Eastern Approaches (43 page)

They were certainly very ingenious productions. They contained tiny cellophane packets of lemonade powder, specially primed with Vitamin C and tiny tinfoil packets of soup powder, specially primed with Vitamin B and a lump of special sugar, neatly wrapped in paper and containing, according to the label, a surprisingly high proportion of Vitamin D. They also contained (all wrapped in cellophane) a piece of chewing gum and two cigarettes, two small water biscuits, one small bit of chocolate and finally one very small tin containing a mouthful of Spam or, as the case might be, cheese.

The Partisans, gnawing their bread, watched us pityingly as we fumbled with the cellophane and tried to mix the soup powder in our mugs. Before we had got anywhere at all, the cry of
‘Napred
’ rang out, and we were off again. We were as hungry as ever, and we had also lost face. We regained it, however, at the next halt, when, during a general showing-off of weapons, I produced my Colt automatic — another product of lease-lend — which was fingered lovingly by the whole party and greeted with gasps of admiration.

Finally, after several more hours of steady climbing and marching through thick woods, we emerged to find ourselves looking out over
a wide sunny plain, with the road winding away in the distance. There were no signs of the enemy or indeed of the Partisans. Then, as we were debating what to do next, we noticed a small German staff car climbing up the hill towards us. As it came closer we saw that in it was a Partisan officer, whom we all knew, Lola Ribar, the son of Dr. Ivan Ribar, who had been President of the Jugoslav Constituent Assembly of 1920 and now was a leading figure on the political side of the Partisan movement. Young Ribar, who was still in his early twenties, had a distinguished fighting record and was regarded as possessing considerable all-round ability.

Now he was full of news of the battle. The Partisans had succeeded in recapturing Livno and were fighting in Kupres, a smaller village, lying between Livno and the point at which we now found ourselves. By the time we reached it it would be in their hands.

We piled into the car and drove off down the road at full speed leaving our escort and the baggage train to follow at their leisure. After a few miles we came to the smoking ruins of Kupres. Scattered corpses and burnt-out trucks testified to the defeat of the enemy. Partisan Brigade Headquarters was established in one of the few surviving houses, overlooking the market place. Here we found the Brigade Commander discussing the disposal of the wounded with his Medical Officer, a formidable-looking woman Partisan, who emphasized her points by thumping his table with her fist. As soon as this question had been settled, wine was brought in (we were approaching the vineyards of Dalmatia) and scrambled eggs and bread, and we were told, at length, the story of the battle, in which the Partisans had achieved a notable tactical success by the use of some captured enemy armoured cars. The enemy, not realizing that the Partisans possessed anything of the kind, had assumed that they were their own reinforcements arriving, and had greeted them, literally, with open arms, a mistake for which they paid dearly. When we had finished our meal we were taken to admire the armoured cars, now safely camouflaged behind some haystacks.

We waited at Kupres whilst our wireless operator, who had erected his aerial in the market place, tried in vain to make contact with Cairo. As so often happened, weather conditions or the neighbouring hills
intervened and he tapped and twiddled unavailingly in the midst of a large and admiring crowd of Partisans and villagers.

It was late when we started for Livno, this time in a captured motor-bus driven by a handsome young Italian dressed in a splendid white sheepskin coat. He was, it seemed, the pilot of an Italian aeroplane which had come over and bombed the Partisans every day until one day someone had succeeded in shooting it down with a rifle. As he did not seem a very convinced Fascist and as they were very short of drivers, they had turned him on to driving a truck. This he did with tremendous gusto, manœuvring his clumsy vehicle as if it had been a dive-bomber, and accompanying each flick of the wrist with a burst of grand opera delivered in a rich tenor. But by now we were too tired to mind anything and nodded in our seats as we jolted over the uneven surface of the road and shot round hairpin bends.

At midnight a single lantern, only half illuminating the market place and masking the squalid debris of battle, gave Livno a romantic air. We were billeted above a shop in a room where holy pictures alternated with portraits of Hitler and Pavelić, which there had presumably been no time to remove. We were tired and, having failed to obtain any food from a sour-looking landlady, fell asleep almost immediately.

Next morning we called on Milić, the local Partisan Commander, to make arrangements for our onward journey. The situation between Livno and the coast was obscure. Milić produced maps to illustrate the progress of the German pincer movement. The two claws seemed almost to have met. He hoped to have more detailed information the following day. Until this had been obtained it would be foolish to try to get through. In any case the journey to the coast and across to Korčula was not likely to be an easy one. Clearly we should be lucky if we got away in twenty-four hours.

Resignedly we settled down to explore the town. Livno lay in the sunshine, a little cluster of white houses at the foot of a great rock cliff. From amongst them rose the dome and minarets of a mosque. Beyond the town, Livansko Polje, the great rolling plain to which it has given its name, spread away into the distance. On the outskirts of the town earthworks had been thrown up and the houses, used as strong-points,
had been battered and scarred in the recent fighting and in previous battles, for Livno had changed hands many times.

Now, on the day after the battle, the shops were open again, displaying a rather fly-blown collection of German-made fancy goods for sale in exchange for hundreds of
kunars
, Pavelić’s heavily inflated currency. We went into a watchmaker’s to try and buy a strap for my wrist watch. The watchmaker greeted us with a brisk ‘Heil Hitler’ and a Nazi salute, redeemed, on second thoughts by a sudden convulsive clenching of the fist. Clearly he found the military situation rather hard to follow, but this did not worry him for long and he was soon doing his best to sell us a monumental marble clock for which we could have no possible use.

Next we visited the waterworks and power-station, stumbling upon them by mistake at the foot of the cliff behind the town where a spring of water gushed suddenly from the face of the rock. The plant and the shed that housed it were undamaged and working away merrily, dispensing water and light indiscriminately to Fascist and anti-Fascist alike. As the engineer in charge, who had worked for both sides, explained to us, the Germans had not bothered to demolish the installation when they were driven out, because they knew they would be back soon and wanted to find it in working order when they returned. In this they were disappointed, for some weeks later the retreating Partisans blew it sky high.

Livno was a notorious Ustaša stronghold and we found the population surly and ill-disposed to both Allies and Partisans. Even the cajolery of Sergeant Duncan, generally infallible, and backed with the offer of a golden sovereign, could not prevail on our landlady to provide us with food from her well-stocked larder. She remained aloof amongst the pictures of the Führer, the lace antimacassars and the religious oleographs in her prim little parlour, preparing for herself and eating enormous meals and twanging provocatively on a large shiny yellow mandolin, decorated with a bunch of ribbons in the colours of the independent State of Croatia. Clearly appeasement formed no part of her nature.

Looking back, I suppose that her conduct was in fact heroic and dignified. At the time and on an empty stomach, I must confess that I
found it extremely irritating, which is doubtless just what it was intended to be. Later we discovered that, as soon as I left, she had sent a messenger to the nearest German Commander informing him of my movements. She was, at any rate, nothing if not consistent. We christened her The Little Ray of Sunshine.

Having failed to get anything to eat at home, we turned to the Partisans who, after a whispered discussion, at once made us members of their Town Major’s mess. This functionary turned out, somewhat surprisingly, to be an elderly general of immense distinction of manner. His career had been consistent in one respect only. Throughout his life he had remained a regular officer, though not always in the same army. He had held his first commission in the forces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in which he had fought against the Serbs and the Italians in the First World War. After the defeat of Austria in 1918 he had joined the Royal Jugoslav Army in which he had, during the twenty years between the wars, risen to be a general. On the dismemberment of Jugoslavia in 1941 he had thrown his lot in with Pavelić who had made him a general in the Domobran. Then on second thoughts, prompted perhaps once again by the course of events, he had gone over to the Partisans, who, with commendable caution, while leaving him his rank of general, by which, I suspect, they were not unimpressed, had given him an appointment where his actions were unlikely materially to affect the course of hostilities.

The general (he and I invariably addressed each other as Excellency) made a charming host. He was, he said, only sorry that he could not entertain us in a manner more worthy of such distinguished guests. His present establishment was a very squalid affair compared with the old days in Vienna before 1914. In his regiment they had had silver plate and champagne every night. Even in Belgrade, between the wars, things had not been too bad. Now, he missed all that. Indeed there was much about Partisan life that he actively disliked; sleeping out, or in bug-infested hovels, being constantly on the move, and the table-manners of his brother officers.

At the moment he had another cross to bear. After his long and varied military career he had retained strong feelings on at any rate one subject: he very much disliked the Italians. He had fought them on the
Isonzo in 1917. He would like to have fought them over Fiume in 1921. They had come yapping and snapping into Jugoslavia at the heels of the Germans in 1941. They had, even from the point of view of the Domobran, been unsatisfactory to collaborate with. For an all too short period, after he first joined the Partisans, he had once again had the pleasure of fighting them. Now they had capitulated, and some Italian units had actually joined the Partisans. To his disgust they were once again his allies. On top of everything else, an Italian Colonel had now been quartered on him and was actually going to sit down to lunch with us. ‘Here he is — the swine,’ he added as the smartest Italian officer imaginable, complete with varnished boots and rows of medals for
valore
, bowed his way into the room and introduced himself all round as Colonel V … commanding the Garibaldi Brigade.

The meal that followed was highly diverting. The General and the Colonel had no language in common; but this did not prevent them from wishing to communicate, or rather argue, with each other, and my services were soon enlisted as an interpreter. Battle by battle, we re-fought, in Serb, Italian and sometimes German, the Isonzo campaign of 1917, in which, it now appeared, the Colonel had also taken part on what he called the Allied side, pointing proudly to the ribbon of the Military Cross which nestled snugly next to that of the Iron Cross on his much decorated chest.

Soon mutual accusations of cowardice, treachery and barbarity were flying freely back and forth, only partially mitigated in the process of translation. When we reached the present war, the fun became faster and more furious, for now the mess waiter, a gigantic, bewhiskered Serb who had been a Partisan ever since 1941, plunged into the dispute, feeling, no doubt, that he was able to put the Partisan case rather better than his General. ‘Here, hold this!’ he would say, handing the dish of stew to his assistant, a fair-haired, well-built Partisan girl, her shapely body straining the buttons of a very tight dark green captured German tunic, and the usual couple of hand-grenades dangling from her belt. ‘Hold this, while I explain to the Comrade General what really happened.’ Soon the discussion became general, more Partisans came in and sat down, the stew went out of circulation altogether and in the ensuing confusion we managed to slip away.

Dinner that night was a repetition of the midday meal and by next morning I had come to the conclusion that if I stayed in that mess for very much longer I should have a nervous breakdown. Besides, it was imperative that I should reach the coast before it was too late. We went round to see Milić, only to be told that he was away on a reconnaissance. There was nothing for it but to wait another day.

We walked out into the Livansko Poljc and looked at some ancient white Turkish tombs, topped with stone turbans. We made a tour of the defences and looked at the turf-covered ‘bunkers’ in which the Germans and Ustaše had made their last stand. We were shown the place where a twelve-year-old girl had dropped a hand-grenade into the turret of a German tank, killing the crew to a man. We talked to innumerable citizens of Livno, some of whom liked the Partisans, while some clearly preferred the Germans and others frankly didn’t care, but wished that both sides would go away and leave them to earn their living in peace.

I talked, too, at length, with the Italian Colonel. He was delighted at finding someone who could speak his own language, and to whom he could at last unburden himself freely and I was also glad to have an opportunity of talking Italian again after so many years. His chief concern, I soon found, was to get himself and his men back to Italy, whither their General, who evidently believed in leaving nothing to chance, had already preceded them in the first aeroplane he could find. The Colonel made no attempt to disguise his horror of the Partisans, or
bolscevicchi
as he called them. They had, he said, been terrible enemies, and now he had no wish to fight for them, or indeed for anyone else; he simply wanted to go home. I asked him if he had come across the Četniks of General Mihajlović. At this he brightened. He said that, although the rank and file were sometimes undisciplined and gave trouble, he had always found the Četnik leaders very civilized and easy to deal with. Indeed one of the best parties he remembered since the beginning of the war had been given at his General’s Headquarters to celebrate the award of the Karadjordje Star by King Peter to Pop Djuić, one of Mihajlović’s principal Commanders in Dalmatia. What had made it all the more enjoyable, he added, was that this high
decoration had been bestowed upon Djuić for gallantry in the face of the enemy, and there he was in person carousing at enemy Headquarters. That, the Colonel commented contemptuously, bursting with national pride, was the sort of thing that could only happen in the Balkans.