by Tim Pears
‘It was hardly his fault, Jack, we were ambushed. People grabbed what they could.’
‘Of course it wasn’t his fault. No soldier ever lost a battle through any fault of his own. It’s always someone else who’s let him down.’
‘We need to use your radio. I’ve got to tell base there were Chetniks on the mountain.’
‘Chetniks? This far from Serbia? Hardly likely.’
‘There’s no doubt about it, and they were firing at us. They were with the enemy. Base have to stop giving them support, Jack, there’s nothing annoys the Partisans more.’
‘We don’t get involved in politics.’
‘We are involved in politics. We’re here, are we not?’
‘We obey orders. I’ve heard a lot of rumours myself, about all sorts of Balkan riff-raff fetching up in these mountains. Without material proof we say nothing.’
‘I know what they look like, Jack. I saw them with my own eyes.’
Farwell shakes his head. ‘Without evidence it’s not intelligence, don’t you realise? It’s no more than a fancy. A trick of the light. Leave it, Freedman. That’s a bloody order.’
August 8
DURING THE NIGHT, assault units are moved into position. There is no artillery that Jack knows of, only men and women with their rifles, hundreds of them, making their way down through the dark woods. Tom scans the tops of the trees and knows that the woods seethe with movement, encircling the silent village of Ljubno, whose occupants sleep. A few sentries doze on their rifles. One reality snoozes in ignorance of another, a slow premeditated surge towards violence that is about to engulf it.
The attack begins with children: bombashi, hand-grenade men, except that they are boys or girls of twelve or thirteen. Around the outside of the town are a dozen bunkers, with walls of earth or brick. One or two have been built with reinforced concrete, like pillboxes. Tom knows what is coming, but when it comes he isn’t sure he really sees it. In the first light of morning – there is not yet colour in the valley, mist has risen from the river and lies in shifting ribbons on the fields – the bombashi slip out like tree spirits from the cover of the woods and run crouching forward across the open ground. Two converge upon each bunker. There is a hiccuping rattle of light-machine-gun fire and one of the children stops running abruptly and lies down. His or her colleague reaches the bunker as do all the others. They throw their grenades over the top of the wall or through the gun-slits. The detonations are muffled, as if occurring deeper underground.
With the bunkers eliminated, the surviving bombashi withdraw, back to the shelter of the woods, while adult Partisans run past them, lugging light machine guns: they occupy the bunkers, beside the dead enemy, or if they are all caved in set up behind them, and put covering fire into the village. The pillboxes are transformed from defensive positions to offensive redoubts. A second wave of Partisans enters Ljubno from all directions.
The defenders of the village are now awake, and firing back. There is no artillery on either side and the only sounds carrying up the hill are the rattle of Stens and Brens, of Mausers and Berettas, and the crack of single rifle shots. The Partisans advance from house to house. It is like watching a gunfight in a silent western, but with the camera too far away. And field glasses render them somehow more, rather than less, distant: the figures two, three hundred yards away are not quite real, but actors playing the part of soldiers. They play it poorly when they fall, crumpling upon the impact of the bullet that hits them, dying without noise, discreetly, making no drama of their demise.
Tom lowers the binoculars. This was how generals saw battle, from a grassy knoll, at one remove. It would be much easier than he would ever have considered it to be to see your men fall and order reinforcements into the fray when they were not flesh and blood but models of men on an unreal diorama.
He becomes aware of an odd sound close by, on the ground, in the grass: it is like a disappointed teacher tut-tutting his pupils. Strange insects? Tom looks instinctively towards the village and sees two men in the steeple of the church, with rifles pointing towards him.
‘Jack! Christ!’ Tom exclaims. ‘They’re firing at us.’ Ducking, swerving, he runs back into the trees behind him. He is pretty rattled. When he turns and peers from around the shelter of a beech trunk he sees Farwell still gazing at the scene below through his field glasses.
‘Jack!’ Tom yells. ‘Come here, you bloody idiot.’ He can hear the bullets still hissing in the grass that must be about as far as they can reach, perhaps they are old sporting rifles with a limited range. But Jack can’t know that. He stands there unconcerned, surveying the scene. Tom feels like a fool, cowering behind the tree trunk. But Farwell is the fool, with his cynicism and bravado, and his being an idiot does not make Tom yellow. He calls out again and this time Jack does respond, turning reluctantly and walking slowly to join him.
‘Why do they want to waste their ammo on me?’ he asks. ‘A scurvy trick to play. I’m not the one about to lead them into the abattoir. Those Jugs down there are. And the first thing they’ll do,’ he muses, ‘will be to take the boots off the men they’ve killed, before they’ve even croaked.’
Tom swallows his rage, and turns back to peer at the village through his glasses. The snipers in the church steeple are shooting at men on the ground, though the flank of the hill they stand on partially blocks his view now that he and Jack have moved back, and he cannot see their targets. Scanning away from the village he can make out from where he stands a scrum of Partisans at the edge of the trees, poised to join the attack. With a shock he recognises amongst them Franjo and Nikola, father and son, side by side. And is that Pero, behind another man? All of a sudden he identifies others, not down there, now, but in retrospect: realises he’d seen Marija and Stipe – carrying the LMG – silhouettes running towards one of the bunkers. This recognition was there but he had not acknowledged it at the time: yet it lay buried, waiting, and now, an hour later, he’s unearthed it.
‘I’m going down, sir,’ he says, and does not wait for a reply. ‘Get a closer look,’ he throws over his shoulder, and breaks into a run.
It seems as though he reaches them in a moment, had thought to join them and is there, in some H. G. Wells time machine, an impression exacerbated by the fact that he is neither out of breath nor sweating in his uniform on this warm August morning. They greet him warmly, telling their comrades, ‘This is the Englishman. The one we told you about. This is he.’
Then Francika is there but she does not embrace him. ‘I am the commander of this unit,’ she says. ‘You cannot come with us.’
‘I must,’ he says. If they are to fall he wishes to fall with them, not to watch, beside Farwell, as they advance into battle. If death is to be meted out this day he will be proud to receive it, to perish beside these peasant revolutionaries, rather than skulk on a hill behind a pine tree.
‘I cannot allow you,’ Francika says, but then an order comes to her and she has no option but to yell out, ‘Advance!’ and Tom is running.
Pero beside him says, ‘You have no gun,’ and he takes his hand and they run together to a fallen Partisan. Tom lifts the man’s rifle from the ground. Around his head is a black halo of blood. Pero wrestles free an ammunition belt and they run on. Guns go off behind, in front, all around him. To Tom there is no logic. Bullets trace an invisible chaotic latticework of death. As they reach the first house someone beside him falls. They crouch against the wall of the house. Two Partisans drag the wounded soldier to shelter. His body is floppy. He is not wounded. He has gone from vitality to extinction in an instant, this extreme and awful mystery. Then someone turns his body and Tom recognises the dead soldier. It is Nikola. He must have been hit in the torso for his face and head are unblemished, his youthful skin is cleanly shaven, his green eyes gaze at existence and see nothing. In the shelter of the wall they lay him down. His father Franjo stands above him; the third, the last, of his boys to be killed in this war.
‘My son,’ he says quietly
, yet Tom can hear every word. ‘My son, let the sun shine on you for the last time.’ Franjo’s unused voice is low and gritty. ‘My son, I will not weep. That will be for the widows of those whom we are about to kill.’ Franjo’s eyes are clear. He lifts his rifle, turns and walks around the corner of the house. The others follow him.
Explosives are laid against the walls of the large house where most of the garrison are billeted, or, rather, now trapped. The wall is breached, grenades are thrown in, among them small, red, Italian oval hand grenades. Surrender comes quickly and enemy soldiers file out, covered with dust, some with streaks of red blood oozing from beneath the white dust, arms in the air.
Some have fled to other houses and continue to fight. These houses are taken one by one, with gunpowder and fire, by the afternoon. Only the church remains, with an unknown number of enemy inside. The riflemen in the steeple have withdrawn from view. Rather than attack the church the Partisan commander in charge of the operation demands a surrender from those within, posts guards around the two doors to make sure there is no chance of a break-out, and then seems to ignore the church.
Prisoners are brought into the town square, where they stand with both arms aloft, save for one with his left arm in a sling. Partisan soldiers wander about, glancing at the German and Slovene Home Guard soldiers who look blank and hopeless, stunned by how history, which only yesterday had seemed to assure them of a secure and prosperous future, has quite suddenly turned on them. The Partisans coalesce in small clusters, break up and move on around the square, smoking, automatic rifles slung over their shoulders or clasped in their hands as if to remind both themselves and their enemy with their empty hands in the air: Look, we have our guns, you do not have yours. You have wielded absolute power in this valley. You are powerless now.
Villagers too leave their houses and come as far as the edge of the square, clutches of wary women in tight headscarves and aprons, some with small children. They look as if they can only linger for a moment; the battle interrupted their daily chores, to which they must return. Old men in their frayed suits and hats give the opposite impression: they have little or nothing to do all day long and will be quite happy to congregate here and watch this changing of the guard for as long as it takes. Perhaps, Tom considers, the Partisans are no less strange to them than the Germans; certainly there are many more Slovene Wehrmänner amongst those with their hands in the air than in German uniform. Some might come from this very village. The Partisans are adorned in their customary weather-beaten motley of British, Italian, German and Yugoslav uniforms.
All occupying armies, Tom supposes, must be a dangerous nuisance to such villagers; an unwanted interruption to the more important activities of cleaning the house and tending the vegetables. What ingratitude! What dumb and wilful ignorance. Yes, this is a civil war as well as resistance against foreign occupier, a civil war that is raging across Yugoslavia. The Partisans are fighting to build a better world for all – including these peasants, trapped in their smug self-absorption. The Partisans will liberate their country from the Germans but also from the feudal past.
The prisoners are being separated, escorted in one direction or another, in what appears to be a peremptory and arbitrary manner. The armed guards look as if they are acting under orders except that, so far as Tom can tell, no one is giving them. He follows a cluster of fifteen or twenty through the village. Outside a house they are told to remove their boots and German uniforms. A number of them are old, for soldiers: in their late thirties or even early forties. A tall, skinny, trembling man; two short, tubby men in stained underwear. Not a single specimen conforms to the Aryan ideal, yet here they were fighting for the Reich. They had been sent all over Europe to enact Hitler’s expansionist dream of conquest. Are these to meet their end here, in a mountain village in Slovenia?
One of the Partisans asks a comrade whether they should take the helmets. ‘No,’ the other replies. ‘They look funnier like this. They can keep them. They must keep them.’
It is mid-afternoon and quiet now. Tom can hear the tall, thin prisoner’s teeth chattering from yards away. None of the Germans speak to each other. They avoid each other’s eyes, as well as their captors’, each locked into his own torment. Some have holes in their socks. These men have become passive in the face of their imminent extinction. If Tom had been told of it he would have wondered why they did not attempt, at least, to overwhelm their three or four armed guards. Better to die trying to escape, surely, than to be led like lambs to the slaughter. Yet such a pathetic gesture is unthinkable here, now, in this quiet village, under the bright sun. Their destiny has been shaped by powerful forces that have brought them to this moment, and all are obliged to submit to that power; including the Partisans, one of whom even has to heap mocking insult upon murder, having them die in their helmets. Including, indeed, himself: there is nothing Tom can do to intervene; he is a passive observer as they are passive victims.
Two Partisans are going through the pockets of the discarded uniforms. Tom looks at what they find. A faded letter, a diary, a bottle of hair oil, some rubber protectives, a postcard of a dark-haired girl with a hand-written message scrawled across the corner; a photo of an old lady standing beside a farmhouse door. One of the Partisans finds a ripped grey canvas haversack, shovels these items into it, and hands it to the nearest German. Are they to be buried not with their weapons but these domestic mementoes, a mocking tribute, in a common grave?
The Partisan who’d decided the Germans should keep their helmets on says, ‘Go!’ He does not look at them but makes a dismissive sweeping gesture with his right hand. ‘Go back to Celje. Enjoy the walk.’
The Germans look perplexed, almost upset, but then they become agitated. As if they’d been too cold in their underwear now suddenly the heat of the day is upon them, and they sweat as they come jerkily to life like marionettes, stopping and starting, until gradually reaching some kind of unspoken consensus and setting off on the white stone road out of the village. There is always one or another of them looking back over his shoulder – is this one last cruel trick? – but the Partisans watch them, chuckling, and all of a sudden Tom too finds the sight of them padding away in their grubby underwear risible and comic, the ones with their coal scuttle helmets the funniest of all, and he realises that is the point: for as many villagers as possible to see the fearsome Teuton soldiers traipsing home half-naked with holes in their socks.
Returning towards the square, Tom hears sounds beyond a house at the village edge, and is drawn towards them. The sounds are those of voices, two of them in conversation. One is harsh, the other wheedling, pleading, yet they talk over each other, with no apparent relation between the two. He steps around the corner, into an open field. Several men, some in German uniform, others in civilian clothes, are lined up facing a squad of Partisans. Upon orders from an officer, two Partisans raise their sub-machine guns and open fire. The line of men collapses like skittles hit by an invisible ball.
As Tom stands unmoving, petrified by what he’s walked into, Partisan officers turn towards him. Their obvious embarrassment somehow clears his head. One of them advances a couple of steps towards him, and salutes.
‘Lieutenant,’ the man says. The other three also salute. All are dressed in new, clean, high-collared uniforms, ‘in the Russian style,’ according to Jack Farwell the day before.
‘My friend,’ the man continues, and only now does Tom recognise Jovan. Of course it is Jovan! How could he not have seen immediately? Tom finds himself walking back around the side of the house, steered towards the village square, as if Jovan had known that was where he’d been headed, only to be waylaid by this unpleasant diversion, and was being intuitively helpful.
‘What happened?’ Tom asks. ‘Who were those men?’
‘The mayor and his cronies,’ Jovan says. ‘The German commander and two of his men who have committed savage acts against the people.’
‘But I thought you would bring law with you. What kind of tria
l could you possibly have carried out in so brief a time?’ Tom demands. ‘None. Merely summary justice.’
‘Surely you have learned from our days together, Tom, that this is not a game.’ Jovan takes a cigarette from a packet and passes it to Tom, then takes one for himself. The cigarette is triangular rather than round, and the packet has Cyrillic lettering. ‘We have had intelligence from here for many months. We know from the people themselves who are the war criminals. To witness how swiftly we dispense justice will be a great reassurance to them.’
‘And now the Germans’ mayor is dead, you will install a new mayor?’
Jovan smiles. He lights their cigarettes with a lighter, the petrol smell of whose fluid Tom inhales; it is different from any he has smelled before. ‘One of our own, Tom, yes, of course. Come. I have much to do. We shall have hundreds of Slovene Wehrmänner joining us. We have to give them a political education before trusting them with a weapon.’
‘You have the job you came to Slovenia for,’ Tom says. ‘You are the political commissar.’
‘I am,’ says Jovan.
‘I am so glad to see you,’ Tom says. He wants to hug Jovan, but there are too many people around them.
‘We shall see much of each other, I hope,’ Jovan tells him, before being called away.
August 9
USING THE WIRELESS belonging to Farwell’s operator, Morris, Sid Dixon taps out the code. ‘Priority radios, PIAT ammo, rifles, Stens, Brens, mortars. As many planes as you can send. Future operations depend on holding this area as base. Please send planes every night till further notice. Soon have runway too.’
Six Partisans were killed in the assault on Ljubno yesterday. A collective funeral service is to be held for them. There are fresh flowers in vases on the window sills of the bare, whitewashed interior of the church. Up in the chancel vault are two paintings: of the Virgin Mary and child, and what looks like the portrait of a peasant, though it may, Tom suspects, be meant to represent a biblical figure. There are no signs of the church’s occupation or siege: the enemy had apparently agreed to surrender in the afternoon, and after forfeiting their clothing followed their colleagues on the rough road back to Celje.