Rogue Justice

by Geoffrey Household

  Not a hope of escape. No lane, garden or shadowed corner. I had to enter that building. I signalled to the two military police that they could clear off now, and loudly knocked.

  The door was opened by a Gestapo corporal with his hosepipe at the ready who looked at me with astonishment. I must be something out of the ordinary to have got so far through the empty streets of the curfew. Behind him was a long passage, with half a dozen doors all shut.

  ‘Your pass!’ he demanded.

  ‘The captain, please, and at once. I will wait here.’

  Again the cultured voice and the air of confidence did the trick. He turned about smartly with his back to me.

  I leaped on him. My difficulty, I remember, was to stop him falling with a crash and at the same time to keep a hand over his mouth while twisting the bayonet. Perhaps assassins have a technique for that. He was quite dead. I had no time to pin my trademark, so I stuck it into his mouth.

  Brutal. But this was war; and cold steel has always been an exaltation of war, though the sabre and lance cause viler wounds than any but shell splinters. True, a stab in the back can hardly be included in such cruel gallantry, but when the enemy is as despicable as the Gestapo?

  All was so quick that when I opened the door and looked out my military police were still in the street. I had to wait till they were round the corner – an interminable wait, though probably not more than thirty seconds. Anyone might come down the passage or out of one of those closed doors. As soon as the pair were out of sight, I quietly shut the front door and walked away, exposed in a straight empty street. Down the first intersection was a patrol which challenged me, but was too far away to catch up. I ran and on my left passed a small builder’s yard, for which I thanked God – not because I intended to hide in it but because, if I were out of sight, the patrol was sure to stop and search it. Just in time I charged at random into one of the narrow, cobbled Greek lanes where darkness and the slight slope hid me. No following steps echoed behind as I left the blank walls and wandered through little olive groves and over walled terraces, the outline of hills against the stars showing me that I had come out of Kozani on the right side. When at last I stumbled into the usual patch of thick scrub, I burrowed into it to get my breath back.

  At first light I crossed the main road and after making a detour to recover my rifle climbed up into my home territory. Now, with the leisure to move about and look down, I had the impression that the full force of a furious garrison had turned out. They had no solid evidence that I was or had been on the edge of the range – I might be anywhere – but they did know that I had attacked the blockhouse from the spur above it, that I had shot the motorcyclist only a mile to the south and that I had entered Kozani by the western road.

  The blockhouse was occupied; two troop-carriers were weaving up the spur and nearly on a level with me and, worst of all, there was a company of men who behaved like experienced mountain troops traversing the slope towards me and beating as they went. If I was going to show myself at all, it had to be now, before the advancing screen got within range. They were tied up in all that squat thicket while I was on rock and gravel with a clear scramble to the summit ridge. A few wild shots were fired at me, but I was soon over the edge and out of sight. The line changed direction, their left going hard for the top, their right traversing the slope obliquely to catch me if I turned back.

  I knew infantry could never overtake me if I went straight on towards the west, but I distrusted the troop-carriers. I had already seen how fast they could pick their ground. The best way to get clear was to go north into country I hardly knew, round a low peak carved and riven as if by a mad Gothic architect, and into the surrounding bare, broken crags where troop-carriers could not follow and there was plenty of cover in which the advancing line could waste their time searching for me. The whole enemy screen was now behind me, leaving piquets on the edge of the range in case I dashed down in the direction of Kozani. Sometimes they had a chance of a harmless snapshot, as likely as not taken standing awkwardly on one leg.

  As I thought, the carriers could not take the crags and remained on a track which wound along the eastern slope, cutting me off from the low ground but nowhere else. I had time in hand to try a little north-west-frontier stuff on the nearest carrier, scoring on a too eager head-and-shoulders. The response was efficient and immediate. Something loudly exploded twenty yards behind me. It was my first experience of a mortar – evidently a useful weapon for keeping a sniper on the move.

  The spurt of splintered rock at least pinpointed my position for the following line. I was not sorry for that, since the direction of their attack was clear. So far as I could see, they meant to sweep round the jagged cathedral of rock in roughly crescent formation and drive me on to the machine-guns of the carriers. That gave me time to fall back northwards using every angle and pinnacle of cover till I was somewhere beyond and outside the point where the left horn of the crescent of beaters ought to finish up.

  They were still certain that I was inside the cordon and bound to show myself in order to escape. In fact I was already outside, having anticipated the attack and encouraged it to come more or less as it did. I wanted to be able to pick a single man, far enough away from his comrades for me to have a moment to label him with my compliments. I reckoned that this contemptuous insult would make them lose their tempers and conduct the search for me in such a good Teutonic mood of hysterical anger that they omitted military precautions.

  It didn’t work out quite as I intended. The pack following me were dodging about fairly close together. However, the infantry deployed from the nearest carrier were loosely extending the western horn, leaving two men behind to keep contact between the parties or perhaps close a gap. One of these men – he may not have realized how daring he was – had nipped swiftly into good cover and I was not sure exactly where he was.

  It was easy enough to leave my own clump of rocks unseen but then I had to locate him. He knew his job and if it had not been that a single clink of the barrel on stone gave him away he would have cut me in half with his machine pistol. Very slowly I crawled round behind him using all the old teachings of professional hunters. It was curious to see his reactions. I had not given my presence away by any footstep or rolling stone, yet he was aware of my presence, continually looking behind him and fidgeting. How well I know that sense of being stalked! An animal bolts, but a man, unused to the saving instincts of the preyed upon, accuses himself of nerves, cowardice, superstition. I knew what he was vaguely dreading as if I had been alongside.

  At any time now I could have shot him, but that was not what I wanted. Nearer and nearer I crawled until there was only a little gravelly ridge between me and his feet. To cross it I could not help being heard. We jumped up together, but, as he had to swing round on me and I dived straight from the balls of my toes, the bayonet took him under his left arm with all the weight of my body behind it. There was no need to finish him off. A fine splinter of stone pinned the label to his throat.

  Our heads must have been seen but probably no more. The mortar tried again, scored a near miss and I was gone. The crescent, so far as I could reconstruct it by the blasts of fire, became a flitting, stalking circle around the dead man, which made it easy for me to put the rocky summit between myself and this expeditionary force better fitted to engage a whole commando than one man. The way to the north was open, and soon I could proceed safely at a jog trot. When I reached kinder country I was utterly exhausted. There was cover of some sort. What it was I do not remember. I rolled into it and slept.

  I was awakened by the distant noise of a tracked vehicle. It was far away on an even slope running down to the plain. It didn’t bother me. I had no doubt that the search for the nightmare killer would go on, and by the process of elimination the enemy could be fairly sure in what part of the range he was to be found. The urgent problem was going to be food. For drink I could depend on the gully puddles or
occasional springs among the rocks clear enough for any nymph. I ate my last scrap of cheese and stale bread for breakfast and lay down to bask in the sun with my hands behind my head, thinking not so much of my next move as of what my true objective ought to be. Ever since the plane hit ground in the eastern valley of the Aliakmon it seemed to me that action had usually been decided at half an hour’s notice. It had been mere luck that I had been able to turn from badly wanted fugitive to the attack.

  To return to the Kozani area would be folly; on the other hand, it was a pity not to exploit my minor military success. To continue vengeance, unremitting vengeance, or to disengage and escape to the coast? The second alternative was perhaps my duty. I could serve Europe to rid itself of this evil plague much better in the armed forces than on my own. Yet my private operations had been effective and to the bloodshed I had added political warfare. I won’t say that my labels would have had much effect on the decent man in the ranks, but they might make him understand that respect for the Herrenvolk was far from general and that a plain, skilful, patriotic soldier had been sacrificed from sheer hatred.

  I set out to explore my new territory. The range was narrower with more plentiful stands of pine. A small lake was in the distance, and the hollows were marshy, one or two of them looking as treacherous as Dartmoor bogs. Evidently water from the winter snows of Pindus had difficulty in flowing down to the plain. The country gave an impression of emptiness, villages being far away from each other and tending to hug the flanks of the range. From the high ground, olive green in calm, silver in a breeze, one could see for miles. I picked out two troop-carriers full of black-uniformed Gestapo apparently doing a round of the villages to question and threaten. There was also a party on foot working the western side of the mountains. For the sake of the local inhabitants I left them alone. To kill one or two at long range would only increase fear and anger which they would take out on the villagers.

  In the evening, when my hunters had packed up and gone home, I risked the noise of a shot and bagged a hare. Grilled over a fire built in a cleft of the rocks, it gave me the first satisfying meal for several days, so that I was ready to explore a piece of the night and gain some mental picture of the tracks which led from one faint constellation of candlelight to another.

  I had noticed during the afternoon that below me and a little north the tops of pines were showing and that near the edge of them a streak of red rock seen through the trunks could be the highest roof of a village hidden in the valley. It was worth investigation, partly for any chance of food, partly for its communications with the plain. To reach the straggling patch of woodland, threading a way in darkness between boulders and bushes, took a long time, but once arrived I found the trees well spaced and that I could walk silently over an even floor of pine needles – blindly as well as silently, for the stars were hidden and I had no guide but the slope.

  When a distant, dimly lit window showed me that the village was not far below, it seemed to me that a cold finger touched my cheek. I stopped short, common sense telling me it was a dead animal, fantasy suggesting a kindly warning that I was about to step over a precipice. Putting out a tentative hand I found that it was indeed a finger which had touched me and above it was an arm. A corpse, rags of clothing obscuring the outline, was hanging by its feet from a branch.

  I waited by the body till the first glimmer of dawn to make sure what had happened and whether or not I was concerned. I was not quite alone, for nailed to the tree was an icon of St Michael, whose drawn sword kept watch over the dead or perhaps promised a day of reckoning. The body was striped like a zebra with dried blood, the clothes shredded by the whip. Did they believe that he had hidden me, or was this cruelty just a warning to an innocent village of what would happen to anyone who gave me help?

  I stayed long enough to watch the black-veiled figures of two mourning women, his mother and his young wife, come out as soon as the light allowed accompanied by the priest. I gathered from their high voices a lamentation that they did not dare to cut him down; if he was not still there for the crows when the next detachment of the Gestapo passed, another would hang from the branch in his place. From then on, my self-questioning conscience knew no more feelings of guilt.

  Very cautiously I returned to the summit where I could occasionally glimpse some of the hunting parties. By affixing my labels I had done my best not to involve the local inhabitants in the Kozani district, but here the Gestapo, determined to have victims, were following their usual practice of choosing them at random on the general principle that since everyone loathed them no one could be innocent. Movements of carriers and, where roads were passable, a few cars, suggested that they were trying to run me to earth by means of interrogation. Their exploration of the tops was perfunctory. After all it would have taken a line of men at five-yard intervals to flush me out, and there could not be troops to spare left in the mountains of Macedonia.

  After observation for a whole day I became familiar with the few cross-country tracks, limited in their windings by cliff or woodland or marsh. If only, I thought, I could lay my hands on a mine and know how to arm it and bury it! I had not even a spade to dig a game trap, which I knew well how to disguise so that hippo or even elephant, sticking to the same path through forest or tall grass, fell into the straight-sided pit and were impaled, to be finished off by the broad-bladed spears on their way to the communal pots.

  For the next day and night I was without food. Possibly I could have found a peasant to trust but after what I had seen I refused to involve any of them. The only hope of edible life was on the kinder slopes of the west of the range rolling down in waves and terraces where neither rocks nor scrub were tall enough to hide me. In daylight it was dangerous. A road crossed it halfway down with a fair amount of military traffic which sometimes put out patrols. The enemy had the same conviction as the Greeks: that an English fugitive would always make for the sea.

  On the edge of one shallow depression, deep enough to hide me from the road, there were frogs about but too nimble to catch with my hands. As for a bullet, that would not leave me much of a frog even if I could hit it. Then I found a competitor also after frogs. It was a fine, fat snake good for two meals and easily to be captured if he didn’t wriggle into a crack. He went fast for the nearest boulder and, as he was as fast as I over ankle-breaking ground, I started to run across a patch of dead grass in order to cut him off. In an instant I was up to the knees in bog and could never have got out if a clump of coarse grass had not been just within the reach of a stretched arm.

  The snake was still catchable and I caught it. That success was enough for the moment and I hardly realized what a narrow escape I had had. However, before leaving for my wind-swept home and breakfast I had a close look at the extent of the bog so that I could avoid it in future. It was not very broad and formed a sort of tableland of its own, with the rough ground over which I had chased the snake on one side and a long rounded ridge on the other with occasional clumps of rushes and the same dead, matted grass as the rest of the hillside. The bog itself was a trifle greener, and I think I would have spotted it if I had not been concentrating on the snake.

  That thought married up with my futile dreams of elephant traps. But the snake to be chased would have to be me, and there had to be an easy, tempting approach up from the road. I walked round the head of the bog and decided that the surface of the hillside should not give any trouble at all to a tracked vehicle. If the occupants caught sight of me – identifiable at once by the rifle slung on my back – above them, the right tactical approach was to leave the road, bounce over a couple of ridges, then go straight for the top and deploy as soon as the going became impossible. Don Ernesto, alias Captain Haase, alias Ludwig Weber, was doomed. The only snag was that he really might be.

  Hunger could wait. Snake grilled can be excellent but a bite at snake raw was prohibitive. I chose a lair at the foot of the cliffs from which I could look down and command a
mile of road. It was easy to spot me from above and I could only pray that none of the foot patrols, admittedly rare, would choose that morning for reconnaissance of the ridge.

  I had to wait till the early evening for a worthy victim. No carriers passed, only country carts and a couple of staff cars. Then at last a troop-carrier full of black uniforms came in sight, travelling back to the south after some bestial outing. I started to attract their attention a little late, for it went against the grain to show myself openly after all this time of practising the stealthiness and camouflage of a leopard among rocks. Outlined against the cliff I moved along it turning over stones and poking into crevices as if desperately searching for something to eat. Even so it took them the hell of a time to notice the careless figure above them.

  The carrier suddenly swerved off the road and went hard at the slope, making such a racket that I could no longer pretend not to have heard and seen it. They saw me dash for cover, fail to find it and run across a stretch of open grass in panic – a necessary pretence which was much too real for my comfort. I was now within easy range and their machine-gun opened up in spite of the swinging and lurching of the carrier; if they had stopped long enough for any man to take aim, he must have bagged me. But they charged straight up after this killer of the mountain all intoxicated by anger and mere speed, until the carrier flung itself over that gentle ridge.

  I had now thankfully dropped flat behind the boulder where I had caught my snake, so that I was deprived of the joy of watching the disaster. When the firing had stopped and there was no louder noise than shoutings, alarms and frenzied advice, I looked out. The tracks were already under and threshing up mud until they stopped. The vehicle then visibly sank a couple of feet with its tail in the air. Two black uniforms had jumped out into the bog and were hanging on. The rest were fluttering up and down in their seats. As soon as the machine-gun was pointing into the green slime and personal weapons were no longer at the ready, some even thrown overboard to get rid of the weight, I could safely stroll out of cover and wish them good evening. They called for help, though it should have been quite obvious that there was nothing I could do or had any intention of doing. The carrier disappeared with men still standing on it up to their thighs. I left the trap and its victims. Even I did not wish to see any more.