by Tim Pears
At a distance that is surely out of anyone’s hearing, Tom pauses, and says, ‘Fire away.’
Sid clears his throat. ‘I’m soft on her, sir,’ he says.
Tom says nothing.
‘Francika. She’s soft on me.’
When Tom looks at his corporal, Sid is grinning. ‘We want to be together. We wants to get married and everything.’ It comes tumbling out. ‘I plan to take her back with me to Devon. As soon as possible. When you’ve got a farm to take on you can’t never marry too young. That’s what I’d like you to arrange, sir, if you could.’
This time Tom does smile. ‘But it’s impossible,’ he says.
‘Impossible?’ Sid’s eyes blaze. Even in the dying light Tom can see his cheeks darken. ‘No, sir. You see, she’s the one. That’s it.’
‘You know where we are, Dixon, what’s going on. For God’s sake. The Partisans disapprove of such relations, even within their own ranks. What can I possibly do?’
‘I thought you might be able to wangle something, sir. Being as you and the commander are so close and all. I don’t know what.’
Tom sighs. ‘I’m not going to give you any bull’s wool, Sid. Look, I’ll mention it to the major. But in the meantime, be patient. And be discreet.’
As he lies on the ground, Tom hears the sounds of snores from his companions; occasional scurrying in the undergrowth beyond. He is wide awake. He remembers the story of the Sacred Band of Thebes: the army of lovers, made up of a hundred and fifty couples. The fighters, bound to each other by love and honour, ‘although a mere handful, could overcome the world’. Was something similar forming in their own small unit? Perhaps it was the natural tendency of military life, among men or women.
Birds begin to screech and shriek in the darkness, their agitation further impediment to sleep. But towards midnight they calm down, and the forest is silent.
July 29
A NEW COURIER has come up into the mountains and found them. He has clearly run uphill. He wishes to speak, but Francika takes the tall, thin youth to one side, gives him water, makes him sit, until the pulse on his forehead ceases beating, and the sweat ceases pouring from him, and his gasping breath subsides. She nods to Jovan, who comes over. Tom follows.
‘Heavy reinforcements in Celje,’ the youth intones. ‘Garrisons along the main line, in Lipoglav and Pragersko, are double or triple in size. On the single-track line, in Mislinje, too.’
‘Are they coming down from the north?’ Jovan asks.
‘Heavy reinforcements in Celje,’ the boy repeats. ‘Garrisons along the main line.’ Jovan stops him. They leave him to eat, and walk away.
‘It’s not good, of course,’ Jovan says. ‘But I’m surprised it hasn’t happened earlier. They’ve had enough of us. They know we’re here, floating from one place to another. Imagine how angry they must be.’
‘Now what?’ Tom asks.
‘Now they will try to encircle us, close in on all sides and liquidate whatever they catch in the net. Every one of our fighters, but especially this group. You British and your radio.’ He lays a hand on Tom’s shoulder, and smiles. ‘Do not look so alarmed, my friend. We will move and hide; hide and move. They don’t like to stay in the mountains for long. A day or two away from their garrisons and the hearth calls them home.’
They consult maps. The youth comes over. He has something else to tell: mobile anti-guerrilla units. The Crna roka are coming from Kranj.
Dixon radios base to cancel their regular skeds, and to call off all drops until further notice. He passes on good news from elsewhere: in Normandy, the Germans are pulling back towards the Seine; in Italy, Pisa has been taken; Soviet troops have reached the Polish frontier. The news is greeted with a more sombre pleasure than usual. Even Pero simply nods, manages a weak smile.
CHAPTER FIVE
Off the Mountain
July 30
TOM DOES NOT sleep well. The weather is fine and warm. It does not rain. They cannot move for they do not know from where the enemy will come. They wait where they happen to be, somewhere in the middle of the Pohorje. As the afternoon drags on they begin to convince themselves the whole thing was a false alarm. The Germans have not been known to venture this high into the mountains. Over in the Karavanken Alps, yes, dreaded SS Mountain Divisions have been deployed, but that is on the border with Austrian Carinthia. Surely the SS are not here. Perhaps the movement of troops the youth reported has been misunderstood, actually it is the beginning of a mass Axis retreat from the Balkans. But in the late afternoon a new boy courier comes running. A tank has rumbled north up the rough road to Mount Rogla at the head of a body of men; a line of vehicles has come south to meet it, and cut the mountain range in two. A unit of the Home Guard has entered the village of Oplotnica, but the odred there slipped out through back gardens and up into the woods.
They load up and set out, away from the sound of dull petulant cracks behind them. Small-arms fire. The hunters are on the move.
July 31
THE NIGHT IS overcast and very dark. They stumble through the woods. Several times someone falls down; almost always Marko, identifiable by his loud curses. It is a small amusement. At first light the courier leads them to a hillside, where a hole, a baza, has been dug in which Partisans can hide.
They sit in the cover of a copse of growing sycamores, their leaves yellow-green and fluttering a little in the air. They can see in the night sky smoke rising from where they have come, to the west; the village of Lukanja burning, the courier tells them before he leaves. Also, infantry have been put in the woods to the east. They sit beneath the sycamores and listen: desultory silence, interspersed from far away in this direction, or that, by a brief flurry of rifle shots, as the enemy beat the woods around them.
The hole is fifty yards away, its entrance concealed by an overhang and a mask of undergrowth, in the grey-mud bank of a brook that trickles in a small canyon down off the mountain. By the time they have all crawled in to have a look, and out, headfirst, their legs kicking out behind them in the grey muddy gulley, the camouflage is tattered.
They scramble into the hole at dawn. Stipe can barely squeeze his shoulders through the entry. The baza has two chambers, with a passage so arranged that a grenade flung through the entry will have no effect on anyone lying in the large inner chamber. Except, Tom reckons, to bring down earth that will lead to suffocation. Stout timbers support the roof, three feet from the floor. They lie, all ten of them, squeezed up and folded over themselves like fairy-tale babies in a giantesses womb. The air in the chamber thickens as they sleep. They wake, shift position, sink back into unconsciousness. How good it would be, it occurs to Tom, to be able to hibernate; to doze right through the coming autumn and winter, and emerge from the ground in the spring of 1945, when the war will surely be long over.
August 1
AT DUSK JOVAN asks Pero to find out what is happening outside. He crawls out of the hole, and first refills their bottles with water from the brook. He whispers something through the entry before he leaves. His voice seems to come from far away, from another world. When he takes his head away a shaft of light pokes into their darkness. Then Pero stuffs fresh-cut branches across the entry to disguise it, and the light is green like sunlight seen through water.
Francika breaks pieces of bread and hands them round, with slices of pork fat.
They piss in a biscuit tin; all except for Francika, who is too shy.
They lie on their backs, knees doubled up, the warm air inside the hole making them drowsy. Someone farts. Marija curses Marko. ‘You are a pig,’ she tells him. ‘A goat. A dog. Have you no idea of civilised human behaviour?’
‘It was not me,’ Marko complains. ‘Check your facts before you make accusations, woman.’
‘You’re lucky it is dark,’ she tells him. ‘If I could see you I would slap your ugly peasant mug.’
‘I would like to see you try it,’ Marko says.
In the silence they hear someone giggling.
‘There is your culprit!’ Marko says. ‘Too much of a coward to admit it.’
But then the malefactor, or another, breaks wind again, and they all groan and curse him.
The close dank smell of earth, damp clothes, stale breathing. It is best, Tom finds, to drift off to sleep.
He is woken by sounds outside, scrabbling and scrambling on the bank, then the shield of green undergrowth is pulled aside. Damn and blast it, he thinks. It’s come. Why here? Now?
Sunlight floods through to the inner chamber. Pero’s voice. ‘It is me,’ breathless. He crawls in to join them. The sunlight makes the air feel easier to breathe.
‘I went east,’ he says. ‘It was quiet. The woods were silent. Animals were still. Nothing moved. Birds were hiding. I came over a ridge and you know what? Someone shot at me!’ Pero seems both impressed and affronted. ‘In the silence there was a sound. I thought, “Oh, that is a rifle shot. Oh, and that is a bullet whistling through the branches beside me.” Then I turned and ran. Mary mother of God I ran like a lynx.’
‘Like a wild boar squealing,’ says Marko.
‘You ran straight back here,’ Jovan says, matter-of-factly, more sadness than anger in his voice.
‘Of course not,’ Pero says. ‘I ran right around the hill, they will think I went north. Then I cut back here. I couldn’t find this bank for a long time.’
They sit in the hole for the rest of the day. It is hot and the air is bad. The screen of branches has been relaid. They doze, and fidget, and grow resigned to their fate in the green submarine murk. Of course: what else could this be? They have crawled into their own tomb.
As if reading Tom’s mind, Nikola says, ‘We are going to die here, aren’t we?’
Jovan does not disagree with him. Instead he tells them of when the Germans attacked Serbia in 1915. ‘Belgrade was surrounded,’ he says. ‘One battalion of the Tenth Serbian Regiment received orders to fight to the last man, in order to slow the German advance. Before the final onslaught, the commander of the battalion spoke to his men below the Kalemegdan fortress. “My soldiers,” he said, “my heroes. Our Supreme Commander has struck the name of our battalion from his list. We are to be sacrificed for the honour of our country. Do not worry about your lives, they no longer exist. Come, let us advance to death and to glory.”’
‘What happened?’ Tom asks.
‘They marched forward,’ Jovan replies, ‘and were slaughtered to the last man.’
‘You can tell how moved he is, Tom,’ Marija says. ‘Oh, how the Serbs love to be defeated. If you went to his village you would find the old women all in black. Do you know why? To remind the young people of the sorrow, the great sorrow, after defeat to the Turks in the battle of Kosovo, in the Field of Blackbirds. When? In nineteen fifteen? When these women were young? No. When their mothers were young? No. Over five hundred years ago.’
Jovan smiles. He does not conceal his pleasure at being teased by Marija.
‘Their finest defeat,’ she says. ‘Each generation since has tried to match it. Perhaps this time they will.’
Towards dusk they squeeze out, one after another. It is as if the earth herself gives birth to them. They feel immediately relieved, triumphant even: it is no bad thing, after all, to die in the open air.
There is enough light left to see the mess the ten of them are making of the bank. They pray that Jovan will not ask them to go back in the hole. They slither down to the brook, splash along the bottom of the canyon, climb out into the sycamores.
The young courier who brought them here reappears. He is clenched tight with fear, almost unable to speak. His courage emboldens them as much as his fear confirms the danger. Enemy patrols, the boy mumbles; advancing up the hillside from Zrecˇe, are beating the woods for bazas, and have already found three.
‘They will be keen to find more,’ Jovan says. ‘Only a platoon of blind men could fail to find ours.’ He orders the boy to lead them to a courier crossing point, to the west. Sid and Nikola crawl back inside the hole for the radio and battery, and the light machine gun.
August 2
THEY WALK MORE slowly than they ever have before, each one of them listening intently, with eyes peeled for movement in the darkness. Did Pero tell Tom earlier that it was silent in the woods? It is never silent! There are sounds all around him, all the time: a broken twig hits the ground; a branch, growing under tension, suddenly snaps; two close-grown tree trunks groan against each other; a small creature scampers across pine cones; an owl hoots.
Each one of these sounds is, for a terrible second in their tight-strung attention, evidence of the enemy closing in around them. Jovan doubts that they will all settle down in an encampment tonight: some German troops, or the Black Hand, will surely be night hunting. It would be absurd were they not to.
They come at dawn to a hamlet whose name, if it has one, Tom does not hear. Two other groups of Partisans are already gathered here, and Tom’s comrades fall upon them with unreserved conviviality. Perhaps they will not be cut down on this mountain in a hail of crossfire but, together, will fight their way out.
The whitewashed walls of ruined houses gleam in the darkness. One of the other groups has a pony; it grazes, cropping the weeds that grow everywhere. It is a grey cob. Tom pats it; he inhales the lovely sour tang of its sweaty hide. Sid comes over too, and blows softly into its nostrils. The animal becomes still.
‘You seem to know what it likes,’ Tom tells him.
‘I love horses,’ Sid says. ‘I envy my old man, tell the truth. I mean, they say tractors is better than horses, but what I say is, it may be better for the farmer. Don’t mean it’s better for the farmworker.’
He scratches the cob behind the ears. It bends reluctantly from this human touch to graze again on the weeds.
There are between forty and fifty Partisans now. Jovan confers with the leaders of the other groups. He assumes overall command. They sleep where they can. Guards are posted.
August 3
TOM IS WOKEN by the slamming of a door. And then again, sending an ominous bolt through his nerves. And again. Artillery, not far away.
Francika has found wild strawberries. At first light, the big men with their rough peasants’ hands pick the dainty berries and put them in their mouths.
‘What do you think?’ Tom asks Jovan.
‘I believe this will be our last day,’ Jovan says. He glances at Tom and smiles. ‘No, no, my friend. Don’t look at me like that. Our last day on this mountain, I mean. We have to break out tonight.’
‘I thought…’ says Tom. ‘It was as if you knew…’
‘No, no,’ Jovan tells him. ‘No man knows. And it is good to be afraid.’
Jovan steps forward and embraces him. Tom can feel himself trembling in Jovan’s hold.
‘The man without fear is not a man,’ Jovan whispers in Tom’s ear. Tom feels himself flooded with sudden emotion.
‘Thank you,’ Tom whispers, hugging his friend. They hold each other tight. ‘Thank you.’ They relax their embrace.
The others eat the strawberries as they pick them, for who knows when they may have to move, but Jovan patiently collects them in a piece of tree bark. Tom copies him, and when they have enough they lie on the grass.
Marija joins them. Jovan offers her his plate of berries. She shakes her head. ‘I am as greedy and as nervous as all the others,’ she admits. ‘I have eaten my fill.’
A courier comes with news: an enemy detachment is three miles to the south. They await its arrival on full alert. There is no sign. An hour later a second courier: a German battalion, or a brigade, or maybe a platoon, of crack alpine troops has been spotted. Unless it’s a bunch of old policemen. Or raw Slovene Home Guard boys. They’re closing in from the north. Partisans are being picked off.
Nikola tells those around him that his father has given him some useful advice: if they are shot at, and there is a haystack nearby, they should hide behind it, for bullets do not penetrate hay.
‘This is t
rue,’ Stipe avers. ‘Or wool, either.’
‘Hide behind a sheep,’ Marko suggests. ‘If you can catch one.’
All day long small-arms fire rattles round the edge of the woods. Jovan wants to wait till nightfall, but they all know they may have to take off at any moment.
Franjo walks off into the long grass to relieve himself, and Nikola frets that they might leave without his father. He keeps looking over in the direction he disappeared in, until after a while the old man returns.
A courier comes running into the ruined hamlet from the west, the direction in which Jovan wants to go. A column of German troops is heading directly towards them. No sooner has this news been absorbed than the woods are battered by artillery. Shells crash into the trees around them, ripping up branches, pulverising wood. They flinch and cower. Tom crawls towards a stout tree and curls up at its base, making his body as small as possible. But the wood is no more sturdy than balsa. The sound of living wood wrenching, splintering, falling. The air is filled with the smell of sawdust. And his body is enormous, an unmissable target, a blob of vulnerable flesh. Fear feels like something that grows suddenly inside his gut, something alien making him sweat and shiver as the shells fall into the wood. Tom cannot identify the source of the incoming fire, it could be artillery, mortar, even aircraft, he has not the faintest idea, his brain will not begin to function. Nor its direction. Only its target: himself. It must be a howitzer, those most accurate and deadly guns. Bangs, thuds, as shells land on the hillside around them, the sound of men screaming, groaning. He hears someone near him squeal like a rabbit, then stop.
Tom cannot tell if he is weeping or not. He can hear a sound close by, some kind of rapid percussion, then realises it is his own teeth chattering. He is looking at himself from outside. Are these trembling hands his own?