In the Light of Morning Page 5

  They cross the frontier. Just before they enter forest on the northern side Tom glances to his left. A smudge of white on the horizon: clearly visible, what he presumes must be, ten or twenty miles to the west, the lights of Ljubljana.

  The moon sets, and the forest is pitch black. Tom listens for the sound of the man ahead, and blindly follows him, a sightless pilgrim. They scramble up wooded ridges, splash through streams, stumble down scree. At some dark unidentifiable place they meet another new courier, who takes them forward across the double-track railroad connecting Vienna with Italy: the very target, further north, of their intended attacks.

  Beyond the rail tracks lies the wide flowing Sava. The soldiers of the Partisan escort return to their village south of the frontier. The courier, Jovan, Pero and the Englishmen are ferried across the river, one at a time, each with equipment, in a tiny rowing boat. As Tom, the last man, comes over the first light of dawn is beginning to illuminate the scene – the ferryman’s oars dipping into the water, the shape of the boat girdling him – but in a ghostly, partial way, as if the night will not easily let go of its black ubiquity, until Tom realises that the river is covered in mist. When he reaches the far bank there is a new patrol ready to escort them on.

  They dash across an empty road and with relief enter forest beyond, climbing steadily up into the mountains. After some hours of hiking they reach the patrol’s farmhouse headquarters: there these new arrivals in the Third Reich lie down, exhausted, and sleep.

  June 6

  DAYS AND NIGHTS have passed, walking in the dark, waiting; eating, marching on.

  When permitted to sleep, Tom slips swiftly into exhausted unconsciousness. On the hard ground, whether in peasants’ houses or in the forest, his weight makes his hip or shoulder ache: the pain registers somewhere in his dreaming brain but is not enough to pull him out of the depths of sleep.

  When they wake, a farmer’s wife feeds them bread and broth. Neither she nor her husband look in their direction.

  ‘It’s bad enough to help Partisans,’ Jovan tells Tom. ‘To help you, foreign soldiers, that is very dangerous for them. They are simple people: I believe they hope that if they have not seen you, no one can prove you were here.’

  In the hot afternoon Sid Dixon rolls up his trouser legs to make them into shorts. Jack Farwell pretends to be blinded by the glare.

  ‘Good God, Corporal, have those legs ever seen daylight before?’

  ‘Should a seen me in the desert, sir,’ Sid replies. ‘Proper darkie, I was.’

  As darkness falls they set off with a young courier. They move forward in silence, at a fast pace. Tom walks the stiffness out of his limbs. For a while he feels strong, but worries he’ll flag before too long. He regrets the active service he’s missed out on; sports lessons he bunked off at school. He is impressed that Jack Farwell, more than ten years older than Sid Dixon or himself, has not yet grumbled.

  Tom bumps abruptly into the Partisan in front of him. Can feel the breath of the man behind him. They grasp their weapons then stand still, on guard, making no noise; so as to hear the enemy. Something has been spotted, or heard, or sensed, up ahead. The courier slips back past Tom. They turn around. The rear of the line becomes the front. They retrace their steps, and take a different, more circuitous route.

  If there is a hill, however steep, they never track around but are forced up it – breathless, lungs heaving, sweating profusely – and descend the other side, knees taking the strain.

  Later on in the night it happens again, the whisper of a German patrol; again they double back, resume. The threat is intangible; their response feels like a nocturnal, adult version of childhood games he recalls from Scouts. Or the Great Game, revived, transposed from the north-west frontier to the Balkans, the Khyber Pass to the Ljubljana Gap. Tom is not an aching, sweating foot soldier, with not the foggiest idea where he is, but a representative of the British Empire. His companions are, what? Like the Pathan Musselmans in the British Indian Army… They walk in silence, each tired mind a world unto itself.

  They are met in the darkness by a new courier, a girl this time, who, fresh and unencumbered, resumes without pause at a hard pace. Jack Farwell now objects, but Jovan says they have to make their destination before daybreak. Tom wonders whether Jovan is assessing them, their physical resolve, so he will know what they are capable of when truly tested? Jack Farwell struggles on.

  June 9

  THE DAYS PROGRESS one into another. They reach tiny farmhouses high in the mountains. Food is mutton stew, if they are lucky, or more often a watery bean soup. Dark, heavy bread. White wine. Waking in the afternoon squashed together in a room, or a hayloft. The stink of sweating feet, of unwashed socks. Ablutions. Jack and Tom shaving in a pigs trough; Sid Dixon lets his beard grow.

  ‘You still look like a yokel,’ Jack tells him, ‘but now it’s from the last century.’

  The nights are dark, lit fitfully by flashes of far-off gunfire and by signal rockets. The mountains are hostile, pitted with gullies and trackless rock. As they climb higher, each of the Englishmen feels some nausea. At one point their path is cut into the side of a rock face. Tom shuffles forward, crabwise, feeling his way against the cold rock, vertigo making him shrink and cower. Jack Farwell enjoys Tom’s grave discomfort. ‘Just as well it’s dark, Freedman,’ he jeers. ‘You can’t see the sheer drop.’

  ‘You don’t think I’m cut out for this, do you?’ Tom asks him when they pause to rest.

  ‘What I think counts for nothing,’ Jack says. ‘You’re precisely the sort they go for now. The back-room boys don’t really trust impulsive types like me. Reflective, that’s the word, that’s what they prefer these days.’

  Tom is not sure how to take Jack’s comments, though he knows he’s being needled.

  ‘With me, what you see is what there is,’ Jack continues. ‘You may not like it. I don’t give a damn.’ He takes a puff on his cigar then hurls it down the rocky incline. ‘That’s the last of them,’ he says. He puts an arm on Tom’s shoulder. ‘Might do well to steer clear of me the next day or two, old chap.’

  In the afternoon Sid Dixon sends messages to Italy, and receives others back. Tito and his staff, and the foreign Missions, are safe. The US Fifth Army has entered Rome. Then he switches to the short-wave Forces programme. Those three familiar short notes and one long one; the Beethoven Fifth; the BBC. An announcement. Sid lifts his headphones. ‘The second front!’ he yells. ‘It’s begun!’ Tom translates: four thousand ships are taking troops and guns across the Channel; the RAF is bombing German coastal defences. Before Jovan can stop them, two of the Partisans shoot their guns in the air. Others hug the English soldiers. A couple start chanting something.

  Jack Farwell is beaming. ‘Well, old boy,’ he says to Tom, ‘it’s started. The push from the west.’ He lights a cigarette, takes one puff, grimaces and throws it away. ‘I say, Freedman, what are those boys yelling? Up the Arsenal?’

  ‘Nasa je Trst!’ Tom tells him. ‘Trieste is ours!’

  ‘Well, why not?’ Jack nods. ‘Let the blighters yell.’

  Later, while they eat, Jovan makes the men who’d let loose their rifles stand guard for their indiscipline. Jovan is an outsider to the rest of these Slovene Partisans. Tom hears them refer to him as ‘the Spaniard’. He asks Jovan why.

  ‘My father was a merchant in Herzegovina. I was sent to Belgrade to study law.’ There, Jovan explains, he was drawn into the milieu of progressive student clubs; by the time he graduated, in 1937, he had been imprisoned twice for his membership of the outlawed Communist Party. The party sent him to Spain, where he fought for the Republicans in the Civil War. Upon their defeat he escaped to France, and spent the next two years in an internment camp, along with a number of other Yugoslav communists. To Tom’s disappointment, Jack joins them.

  ‘Those two years,’ Jovan continues, ‘we developed a twin conviction: that revolution is first and foremost a national affair; but that communism is international or it is n
othing.’

  ‘“International” meaning everyone does as Uncle Joe tells them?’ Farwell asks.

  Tom winces at Jack’s rudeness, but Jovan only smiles. ‘We trust the representatives of the British Empire,’ he says, ‘will teach us helpful lessons in colonial freedoms.’

  ‘Indeed we will, Major,’ Jack responds. ‘We’ve given civilisation to half the benighted peoples of this world. Something to be damned proud of, I’d say. We’ll be glad to help you out as well.’

  Jovan is far removed from the kind of dogmatist Tom had imagined; his amusement makes Farwell, splenetic apologist for parliamentary democracy, appear the demagogue. In 1940 he returned from the camps in France, through conspiratorial party channels, to Belgrade. A number of the Partisan army divisional commanders, and generals, he says, are Spanish veterans. Jovan has been with the Liberation Front since the surrender of April 1941, and Axis occupation. First those frustrating months of waiting, until the Soviet–Axis pact was torn up with Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Then the rising in Serbia in the summer.

  ‘It is also true,’ Jovan admits, ‘that they prefer to think of me as a Spaniard than a Serb. All the Serbs they saw in Slovenia were either business sharks or military officers giving orders.’

  They walk on through another night. Tom becomes an automaton, walking. Each member of the patrol has by now informed his English guests how beautiful Slovenia is; the most enchanting region in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, by far. While they walk across it in darkness. Now and then Farwell will mutter to Dixon, ‘Beautiful country, Corporal,’ followed by sardonic chuckles.

  June 10

  THEY WAIT, IN the forest.

  The resistance headquarters is constantly on the move in this annexed country, as are all the assorted Partisan patrols and platoons scattered amongst the mountains and forests. All rely on couriers, who try to keep track of the shifting paths and ever-altering positions.

  Pero began his Partisan career, he tells Tom proudly, as a boy courier, running lines across an area around his family farm. ‘I have carried many messages between our headquarters in the south and here in the Fourth Zone. I have guided one group of walking wounded to a hidden hospital. And the escaped Allied prisoners of war and downed airmen you met, who are heading for evacuation to Italy.’ The courier system, he says, is a wartime expression of Balkan hospitality: a traveller will not be let go by his host until escorted onward and delivered into safe hands in the next village. ‘It is our tradition,’ Pero says, with a modest shrug, as if they might prefer to live less honourably if they had the choice, but their ancestors have left them none.

  No courier knows the identity of more than one comrade, Pero explains, in either direction. The contact points between segments of the line are changed every few days. There are certain post boxes – a hole in a tree trunk or rock – where messages can be left without two people having to meet. ‘One of our couriers was a woman with a baby,’ Pero says, eyes wide at the gall of it. ‘She hid messages in the baby’s nappy.’

  They sit tight in the woods. It seems a link in the chain has been broken, and they wait for its mending. Cast adrift of these tenuous necklaces of boys and girls draped across the forested mountains, they are just an isolated band, easy prey. Tom reads, from the only book he has with him, his New Testament. He reads of those who wished to join Jesus and his disciples. ‘Lord, let me first say farewell to those at my home.’ But Jesus said to him, ‘No one who puts his hand to the plough and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.’

  It is, he thinks, all or nothing. Jack sees what he is reading.

  ‘Good for you, Freedman,’ he says. ‘I’m glad one of us is keeping in with the top brass. Back home, Cassie goes to church for both of us.’

  Darkness falls. Suddenly there is a call, some commotion, and the man on lookout brings in a young boy: their next courier has found them.

  Contact regained, their march resumes in moonlight. Above the forest they follow their own moonshadows. They scramble across a steep bank of scree, loose rocks clanking and thudding below them, and up onto a long ridge. Tom watches his feet plod, one after the other; a hundred times, a thousand times. Then something attracts his attention: a small brightness, on the ground. There. And then again, a few yards further on, to the left, a light on the ground. It is in water, a puddle at the side of the track.

  Something clicks in Tom’s brain and he tips his head back. The sky is adazzle with bright white jewels. He has never in his life seen half as many stars. It’s a wonder they can all fit in the sky. He could reach out and scoop a handful, let them trickle sparkling through his fingers. The man behind him curses. Tom takes a deep breath, and resumes walking, trotting to catch up with the man in front.

  They are back in pine woods. After a while Tom becomes aware of a blueness being breathed into the silvered air; plants slowly assume colour, it seems to seep into them; and his muscles are presented with a new challenge: beside the path grow wild strawberries. Tom bends to pick one. The taste of it makes his head swoon. He had forgotten food could be so delicious. He picks another. As he straightens, the discomfort in his back, lifting the forty-pound load in his pack, is immense. Ahead of him he can see others bend to pick a strawberry too, stooping as they walk. He wishes Jovan would let them pause, but understands by now that there is no chance that they will, in daylight, still short of that night’s destination. He bends and plucks one more: strains to regain upright posture. The small berries are red, and ripe, enticingly growing all along either side of the path. Tom decides he has with great reluctance to forego the pleasure. He can see those ahead of him coming to the same sorry conclusion. They carry on, their shoulders slumped, heads bowed.

  That evening, after the day’s sleep, just as they prepare to resume, a courier arrives with a message informing them that they are only an hour from Fourth Zone HQ and requesting that they wait until morning, so that they can be greeted with due and proper ceremony.

  June 13

  THEY FIND THE headquarters in a forest encampment: a force of some hundred men, a number of whom are lined up, bearing a tattered flag – Tom recognises the pre-war blue, white and red Yugoslav national flag, but now it also has a red star imposed upon it. The soldiers wear a scrappy mixture of ragged German uniforms and civilian clothes: each man bears a different weapon. Some look home-made: simple open bolt, blowback operated guns or sub-machine guns fashioned from nine-millimetre steel tubing. Tom wonders at their parts: what rudimentary ratchets and recoil springs can be inside? The men look to him like a company of tramps, weather-beaten men of the road, vagabonds in the forest. Is this the army they have toiled so far across hostile terrain to join?

  Jack Farwell accompanies the commander down the motley line, returning the salute with a rigid formality, just as if he were beside the King himself, inspecting the Coldstream Guards. He then addresses them with exactly the same words with which he’d toasted the Slovene headquarters staff in Semic three weeks earlier; and arouses a similarly enthusiastic response. They wave guns, shake hands, beam at him. There are drinks and toasts.

  It is evening. They are eating stew cooked up by two women in a large iron vat over an open fire. Tom wonders who carries the cauldron when they move. How much must it weigh? He watches Jovan eating: he consumes his food with speedy relish, enjoying every mouthful and then forgetting the meal instantly, for it has done its job. Tom is still eating. He carries his mess tin over to Jovan and sits beside him before he can get up and walk away.

  ‘What’s to be your role here, Jovan?’ Tom asks.

  ‘I have been sent to Slovenia to be the political commissar here, in the Fourth Zone,’ Jovan tells him. ‘I perform my duty, where it leads me.’ He talks to Tom of his youth. Jovan’s family, Serb merchants from western Herzegovina, could afford to support him all year round in Belgrade. Most families could not. More than a thousand students at Belgrade University lived for most of the year in the villages of Herzegovina, Bo
snia, Montenegro, cutting the grass or tending the sheep with book in hand. They came to Belgrade to sit their exams, and took back to the villages the ideas they encountered at the University. ‘It took more than forty hours on narrow-gauged trains, with long halts in Sarajevo and Mostar, to reach my father’s village.’

  It must have been like the earliest days of steam in England, Tom imagines, a hundred years earlier, when people were terrified by trains that moved at twenty miles per hour.

  ‘In the summer of nineteen thirty-six, after I took my Final examinations,’ Jovan tells Tom, ‘I travelled around Herzegovina with a small group of fellow communist students. We walked from one village to the next, tramping for hours over the burning limestone rocks, nothing to drink for hours. We met teachers and students, and talked with them. The seeds of revolution, you see, Tom, have been sewn in the minds of many people. Even of the peasants struggling to survive in that stony wilderness.’

  Tom thinks of his own student days, studying Molière, Goethe, in the upper reading room of the Radcliffe Camera, far away from the world below. And what did he ever do in the vacation? With how much more intent, and meaning, has Jovan lived? Tom thinks of Christ telling the wealthy man who said he had observed the commandments what else he must do to inherit eternal life. ‘Give away all you have and follow me,’ Jesus said. The man was crestfallen. ‘It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle,’ Jesus said, ‘than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.’

  ‘In those rocky places,’ Jovan continues, shaking his head, ‘where there is no earth, no mud, only a thin skin of red soil between stony walls. Such poverty, Tom, it was hard to believe. We resolved to be rid of it.’