Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Tim Pears
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Map
Chapter One | By Parachute to the Slovene Lands | |
Chapter Two | Into the Third Reich | |
Chapter Three | Attack on the Viaduct | |
Chapter Four | Supplying Units Attacking Railway Tracks | |
Chapter Five | Off the Mountain | |
Chapter Six | In the Valley | |
Chapter Seven | Attack on the Bridge |
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Copyright
A powerful and devastating novel of war, love and loss by one of Britain’s finest writers.
It is May 1944 and in Eastern Europe the Second World War is reaching a dramatic and bloody crescendo. High above the mountains of occupied Slovenia an aeroplane drops three British parachutists – brash MP Major Jack Farwell, radio operator Sid Dixon, and young academic Lieutenant Tom Freedman – sent to assist the resistance in their battle against the Axis forces.
Greeted upon arrival by a rag-tag group of Partisans, the men are led off into the countryside. It is early summer, and the mountains and forests teem with life and colour. Despite the distant crackle of gunfire, the war feels a long way off for Tom. The Partisans, too, are not what he was expecting – courageous, kind, and alluring, especially Jovan, their commander, and the hauntingly beautiful Marija. Yet after a series of daring encounters, the enemy’s net begins to tighten. They find evidence of massacres, of a dark and terrible band of men pursuing them through the wilderness. As the Partisans stumble their way towards a final, tragic battle, so the relationships within the group begin to fray, with Tom finding himself forced to face up to his deepest, most secret desires.
Tim Pears was born in 1956. He grew up in Devon, and left school at sixteen. He has worked in a wide variety of jobs and is a graduate of the National Film and Television School. His first novel, In the Place of Fallen Leaves, won the Hawthornden Prize for Literature and the Ruth Hadden Memorial Award. His second novel, In a Land of Plenty, has been adapted for television and is now a major BBC television series. Tim Pears is the author of eight highly acclaimed novels including Landed, Disputed Land and A Revolution of the Sun.
In the Place of Fallen Leaves
In a Land of Plenty
A Revolution of the Sun
Wake Up
Blenheim Orchard
Landed
Disputed Land
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Published by William Heinemann 2014
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Copyright © Tim Pears 2014
Tim Pears has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work
First published in Great Britain in 2014 by
William Heinemann
Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,
London SW1V 2SA
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The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780434022748
To the memory of my father, Bill Pears, and all those who fought for the liberation of Yugoslavia (1941– 45) and dreamed of a better world
‘It is for your sake that I am dying.’
Slovene peasant Partisan,
calling to German firing squad, 1944
THEY STAND ON the sweltering tarmac in Brindisi, leaning into the wind of the Halifax engines. The air is thick and fumy with the sour-sweet smell of aero-petrol.
‘Storms in the Med,’ the navigator yells. ‘Going to take you blokes up the spine of the country.’
Sid Dixon gives the man a thumbs-up. ‘That’s a relief, innit, sir?’ he says to Tom. ‘Least us won’t be coming down in the drink.’
‘Don’t fancy a night swim?’ Tom asks him.
‘Can’t swim, sir,’ says Dixon.
‘Are there no rivers in Devon?’ Jack Farwell queries, pointing his cigar in a general direction north-west.
‘They’re for cows to cool down in, sir,’ Sid tells him.
‘What about the sea then, you country bumpkin?’
‘Never seen the sea, sir. Not until this war.’ Sid shakes his head. ‘Still can’t see the point of it.’
Farwell rolls his eyes in theatrical despair. Tom smiles. The badinage, he thinks, of nervous men.
The plane rumbles along the runway, roars and whines forward, gaining speed, then heaves itself into the air. It climbs laboriously; gradually levels off. The engines even down to a steady hum of efficiency.
It was balmy in the heel of Italy. They were told it would be cold in the plane, so Tom Freedman pulled on layers of clothes. A vest, a shirt and two pullovers, scratchy and sweaty. An extra pair of thick woollen socks. They aren’t enough. The plane is rising once more. There is rain and thunder, the peaks of the Apennines light up beside them – nature’s mirror, Tom reckons, to what is happening far below, where the Allies and the Germans bomb each other’s men to bits along the Gustav Line. The plane climbs ever higher, ever colder. The dispatcher gives them Sidcot flying suits, which they each clamber into, but still they sit there shivering, the three of them.
Major Jack Farwell, thirty-eight. A corpulent man, with thinning sandy hair. He looks at Tom and says something that is lost in the noise of the plane, then looks away. He only joined Tom on the language course in the last few days, and paid little attention. Jack was a Member of Parliament when he joined up. He went to the same school as the Head of the British Mission; signed up to this jaunt rather as he’d agree to a hunting expedition: looking forward to some sport. Downed his first gin of the day punctually at six and devoted the rest of the evening to boozy conviviality. Cards, gossip, argument. He yells again, frowning. This time Tom draws nearer.
‘You look petrified, Freedman.’
‘Are you not worried, Jack?’ Tom asks.
Farwell looks at him askance. Jack’s eyes are the palest blue imaginable, light and depthless. ‘If anyone tells you they’re not scared before a drop,’ he says, ‘they’re either a liar or a bloody fool.’ His acrid cigar breath.
‘Are you scared?’ Tom asks him.
‘Me?’ Jack says. ‘Of course not.’
It is a joke, surely, but Jack is deadpan, there’s not the slightest twinkle in his eye. Perhaps he is serious. They sit close enough for their flying suits to touch, but still they have to shout above the din. Jack has dry, lizard-like skin; white bushy eyebrows. ‘What I want to tell you, Freedman,’ he says, ‘is that we don’t have to like each other.’
Tom is taken aback. He had guessed that Farwell considers him bookish, dull; and that’s about the sum of it. Lieutenant Tom Freedman is twenty-six. The first in his family to go to university. He was looking forward to his third year in the Honour School of Modern Languages, when war was declared. Apart from a brief bout of artillery training he has spent the war in libraries in country training schools, and in offices in Baker Street, helping to make sense of intelligence sent back from the field or of German transcripts intercepted.
‘I’m sure you don’t like me,’ Jack continues, lurching close to Tom to make himself heard, ‘any more than I like you.’
Tom wonders what he’s done to earn Jack’s antipathy; does not wish to acknowledge how mutual their feelings might be.
‘You got to Oxford,’ Jack says, ‘because you deserved to. I went because my father did, and his before him. But that’s not it. There’s something shady about you, Freedman. You’re not a man’s man. But you’re too bloody handsome. And quiet! You don’t say enough, that must be what it is. You’re the kind of cad, Freedman, who instead of talking to men prefers to listen to women. Let them witter their way into bed with you, is that it? I’ll bet they eat you up, don’t they, with those doe eyes and those soft lips? I’ll bet they bloody well devour you. Well, I wouldn’t trust you with my wife, but the point is that we’re both British officers, Freedman, do you see? That is the point, man. And so I trust you with my life.’
What nonsense. How wrong could he be? Tom wonders how many drinks Farwell bagged before they left.
Jack Farwell reaches inside his flying suit and pulls a fresh cigar from his jacket pocket. He’s pretty pleased with his little speech. ‘Nice irony, eh, Tom?’ he says, holding up one hand with the cigar, the other with his lighter, props to emphasise his point. ‘Wouldn’t trust you with my wife, yet trust you with my life.’ He slaps Tom on the shoulder, as if out of gratitude for the minor role Tom has played in furnishing this profound couplet. Jack lights his cigar, inhales, blows out the pungent smoke in triumph. ‘What we both have to do, of course, is to look after Dixon there.’
Tom can hardly imagine anyone less in need of care than their radio operator, Corporal Sid Dixon, who is leaning against a strut, looking around. A Devon farmer’s boy, twenty-two. Short, wiry, tough. Dark-haired, brown-eyed. His sharp nose, and air of alertness, put Tom in mind of some keen bird of prey. Dixon signed up for this, ‘to get back in to green valleys, sir. Couldn’t stand all that sand.’
They are shivering. Dixon fumbles inside his jacket and locates a small flask of rum. He passes it with quivering fingers to Farwell, whose own hand shakes so much he can barely keep the rim of the flask to his lips. The sight is too comical: Tom is unable to stop himself from grinning. He realises his mouth must be a strained simian rictus over chattering teeth, the effect no doubt grotesque. Thus, he thinks – trembling, grimacing – we are taken to this remote theatre of war; this sideshow, as Jack Farwell resentfully dismisses it.
Night falls. The dark confers a stillness upon the scene, and seems to mute the roar of the engines, as if the men are no longer thundering through the sky but hovering in some higher dimension of space. Up in the cockpit the pilot appears as if he is made of stone.
Farwell demands a torch from the sergeant dispatcher and studies a map by its light. Sid Dixon lies back against his pack, closes his eyes, and within moments, to Tom’s astonishment, is sleeping like a baby.
Tom tries to read, from his regulation pack New Testament, but cannot concentrate. He ponders their destination. His mind ratchets around information they’ve been given, the fragments of things he knows, in the dark unknowable void of what awaits him.
The Slovene Lands, or Slovenia, is a country the size of Wales. With fewer inhabitants. Even more varied terrain.
Slovenia is lapped by the sea in the south. The Julian Alps loom over it to the north.
Every Slovene has his smallholding; his vegetable plot, his fruit trees.
Over and over, Slovenia, in a repetitive mental stutter, revising cogent facts as if for an exam.
Slovenia is the most heavily wooded country in Europe. No, that can’t be right, surely there are Scandinavian countries with more forest?
Slovenia has been slashed in two in a line from east to west. The south was occupied by the Italians – until their capitulation last September – but the north was annexed by Austria in 1941: it became part of the Third Reich. That is where Tom and the others are ultimately headed. They are destined for the vipers’ nest.
Suddenly there is light shining in his eyes. ‘What are you looking so worried for now, Freedman?’
Tom shields his eyes with his arm. Jack Farwell lowers the torch. ‘You know what worries me?’ he asks. ‘What gut-rot are they going to give us down there? They tell us we’re to avoid politics like the plague. Strict orders. Fine. I’ll say nothing! But what kind of booze will the Reds provide? And what’ll they make us smoke once my cigars run out?’
Jack does not expect or desire reassurance; without waiting for a reply, he resumes his study of the map. Tom glances over. Jack’s finger rests on a spot in the Alps, between Slovenia and Austria: the Ljubljana Gap. He is like the Dutch boy, Tom thinks, with his finger in the dyke.
Jack says, without looking up from the map, ‘I wouldn’t worry if I were you, Freedman. We’ll be lucky to survive the bloody jump.’
The dispatcher, a Royal Air Force sergeant, interrupts Tom’s brooding. Dixon wakes and gives him a shot of rum.
‘Wouldn’t fancy your job,’ Sid tells him, ‘being stuck in this heap a metal.’
The sergeant, Scottish, red-faced, shoots back, ‘Wouldnae fancy your job jumping out of it, pal.’
‘I thought you lot had to?’
‘Not us. It’s the parachute packers got to jump, once a month, keep their minds on the job.’ He has a sip of liquor. ‘Here, have you heard the one about the plane full of German paratroopers over Greece?’
Dixon shakes his head.
‘The dispatcher, right, he guides each parachutist to the door and pushes him oot. “Achtung, achtung. No time to mess about! Out with you cowardly schwein! Go! Go!”
‘But one a these blighters resists. Kicks and screams, tries to jam his legs against the doorframe.
‘“Out! Schweinhund! Zer is no place in ze German army for cowards!”’
The sergeant’s German accent is vehement and absurd. Sid Dixon nods, smiling.
‘Finally, the dispatcher gives him a kick up the arse and he flies oot the door.
‘The parachutists still waiting to jump start to laugh.
‘“So, you sink that vas funny, you schwein?”
‘“Funny? Ja, sir,” says one a them, as he jumps out. “Zat vas the pilot.”’
Dixon chuckles. He and the sergeant each take another pull from the flask of rum. Tom lights cigarettes for the three of them.
Smoking, they become pensive once more. Tom tries again to concentrate, to keep fear of the unknown at bay by considering the known. The Balkan war, as it moves towards its no doubt bloody culmination, is shifting geographically. Armies are sliding northwards. Slovenia is assuming the greatest importance of the Yugoslav territories.
Reciting the facts is soothing, until Tom remembers he is not in a library but in this plane. The moment he has been dreading approaches. Three hours into the flight the sergeant dispatcher suggests they go aft to the rear of the fuselage. They waddle back, and it is only then that they realise how the height has been affecting them, for the short journey from the flight deck, along the catwalk, and into the bomb bay, is exhausting. The dispatcher helps them pull on their parachutes, and they sit down heavily, like three large slugs.
The altitude sickness is added to the queasiness in Tom’s gut and makes his head throb and swim. The Halifax suddenly bucks and jumps. Caught in down-draughts, the aircraft begins to lurch and yaw. Then it is turning, circling.
‘Skipper’s seen the fires,’ the sergeant informs them. They themselves can see nothing from the windowless bomb bay. ‘Dropping to four thousand feet.’ Wearing a body harness tied to the plane, the sergeant removes a wooden cover from a hole about four feet in diameter in the floor.
Large metal containers of explosives, guns and ammunition are attached to the undersides of the wings. They have been cut loose. The red warning light on the ceiling comes on as the pilot starts his second pass. They hear the engine power cut: the aircraft slows, rapidly loses altitude. Then the engines come back on full power, they feel the plane lunge forward, climb steeply, then bank in a sharp turn. The dispatcher moves two cargo containers with the mission’s radio and batteries, backpacks, medical supplies to the edge of the hole, and clips the ends of static lines to rings on the parachutes for each one.
When the green light comes on the sergeant pushes out the containers. It will be our turn next, Tom can see. His mind is so woozy he wonders if he will faint. The static lines, having pulled open the container chutes as they fell away from the plane, rattle drily against the underside of the aircraft. The sergeant pulls them in as the plane circles again.
How uncanny it is, it strikes Tom, that I am here, in this clattering lump of leaden deadweight metal, in the night sky high above a strange country. How unlikely. How odd. His mind is detaching from him.
Sid says something, and Jack nods, but they seem, bizarrely, to be twenty or thirty feet away from Tom. They are like little copies of themselves, homunculi mocking him. He realises that he cannot focus on what is happening. Jack Farwell’s reptilian face appears childlike, fragile, adrift, that of a despised, overweight schoolboy; Tom feels a sudden, immense pity for him. Sid Dixon looks back at him now, and smiles, as if he knows what is passing through Tom’s mind for it passes through his, in union.
The sergeant hooks static lines to the parachutes strapped on Jack and Tom’s backs. Perhaps these are really wings. Jack and Tom take their positions sitting on the edge of the hole across from each other. Its sides are some feet deep, to keep their legs from the plane’s rushing slipstream. Sitting there on training jumps, his eyes fixed on the ground far below, Tom was often paralysed by fear, and had to be given a shove. Now he stares into a black night void below him. He is freezing cold, yet he can feel a neat line of sweat trickling down his spine.
Again the engines are throttled back and the flaps lowered, and again Tom’s stomach is in his mouth as the plane seems to plummet hundreds of feet.
Tom glances across at Farwell: Jack gazes placidly into the dark. The coloured lamp is on again, red for Action Stations. Tom pulls on the end of the static line attached to the plane to make sure that it is tight. Then he reaches over his shoulder and tugs on the end attached to his parachute. The thought occurs to him that the crew are Axis spies, tipping parachuteless Allied soldiers out of planes. They want to kill him. Jesus Christ. The light is green for Jump.
‘Go!’ yells the dispatcher, and Jack Farwell, as senior officer, disappears. A moment later the sergeant repeats his command. Tom closes his eyes, grits his teeth, and shakes his head. ‘No,’ he whispers. He feels the sergeant’s boot between his shoulder blades.
Tom plummets into a whirlpool of cold wind. It rips and tears at his clothing. He is tossed and buffeted. He is both a dead weight dropping and a tumbling speck of fluff. Mountains, stars, clouds whirl around him. He catches a single glimpse of the big plane, going away over his right shoulder, before he is yanked up by the shoulders, and held in the secure grip of the harness. The swaying canopy of the parachute cuts a dark circle out of the sky above. Relief washes through every exultant pore of his flesh.
In the distance far below he can now see the fires marking the drop area. The noise of the aircraft engines dies away, and so too does the wind. There is no sound except for the rustle of air against the silk parachute. Tom hangs, motionless in the black night. The ground rises towards him. The earth tilts fast on its axis. The fires disappear from view around the crest of a hill.
In training they had been instructed never to anticipate landing, especially at night: reflexes are conditioned to the speed of a jump off a rock, and you expect to hit the ground a fraction of a second earlier than it actually happens. Legs are broken by this misjudgement. Instead keep your legs together, knees slightly bent, arms on the risers of the chute; relax, and roll with your fall when you reach terra firma.
Tom sees what he takes to be a pool of water some distance away, reflecting stars. Just as he is trying to make out other features of the landscape below, he hits the ground.
TOM HAS SURVIVED the drop. No broken bones. As he unbuckles the parachute he becomes aware of whooping and yelling in the darkness. Suddenly, he is seized by two sweat-smelly, rough-shaven young men. They hug him, and kiss him, then take him one by each arm and lead him he knows not where. There is a faint yellow light. A window. A peasant house. Jack Farwell is already there. Tom is given a shot of liquor that scalds his throat, but does not clear his head.
‘Slivovka, they call it,’ Jack says, grimacing. ‘A rough plum brandy. I’ve an awful feeling we’d better get used to it, Freedman.’
Sid Dixon is brought in. They are given more glasses of slivovka by men who propose noisy toasts. To Tito! To Churchill! Jack appears to have learned not a word of Slovene. Tom translates as best he can, though hardly well, his first day on the spot, throat burning, brain throbbing. Does Farwell expect him to hang on his shoulder and act as his interpreter? Of course he does.
While their arrival is celebrated in this manner, other members of the Partisan detachment bring in the containers scattered around the drop zone, and divide up the contents. Tom staggers outside. As he stands pissing against a tree he looks across and can make out a couple of fighters cutting a silk parachute into strips.
In the first light of morning they leave the house and enter a world taking shape before them, green meadows in high valleys speckled with wild flowers. Crocuses grow right up to the snow’s edge. Birds awaken and fill the thin air with their song.
The supplies are loaded on farm wagons that are pulled away by oxen along white chalk roads. The Englishmen are led on a shorter route, accompanied by half a dozen men in assorted clothes, the only sign of a uniform a red star sewn into whatever headgear each sports. Around them are mountains.
Tom turns to Sid Dixon behind him. ‘So this is where we are,’ he says. ‘This is where we shall be.’
Dixon nods. ‘It’ll do me, sir.’
The meadows are surrounded by dark pine forest. The outer tips of each sombre tree’s branches are a light, luminous green. In a pasture stands a twin-towered gateway facing the forest like the entrance to a great castle that has vanished. There comes the sound of bells, a flock of sheep ahead. Loath to pause their grazing, the greedy beasts scatter at the last moment to let the single file of men through. A young shepherd watches, never takes his eyes off them. They pass a tall stone tower with a conical roof, a fairy-tale tower. Tom sees Rapunzel, Rumpelstiltskin, Sleeping Beauty. They are being led not towards war but away from it, into an entrancing idyll. His head is thumping, his throat is dry, he has a terrible thirst but they do not stop.
Instead, three of the Partisans take the packs off the backs of the Englishmen, put them on their own, and up the pace.
They walk past white peasant houses with red tiled roofs. Children pause to gape at them: if greeted they wave back, shyly, or turn away. Women do not see them. An old man limps across from a barn to waylay them but the Partisans do not tarry and the old man fails to intercept the crocodile formation of ragged soldiers. He beseeches and complains with the tongue of a toothless mouth, lips working over his gums like a baby. Dixon breaks rank, runs across to hand the dotard a cigarette, then trots back to catch up with his companions.
To Tom’s surprise they do not stop: the march seems like a stroll to the Partisans, it costs them less effort than it does the Englishmen to haul their weight across the rolling surface of the earth. Neither do they speak, for while the foremost man in particular scrutinises the way ahead, the others too remain in a state of high alert. Jack Farwell, crimson-faced, breathes heavily, he takes off his jacket and ties its arms around his waist; ties his pullover around his neck. He looks like a kidnapped cricket umpire. Sweat darkens the armpits of his shirt, but he does not complain.
They descend into a boggy, marshy valley that is cool and dank. Tom listens, and realises the high-pitched calls of alpine birds have faded away. They approach the entrance of a cave out of which a brownish stream flows. As they pass he sees the slimy stream is made of frogs jumping and sliding over each other, hundreds and hundreds of common frogs, emerging from their winter home, out into the open.
They climb again, through a strange wild garden full of orchids. Above them are flashes of gold in the morning sun: the dipping flight of yellow wagtails. Tom feels nauseous from thirst and headache and tiredness but they do not stop. They emerge into still higher meadows. His gaze lowers from the mountains to the ground and he sees it is alive: the grass is seething. He blinks, wipes sweat from his eyes. There are black beetles on the stalks, and grasshoppers green as chlorophyll.
They stop at a place where water comes out of the hill from a spout of rock. The Partisans bid them take it in turns to fill their bellies with the cool rust-coloured water that leaves a taste of metal on the tongue. When their turn comes the Slovenes grunt with pleasure.
‘The best mineral water in Yugoslavia,’ one of them proclaims, rubbing his stomach in a circular motion, and Tom translates. ‘Very good for the liver.’
They walk between peaks in another meadow where the petals of wild flowers take off and fly in the air from one to another, flower dancing to flower. Drawing closer, Tom sees they are not petals but butterflies, blurs of crimson, yellow, violet. Electric-blue dragonflies, too, and other insects, vibrant and buzzing with a gorgeous satiation of spring.
They descend steeply into a snug valley, and move towards a village. As they approach, the Partisans take up their weapons, though they barely slow and do not stop. At a certain distance it becomes apparent there are no roofs on the houses, or on the church. A smell of charcoal comes to Tom’s nostrils.
Every building is open to the sky, blackened by fire. The village is deserted. Houses are pockmarked with bullet holes. On a blank wall a half-washed-out inscription, Il Duce ha sempre ragione. Across it scrawled in red paint, Smrt fašizem – Svoboda Naroda. Death to fascism – freedom to the people. Zivio Tito.
Again they climb, into wooded hills, the ground is chalk and flint beneath their aching feet and the trees are beech now. Once, they pass a tiny stone forester’s hut, like the home of a troll. The smooth younger beech trunks reach from the earth like the slender limbs of young women, as if this were a place in nature where vegetable aspired to animal. Tom is reminded of strolling in the Chilterns with the family dogs. He has a memory of drinking bitter: yeasty and leaving the taste of hops to linger on the tongue. These beech forests, though, unroll on and on through the afternoon, with no tarmacadamed lanes to cross, no country pub in which to slake one’s thirst with a pint of warm beer. No, there is nothing here but ridge after ridge of beech trees across an endless corrugated escarpment.
Tom remembers his mother on those walks, how the dogs went sniffing after their own adventures but kept coming back to her; to check they hadn’t lost her. When his attention returns to his surroundings, he finds that the trees have turned from beech to pine. The scent of sap mixes with the smell of needles mulching underfoot, and they walk without cease for two more hours.
And then at last, just as the light is fading in the woods, they are precipitously descending and begin to glimpse through the trees an open vista. As they come out of the forest the Partisans relax, light cigarettes, ease out of the single-file formation, let the pace slow, a little, as they walk down off the hills. They drop through orchards of fruit trees, the highest still with pink and white blossom, petals falling upon them as they descend, now – the Englishmen are assured – in safe territory.
They are greeted by the senior British liaison officer, Captain Wilson. He puts Jack and Tom up in a peasant hovel that serves as British Mission in a hamlet half a mile from the small town of Semic, home of the Slovene Partisan Headquarters. They have walked for fifteen hours; they have not slept for forty-eight. Sid Dixon does not want to rest until his radio equipment arrives; the officers do not wait.
We are here, Tom thinks, as he puts his head down. We have made it.
BREAKFAST CONSISTS OF tea and porridge, on which Tom pours fresh creamy milk, still warm from the cow’s udder.
‘We’re well supplied now,’ Wilson says. ‘Here, that is. Not where you’re going, I’m afraid.’
The small room is furnished with a table and four chairs. Kit bags, files and attaché cases are piled in corners. When the table has been cleared Farwell and Wilson lay out their maps. ‘So here’s the Ljubljana Gap,’ Jack says. ‘Cut through the Alps.’
‘A double-track railway line runs through it,’ Wilson says, stuffing his pipe with black tobacco. ‘It was built by the Habsburgs to connect Vienna with Trieste, their port in the Adriatic.’
‘You want to listen to this, Freedman,’ Farwell says, as if Tom were not already intent on every word.
‘You’re being sent into the German-occupied zone – they call it Styria, the Jugs call it Stajerska – to supply Slovene Partisans with the means to attack rail lines running to and from the Gap.’
‘To block the movement of German troops to the Italian front?’ Tom asks.
‘Very good, Lieutenant,’ Wilson says.
‘Or,’ Farwell adds, ‘as we prevail in Italy, to stop them retreating to deploy elsewhere.’
‘You’ll move around,’ Wilson says, waving his pipe at the map, ‘coordinating drops of explosives.’
‘How much ease of movement will there be?’ Tom asks.
Wilson lights his pipe. The smell is less of tobacco than of a garden fire. ‘The total strength of the Liberation Front in the Fourth Zone,’ he says, ‘is, as far as I can gather through the fog of their exaggerations, some two thousand men. They’re in small companies or tiny groups, odreds, scattered across three thousand square miles of mountains and valleys. Most are poorly armed. They’ve attacked the odd road convoy, retreated into the woods. Been living hand to mouth, most of them, reliant on peasants who are terrified of reprisal.’
‘And what do they face up there?’ Jack Farwell asks.
Wilson does not look up to meet Jack’s gaze but continues to peer at the map. ‘A force of thirty-five thousand, if you add together the Germans and their Slovene Home Guard quislings.’
Tom catches Jack’s eye. Jack frowns, his lips tighten. ‘I rather like long odds,’ he says. ‘At the racetrack, the longer the better.’ He lights a cigarette, takes a deep drag, lets out a long plume of smoke. ‘In war one’s a little less fond of such a gamble.’ He lifts his shoulders. ‘Well, gentlemen, we’d better get going.’
‘Not right away, I’m afraid,’ Wilson says. He tells them that a German offensive is in progress in the Fourth Zone, and it’s not possible to take them there for the moment.
‘Don’t they know,’ Jack snaps, ‘what’s going on at Monte Cassino?’
Tom finds Sid Dixon, so they can report their safe arrival. First the message must be enciphered. This was the part of his recent training Tom had most enjoyed, using the Worked Out Key system: from a thick paper pad he takes out a page of letters set out at random; the base in Bari will have an identical copy of this page to decipher the message. Above the letters Tom writes the letters of his message, making of each one a pair.
Now he takes a small square of silk which has the alphabet across the top and down the side, and in the middle a random jumble of letters. He finds the first letter of the first pair along the line at the top of the silk, and the second letter down the side, and finds the random letter at their intersection in the middle. This is the first letter of his message, which he writes on a fresh piece of paper. Tom continues. It is painstaking, concentrated work that suits his studious temperament. At one point something causes his attention to waver: he looks up and sees Jack watching him, shaking his head.
‘Do you want to check these?’ Tom asks.
‘Good heavens, no,’ Jack replies. ‘I have complete trust in you, Freedman. You remind me of my Cassie doing the Times crossword puzzle. Plodding work. Admirable!’
When the message is complete, Tom gives it to Sid Dixon, who makes radio contact with base and then taps out the Morse code with nicotined fingers on his brass key.
Captain Wilson obtains an audience with the Partisan military leadership, and takes Jack Farwell in to Semic. Curious to explore the town himself, Tom follows after them, stiff from yesterday’s march. He passes squat wooden houses, surrounded by orchards with different varieties of tree, and open ground on which animals are tethered to stakes in the grass. A cow and goats graze. A boy leads a pig by a long rope, the end attached to a ring in its nose. A jeep passes Tom on the rough road. Clouds intermittently block the bright sun, but the morning is warm. Two children, a boy and a girl, stand and watch him: they are so immobile it is as if they believe that, should they be able to contain the least twitch of movement, they may remain invisible to him. Even when he has walked twenty yards past them and glances back he sees that they have not shifted an inch. Yet they do not look as though they are straining to achieve this effect: their shy country stillness is natural, effortless.
There are, among the orchards, vegetable plots from which green shoots and leaves are burgeoning. In one, a thin woman bends and hoes between lines, with swift rhythmic repetition.
Tom makes his way towards the pewterish bulbous top of a church tower. The houses are built of stone now, painted pastel colours, with red tiled roofs. They stand closer together; their orchards and gardens have shrunk. Horse chestnuts stand at the sides of the road, graceful candelabras of pink and white blossoms rise from their green-leaved branches. Wild asparagus grows at the verge.
Chained dogs emit low snarls of welcome. Tom admires the overhang of a wooden porch, finely proportioned yet by its marks rough-hewn. He inspects an icon of the Virgin Mary in a wall niche, her shoulders dolorously rounded and her eyes cast downward. ‘For he that is mighty hath magnified me,’ Tom whispers to himself. ‘He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.’
There is one dog unchained: a scrawny black mongrel, whose legs look too long for his terrier-like body, walks with a high-stepping gait, as if he’s on his way to market. He pauses, observes Tom with an air of snooty appraisal. When he has seen enough to satisfy his curiosity he turns and resumes his progress.
There is little sign of artillery or military vehicles. This is not a garrison town but a large country village that has found itself at the centre of events. Two men in uniform trot past on sturdy ponies. A peasant woman walks beside an old nag drawing a tiny cart. As it overtakes him, Tom sees the bed of the cart is filled with jars of something, he cannot tell what. A white-haired man is clearing the road up ahead with a shovel and wheelbarrow. The town’s street cleaner? As Tom gets closer he sees the only refuse the man is collecting is horse dung. The dense globules of digested grass are halfway back to mud already; they will soon be dug into the old man’s garden. Tom overtakes him, inhales the sharp sweet odour of the ruminant’s ordure. The day is warm, the air thin and clear. There is a buzzing of insects in the background.
Around the square in the centre of the village, clusters of oddly uniformed men, and a few women, bristle with intent, speaking to each other loudly and decisively. Tom tries shyly to eavesdrop, but understands little of what the jabbering soldiers say. Ignoring him, they come to mysterious decisions, part from one another at purposeful speed. One jumps onto a motorbike, kicks the stand away and pushes off in a single flurry of movement; he veers off out of the square in a plume of dust. The smell of petroleum is different from that in England; less chemical.
The army and the townspeople appear to coexist, in parallel. Like those childish notions of ghosts, Tom thinks, who linger beside us but in an alternative dimension, unseen except in queer atmospheric conditions. Soldiers and civilians, trying to ignore each other.
Around noon, in a birch grove on the east side of the village, Tom comes across a group of a dozen British officers and men. They sit dazed and stupefied in the grass, eyes closed or gazing into space like long-demented men. He gets talking to them. They are escaped prisoners of war who have slogged down through Austria and Stajerska, over the mountains, evading German patrols. Half of them wear ragged civilian clothing; most of their boots are broken; the men are in bad shape, with sores and abrasions that will not heal because of their poor diet. They are waiting to be escorted further, into Croatia and on to the Adriatic coast.
A young Slovene appears with a gaggle of children bearing food: bread, cheese, three bottles of thin red wine, which they pass around. The youth introduces himself to Tom. Pero has guided the Brits along the last leg of their journey here. He is a Slovene student from a town called Celje. He has a Scottish mother, he says, explaining his fine English. He is being assigned to Tom’s group as their courier and interpreter. He is a tall, willowy youth with a broad peasant’s face yet fine features, giving the impression of both solidity and subtlety; his movements are quick and keen.
‘Come, I want to show you,’ he says. Bowing, he takes Tom deferentially by the elbow. Glancing back, Tom’s eyes meet those of one of the exhausted British officers, who manages a wry smile and rolls his eyes.
As they walk Pero speaks, rapidly, of his wish to hike one day across the Scottish Highlands. ‘To visit the site of my ancestors’ crofts,’ he tells Tom. ‘Before they were turned out. I want to gaze at the architecture of Edinburgh.’ The boy’s eyes are wide and shining, as if the prospect lies before him now. ‘The Athens of the North,’ he says, conclusively. He has taken on his mother’s nostalgia for the home of her birth.
‘It is so good you have come, our Allies, Russia’s allies. We are all so happy you are here, you know.’
‘We are glad to help,’ Tom assures him.
They stop before a line of graffiti. Freshly written in white chalk on a grey wall are words Pero translates: The people shall write their own destiny.
‘This is what we are doing here,’ he says. ‘Our great Slovene poet, Ivan Cankar, wrote those words forty years ago, and we are making his prophecy come true today.’
Tom, impressed but non-plussed at this earnest enthusiasm, is not sure what to say. Pero removes the cap from his head, lays it flat on his palm, gestures to the red star sewn upon it.
‘Of course, the people have to be led by an avant-garde ideologically capable of setting out a government, and of building a truly democratic society.’ Pero takes Tom’s arm as he speaks. ‘I’m sure you know that foreign rulers have referred to the Slovenes as a nation of servants.’
Tom knows, to his regret, no such thing, nor much else at all about the place he’s come to. He thinks of how Napoleon had derided the English as a nation of shopkeepers. Well, that was before Waterloo, was it not? But something from a long-lost history lesson suggests to him that Napoleon was popular in these parts. Had he got down here? Surely not. Across the Alps?
‘Yes, we are servants,’ Pero tells him proudly. ‘We are servants of the people!’
JACK FARWELL WAS kept waiting yesterday. ‘They tried to fob me off,’ he reiterates, with irate incredulity, at breakfast. He is not a man to stand for such treatment. Having eaten, Jack is about to return to the Partisan Headquarters to pursue his cause there when a Partisan major comes to their house and introduces himself. He is heading for the Fourth Zone himself and has been ordered to accompany them on their journey north; he is to be responsible for their safety. Tom translates as best he can into English.
‘Our safety?’ Jack asks, looking the man up and down. ‘You’re the one sent to keep an eye on us, are you? Well, it’s good to know we’re to leave eventually.’ Although they are of equal rank, Jack barges past him, and out of the house.
Embarrassed by Jack’s rudeness, Tom wishes to apologise. He wonders if this would be classed as insubordination. The major, meanwhile, watches Farwell walk away; his expression remains blank, revealing neither annoyance nor amusement.
‘Please come in, sir,’ Tom says. ‘Let me offer you a cup of tea. Though I’ve an awful feeling we’ve just finished the milk.’
The major turns his attention to Tom: there is a moment’s piercing contemplation, and what Tom experiences as some kind of electric jolt of recognition. The major’s blank face cracks open in a wry smile. Perhaps the recognition was one of humour; that they might be meeting on the same plane of ironic amusement. ‘I should love to,’ he says. ‘And do not worry about the milk. It is an odd British taste anyhow. I take my tea black.’
The major’s name is Jovan Vaskovicˇ. He asks about their journey here. Tom tells it as a series of blunders only enormous luck carried them through.
‘I would like to jump from a plane,’ Jovan says. ‘I doubt if I will ever have the chance.’ His brown eyes are the colour of hazelnut shells that have just turned from green to fawn; the skin crinkles at the edges of his eyes. His face is lined, crooked, well lived-in.
Jovan meets Sid Dixon, sees the radio they are to take with them. ‘My men will protect this machine with their lives,’ he promises Sid.
‘I should like to show you something,’ Jovan tells Tom, who readily agrees. They walk along a gravel road out of Semic, away from the hills into a flattish, uneven landscape. Rows of vegetation ankle- or knee-high in the fields. Copses of birch trees and scrub. Green stalks of bracken, the pale ends of their curled fronds droop modestly before they burgeon wide. Today the air is cooler, and the sky is streaked with dull clouds.
‘The medical supplies we receive from your planes are very good,’ Jovan says. ‘But we do not have enough.’
‘Then we must get you more,’ Tom says.
‘Also, the wrong medicines. Sometimes we think they are sent as a joke.’
‘A joke?’ Tom repeats. ‘Having met them recently, I don’t think the blokes in Stores have a sense of humour.’
Jovan nods, smiling. Again their eyes meet, and there is that feeling, for Tom, of contact at the surface revealing a deeper meeting, too. ‘Last month,’ Jovan says, ‘we received a parachute container full of atrobin.’
‘I should know what that is,’ Tom confesses. ‘My father is a pharmacist. But I’m not sure I do.’
‘Atrobin is an excellent drug,’ Jovan nods, ‘for curing malaria. Very effective. But there’s been little malaria in Slovenia for a few thousand years, I believe.’
‘I’m merely a lieutenant,’ Tom tells Jovan. ‘But I’ll do what I can.’
‘How long have you been doing this work?’ Jovan asks him.
Tom wonders if Jovan is being polite: is it obvious? He feels it must be apparent in everything he says and does. ‘Since nineteen forty. My tutor at Oxford joined intelligence, and asked for me to join him. We interpreted information, and also helped agents preparing to go into occupied Europe. But this is my first time in the field.’
A pair of army trucks pass them in a cloud of white dust. As it settles, quiet returns to the landscape like water recomposing its surface after a disturbance. In the distance across the plain a white wispy column of smoke rises. They reach a small village. An old woman is planting something in a stone basin outside a house. Jovan stops and asks Tom, ‘Which of these houses do you think is the hospital?’
‘The hospital?’ Tom looks around. Did he hear right? ‘Bolnišnica?’
‘I was asked the same thing a week ago,’ Jovan says. ‘Standing where you are now. I did not know the answer.’
A girl walks out of a house, and across a patch of grass. She looks over, takes in the two men, pays them no heed; disappears into another house. ‘Neither do I,’ Tom admits.
Jovan spreads his arms. ‘They all are,’ he says, and resumes walking. ‘Each house is a different ward. This whole village has become a hospital. The inhabitants have moved into the barns.’ He turns and points at a house. ‘That house is the maternity unit. The one over there, I believe, is the bakery. And there the children wash blood out of the bandages, with ash if they have no water. Come.’
They reach a stucco-fronted house. Jovan opens the dark wooden front door. Tom follows, into a short dim hallway. A door opens, and a man steps into the passage wearing an apron like a decorator, covered in paint. Or rather a butcher, Tom realises, for it is blood. With the man comes an aroma of alcohol. He passes them and steps outside. Jovan leads Tom into a room. On rough trestles lie what look like open coffins. Eight of them in the room, the heads of four against each of two opposite walls; just enough room between them for one person to stand. On each boxed-bed lies a wounded man. Some have limbs in splints. All lie silent, stoic. Again the stink of liquor, combined with a faint sweet smell of putrefaction. A girl of fourteen or fifteen comes into the room, and goes to a patient in the corner. Jovan leads the way back out.
‘The men,’ Tom says.
‘They’ve gone into the woods,’ Jovan says. ‘They are with the Partisans. The girls run the village, as you see,’ he says. ‘They have been quicker to adapt than their mothers.’ As they walk back towards Semic, Jovan tells him of a Partisan choir of wounded soldiers, who sing in hospitals, and on the front line.
‘Will this area remain safe?’ Tom asks him.
Jovan shrugs. ‘Nothing is certain. There are Home Guards – collaborators – garrisoned all around this district, Bela Krajina. The Germans prod them into launching counter-offensives. Our people retreat into the hills. The Home Guard take back a slice of the plain. Most of them stick close to their village, as Partisans do if they can. Whether a man joined us or the Home Guard seems to have depended upon whether the priest of his village had socialist leanings or was anti-communist.’
Titovka