Briefing for a Descent Into Hell (28 page)

As I came out of the thick forest into the rock-surrounded space outside the cave, I saw a dozen or so soldiers, all of them watching our approach from where they squatted together eating their breakfast, bread and some sausage. They were all young, and some were girls. My presence was explained in a few words. I was handed a hunk of rough
bread. A can of water was being passed around. For me it was a powerfully emotional moment: I was joining the famed Partisans whose exploits people were talking of everywhere. Their heroism had the simplicity of other days, a clean straightforwardness, like the heroes outside Troy. These were people like those. When I had time to look around, and examine their guns and equipment, I saw that this must be a very rough and simple fighting. If they had uniforms, they were taken from dead enemies, so that boots, caps, jackets, belts were of every sort of design. Some had no uniform, they wore anything that could serve as protection in these wild mountains, peasants’ boots, students’ winter knitted caps. The Red Star on their caps or on their breasts was what linked them.

This group of young soldiers contained Serbs, Croats, Montenegrins, Catholics, and Moslems. Nowhere but in these mountains, among these soldiers, these comrades, could it be possible for two people to meet, take each other’s hands, call each other by name, Miro, Miloš, Konstantina, Slobo, Vido, Edvard, Vera, Mitra, Aleksa … take the Red Star as their bond, and forget the rest.

Now, re-creating in imagination that moment, when I came out of the forest with that group, and sat down with them all eating the peasant bread and drinking cold mountain water, I think most of all of something that I took for granted then—their extreme youth. No one was more than twenty-five. I was not myself. Among them, and among those I met in the mountains in the next few weeks were men and women who after the war became the rulers of the
new Yugoslavia, a nation fought for and created by the very young.

I believe that a man who fought with those young people who now has to stand up on a platform in a big hall to lecture, or teach, must often, a quarter of a century later, look down on the upturned faces of students who are rioting and sullen and critical and undisciplined and who in every country of the world reject what their society offers them … this man, a professor perhaps, with responsibility, a place in society, looks at those faces and thinks how young people exactly like them, “children” to their elders, fought the most vicious and terrifying army in history, Hitler’s, fought short of weapons, short of warm clothes, often without food, always outnumbered—fought and won, and created a new nation.

I was with them for—I could say three months. It is only in love and in war that we escape from the sleep of necessity, the cage of ordinary life, to a state where every day is a high adventure, every moment falls sharp and clear like a snowflake drifting slowly past a dark glistening rock, or like a leaf spinning down to the forest floor. Three months of ordinary living can be not much more than the effort of turning over from one side to another in a particularly heavy uncomfortable sleep. That time in the mountains with that band of young soldiers—it is as if I remember every breath I took. Remembering that time is as if a friend’s eyes rest in loving curiosity on your face, and you feel your face spread in a smile because of the warmth the two of you generate.

The band remained in numbers between twelve and thirty. A man, or a girl, would come quietly into the camp with a handshake, a smile, slide off his—or her—pack and rifle, and become one of us. Or someone would leave quietly to take a message, or to reconnoitre, or to slip back to a home village to fetch food or supplies. We stayed on that mountainside outside the caves for not more than two days. I had to be taken to the H.Q. of the Partisans, to transfer messages and to collect their messages and news to take back to North Africa. We had to move carefully, because the mountains were full not only of Chetniks but of ordinary villagers who had fled away from their homes to live the life of outlaws until the coming winter’s snows would force them down again, to death, or to servitude under the Germans or Chetniks.

To stand on a high mountain’s shoulder, and look down and around over hundreds of miles of mountains and valleys and rivers and hillsides: it was the wildest scene on earth, with nothing moving there in all that space but a bird hanging on the air, or, very far away, the smoke rising from a village too distant to see if it was the smoke of pillage, or from an ordinary hearth. Empty. Emptiness. The world as it was before man filled and fouled it. But, as you stood there and waited and watched, a different conviction took hold. On the slope of a mountain high on the other side of a racing mountain stream there was a flash of metal which, no matter how you stared and peered, was not repeated: the sun had caught a rifle barrel, or a knife. Trees two miles away that were painted yellow sage and viridian and blue-grey by spring had a smudge of indistinctness over them
that was—a tree late-in-leaf, a green so lightly spread over the structure of bough that it seemed grey?—or was it smoke from a Partisan’s fire? The binoculars brought the hillside opposite close into the eye, and the smudge was indeed smoke, not new leafage, but the people under the trees, who had made the fire, were wearing grey indistinct clothing, and it was hard to say whether they were villagers, Chetniks, or Partisans. Or, at night, keeping our cooking fire low behind an earthwork or a pile of cut branches, making the flames clear and bright to forbid the sight of smoke to an enemy on a near slope, a quick leap of red faded out again into the dark opposite and we knew that a mile or half a mile away another fire had escaped the shield of banked earth or brush or branch and had been caught and confined again—but by whom, friend or foe? One of us would then, with a smile and a nod, or the stern dedication of the very young, whose duty forbids smiling and lightness, slide away from our low circle of flamelight into the trees and reappear an hour or five hours later with: “People from the village.” Or, “Croats.” Or, with him (or her) would come in from the trees a group of soldiers wearing the Red Star, greeting us with the handshake that was the promise of the life we would all live after the war, when the fighting was over.

Those vast mountains, in which we moved like the first people on earth, discovering riches at every opening of the forest, flowers, fruit, flocks of pigeons, deer, streams of running splashing water full of fish, these mountains were host to a hundred, no, a thousand groups, all moving quietly, beneath the great trees, eyes always on the alert for enemies,
people who slept with their hands on their rifles, and who were skilled to know a friend as much by an instant recognition of comradeship and optimistic heroism as by the Red Star.

When this war was over, we all knew, and our trusting hands, our smiles, our dedication promised this—this land that was so rich and so beautiful would flower into a loving harmony that was as much a memory as a dream for the future. It was as if every one of us had lived so, once upon a time, at another time, in a country like this, with sharp sweet-smelling air and giant uncut trees, among people descended from a natural royalty, those to whom harmfulness and hate were alien. We were all bound in together by another time, another air. Anything petty and ignoble was an outlaw. We could remember only nobility.

If I say all this and put my love in a sound place it was because it was a love that flowered from the time and the place. No, of course I don’t mean that if I had met her in an ordinary way, in peace, we would not have recognised each other. But our love in those weeks was an aspect of the fine high comradeship of the group, whose individuals did not matter, because an individual could only be important insofar as he or she was a pledge for the future, and where individuals came and went and were always the same, being by shared nature high and fine and foreign to the consciousness of ugliness of race or region or a hostile religiosity. Our love was carried, or contained by the group, a flower of it, and this although some comrades did not approve of it, thought and said that a war of this kind was no place for love. But such criticisms were made within the spirit of
comradeship, with a simple frankness, without spite or need to hurt. There was nothing we could not say to each other. There was no criticism we could not make and which, thought over, and followed or resisted, did not become of a conscious growth which—this was assumed by every one of us, was the greatest of our contributions to this war which was a war not only against the bad in our own nation (while I was with them I felt with them, felt Yugoslav) collaborators, Chetniks, the selfish rich, but against all the evil in the world. In those high mountains we fought against Evil, and were sure to win, for the stars in their courses were on our side, whose victory would be at last when the poor and meek and the humble had inherited the earth, and the lion would lie down with the lamb, and a loving harmony would prevail over the earth. We knew all this because—it was as if we remembered it. And besides, did we not live like this now, loving each other and the world? With rifles in our hands, grenades in our pockets, gelignite in our packs, moving as silently as thieves among the towering trees of those magnificent forests, we knew ourselves to be pledges for the future, and utterly unimportant in ourselves, because as individuals we could have no importance, and besides, we were already as good as dead. Of the men and women I lived with, fought with, during those months, very many were killed, the majority—as they knew they would be. It did not matter. What was spilt could not be lost, because at last love had come to birth in man, communism and its Red Star of hope shone out for all the working poor, for all the suffering everywhere, to see and to follow. Within that general Love, I and the Partisan girl loved each other.
We hardly spoke of it, were seldom alone, were soldiers, thinking soldiers’ thoughts. When we did find ourselves together and alone, it was not because it had been planned by us. An accident of our group life had sent us off to forage for food in an abandoned village, or we were put together on guard duty. But we
were
on duty and so had to be responsible. I do not remember when I kissed her first, but I remember our jokes that it had taken us so long to kiss. We slept together once in the frenzy of sorrow after I was told that in a week I would be finished with my mission and with Yugoslavia—and with Konstantina.

That was after I had been taken to Tito’s headquarters, had given and taken information—had done what I had come to do. It was then a question of how I could get away again. That could not be by air. It was dangerous enough dropping men in, but at that stage impossible for aircraft to land. I had to make my way to the coast, from where I was taken in a small boat by fishermen to an island where I met up with others who had been on missions in Greece and Yugoslavia. And how we got back to North Africa from there is another story.

The weeks before I made liaison with the guide who was to take me to the coast were full of dangerous fighting. Our group blew up a railway, destroyed a couple of bridges, fought two bloody battles with groups of Chetniks much larger than ours. After these battles we were weakened and depleted. Some of us were wounded. Vido, the leader, was dead, and Miloš, who was an old school-friend of Konstantina’s, became group leader. She became his second-in-command, and was even more busy than she had been. For
there was much more to do, and many fewer people to do it all. But new people kept coming in. I remember one evening we were on a mountain flank above a village which we knew to be occupied by German and Croat troops. It was a village where Miloš had friends—or rather, had had friends. He was talking of how, next day, he might slip down, with one of the girls, to the village, in disguise. It was a question of getting hold of an ordinary peasant dress and kerchief. Vera, one of the girls, had had such an outfit, but it had been lost in recent fighting. As we sat there that night, talking in whispers, huddled in together, very hungry and cold because we did not dare light a fire, we saw two people move out of the bushes towards us. Rifles flew up, but Miloš shouted out,
No
—and it was just in time. Two boys ran forward silently over the grass, smiling. Miloš embraced them. They were from the village, had heard of our presence near them in the mountains, had come to join us. They were brothers, sixteen, and seventeen. Neither had so much as held a rifle before. They had brought with them two old revolvers from the 1914 war. Also some bread and sausage—even more welcome than the revolvers. That night we began training them in the art of guerrilla warfare and in a couple of weeks these two boys were as skilled and resourceful as any one of us. If memories of wartime are frighteningly precious, the main reason is that in wartime we learn again that peacetime should never allow to be forgotten. That “every cook can learn to govern the state.” In wartime every little clerk, every confined housewife, learns what he or she is capable of. In peacetime these two schoolboys would have become what the pettiness of village life would have allowed them
to become. In England boys of that age, or certainly middle-class boys, are spoiled children. In war, in our guerrilla group, they were trackers, crack shots, brilliant spies, thieves and pilferers, able to march twenty-four hours at a stretch remaining lively and alert, able to find berries, mushrooms, edible roots, able to track down a deer or a pheasant and kill it silently without wasting precious ammunition. What could possibly happen to them in the life after the war—to them and the millions like them in the countries where guerrillas and partisans and the underground operated—to match up to what they were given in war? That is, unless they went to prison (where many still are) and learned a different kind of skilled endurance. In the less than a month that I was with the two boys, I had learned again what I had already understood in my first day with the Partisans—that any human being anywhere will blossom into a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to use them. Both those boys survived the war. Both are now high in the government of their country. They had their education with the guerrillas in the mountains and the forests.