‘That was the firing we heard?’
‘That was the firing you heard. And if the frontier post is anywhere near they will have heard it too. So be careful!’
‘They won’t turn out in force till daylight. Shots in the night are nothing new and this lot value their skins. Now come with us!’
‘My companion is still recovering from what the Gestapo did to him,’ I said, ‘and he must not walk any more. Have you a spare horse?’
He himself immediately dismounted and helped Moshe into the saddle.
‘Now lead us to the bodies!’
‘We have only to follow the track. Where it turns left into the dip we shall find them.’
We walked together behind the horses. When I let him know that I was English, he asked me how I came to speak German so well.
‘My mother was Austrian and I often visited her parents.’
‘Where?’
‘Not far from Uzhgorod in Slovakia. Down below us they lived on what was left of their estate.’
‘I can take you there.’
‘Not now. Not any more.’
We picked up the bodies, tying each down behind a rider, and marched a few miles to the east, where again we entered the forest and arrived at what seemed a temporary bivouac cunningly placed on the edge of a gorge which could not be seen at all from the high tops, and would appear to an observer on the opposite side of the valley merely a terrace of the cliff wide enough to support a mixture of beech and pine. Here were a dozen more partisans with plenty of food and ammunition and another light machine-gun. They could not risk a fire but otherwise seemed to be carefree and at home.
I asked if they were all Poles.
‘No, my friend. We represent the provinces of the vanished empire. Here are Poles, Slovaks, a Czech, two Romanians from the Bucovina and myself, an Austrian. I represent, in all but its hopeless inefficiency, imperial Vienna, when at least we remained Europeans and men of honour. For me as for my ancestors frontiers are only a nuisance.’
He delighted in his irony, reminding me of all the smash-and-grab since March 1939. The Czechs were swallowed by Hitler. Slovakia timidly put itself under his protection. Poland and Hungary collected a common frontier from the garbage, and after the defeat of Poland Russia took her slice of Poland and in 1940 annexed Bessarabia and Bucovina from Romania.
‘And now the Russians are back on the Volga and the frontiers are a spider’s web of abandoned posts and wire. No one knows them as we do, not even the garrison commanders.’
‘What are your objectives?’
‘Simple. To squash these lice who crawl over honour and humanity. If you care to join us I will welcome a Jew who, I can see, remains a fine horseman in spite of the Gestapo and an Englishman who has the national virtue of gnawing the enemy while keeping his mouth shut.’
I could see no point in keeping my mouth shut any longer, so I gave him my history since the escape from Rostock without mentioning how I got there. If I told him of the three years spent trying, in a manner more patient than my first attempt, to get near enough to Hitler to kill him, he would no more have believed me than my interrogator in Stockholm had.
‘And where do you want to go?’
‘To join the armed forces of my country. And if I cannot, I will fight alone.’
Casimir’s flame of outraged patriotism was easy to understand, but this man’s country was in his spirit rather than in any land. He had been marked down for execution soon after the Anschluss when Hitler united Germany and Austria, and had taken refuge in Poland, where after the defeat he had begun to organize his own force in the little towns and villages of the Carpathians.
‘Some of us have escaped from death or prison, some from the disgrace of serving Hitler,’ he told me. ‘Freedom or death! What a cliché! Every man is a slave and all he can expect from his master is generosity.’
He pointed to the two bodies lying apart under a tree of their own. ‘It’s sad to think of those two honest men, fathers of families perhaps, who served their country. Gladly? Resignedly? We shall never know. But the fault is theirs. They voted that clown into power. Don’t you think it would be right to describe my command as the Educational Corps?’
‘Yes, Herr Professor, though I don’t agree that the fault is theirs.’
‘Then you are sorry for them?’
‘Not in the least. I once killed a man-eater. Being old and hungry, it was not his fault. But he had to die.’
‘I think you are in love with death.’
‘I have had for so long nothing else to be in love with.’
‘Not life?’
‘For a little while life gave me all I could ever ask. Now only death remains.’
‘You talk like a Russian refugee,’ he said cheerfully. ‘This is the Tatra, not Montmartre. Have another drink!’
Peacefully we ate and drank in the moonlight, each suppressing his curiosity about the other. Moshe had found two German-speakers and was inspecting horses with a glass in his hand, taken back into memories beyond the reach of pain.
‘From the little you have told me, I suspect your maternal grandfather must have been the Graf von Darmshof, but I am ignorant of his English descendants. It is better so. We should not try to find out names. No one can ever be sure that he will keep silence under all they can do to him. In these mountains I am known only as the Voevod.
‘Darmshof ’s son and my father were pages at the imperial court together with a younger son of Prince Euersperg. They were nicknamed the Three Musketeers. Happy days in Vienna under Franz Josef and his half-wit ministers who landed Europe where it is! Euersperg married a Jewess. People still talk of their daughter. She had the fire and beauty of both the bloods. I saw her once. Irresistible! A man could create himself a poet just to pay tribute to her.’
Indeed he could. Dark, slender lioness of love and courage, who commands to this day my soul and inhibits my body from desire of any other woman. You, my treasure, whom I avenge.
‘She gave those damn Austrian Nazis no peace,’ he went on. ‘Plotting violence for violence, it seems, as well as propaganda. She was often in England. You may have met her.’
Yes, first in Spain, where she had taken her mother for safety after Chancellor Dollfuss was assassinated on Hitler’s order and it was believed that invasion of Austria would follow immediately. It did not, so she returned and she and her father reorganized the cells of international resistance.
‘Names. You said we should not try to find them out,’ I reminded him, ‘but the leaders must know them – all of those names of honour and influence in army, the universities, the churches. Then in 1937, when the Nazis and their Austrian supporters burst in and raped the state, father and daughter were quietly removed to Germany.’
‘Silence is the worst cruelty of dictatorship. There was a rumour that she was shot,’ he said.
‘Shot? Do you think they can be as merciful as that?’
I had not meant to say more, but he shared the memory of her, and from a single meeting.
‘They split her apart slowly,’ I told him, ‘inch by inch between the questions, as if delivering a child that was too large. And still she would not talk. They let her die. She didn’t count. After all she was only half Aryan.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because her father told me. They made him watch. He gave the names they wanted but it was too late. He was sent home with a memory that was worse than torture. He killed himself.’
I could have taken his hand and sobbed like a child, but it was no more his business than that of the carrion lying under the trees.
3
Sentries were posted high above us. The camp of partisans slept on its hidden ledge. In the morning the Voevod asked me how I intended to reach the British army in the Middle East. I could only reply that I had always been a few hours ahead of
capture and that until I fell in with Casimir I could not begin to make plans. My best hope was to reach Romania and then by sea, if it could be done, by sea to neutral Turkey.
‘Have you any papers at all beyond those of Haase?’ he asked.
‘A valid passport in the name of Ernesto Menendez Peraza, landowner of Nicaragua.’
‘But that would let you through.’
‘It would – if Don Ernesto had not been involved in an attempt to assassinate Hitler.’
‘Impossible unless one belonged to his entourage.’
‘I was well on the way to that.’
‘Would German frontier guards have your name on their blacklist?’
‘Yes. At the top of it. But ordinary Romanian guards might not.’
‘Well, I can help you on your way a little. We are running short of ammunition and I have learned that we may get it across the frontier in what was Russia. They left Poland in a hurry.’
The following night we set out, passing round the Dukla Peak and then south. The moon helped, but I was astonished how this pack of frontier wolves fat with flesh of the dead could keep on course across the featureless watershed, always ready if threatened to split up, radiating into the valley forests and reuniting after days of concealment. Every man was self-supporting in food and weapons.
Dawn after our second night’s bivouac brought back memories of early youth. I knew where I was. Through a V between the hills I could catch a glimpse of the plain of the Tisza and see part of a broken line of wire and blockhouses which marked the frontier – a frontier which had only lasted two years.
The day was spent gathering more local intelligence. Our own Slovaks were out on foot mixing with the peasants. Two shepherds found us and gave us local news. We heard that nobody paid much attention to the former frontier, that it was very lightly garrisoned, and that it would take time to concentrate enough troops to hold us up on our passage from forest to forest. Not surprisingly I remember the tactical position very clearly. Though no soldier, I drew from it the lesson that it is intelligence which counts. Our daring Viennese commander made the mistake of Franz Josef and the Czechs in believing that no Slovaks were pro-German.
He decided to move down to agricultural land and take position in the evening just inside the last of the woods. There we had open country in front of us for four or five miles. We were to rush this in a bunch instead of sneaking over one by one or in small parties, and should reach safe refuge in the tangled foothills on the other side as the night closed in. Since our objective was to collect arms and ammunition from some small depot which the advancing Germans had not found or not bothered to find, it looked to me as if his retreat to his usual hunting grounds would be long and dangerous.
And so began my second battle. We emerged from the trees in two ragged columns. To our right was open country with a couple of abandoned blockhouses; to our left, at an angle of forty-five degrees to our advance, was a narrow valley running up into the hills with a stream at the bottom. The map showed another small stream running across our front, not deep enough to form an obstacle.
We were all trotting fast to cross the long stretch of open land and have time to find some easily defensible position for the night. I was riding along near the front of the left-hand column, remembering days of the 1920s and the adventurous happy youth who cantered out into these valleys past peasants doffing their caps, when a blast of machine-gun fire hit us from the front. My horse was shot under me in the best tradition of wars of the last century and I pitched over its shoulder in a fall more sudden than that of the hunting field but no worse. Lying still with bullets spitting earth at me, I vaguely recalled that cavalry horses some time somewhere were trained to lie down while the rider fired over the body as if it were a sandbag. That seemed hard on the horse, but mine was already dead.
I slid into that useful cover and took a quick glance over it. Half the left-hand column were down and the survivors had raced for the nearby valley, the leaders galloping for the shelter of the ravine bent low in the saddle. The right-hand column had not suffered so badly and were off their horses and returning the fire.
I unslung the Mannlicher and prepared to join in. It was obvious what had happened. The enemy had learned of our movements late in the day, and while we were still in the trees short of the frontier had correctly assessed our intentions and seized the opportunity for a successful ambush, moving whatever men were available into the stream bed which ran across our front. Casimir, whose secret campaign depended on the apparent innocence and humility of his village cells and his own deadly skill as a double agent, would never have taken such a blind risk as our partisans.
Little could be seen of the enemy, but as they were not dug in they had to show occasional heads above the banks of the stream. The Mannlicher, now that we were on good terms, bagged a brace at two hundred yards. I had the impression that, fully engaged with our right column, they did not at first appreciate where the shots were coming from and opened up on the edge of the wood. That gave our right a moment of respite in which they attempted short rushes to get round the flank. Hopeless. Another machine-gun was on a fixed line of fire parallel to the enemy front.
Uniforms glimpsed – but too quickly for action – suggested that these frontier troops were Slovaks under experienced German command. They were showing no exaggerated enthusiasm for action. They ought to have been able to wipe us out instead of pinning us down. The detachment commander – an oldish man probably only fit for garrison duty in comparatively peaceful Slovakia – exposed himself with first-war resolution once too often to the Mannlicher. Slackening fire thereafter showed that morale was crumbling. But neither side were going to rise from the earth and risk annihilation before nightfall. Meanwhile I had proved to my own satisfaction that the rifle, given some cover and in the absence of mortar, was the superior arm. However, this last shot revealed my position. It was convenient to change horses – on the ground, that is.
In the deep dusk there was some movement. I could vaguely make out the Slovaks crawling like crocodiles out of the stream bed. There was some firing but, I think, no casualties. Then what was left of our right column rushed forward and found the position unoccupied. They caught the few horses which had bolted out of the line of fire and went straight on towards the distant wooded hills which had been our original objective. I did not follow. It occurred to me that the enemy might have fallen back to a more serious line where they could receive reinforcements and stop our escape.
The deep and narrow valley into which half of our left-hand column had galloped seemed a safe spot, so long as the head of it was not closed. So half a dozen of us disappeared into it carrying our wounded who had a chance of recovery. We were too small a band to have medical services or more than one primitive ambulance. A heartbreak. When we had gone we heard a few shots from men who had decided on death at their own hands rather than the enemy’s. They knew there would be no mercy for them in the morning unless for those who were kept alive long enough to be interrogated. I believe there were no wounded left alive in the stream bed either. I decided that in future I would fight with regular troops or alone, but never again with guerillas.
As we advanced up the valley, the rising moon showed enough of it for me to recognize. There I had ridden as a boy. I had even killed a harmless wolf. My misgivings about the head of the valley increased. It became a gorge with few trees but steepish sides of limestone cracked, creviced and pinnacled. Plenty of cover there was, but both ends were remarkably easy to block.
We caught up the rest of the left column. They had suffered more severely than the right, and I was very glad to find Moshe unhurt. He appeared to prefer being shot at to shooting and was coolly patching up a neat hole in his horse’s ear. The Voevod, in the way of commanders, was more inclined to congratulate the enemy than to blame himself. I told him all I knew of the lie of the land and advised him to reach the pines of the high fore
st before dawn if we had the strength, for there could be no doubt that we had stirred up a wasps’ nest. He agreed that there might be trouble, but assured me that many times the enemy had triumphantly surrounded them and then found that there was nothing at all in the middle. He cursed those honest shepherds who had given him false information. He should have known, he said, that any of them who were left free to feed their flocks over those miles of abandoned fortifications must be on good terms with the patrols, German and Slovak. They did not seek vengeance as we did for innumerable brutalities but wanted only peace and a good price for spring lambs.
We were not out of the valley at dawn. We lost time crossing and recrossing the stream and twice hauled horses up promising slopes which ended in sheer ledges. Moon shadows, stretches of complete blackness, fantastic rock formations – whatever that crumbling, waterworn limestone could do, it did. Years ago it had made some sense to me, but then, in sunlight, one could see at a distance where there was a possible path and where there was not.
Daylight did show us that we were nearly there and that the valley ended in a slope of scree which could easily be traversed. We halted to draw breath and a moment later were diving for the cover of rocks, leaving two more of our dead on the ground. Further progress was impossible, and if our retreat too was blocked this was the end.
The way up and out of the valley had only been vaguely in my mind, for of course it offered no special difficulty to a boy who could leave his pony at the bottom and scramble up the scree if he wished. What I did remember, rather to the exclusion of all else, was a raven’s nest to which I had climbed. It had been on the flat lip of a buttress thrust out from the cliff very near the top. A tangle of wind-swept sticks hanging over the edge showed that the nest was still there. It occurred to me that if I could get up our light machine-gun I should be well above the enemy position and in excellent cover.
‘But are you sure you can get there?’ the Voevod asked when I suggested my plan. He didn’t want to lose his remaining gun before he had to when attacked from front and rear.
Rogue Justice Page 9
