Briefing for a Descent into Hell Part 17

Yours sincerely, ROSEMARY BAINES.

DEAR DOCTOR X,.

I am of course only too happy to help in any way possible.

I knew Charles Watkins off and on during our schooldays. We were at different schools. When the war started we both found ourselves in North Africa. Charles saw more fighting there than I did. I was in Intelligence and at that stage less active. We met from time to time, but then I went to Yugoslavia and he went to Italy. Yes he had a hard time in the war, but more in the sense that he had a steady hard slog right through it, infantry, and then tanks. We did not see each other until the end of the war. In 1945 we met again and spent some months together. We both found ourselves pretty well shaken up and needed the company of a person who understood this. Personally I do not believe that people are "changed" by stress. In my experience certain characteristics get emphasized, or brought out. In this sense I did not find Charles Watkins "changed" by the war. But he was certainly ill after it. I would like to see Charles if it is possible. I think his C.O. may help you. He was Major General Brent-Hampstead of Little Gilstead, Devon.

Yours sincerely, MILES BOVEY.

DEAR DOCTOR X,.

Charles Watkins served under me for four years. He was satisfactory in every way, responsible and steady. He refused a commission for some time although I brought pressure to bear, because of friends he did not want to separate from. Understandable, but I was glad when he changed his mind, towards the end of the war. That was during the Italian affair. He ended up a lieutenant, I believe, but we are talking of twenty-five years ago. I am sorry to hear he is not too fit.

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 a.s.sist 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: YOU 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. Milo? Milo, yes, I do think I ... but he is dead.

DOCTOR Y: I can a.s.sure 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 t.i.to was the real opposition-which we should be giving all the aid we could. But t.i.to 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 t.i.to-Michailovitch struggle.

The campaign to support t.i.to came first from the Left, which claimed that Britain was refusing to aid t.i.to 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 "bra.s.s" to listen to better-informed left-wing advice about Yugoslavia. It had been decided to establish liaison with t.i.to'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 n.a.z.i-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 compa.s.sion: 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 s.p.a.ce-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 s.p.a.ce 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-pa.s.s 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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 n.a.z.is, 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 n.a.z.i, 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 n.a.z.is 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 ma.s.sacred 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.

As I came out of the thick forest into the rock-surrounded s.p.a.ce 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 pa.s.sed 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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, Milo, 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 s.p.a.ce 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 leaf.a.ge, 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 ign.o.ble was an outlaw. We could remember only n.o.bility.

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 a.s.sumed 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 t.i.to'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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 Milo, 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 Milo 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 Milo shouted out, No-and it was just in time. Two boys ran forward silently over the gra.s.s, smiling. Milo 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-cla.s.s 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.

They were not the only ones to come secretly from the villages. By such recruitment, our group went up again to nearly thirty, seeming always to get younger and younger. The "old ones" would joke about "the children." Milo was "the old man." He was twenty-four.

Although it was summer, we were always short of food, and our medical supplies were low. Konstantina was reduced to a few bandages and ointment. It was decided that she and I would go to a village where her aunt lived, to try and get supplies. The plan was for us to move up to the edge of a field above the village, where the women would be at work among the maize. Konstantina knew the village well, and the habits of the people. She knew they were sympathetic to us, and hated the occupying Croats. The women would bring a skirt, a blouse, a kerchief. Konstantina would put them on, join the working women, return with them to the village at midday, and go to her aunt's house. There she would get her aunt to find bandages, disinfectants, medicines, and food. There was only one point of danger that we could foresee, which was that at this time of the year the women often did not return to their homes for the midday meal, but took it in the fields as they worked. But one of them could run back to the village and fetch Konstantina's aunt to us in the forest. Or, if all this was too dangerous, if the occupying troops were too alert, then we would have to stay at the edge of the field above the village, and one of the women would take the message down to the aunt, and the supplies could be brought to where we were.

But it all went off very simply. We left our friends early, before the sun was up, and had reached the village by mid-morning. We slid on our stomachs to the edge of the field. Often fields were guarded. But it was apparently a pleasant peaceful scene. The women were hoeing among the tall maize plants, talking and laughing. Konstantina called out to a woman who looked up, startled, and who then showed how well she had been taught by war-she took in the situation at once, gave us a single gesture, "I understand, keep quiet," and worked her way slowly towards us, while keeping up her chat with another woman ten yards away. When she reached us, she and Konstantina talked in low voices, one from the field, the other from thick bushes at the edge of it. The woman's lips scarcely moved. In this and in her quickness and her caution we could see very well the state of that village under its occupying troops. She said that with the women in the fields was the wife of a man known to be sympathetic to the Germans. It was necessary to think of a plan to get rid of her. But luck was with us. After we had lain hidden in the bushes for not more than an hour, watching the lively women working, this dangerous woman of her own accord went back to her house. She said she had bread to be baked. After that it went fast. One of the women slipped back to her house, and fetched a bundle of clothes, which was thrown into the bushes where we lay. In a few moments Konstantina had changed from a soldier to a young girl. She walked out in a full blue skirt and a white blouse and white kerchief from the trees, and joined with the women, bending and making the movements of someone who held and used a hoe. In a few minutes all the women went off together to the village, Konstantina among them.

The field that sloped down to the village was quite empty. The maize plants were a full strong glossy green. All the trees and bushes around the field were in the lush fullness of early summer. The sky was deep and blue. It was rather hot. The maize plants were at that stage when they have reached their full growth, but still seem as if the push of the sap is sending them up. They were very straight and the stems were as crisp as sugarcane. The ta.s.sel on each plant had turned white, but only just. The acres of tall green plants were topped with waving white braided ta.s.sels, but they were a greenish white still. The cobs pushing out heavily from the stems were not filled out yet, and the soft silk that fell from the end of each cob was fresh and new. None had dried. Each cob had its tongue of gleaming ruddy silk, a welling of soft red. That morning it had rained. The tips of the arched leaves and the dangling red floss dripped great glistening raindrops. The earth smelled sweet and fresh. A lively steam went up off the field. Everything in that field was at a peak of young but mature liveliness. Even a week later, the curve would have turned, and begun to sink, with the arching leaves just tingeing yellow, the crests on the plants very hard and white, the dark red of the ta.s.sels drying and clotting. It was like looking at a wave just before it turns over and breaks.

Down in the village some smoke went up into the blue. There was no one to be seen. It was absolutely silent. Yet the village was occupied, and we knew that two weeks ago a dozen people had been shot in the main street. They had sent supplies to the Partisans, and for this adventure today, people might be killed, if we bungled it. But things continued to go well.

Soon a dozen women came up from the village into the field, taking their time about it. They picked up their hoes where they had dropped them. Konstantina now had a hoe and worked with the rest. I could have sworn that she was working for the pleasure of it, remembering peace and village life. She slowly hoed her way to the edge of the field, and in a moment had dropped the hoe and rolled in beside me. Under her full skirts were suspended parcels of bread, meat, sausage, even eggs. Her aunt went past, her hoe rising and falling; a package flew into the bush where we lay hidden, and I reached up to grab the precious medical supplies off the branches, like a fruit. By then Konstantina was out of her peasant woman's garb and was a soldier again. She threw the bundle of clothes back into the field; and after a swift good-bye, good-bye, between her and the woman hoeing not six feet away, we were off and away. The raid was a success. There were no consequences to the villagers. And before that winter our people routed the enemy and the village became itself again.

We stowed the goods carefully about us. We were now heavily laden, and it was hard to walk lightly, as we had to. We had about ten miles to go before meeting up with our group, which we knew to be making its way to a peak which we could see straight in front of us. But between us and this peak were lower mountains, rivers, valleys. It was not an easy ten miles.

When we had gone about half way, we stopped on the flank of a mountain before the one we were making for. It was now midafternoon. The sun was in front of us and shining into our eyes. The sky was still cloudless, and it was all a glitter and a dazzle of light off sky, leaves, gra.s.s, rocks. We decided to rest for a few minutes. It was not that we were prepared to relax our guard, or to become careless. But we had finished our task, and we believed that we had not endangered our allies in the village. We sat with our backs to a big rock, and held hands like children. In front of us was a glade that opened out among very large old trees down the hillside. At one side of the glade were some low rocks, where the yellow light lay broken and dappled. A small tree at the foot of the glade was a cloud of creamy pink blossom on which b.u.t.terflies cl.u.s.tered. It was very silent.

Into this scene of perfect sylvan peace came a deer. Or rather, it was a question of realising that the deer had been there, looking at us, for some time. It stood about twenty yards away, near the pile of rocks. It was because the light lay broken over rock and plants and deer that we had not seen the animal. Now it was hard to understand why we had not seen it. It was a pretty sight, a golden beast, with its fur warm and rich and sunny, and its little sharp forward-pointing horns black and glossy. We stood up. I was thinking that if we had so easily overlooked a deer that stood so close, we might equally have overlooked an enemy. Probably she was thinking the same. Now I wondered for a moment if I should shoot the beast, and carry it back to camp with us. But it was always dangerous to shoot. We did not know who else was on that mountain slope-perhaps watching us, just as the deer had done, before we saw it. And we were very heavily loaded. The thought of shooting it faded. I was pleased to let it go. For it looked so very delightful standing there, its head slightly lowered, looking at us rather sideways out of its eyes. It was a small deer, not much higher than Konstantina's waist. I was suddenly incredibly happy. This appearance of the beautiful animal seemed to me a crown to that successful day. I looked at Konstantina, to share the pleasure, but she was not smiling. She was serious, severe. There was a small frown between her brows that I knew well: it showed when she was puzzled, in doubt. She was looking doubtfully at this deer. The beast was much closer. I remember thinking that perhaps we had moved forward towards it without knowing we had, just as we had stood up automatically after seeing it-alerted by it, as if it were in fact an enemy. I thought that the deer's pretty sidling prancing movements were too slight and delicate to have advanced it so fast. Then the deer was very close. It kept making the same movement, a light shaking semi-circular movement with its horns, and I felt I had to watch this movement, it was so graceful. And then, as the thought came into my mind that this small pretty beast might be dangerous, Konstantina made a sharp exclamatory warning noise, and moved in front of me, as the beast took a jump forward and sliced out with its sharp black horns.

And then nothing happened. The deer stood there, blood dripping from its horns which now were lowered, immediately in front of Konstantina, who was standing between me and it. Then she began to slide downwards. It was as if she had decided to let herself sag at the knees. I caught her, my hands under her armpits.

I said, "Konstantina," in wonder, or even admonishment. I still had not quite understood that this charming creature had wounded her.

Then her weight dragged her down to the forest floor, and I turned her face up and I saw that her eyes were closed and that blood poured from her stomach. She was greenish white.

And now I did understand. There followed minutes of impotent anguished incompetence. In a package that lay two feet away from her were medical supplies, but there was nothing there that could staunch such a wound. Later I understood that it did not matter, that she was not saveable. I pulled up her jacket, pulled down her soldier's trousers, exposed her stomach. The deer's horn, sharp as a surgeon's knife, had cut straight across her entrails. I did not think she would open her eyes again. I believed she would die at once, for her pulse had already nearly gone and her face had shrunk with death. I looked for my poison pill, for I did not want her to suffer the pain of that terrible wound, but before I had found it, she opened her eyes, smiled, closed them again and was dead.

I laid her on the forest floor. I saw that the deer had retreated a little; it was standing near the rocks where I had seen it first. Again I wondered if I should shoot it, and this time knew if I did it would be in revenge. It did not occur to me that it might still be dangerous. It had killed Konstantina because she had stepped in front of me to save me from the slicing horns. It might again come close and kill me. But I did not think of it. I forgot the deer.

I knew I had to bury Konstantina. I had nothing to dig a grave with. But by then I had a.s.sisted in many forest burials. I knelt down and began scooping up leaves with my hands. The light was very heavy and yellow and strong. It laid a yellow patina over Konstantina's face.

I went on digging. It was very easy. The leaf mould was many autumns' work. The rich sweet-smelling crumbling soil which was the flesh of the forest leaves came up in great double handfuls. I worked on and on steadily and methodically, trying to get it done fast and well. For I knew that if I and Konstantina did not appear by ten that night, our people would send out search parties to look for us. They knew we would be slower and more vulnerable than usual-and what we carried was precious.

It would be evening very soon ... Then it was evening. By then I had dug a pit from the leaf mould about five feet deep and three wide. I slid her into the pit, so that she lay straight in it, and I lay on my stomach on the edge of the pit, and covered her face with some fresh green leaves. I laid her hands on her breast. I threw the leaf mould back over her. I was swearing and crying all the time, but silently: later I discovered I had bitten my lips through. Quite soon the place where she lay in the forest was shown only by a roughening of the surface of last autumn's leaves. I could not mark her grave then. Standing by it I picked out three trees whose intersecting lines met here. I cut big chips of bark out of the trees, and then rubbed earth into the white gashes so that an enemy might not notice them.

When the war was over I took a plane to Belgrade, a train to the village we had visited that day, and walked with a friend into the mountains. The friend was now a government official, and he had been a member of our group-but after I left it. We met in London. Together we found that place on the mountainside by the by now old scars on the three trees. We put up a simple headstone. On it was this inscription: KONSTANTINA RIBAR.

PARTISAN.

SHE GAVE HER LIFE FOR HUMANITY.

And of course, for me.

By the time she was buried, the setting sun was straight above the peak I had to reach before moonrise. The glade was now flooded with yellow evening light. And as I picked up the packets and parcels of food and medicaments, trying to make two peoples' burdens into a convenient load for one, I realised that all this time, two or three hours, or more, that deer had stood there, twenty paces away, among the rocks. I believe it was the sound of its hooves clicking on a stone that made me look up. It was still facing me, and its head again began to make the delicate sidling movements as I took a few steps nearer to pa.s.s it. On one of its horns was a stain-Konstantina's blood, that might very easily have been mine. I stood still, looking at the beast. I did not understand. I could not understand why, having attacked and killed, it did not simply run away. That it should have stood there, watching me during my labour of digging out the forest floor, and then burying Konstantina, without coming nearer and making itself felt at all-I did not understand it. By now I had slid into that detached, dreamy state that follows an excess of emotion. That glowing little beast standing there, with its elegant horns lowered, apparently waiting, for no reason at all, only added to the sharp unfocus of the scene.

I stood opposite the beast and stared at it. I was about fifteen paces away. This time I saw that the beast was a doe. And that it had a loose staggering look to it-exhaustion. I saw that it had lately given birth. Then I saw the fawn.

The little creature lay beside the rocks facing towards the setting sun. Its softly glowing coat was full of health. Over it, as if standing on guard, was a tall plant, with clear bright leaves, that fanned and sprayed out all around the fawn, so that it lay under a fountain. The fawn was perfect, a triumph, too dazzlingly so, as if those vast mountains and forests had elected this baby animal in the sunny glade to represent them, but the scene was overcharged with meaning and with beauty.

Then I saw that on its hide lay some dried threads of the birth liquor, and on its creamy stomach lolled the fat red birth cord, fresh and glistening. Three or four days later, the cord would be withered and gone, the fawn's coat licked and clean, the fawn, like a human child, or like the maize plants I had seen that morning, at a crest of promise and perfection. But to witness a birth is to be admitted into Nature's workshop, and there life and death work together. The sight of the cord, the still unlicked coat, rescued the creature from pathos, restored it to its real vulnerability, its terrible weakness. Yet its eyes regarded me quietly, without fear. For between it and me stood its mother. I think that the fawn had not yet clambered to its feet. Probably the two soldiers, coming into the glade, had interrupted the birth scene, had in some way upset the mother and baby in the ritual they had to accomplish, had thrown things out of balance. And there stood the deer, and it was only now that I saw it was standing shakily, for its back legs trembled with weakness where they were planted on the soft gra.s.s.

I walked at a careful distance around the mother and her baby, keeping my eyes on the exhausted beast who slowly moved about to keep her lowered horns pointing at me. Behind her, the fawn lay presented in the glowing light under the plant, which was probably a fennel, or a dill.

I could only move slowly. I was carrying something like two hundred pounds of food and medicaments. When I reached the bottom of the glade, I looked back and saw that the fawn was in the act of struggling up on to its long slender fragile stalklike legs. The deer still watched me. And so I left the glade with its new grave, where the mother deer had one blood-dulled horn pointed at me, and the little fawn stood upright under its shining green fountain.

DEAR DOCTOR Y,.