Eastern Approaches (61 page)

Thereafter we came upon Russians at every turn, in large bodies and in small, on foot, on horseback, in carts, trucks, armoured cars and tanks, all moving up to the front. They were certainly not smart. Their loosely fitting drab-coloured uniforms were torn and stained and bleached by the sun and rain. The clothing of many had been supplemented or replaced by articles of equipment captured from the enemy. Their boots, as often as not, were completely worn out. The individual soldiers were an extraordinary medley of racial types, from the flaxen hair and blue eyes of the Norseman to the high cheekbones, slit eyes and yellow complexion of the Mongol.

But they looked as though they meant business. Ragged and unkempt though they might be, their powers of endurance and their physical toughness were self-evident. Their weapons, too, were clean and bright. They gave an indefinable impression of being immensely experienced, self-reliant, seasoned troops, accustomed to being left to fend for themselves and well able to do it.

And all this, no doubt, they were, and more, for they had fought their way here from Stalingrad and the frontiers of Asia, and that
fighting, we knew, had been no light matter. Most of them wore two or three campaign medals or decorations, not just ribbons or miniatures, but the full-sized bronze, silver or enamelled medals and stars themselves, clinking and jangling on their tunics. Somewhere in my kit I had the large silver and platinum star of the Soviet Order of Kutusov, which had been awarded me some months before, and, seeing that this was an occasion on which decorations were being worn, I dug it out and screwed it on to my battle-dress tunic. This, and the fact that both Charlie and I could talk to them in their own language, had an immediate effect on the Russians, who came crowding round the jeep whenever we stopped, fingering our weapons and equipment admiringly and proudly exhibiting their own.

Scattered over the fields through which we were passing, large numbers of derelict tanks and guns, some blasted by direct hits, others seemingly intact, testified to the violence of the battle which had been raging for the last twenty-four hours and was still in progress. Soviet heavy tanks predominated. In the space of a mile we counted a dozen along the side of the track, their shattered hulks still smoking. Evidently there was still some fight left in the German anti-tank gunners.

Twenty miles or so south of Belgrade we emerged on to the main road and joined a continuous stream of Red Army trucks, tanks and guns flowing northwards into battle. One thing in particular struck us now, as it had struck us from the first, namely, that every Soviet truck we saw contained one of two things: petrol or ammunition. Of rations, blankets, spare boots or clothing there was no trace. The presumption was that such articles, if they were required at all, were provided at the expense of the enemy or of the local population. Almost every man we saw was a fighting soldier. What they carried with them were materials of war in the narrowest sense. We were witnessing a return to the administrative methods of Attila and Genghis Khan, and the results seemed to deserve careful attention. For there could be no doubt that here lay one reason for the amazing speed of the Red Army’s advance across Europe. Thinking it over, and recalling the numbers of dentists’ chairs and filing cabinets which were said to have been landed in Normandy at an early stage of the
Allied invasion, I wondered whether we ourselves could not perhaps profit to some extent by the Russian example.

Every now and then the stream of traffic was checked. Further on, the enemy were shelling the road and progress was slowed up. Looking at the long defenceless crocodile of tanks and guns and vehicles stretching away into the distance, one felt thankful that the Luftwaffe was no longer in a position to take advantage of the tempting target which it offered.

In one of the frequent traffic blocks we found ourselves jammed against a Russian ammunition truck, liberally decorated with Soviet emblems. Its occupants, cheerful, fair-haired lads scarcely out of their teens, were inordinately proud of it. ‘You can’t produce this sort of thing in capitalist countries,’ they said smugly. From his jeep, meanwhile, Charlie’s Top-Sergeant, oblivious of what was being said, had been examining the Russians’ truck closely, and discovered what he had suspected all along, namely that, despite the red stars, hammers and sickles, which now adorned it, it was a Chevrolet, produced by General Motors at Detroit, Michigan. ‘It makes you sick,’ he observed, ‘to think of these God-damned Russian bastards having all this good American equipment.’ In the interests of inter-Allied friendship, it seemed wiser to leave both remarks untranslated.

For some time past we had heard the noise of gun-fire in the distance. Now, as we moved forward, the sounds of battle came closer. There was a whirring and wailing in the air, and from the muddy fields and tangled thickets on either side of the road came the rattle of machine-gun fire and the thud of mortars.

Before us the sugar-loaf hill of Avala, crowned by Mestrović’s monument to the fallen of the first war, loomed above the road. On its steep slopes fighting seemed to be in progress. We could not now be more than ten miles from Belgrade. We decided that, before going any further, we had better secure a more exact estimate of the military position than we had been able to obtain hitherto. The Russians had established an artillery command-post in a tumble-down cottage near the road and here we turned aside to seek information.

We found the post occupied by a Lieutenant and a couple of Sergeants, friendly souls, who, finding that we spoke their language, at once made
us welcome. Soon all of us, including the family of peasants who owned the cottage, were sitting on the only bed, drinking hot milk and some kind of raw alcohol and eating black bread and listening to a detailed account, not only of the immediate military situation, but of the Lieutenant’s own war experiences and of his early life and childhood in far-away Vologda. In a flash I was back in the Soviet Union: the taste of the food and drink; the stuffiness of the little wooden shack; the cold outside; the heat inside; the droning voices; the soft inflexions of spoken Russian; the stereotyped Soviet jargon; and, above all, the smell: that indefinable composite aroma of petrol, sheepskin and vodka, black bread and cabbage soup, Soviet scent and unwashed human bodies, which permeates every square inch of the Soviet Union and which Russians somehow manage to take with them wherever they go.

From our new-found friend we learned that in the night a large force of the enemy, which in the confusion of the retreat had become isolated from the main body, had sought to cross the road at about this point in a desperate attempt to fight their way through to join the German garrison in Belgrade before they were finally cut off. The result had been a battle of exceptional ferocity which had raged over this part of the road all night long in the rain and the darkness. Now, the issue was no longer in doubt. Practically the entire enemy force, numbering many thousands had been annihilated. The road was again more or less clear. It only remained to liquidate isolated pockets of resistance.

The thought of this victory and of the accompanying slaughter of the enemy had clearly put the Lieutenant in the best of humours. As he drank his hot milk, a broad grin spread over his broad, faintly Mongoloid countenance. He had, he confided, come to hate the Germans more than anything else on earth. He himself had fought against them for three years and found them brutal, inhuman enemies. They had overrun and destroyed his village and massacred his mother and sisters. His only brother had been killed fighting against them. He was glad now to sec them finally routed and crushed. In this last battle, he said, they had not taken many Germans alive. I asked him what they did with their prisoners. ‘If they surrender in large groups,’
he said, ‘we send them back to base; but if,’ he added, ‘there are only a few of them, we don’t bother,’ and he winked. I wondered how many prisoners it took to constitute a large group.

In the knowledge that the road before us was more or less clear, we now continued our journey. Hitherto we had only come upon an occasional dead body, sprawled in the mud beside the wreckage of the tanks and guns. Now corpses littered the sides of the road, piled one on another, some in the field-grey of the Wehrmacht, others stripped of their boots and uniform and left lying half-naked; hundreds and hundreds of them, their pale faces disfigured with mud stains, greenish grey upon the greenish-grey skin. As we passed, the sickly stench of death struck our nostrils, hanging heavy on the air.

The troops who had tried to fight their way out were a composite force, hurriedly thrown together from elements of half a dozen different divisions, and, looking at the dead, we recognized many familiar badges: the Edelweiss of the First Alpine and the double thunderbolt of the Prinz Eugen. The tables had indeed been turned since we stood opposite these same formations in those early, precarious days in the mountains of Bosnia.

Further along, we passed a great throng of prisoners going in the opposite direction. Many had been left with only their shirts and underpants, and they shivered as they hobbled along in the chilly autumn air, their faces as grey from cold and fear as those of their dead comrades. As we watched, one of the guards appropriated a pair of boots which had somehow passed unnoticed and put them on, leaving their former owner to continue on his way barefoot.

Soon after, Vivian pointed to the side of the road. Looking in the direction in which he was pointing, I saw a hundred or more corpses, lying in rows, one upon the other, like ninepins knocked over by the same ball. They had clearly not died in battle. ‘A small batch,’ said Vivian. The smell, sweet and all-pervading, was stronger than ever.

Already we were approaching the outskirts of Belgrade. The road, which until now had twisted in and out round the contours of the hills, became straight and broad, with an impeccable surface in the best autobahn style. It was the first tarmac road I had seen in Jugoslavia.
Our little convoy of three jeeps bowled merrily along. The thunder of the heavy guns grew louder and more distinct. Over the city a dive-bomber, black against the watery blue of the sky, got into position and, as we watched, went hurtling down towards its target.

Meeting a Partisan, we asked where General Peko had his Headquarters, and were directed to a villa in a residential suburb outside the town. But when we got there it was only to find that Peko had moved elsewhere. A rear party were busy packing themselves and their belongings into a truck. The position ‘proved somewhat inconvenient’, one of them explained, a series of deafening explosions from nearby gardens lending force to his remark, as the enemy, wherever they were, settled down to shell the neighbourhood in earnest. Taking advantage of his offer to pilot us to the General’s new Headquarters, we climbed back into our jeeps with as much nonchalance as we could muster and followed him gratefully back to the comparative quiet of the outer boulevards.

We found Peko installed in a house on the outskirts of the town. He was about to have lunch and invited us to join him. The house in which he had set up his Headquarters had belonged to a millionaire and was furnished with extreme richness, and the meal which we now ate was of excellent quality and luxuriously served. Having washed it down with plenty of good local red wine, we felt much refreshed and ready for anything. Taking Peko’s Chief of Staff with us, we set out in our jeeps to see for ourselves how things were going.

The Chief of Staff, we soon found, had only a rather sketchy idea of the geography of Belgrade. But as none of the rest of us had ever been there before, we left the task of navigation to him, and, under his direction, plunged gaily into the centre of the town. Our first objective was the Kalemegdan. This, it appeared, was some kind of fort, which had just been taken and from which we should be able to follow the progress of the fighting.

The streets through which we approached it were under heavy shell-fire. They were also crowded with civilians, some enthusiastic, some just standing and gaping. From time to time a shell would land full amongst them, killing several. This left the Chief of Staff
unmoved. Sitting beside me in the front of my jeep, he was busy showing us the sights of Belgrade, which he had not visited since he was a child. ‘That,’ he would say, ‘is the Parliament Building. And there is the Opera. And now I am afraid we have lost the way again. Ah, that must be the Ministry of Agriculture.’

From the back of the jeep, Vivian, who as a seasoned infantryman had had considerable experience of long-range shelling and its results, was beginning to show signs of impatience. ‘Mightn’t it be better,’ he would suggest politely, as we swerved down yet another side-street, littered with the same little heaps of fresh corpses, ‘mightn’t it be better to go straight there?’

But the Chief of Staff was not to be put off. Accustomed to the hand-to-hand fighting of guerrilla warfare, long-range shelling meant little to him. Whatever happened, and even though he might not be quite sure of the way, he was determined to do the honours of the capital in proper style.

Next we tried to guess where the shells were coming from and what they were aimed at. But even that was not easy. Nor did the Chief of Staff himself seem to have a very clear idea of the situation. One thing only was evident: that heavy fighting was going on all round us. The thunder of artillery and the rattle of small-arms fire resounded from all sides. It was not until we finally reached our destination that we got a clear picture of what was happening.

The Kalemegdan is an ancient fort, built of stone and red brick, from which, in Turkish times, the Ottoman conquerors held sway over Belgrade and the surrounding country. We approached it on foot through what seemed to be some public gardens, having first left the jeeps under the cover of a clump of bushes. As far as we knew, the Kalemegdan itself was in Soviet or Partisan hands, but in the immediate neighbourhood skirmishing was still in progress and through the trees came the occasional crack of a rifle or a burst of fire from a machine gun. It was not without caution that we wended our way amongst the ornamental flower-beds and clumps of shrubs. ‘Keep off the grass’, said the notices unavailingly.