Eastern Approaches (59 page)

Of young King Peter no mention was made. In the trim little villa where we were taken to rest after luncheon and which had belonged to the bank manager or some other leading citizen, I noticed an elaborate portrait of him in oils hanging in the front parlour; but in most of the peasants’ houses that I visited while I was in Serbia the pictures were of his father King Alexander and even of his grandfather. Most of the Serbs with whom I talked were monarchists (even the Communists admitted that in Serbia over fifty per cent of the population were in favour of the monarchy), but their loyalty, as far as I could see, was to the dynasty rather than to the young King himself, who did not seem to mean much to them one way or the other.

We did not stay long in Lebane. Soon we were on the move again, travelling northwards in the direction of the Toplica Valley where I hoped to join up again with Koča. The reports of
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which I had received hitherto were so encouraging that I was thinking of suggesting that operations should be continued for a second week, and I wanted to discuss with him future plans for Serbia.

Under cover of their counter-attack the Germans were already making frantic efforts to repair the railway, but they had reckoned without Balkan Air Force. Every time that we received reports of a breakdown gang at work, we signalled its location to Bari, and within a few hours our fighters were on to it.

Each evening towards sunset, would come the cry of ‘
Avioni!
’ and, looking up, we would see the familiar shapes of two or three Junkers 52 transport planes winging their way ponderously northwards, like geese against the evening sky. The evacuation of Greece and Macedonia had already begun and these, no doubt, were senior staff officers and others, who preferred not to attempt the journey by train and were getting out by air while the going was good. Here was a loophole which needed blocking up. A signal to Bill Elliot, giving the time and approximate route of these flights, did the trick. Somewhere or other our fighters must have swooped down on them for after that we did not see them again.

Brko, by now an old friend, accompanied us on our journey north, still mounted on the faithful Draža. I have agreeable memories of that ride. For several days we were on the move from dawn to dusk through the same green, rolling, fertile country. Sometimes we slept in houses, sometimes in the open; sometimes our rest was disturbed by the familiar shout of ‘
Pokret!
’ and reports of approaching German columns. The villages through which we passed bore a family resemblance one to another; a church and a single street of white-washed, red-roofed houses, now clinging to the side of a hill, now nestling in the valley, now peeping from between trees, now sprawled across the dusty plain. Everywhere the villagers were loud in their protestations of friendship for Great Britain. For the Partisans they did not always show quite the same enthusiasm; they had heard, they said, from the Germans and Četniks that the Titovci would steal their property and
cut their throats. But in most places Brko’s benign appearance and the studied moderation of the views which he expressed soon reassured them. Everywhere we found the same prosperity, so surprising after Bosnia and Dalmatia, and the same overpowering hospitality, the same rich, plentiful food.

I remember arriving at nightfall on the outskirts of a little village which I think was called Dobrovo. We had been travelling since early morning. Part of the time John and I had ridden our two horses and some of the time we had walked and given Duncan and Campbell a spell — a proceeding which struck the good Communist Brko, with his strictly hierarchical ideas, as highly improper. In the end, to salve his conscience, he had got off and walked too, leading Draža after him. It had been a blazing hot day and by evening we were all five tired and hungry.

We did not go right into the village, but camped in a little clearing just outside, amongst the trees. Immediately the news got round that we were there and soon we saw the welcome sight of a procession of peasant women arriving with an array of bowls, baskets, jars and bottles. From these they produced eggs and sour milk and fresh bread and a couple of chickens and a roast sucking-pig and cream cheese and pastry and wine and peaches and grapes, which they laid out on the ground. Then they squatted round to watch us eat, plying us meanwhile with innumerable questions: Were the Allies winning the war? Had we come for good, or would the Germans come back again?

Most of them were rosy-cheeked, stolid-looking creatures, broad in the beam, with thick arms and legs, but amongst them, I noticed, was one exceptionally pretty girl, slim and dark, with classical features and a clear, pale skin, holding a little curly-haired child by the hand. I asked her where she came from. She told me Belgrade, and then, pleased at being paid attention, launched into her life history, a typical Balkan story: a husband who had disappeared, who might have been killed or might just be hiding (from whom was not clear); friends who had advised her to leave Belgrade to escape from the bombing; Četniks, Partisans, Germans; collaboration which was not really collaboration; spies, traitors, assassins; financial difficulties; political difficulties; religious difficulties; matrimonial and sentimental difficulties.
And what did I advise? And was I really a General? All this with much fluttering of long black eyelashes.

As I went to sleep under the stars, with the horses crunching their oats nearby, I reflected that I had not enjoyed an evening so much for a long time. Feminine wiles and good food and drink were luxuries of which we had almost forgotten the existence.

I recall, too, without being able to place them in the general plan of our journey, numerous isolated scenes and incidents which have somehow stuck in my memory; cold clear water spurting from a pump on the hillside under the trees in a village where we stopped in the blazing heat of midday, one working the pump while the others put their heads under it; a vast meal of milk and scrambled eggs eaten ravenously by the open window of a low, cool, upper room overlooking a valley; sleeping on the grass in an orchard by a little stream and waking suddenly in the dark to find Sergeant Duncan’s hand on my shoulder: ‘They’re moving off, sir; they say the Germans are coming’; and then shouts of ‘
Pokret!
’ ‘Get going!’ and confusion and plunging horses and ‘What’s happened to the wireless set?’; long dismal tramps in pitch darkness through pouring rain; discussions whether to push on or to stop in a village with a population reputed to be pro-German or riddled with typhus; speculating as to the meaning of black flags hung outside peasants’ houses; knocking and being told that they mean that one of the family has just died of typhus; hoping this is bluff and sleeping there all the same, all crowded into one room; waking next morning to find the rain stopped and the house, where we had arrived in the middle of the night, surrounded by orchards laden with ripe plums; arriving in a village to find a wedding in progress and being swept, before we know where we are, into a
kolo
, twisting and whirling in the sunshine on the green with the village maidens; lying at night out on the hillside in our sleeping-bags and listening to the wireless: the B.B.C., the nine o’clock news, Tommy Handley.

Then, at ten o’clock, loud and clear, Radio Belgrade; Lili Marlene, sweet, insidious, melancholy,

Unter der Laterne,

Vor dem grossen Tor …

‘Not much longer now,’ we would say, as we switched it off. It was a stock joke but one that at last began to look like coming true.

Sometimes, in villages, when we asked where all the men were, we were told: with Nedić or, with Draža; and there was a faint air of embarrassment. In one house I was asked whether I knew Colonel Bailey, the former Head of our Mission to Mihajlović (‘Ah, he was a merry fellow!’).

Then there was the house where John had lived some weeks before and which in the interval had, it seemed, been occupied by the Bulgars. Knowing the Bulgars’ reputation, we looked shocked. ‘Did they know,’ we asked anxiously of the owner, ‘that you had had a British officer living here?’ ‘Of course they did,’ came the reply, ‘the neighbours betrayed me. But it was all right,’ he went on. ‘I told them that you had terrorized me into letting you live here; that you had behaved with unimaginable ferocity. They were most sympathetic.’ And we all laughed at the simplicity of the Bulgars. Thinking it over afterwards, I wondered whether a good many Balkan stories did not perhaps originate in this way.

Finally one evening we clattered into a village a few miles south of Prokuplje to find that Koča and his staff were there. We had caught up at last.

But we still get no rest. Almost immediately the whole party starts off again. The Partisans, it appears, are advancing in the wake of the retreating Germans. What is more, the Bulgars have capitulated. This means that the Partisans may be able to gain possession of the towns of Niš and Prokuplje. Then comes confirmation over the wireless that Bulgar representatives are in Cairo, negotiating armistice terms with the British and Americans. Then the news that the Soviet Government, in order not to be left out of the peace negotiations, have somewhat belatedly declared war on the Bulgars with whom they had up to then maintained normal diplomatic relations. Our jokes about this somewhat transparent manœuvre on the part of our Soviet allies are not very well received. Then almost immediately we hear that the Bulgars have entered the war on our side. There is a tendency to refer to them as Slav Brothers. But this goes against the grain with
a good many people, for the atrocities committed by the Bulgars are still fresh in their minds. The Bulgars, for their part, do not seem to care very much which side they are on. Having hitherto fought for the Germans with efficiency and brutality, they now fight against them in exactly the same fashion, still wearing their German-type helmets and uniforms.

Prokuplje is liberated, and we enter it in triumph, a typical Serbian market town, at the end of a branch line of the railway, consisting of a single wide straggling sun-baked street of low houses, which at one point widens out into a market square. A group of statuary in the centre celebrates a previous liberation from some earlier oppressor. Outside the municipal building a notice has been posted proclaiming an amnesty for certain categories of collaborators provided that they join the Partisans before a certain date. A little crowd of citizens are looking at it dubiously.

A Liberation dinner follows a Liberation luncheon. Photographs are taken, speeches made, songs sung and healths drunk. I am presented with a bouquet by a schoolgirl. In the intervals we go shopping. It is the first time we have been in a town of this size since we arrived in Jugoslavia and it rather goes to our head. The shops are full of German-made goods and local produce and we buy all kinds of things we do not really want. Just as we are leaving I catch sight of a full-sized enamel bath outside a junk-shop and buy it for a pound.

There is talk of establishing our Headquarters in Prokuplje itself, but for the moment we continue to camp outside. I sleep in a barn which I share with an owl and some largish animal which I hear but never quite see — a stoat, possibly, or a polecat. My bath arrives on an ox-cart and we decide to have a hot bath — the first for weeks. The bath is erected in an orchard and a cauldron of water put on to boil. The Partisans and the local peasants watch the whole proceeding from a distance, now convinced that we must be quite mad.

But at this moment a messenger gallops up on a horse, shouting ‘
Pokret!
’ The Germans, it appears, have counter-attacked, not unsuccessfully, and we are on the move once more. Reluctantly abandoning our bath, we stuff our few belongings into our rucksacks, or as we have come to call them,
pokret
-bags, and set out.

From Prokuplje we headed for the Radan, always a relatively safe refuge in case of trouble. On the way Koča and I, keeping in touch with Balkan Air Force, planned further operations in continuation of
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. The enemy’s counter-attack might temporarily relieve their situation, but, once it had spent itself, they would still be faced with the problem of getting the bulk of their troops out by one or two main routes which were open to attack for the whole of their length. The
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operations undertaken up to now had already sufficiently demonstrated what could be done in this way.

For the next two or three days we kept on the move. It was the same agreeable existence which I had led ever since my arrival in Serbia. The long early morning marches through the green, sunlit countryside; the halt at midday on the grass under the fruit-laden trees of some wayside orchard; the search, as night approached, for a good place to camp and the arrival of extravagantly hospitable villagers with grapes and peaches, bottles of wine and sucking-pigs, fresh eggs and butter; the evening meal and the brief period of tranquillity in the half-light before it grew quite dark. Then either a night of alarms and excursions, of attacks and counter-attacks, of marches and countermarches, of rumours and counter-rumours; or else, all the more peaceful by contrast, a long sleep under the stars with the wind on one’s face and the trees rustling overhead, until the sun rose and it was time to start. And, bubbling again up within one all the time, a feeling of elation which came from the knowledge that victory, complete and overwhelming, was at last at hand.

Living this life, I looked back with heightened distaste on my existence on Vis; reflected that the political negotiations were, through force of circumstances, likely to remain for some time in a state of suspended animation, that there were no other outstanding questions of any importance, and wondered whether it might not after all be possible for me to stay in Serbia until such time as Koča Popović, having cleared the enemy from the south and centre, swept on into the north for the final encounter before Belgrade. For, as far as one could tell, it seemed likely that it was to him that the distinction of driving the Germans from the capital would now fall; and that was a battle at which I was determined to be present.