Briefing for a Descent Into Hell (27 page)

Yours truly,

PHILIP BRENT-HAMPSTEAD

DOCTOR Y:
I’d like you to try something else, Professor. I’d like you to sit down and let yourself relax and try writing down anything that comes to you.

  
PATIENT
: What sort of thing?

DOCTOR Y:
Anything. Anything that might give us a lead in.

  
PATIENT
: Ariadne’s thread.

DOCTOR Y:
Exactly so. But let’s hope there is no Minotaur.

  
PATIENT
: But perhaps he would turn out to be an old friend, too?

DOCTOR Y:
Who knows? Well, will you try? A typewriter? A tape-recorder? I hear you are a very fine lecturer.

  
PATIENT
: What a lot of talents I have that I know nothing about.

Patient’s time is up at the end of this month. See no reason why he should not be transferred as previously discussed to the North Catchment
.

DOCTOR
x.

As patient is very tractable and amenable and co-operative and willing to assist with other patients I suggest this improvement should be consolidated by further stay here in present conditions
.
There is a precedent for an extension for another three weeks
.

DOCTOR Y
.

DEAR DOCTOR X
,

Thank you for your letter. I am so glad that my husband is so much better. Does he remember me and his family yet?

Yours sincerely,

FELICITY WATKINS

  
PATIENT
: Yes, I am trying, but I don’t know what to write about.

DOCTOR Y:
How about the war?

  
PATIENT
: Which war?

DOCTOR Y:
Y
OU
were in the last war, in the army, in North Africa and in Italy. You were under a Major General Brent-Hampstead. You had a friend called Miles Bovey.

  
PATIENT
: Miles. Miloš? Miloš, yes, I do think I … but he is dead.

DOCTOR Y
: I can assure you that he is not.

  
PATIENT
: They all of them were killed, in one way and another.

DOCTOR Y:
I’d like to read about it. Will you try?

The briefing was in the C.O.’s tent. I did not know until I got there what to expect. I had been told that I had been chosen for a special mission, but not what the mission was. I certainly had no idea that it was in Yugoslavia.

The Allies had been supporting Michailovitch. There
had been rumours for some months that Michailovitch was supporting Hitler and that Tito was the real opposition—which we should be giving all the aid we could. But Tito was a communist. Little was known about him. And things in Yugoslavia were confused, with ancient provincial and religious feuds being settled under the cover of the Tito-Michailovitch struggle.

The campaign to support Tito came first from the Left, which claimed that Britain was refusing to aid Tito because he was a communist, and that this was in line with the wider strategy of trying to remain the U.S.S.R.’s ally while containing or destroying local communist movements. Finally Churchill put in his oar, had gone over the heads of the “brass” to listen to better-informed left-wing advice about Yugoslavia. It had been decided to establish liaison with Tito’s Partisans and to make them trust us, the Allies, particularly Britain, by convincing them that we would no longer support Michailovitch or any other Nazi-oriented movement. We would offer the Partisans arms, men, equipment. But it was not at that time known exactly where the Partisans were. It had been decided to parachute in groups of us, where Partisans were thought to be.

There were twenty of us in the C.O.’s tent that night. We had been chosen for a miscellany of accomplishments. But we all spoke French or German or both. We could all ski, and in civilian life could be described as athletes. Mostly we were not known to each other. I sat next to a man who during the period of training became a close friend. His name was Miles Bovey.

During the next month we were put through our paces
in every way, toughened up physically, taught parachuting, taught how to use radio equipment, and given an adequate knowledge of the history of the country, with particular reference to the regional and religious conflicts which we were bound to encounter.

The final briefing saw our number reduced to twelve. Two men had been killed in parachute jumps. Another had cracked up and was in the hands of the psychiatrists. There were other casualties, trivial enough, a sprained ankle, a dislocated shoulder, but sufficient to disqualify a man for the jump and the ordeal after it.

Miles Bovey and I were to be together. We were to be dropped over the Bosnian mountains, to contact the Partisans.

The final briefing was primarily to tell us how to survive if we did not immediately contact the guerrillas. Also to instruct us in the event of our capture by the Germans or by local quisling groups. These instructions were very unsophisticated compared with what we now take for granted in the way of torture, preparations to withstand torture, drugs, psychological methods. We each were given a couple of poison pills to take in the case of extreme need. But implicit in our last briefing was the idea that we were expected to resist torture if caught, to stand up to it. The idea that human beings cannot stand up to torture and psychological methods and should not be expected to, had not yet become part of general knowledge. I cannot remember this idea being expressed even by implication at any time during my war service. I would not have allowed myself to hold it, and if I had heard someone else use it I would
have been shocked. And yet torture had been, was being, brought to its present height of sophistication everywhere the war had spread or might spread. We were in the condition of peasants in a technological society. We still believed in the power of heroism over any odds. I do know that men continue to resist torture against impossible odds, but frightful pressures have increased compassion: every soldier now who may have to face torture has as his property the knowledge that if he cannot stand it, if he cracks, he is not a coward and a poltroon, and that no one anywhere would think him one. Progress.

I can remember very clearly my fantasies of those few days of waiting, the daydreams that are the most useful of preparations for forthcoming stress or danger. My day-dreams—or plans—might have come out of a boy’s adventure story, or Beau Geste. The sordidness, the dirty-cellar nastiness, the psychological double-twisting of modern torture would have taken me completely by surprise if I had had the bad luck to be caught.

I and Miles Bovey were dropped together on a dark and very cold night into a total darkness. We might have been falling into the desert of the sea—or upwards into the nothingness of space—instead of into mountains where, we knew, were villages, and which were full of groups of fighting men, the Partisans and their opponents, the Chetniks.

Bovey dropped first. He gave me a small nod and a smile as he jumped—it was the last human contact he had. I did not even see the white of his parachute below me as I fell into the dark. The tiny gleam from the aircraft fled into the black overhead, and I swung down and down until
something black came swinging up—I missed the crown of a tall pine by a few feet and landed in a heap in a space between sharp rocks. I hurt my leg a little. It was four in the morning, and still night. It was cloudy: they had waited for a cloudy night. I did not dare call out to Miles. I piled the parachute behind a rock, where its whiteness would be hidden, and I sat on it. It was extremely cold. I sat on until the light came filtering down through high conifers. I was on the side of a mountain. It was still dark under the trees when the sky was flooded with a rosy dawn light. I saw a white glimmer high in the air about a hundred yards away and sat on without moving until I could determine that it was, as I thought, Miles’ parachute. But it could have been a layer of snow on a branch.

The parachute was hanging from a high branch, stirring and moving in the dawn wind. I emerged from behind my rock with caution, and found, a few feet away from the tree which held his parachute, Miles, quite dead. He had not been shot, as I first thought from the dark stain of blood on his forehead. He had crashed down through the tall pine. His parachute had caught in it. He had hung there like a fly in a web. Trying to unhitch himself he had fallen, and had knocked his head on a rock. The fall had not been much more than thirty feet, and all around the rock he had struck the forest floor was soft with old leaf mould and littered with pine needles. It must have happened no more than minutes before I landed. He had been as unlucky as I had been lucky.

The parachute was catching the light, making a beacon that could be seen for miles. I had to climb that tree and get
it down. The trunk rose straight up without a branch for twenty feet or so, but had many sharp projecting woody bits. I went up it clinging with my arms and legs, trying to by-pass the sharp pieces, and trying, too, to keep a lookout for anyone who might be coming to investigate that high patch of glistening white. I got to the level of the first branch, when I heard a sound that might have been a twig breaking or the crack of a rifle, and I remained quite still in indecision before thinking that nothing was more dangerous to me than that heap of stirring white. I went up the remainder of that trunk as fast as I could, and, lying face down along the projecting branch that held the parachute, wriggled out towards it. I had just grasped the silk, and was tugging and jerking it to free it from the twigs that held it, when I saw coming down over the shoulder of the mountain, five soldiers, holding their rifles pointed at me. I had no means of knowing whether they were Partisans or Chetniks. I therefore sat up on the branch like a boy caught stealing apples, and went on wriggling and jerking at the parachute to free it. I saw that the second of the soldiers was a girl. She was the most beautiful girl I have ever seen. She had thick black braids falling down her back under her cap, black oriental eyes, and a face like Aphrodite’s.

I saw the Red Star on their breasts and said: I am a British soldier.

The leader said something to the others, who lowered their rifles.

He said, in French, We were expecting you.

I said: I’ll just get this parachute off. As I said this, it came loose and flopped to the forest floor.

The sun had come up. The forest was infused with a reddish golden light. The birds were singing. The five under me were staring up. They were smiling. I said: But my friend has been killed.

They had not seen Miles; their attention had been on me.

The girl went straight to him, to make sure he was dead. She was a medical student who played the part of doctor for her Partisan group. I will say here that her name was Konstantina and that I loved her from that first moment, as she did me.

By the time I had slid and scrambled down the tree, she had finished examining Miles, and now she examined my hands for scratches from the rough trunk, and saw to my leg, which was aching badly from the blow I had given it on landing. The others were already digging a grave in the forest. My first moment of meeting with the Partisans, with my love Konstantina, was a burial. They were scooping out the soft leafy soil with their hands, their belt-knives, their canteens. Before we laid Miles in the grave we took his equipment, very precious to those underequipped hand-to-mouth soldiers, and I took his poison pills from where I knew he had hidden them, in his belt.

The six of us left him there and walked down into a valley where a stream was swollen with melted snow, and across the stream and up into a mountain peak where the snow still lay thick and wintry, although the spring sun was hot enough to make us fold our great coats and carry them with our packs. There, just below the snow line, were caves, and in them the temporary headquarters of this
Partisan group: they never stayed anywhere longer than a few nights.

In other countries occupied by the Nazis, there was the pattern of people fighting against them, and those who collaborated with them, out of a natural sympathy, or because of a belief that they must win. In some countries this pattern was very simple. People living in a town, a village, knew that so and so was a Nazi, and that so and so was not. Northern countries seemed more straightforward than the South. Norway for instance, or Holland. Information from occupied Holland might come that the Nazis had hanged or shot or imprisoned twelve members of the Resistance; that certain members of the Resistance had committed such and such acts of sabotage. But in Yugoslavia things were at the opposite extreme. The information was not: The Germans entered such and such a village and shot twenty Yugoslav Resistance members; but that: “The Croat collaborators entered such a Serbian village and exterminated all its inhabitants,” or “Moslem troops massacred all the people in the village of …” or, the Partisans entering such a village after sharp fighting found all the inhabitants murdered by—the Croats, or—but it was endless, with Catholics, Moslems, Montenegrins, Herzegovinians, Croats, Serbs, and so on and so on.