Eastern Approaches (63 page)

Nor was the ruined palace our only reminder of dynastic difficulties. Soon after we reached Belgrade, an elderly gentleman, wearing a beret, called at my Headquarters. He introduced himself as Prince George Karadjordjević, King Alexander’s elder brother and the uncle
of the present King. Then he plunged straight into his life history. It was, he said, an exaggeration to say that he had murdered his valet. His enemies had made unfair use of the incident. If he had his rights, he would be King of Jugoslavia today.

Someone asked him if, apart from this, he had everything he needed. Yes, he said, everything. The Partisans had been very kind. They had given him back his car which had been requisitioned during the fighting, and now Tito had sent him a present of food. It was nice to find someone who appreciated him. And he stumped off, a mildly disgruntled royalty, his beret set at a jaunty angle over one eye.

For several weeks after our arrival the streets were enlivened at night by periodic rifle shots and bursts of machine-gun fire, as stray Germans, who had been left behind in the retreat and had gone to ground in attics and cellars, emerged and sought to fight their way out. The Russians, too, were apt to let off their weapons from sheer
joie de vivre
, and, one day, as some of my officers were sitting in the mess, listening to the wireless, a drunken Red Army soldier lurched in, unannounced, and laughingly discharged his tommy-gun into the loudspeaker.

Then there was the incident of the jeeps. The American Mission kept their jeeps outside their door. Having, like so many of their countrymen, a generous faith in human nature, or perhaps because they were just rather careless, they did not bother to padlock the steering wheels. We of the British Mission, belonging to an older civilization, took a more cynical view of humanity; our jeeps were heavily padlocked and hidden away in a garage. The very first night all the American jeeps disappeared, while ours remained intact. We condoled with our American colleagues, and congratulated ourselves rather smugly on our foresight. We also took the additional precaution of asking the Partisans to post sentries outside the garage. This precaution turned out to be fully justified. Next day, when we went to fetch our jeeps, we found our Partisan sentry contemplating, not without pride, the body of a soldier in Russian uniform, whom he had apparently shot in defence of our jeeps. We hoped that this drastic remedy would at any rate put a stop to this epidemic of jeep-stealing. But our hopes were not justified. Next morning early when
we went to the garage, our jeeps were gone. Lying on the floor were the padlocks, neatly filed through, and the body of the Partisan sentry. It was, we were assured, the work of ‘Fascist
provocateurs
’.

Bit by bit conditions became more normal. Gradually the debris in the streets was cleared away by enthusiastic gangs from the various Communist Youth Organizations and considerably less enthusiastic townspeople detailed for compulsory labour service. The last Germans were winkled out and disposed of. The bulk of the Red Army moved on to fight fresh battles further north. The exuberance of the remainder was curbed by savage disciplinary action. Food supplies, which in the early days had threatened to fail owing to lack of transport, were reorganized. Shops, schools, churches, theatres and a solitary night club called the ‘Tsar of Russia’ and much patronized by Red Army officers, reopened. Slowly, very slowly, all kinds of citizens who had thought it wiser to lie low at first began to emerge.

It would be a mistake to suppose that the liberation of Belgrade from the Germans had been a welcome event to the whole of the population. Many, it is true, had cheered the Partisans and the Red Army when they entered the city. But some, convinced by constant German propaganda or by what they had heard from other, less suspect, sources, went in terror of the ‘Bolshevik hordes’, fearing for their lives, their religious beliefs and their property. Others had consciences that were far from clear. It had not, it must be remembered, been easy to survive in Belgrade under the Germans, unless you were prepared to collaborate with them to some extent, and those citizens who for the past three and a half years had worked for the enemy were not unnaturally inclined to view with apprehension the victorious return of their compatriots who had spent the same three and a half years fighting them in the mountains and forests.

Tito, meanwhile, had moved into the White Palace, Prince Paul’s former residence on the outskirts of the city, and there, almost daily, I repaired to confer with him.

Whatever may be said of Prince Paul’s political judgment, his taste in matters of this kind was excellent. The White Palace had been built by him a few years before the war in the style of an English Georgian country house at home. It was charmingly furnished and contained a
remarkable collection of books and pictures. These had not suffered at all at the hands of the Germans, and Tito had had the good sense to leave them as he found them. He explained meticulously that Prince Paul’s property had been confiscated because of his treasonable behaviour. King Peter’s on the other hand had as yet not been touched.

The first time that I visited him in his new surroundings, he had only just moved in and together we explored the palace, literally from attic to basement. Upstairs we found Olga, temporarily combining the functions of housekeeper with those of private secretary, busily engaged in having the royal cipher unpicked from the bed-linen. As she pointed out, it would hardly have done for a man of the Marshal’s political views to sleep between sheets embroidered with a crown. After admiring the furniture and books and pictures, we went down into the cellar which we found stacked with great black boxes. These, on inspection, proved to be full of gold plate. ‘What can this be?’ said Tito, pulling out a great gilt pot with a heavily embossed lid. After I had diagnosed it provisionally as a soup tureen, we pushed on still further.

The cellar, we discovered, masked the entrance to a labyrinth of underground passages elaborately fitted up with bathrooms and air-conditioning apparatus, and designed apparently both as an air-raid shelter and as a means of escape from an angry mob, for one of the passages had a secret outlet a mile or two away in the woods. Not perhaps an altogether superfluous precaution, when it is considered how many of the Regent’s predecessors had met violent ends. On my way up, I had already noticed the great square blocks of barracks which surround the hill on which the royal palace stands — a piece of town-planning which also possessed a certain political significance. In the Balkans the tradition of violence is old-established and deep-rooted.

Tito, with his natural liking for the good things of life, soon settled into his new surroundings as if he had lived in palaces all his life. His suits and uniforms were made by the best tailor in Belgrade; his shirts came from the most fashionable shirt-maker; he ate the best food and drank the best wine; the horses he rode were the finest in the country. But amidst all this magnificence, it is only fair to say that, to those of
us who had known him before, he remained as friendly and as simple in his approach as ever.

But, now that Belgrade had fallen, most of my Mission felt that the original purpose for which we had been sent to Jugoslavia had been fulfilled, and were already on the look out for some new guerrillas to attach ourselves to in some other part of the world. I myself had asked to be allowed to leave Jugoslavia as soon as a united Government had been formed and regular diplomatic relations established, and this had been agreed to.

Meanwhile, it remained to form a united Government and establish regular diplomatic relations — which was easier said than done. In London, Dr. Šubašić, supported by Ralph Stevenson and Vlatko Velebit, was trying to find a formula which would reassure King Peter, satisfy Tito and provide the Allied Governments with a convenient way out of the dilemma in which they found themselves. It was a difficult and thankless task. King Peter, quite naturally, was not easy to reassure, and Tito, sitting in Belgrade with all the cards in his hand, was not easy to satisfy. The Allied Governments, for their part, confined themselves to emphasizing the need for haste and the importance of truly democratic institutions. From Moscow, from time to time, came a casual hint from Marshal Stalin that he was getting sick of the whole thing. I was kept informed by telegram of what was happening and, in turn, passed the information on to Tito.

In the meantime there was plenty to keep us busy in Belgrade. With the advance of the Allied armies into northern Italy, we needed naval and air bases on the eastern side of the Adriatic. Of late, local Partisan commanders had shown themselves highly suspicious of our intentions in such matters, and extremely non-co-operative, and in Tito’s absence this had given rise locally to considerable friction. Clearly what was needed was a comprehensive understanding regulating this side of Anglo-Jugoslav relations, and I now opened negotiations with Tito which, after a great deal of hard bargaining, eventually ended in the conclusion of an agreement giving us a temporary air base at Zara, another opening the Dalmatian ports to the Royal Navy and a third regulating the distribution of U.N.R.R.A. supplies in Jugoslavia.

With the enormous increase in administrative and other work which had resulted from the sudden liberation of enormous areas of country, he had been obliged to delegate more and more responsibility to subordinates often lacking in experience and judgment, and this had had unfortunate repercussions at any rate as far as Anglo-Jugoslav relations were concerned and no doubt in other respects as well.

But, fortunately, for the whole of the time that I was in Jugoslavia I enjoyed complete freedom of access to Tito and I did not hesitate to use this to take up and eliminate as far as possible the innumerable minor grievances and sources of irritation which already threatened to embitter our relations with the Partisans, however trifling they might seem. We would hammer these problems out in the White Palace as we had in less civilized surroundings elsewhere, and our discussions, though often stormy, generally led to some kind of an understanding being reached in the end.

In London, meanwhile, Dr. Šubašić had still not succeeded in persuading King Peter to accept the terms of the proposed agreement for the formation of a united Jugoslav Government. Indeed it began to look as if he never would.

And so, in Belgrade, Tito began to turn on the heat. The Press, which had up to now scarcely mentioned the negotiations, came out with violent attacks on the King, and, as though by magic, crowds of demonstrators suddenly appeared in the streets, shouting: ‘
Hočemo Tito; nečemo Kralja
’ — ‘We want Tito; we don’t want the King.’ Tito asked me if I had heard them. I said I could not help hearing them as they spent most of their time shouting their heads off immediately outside my window.

Then, on January 18th, Mr. Churchill defined the British Government’s attitude in a speech in the House of Commons. ‘It is,’ he said, ‘a matter of days within which an agreement must be reached upon this matter and, if we are so unfortunate as not to obtain the consent of King Peter, the matter will have to go ahead, his assent being presumed.’ At the same time he once again made it clear that we were not concerned to see one kind of regime rather than another set up in Jugoslavia. ‘We have,’ he said, ‘no special interest in the political
regime which prevails in Jugoslavia. Few people in Britain, I imagine, are going to be more cheerful or more downcast because of the future constitution of Jugoslavia.’

This reassured Tito, who until then had suspected that we might be going to try to restore the King by force and now knew that he had little more to worry about. At our interviews his manner became increasingly jocular.

But there was a surprise in store. On January 22nd, with no warning to anyone, the King informed the Press that he had lost confidence in Dr. Šubašić and had decided to dismiss him and his Government. He was, he hinted, thinking of getting into touch with Tito direct.

‘Do what you can to keep Tito calm,’ telegraphed the Foreign Office, now thoroughly alarmed. But there was no need. Tito had never been calmer. The whole thing he said, was ‘as good as a play’.

For over a month the affair remained in this indeterminate state. Relations between the King and Dr. Šubašić were resumed and gradually the points at issue were narrowed down to the choice of the three Regents, whose function it was discreetly to keep alive the monarchic principle in Jugoslavia until elections could be held.

On this purely academic question — for it had been clear from the first that the Regents would be no more than figureheads — endless telegrams passed between London and Belgrade; it was clearly essential that all three Regents should be real, eighteen-carat, brass-bottomed democrats. But, as usual, it all depended on what you meant by democrat. The rival claims of a number of elderly and experienced Serb, Croat and Slovene politicians were advanced and discussed, and accusations and counter-accusations bandied backwards and forwards in true Balkan style. In the ensuing confusion at least one candidate was rejected by the party which had originally proposed him, on its being discovered that he had already been proposed by the other, while another old gentleman, described to me as being ‘universally respected’ was found, after his name had gone forward and seemed likely for once to meet with general approval, to have been dead for some time. It looked as if this bargaining might go on for ever.

Then, early in February, while the snow still lay in the streets of Belgrade, we learned that the Big Three, Churchill, Stalin and
Roosevelt, were meeting in the sunshine at Yalta, by the shores of the Black Sea. Jugoslavia, we knew, would be on the agenda, and, in some suspense, we waited for the thunder to issue from the Crimean Olympus. In due course the combined oracles spoke. There was the traditional reference to democratic principles. Shorn of these adornments, the utterance amounted to an exhortation to Tito and Šubašić to get on with it. There was no mention of King Peter.

This clinched it. King Peter gave in. The proceedings in London were brought to an abrupt end. Within a week Dr. Šubašić and his Government had arrived in Belgrade, with a mandate to come to terms with Tito as quickly as possible.