thing is we were bombing way over in the east,’ he tells them. ‘Got a little lost on the way home? I mean like the compass must have been spinning like a bloody top.’ He was in a Wellington: they flew along the Danube at two hundred feet, bombing barges carrying petrol and oil from the Ploesti oil fields in Romania.

  ‘You should have seen it,’ he says. ‘The river a great orange flame. Plumes of thick black smoke. Beautiful.’ He tells them that Partisan fighter crews are being trained in north Africa to fly Spitfires. Jovan’s group, when this is translated for them, are very pleased, although they affect the pose of being unsurprised; it was exactly what they had been expecting.

  ‘Slovene pilots,’ says Marko, ‘are the best in the Balkans. Now they fly Spitfires very well.’

  Having prepared fires, they have a few hours to rest in the evening, before the drop. Marija kneels beside Tom and whispers in his ear, ‘Will you join me for a smoke?’

  They walk away from the clearing. They come to a beech with one low branch that has grown straight out from the trunk. They lean against it as if at the bar of an English pub.

  ‘I am trying not to think of you,’ Marija says. ‘I thought you should know that. I am trying. We should both try.’

  Tom nods. ‘Of course. We have to.’ He flicks open his trench lighter and lights their cigarettes. He passes one to Marija. ‘What plans do you have for after the war?’ he asks. As soon as he’s said it he regrets it. What an idiotic thing to say.

  ‘We should not think of afterwards,’ Marija says. He is aware of her gaze turned upon him, but does not look her way. ‘Perhaps it is superstitious of me. But we cannot.’

  They smoke in silence, side by side, leaning against the limb of the beech tree. It could not be more truly perpendicular if a spirit level had been used. ‘You must know,’ Tom says, ‘that Jovan has fallen for you. You do know that, Marija? He is in love with you.’

  ‘You will fight him, for me?’ she asks.

  The idea is alarming. Before Tom can think of anything to say, Marija sighs.

  ‘Men have always fallen for me, as you put it, Tom. It is not love. I have something I wish I did not.’ She smiles ruefully. ‘Men pick up a signal, they think it came from me. You did not seem to.’

  Tom shakes his head, slowly, in agreement. ‘We’d better go back,’ he says, stubbing the fag-end on the rough bark.

  ‘Yes,’ Marija says. ‘You are right. We must.’

  The drop is made. Tom watches the scruffy Partisans make off into the night with their explosives. There is one unit left now. They head west for the remaining hours of the night.

  The Ninth Unit

  July 28

  THEY SLEEP OUTSIDE a friendly farmhouse, in a garden full of turkeys. The smell of the birds is pungent and they gobble loudly all night. The Partisans only get a couple of hours’ sleep.

  ‘Permission to silence the pests,’ Marko pleads to Jovan from under his blanket. ‘You have only to give the word and their necks will be painlessly broken.’

  But they are revived by a generous breakfast: freshly baked, doughy, flat bread. It has been split, and fresh cream spread into it. They are given a mug of milk each. They can smell some kind of meat stewing: the size of the pan assures them there is a hearty lunch to come, too, and so it proves.

  They spend the afternoon in the orchard of the farmhouse picking lice out of their clothes. A disgusting procedure: Jovan shows Tom how to find one and squash it between your nails: the creatures pop with a specific, pleasing crack.

  Dixon’s chest hair is crawling. Francika tells them that the little vermin spread typhus. Marija claims that typhus has been unheard of in peacetime for generations, but that it seems able to lie low and erupt in the unhygienic conditions of war.

  The Partisans bemoan the lack of fresh clothes, or pest killer. In safe areas, soldiers’ clothing can be deloused in steaming barrels. Allied stores are beginning to add DDT, an instant killer, to some of their supply drops. But here in the Fourth Zone lice are an ineradicable menace.

  The ninth unit are in central Pohorje, back near the branch line. The odred set off in the evening light.

  After an hour of walking up and down hill they see smoke in the sky ahead of them. They approach through a wood with foreboding, and when they come to the edge of the trees they find themselves looking down on a large village in the valley just below them, no more than two hundred metres away. Many houses are burning. Tom can see two German troop-carrying trucks, and three motorcycle combinations, parked in the square. There are two more lorries, one at each end of the village.

  The soldiers in their grey uniforms move here and there.

  Jovan passes him his glasses. ‘In the square,’ he says.

  Tom pans, and alters the focus, and finds bodies strung from lamp-posts, half a dozen, hanging. The one at the end is swaying slightly. Out of the nearest side of the square, a crowd that was hidden to them is dispersing: they must be the villagers forced to gather and watch their neighbours being hanged.

  Tom lowers the glasses; someone else pulls them from him for their turn. Pale grey smoke rises into the blue sky. There is no sound carried up to them, of shots or even shouts. A peaceful scene. These Germans have come down the white road along the middle of the wide valley and killed who? Men taken at random, probably, for some real or imagined crime: someone in the village had harboured a Partisan; a Partisan prisoner was shown to have come from the village. Men were taken and hanged from the lamp-posts. Butcher, baker, candlestick-maker. The sheer nihilism. The enemy seems less a human foe than a black beastly force.

  Sid goes over to comfort Francika, who is kneeling on the ground, weeping: the scene, awful in itself, has stirred up dreadful memories.

  Tom walks away. If free will means this, then God’s experiment in creation is a botched endeavour. The end has come for him: he has no further use for God. He finds the pocket-edition New Testament in his pack and throws it down the hill.

  He is brought back to sudden awareness of his environment by sound: those around Tom are shooting. Stipe has set up the light machine gun, Marko is firing his Sten, Franjo and Nikola are shooting their Mauser rifles. Tom unslings the Beretta from his shoulder and joins in, barely aware of what he is doing. He has broken cover and is firing. He has no fear, he is invulnerable. It does not occur to him that he might get hit. Enemy soldiers crumple and fall.

  Then Tom realises that Jovan is yelling at his troops, ordering them to cease fire and withdraw. The Germans have realised what is happening and are beginning to shoot back. Marija does not want to stop. She is cursing and swearing as she fires, in tears of rage. When the clip she is using has finished, Stipe does not replace it but gently takes the gun from her.

  They retreat into the trees and climb, cross the ridge into another valley, and stop. The hills hang heavy with smoke, but the sound of firing has ceased.

  The Partisans are exultant, and so, Tom confesses, is he. A flame has been kindled and sweeps the tinder of the country, a pure and cleansing fire; now he is one of the arsonists. He is a warrior, too.

  They walk on. The blood in their ve
ins lowers in temperature. When they come to rest, Jovan tells the Slovenes to gather round and then, in a tone of calm anger, rebukes them for breaking cover when they knew their orders.

  Tom, listening, understands full well: Stipe, Marko and the others are their bodyguard, or more particularly the radio set’s bodyguard. They are not on any account to engage with the enemy. Because of him and Dixon they must deny their instincts. Just now, for the first time, they could not. After their commander’s dressing-down the odred go about their tasks setting up camp in chastened silence.

  But Marija is unrepentant. ‘Did it not feel good?’ she asks Tom. ‘If you had told me ten years ago what joy there could be in killing I would have said you were mad. But it is a primitive pleasure. We must take it, no?’ She looks at him, her violet eyes wide.

  ‘Yes, I felt it,’ Tom admits.

  ‘I knew it,’ she says with relish.

  A new courier appears, a girl, with a message for Jovan: they are to be brought down from the mountains.

  ‘But I thought we still have one more unit to supply,’ Tom objects.

  ‘There is no time.’

  ‘But we must, surely,’ Tom says. ‘That is why we are here.’

  ‘No,’ Jovan tells him. ‘We are here to do what we are told to do.’ He reassures Tom that there is no bad news. He seems guarded. The courier takes them a short distance to a place she has been told to, then leaves. They are to wait.

  As darkness falls they prepare to sleep.

  Sid Dixon comes to Tom as he is laying out his oilskin. ‘Could I have a word, sir?’ he asks.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘In private.’

  This seems such a comical thing to say in the middle of woods that Tom bites his lip to curb a smirk. He walks away from the others. Sid follows him.