Mission Telemark

by Amanda Mitchison

  Lars took another armful of snow. He didn’t look at me. He just gave a shudder and said, “About coffin-sized. Maybe a little bigger.”

  So Lars taught me the art of a good snow hole. The secret is to start low and then dig up into the hillside at an angle – that way it’s easier to push the snow back out of the way. Also, since hot air rises, the doorway keeps out some of the cold.

  After about half an hour of burrowing we had our snow hole – about a metre tall and just big enough for both of us to lie down flat. I spread my branches out on the floor of the hole and Lars pushed a ski through the roof a couple of times and swivelled it round to make air vents.

  We crawled inside for the night and Lars propped a heavy sweater over the door with a couple of bits of wood. I lit a tiny stub of candle and we ate the very last of the pemmican. It was really quite cosy – in fact it was so warm that the walls and ceiling were melting slightly.

  I suggested to Lars that maybe we should’ve built a snow hole earlier, but he shook his head. “I hate ’em,” he said. “During the night the ceiling always sinks in towards you. Don’t sleep on your back, or you’ll wake with snow up your nose.”

  And with that, he turned over to go to sleep.

  So that’s where I am now – down a hole, lying on my stomach on a layer of branches with the log book in front of me. There’s something quite animal-like about this hole – especially as our boots and sleeping bags are now pretty rank. I wonder what it looks like from outside. Would a passerby see a strange pale glow coming from the snow?

  The candle is beginning to sputter and soon it’ll burn itself out. I’d better turn in now. Instead of counting sheep, I think I’ll keep a tally of the drops of water falling from the ceiling – that should carry me off to sleep.

  Jakob P. Stromsheim

  16TH JANUARY 1943

  We are still down the hole. We’ve had an extraordinary and dangerous night that has changed all things for ever and brought us close together. I find that every word that Lars has uttered still rings in my head.

  This is how it all happened.

  I woke in the very dead of night with the feeling that something wasn’t right. I couldn’t see anything, but I did have a certain “closed in” feeling and I put my hand up to touch the snow. Lars was right – the ceiling does shrink downwards.

  There was no sound, no movement – just my breathing. This darkness was too quiet and the air too still… Then, suddenly, I knew exactly what was wrong: I couldn’t hear Lars breathing.

  I reached out to the other side of the hole. My hand came to rest on branches and hard-packed snow. My heart missed a beat. I reached out again. Lars had gone.

  I wriggled out of my sleeping bag and thrust my boots on. There was barely room to move in the hole, so I had to crawl backwards along the passageway. I pushed away the sweater in the doorway and came out into a wild, moonless night.

  A chill wind hit me in the face. I took a small torch from my pocket, and switched it on. Then, cupping my hands round my eyes, I tried to peer out. At first all I could see in the torchlight was whirling snow.

  But then I caught sight of him. Lars was only a couple of metres from our snow hole and he was sitting propped against the hillside, facing directly into the wind. He’s usually so careful about the cold, but now he had no hat on. His anorak was unbuttoned down to his midriff. One bare, white hand lay limp on his lap. His face was pale and his eyes were half-closed.

  “Lars!” I cried.

  Lars looked up at me and smiled vaguely.

  “Lars! What are you doing?” I crouched down and picked up his hand. The flesh felt cold and hard. His face and hair were crusted with snow.

  “It’s the middle of the night! You’re freezing!” I was screaming at him over the wind. “Where’s your glove?”

  He murmured something, but I couldn’t hear him.

  “Let’s get you in.” I grabbed his arm to hoist him up. But Lars was all limp and his legs wouldn’t hold him. He staggered and gave a silly, careless laugh. I tried again and this time I held him round the middle and half carried, half tugged him along. Lars was no help at all. I could see what the Colonel meant when he said hypothermia makes people act out of character. This wasn’t the Lars I knew.

  Somehow I got him back inside the snow hole, scrabbled around in my backpack, found the last three candle ends and lit them all.

  Now I had to do everything I could to get him warm.

  I took Lars’s boots off and eased him into his sleeping bag. He wasn’t even shivering, and that was a bad sign – it meant his body was no longer struggling to keep warm but had already begun the process of shutting down.

  Lars normally hates being touched, but there was no other way to warm him. I unzipped the top part of my sleeping bag, took off my jumper and pressed my body against his freezing cold chest. He was too cold and sleepy even to flinch.

  “Lars! Come on!” I gave him a shake. “Don’t fall asleep!”

  He gave a little grunt.

  “Let’s sing a song, Lars!” I cried. I was desperate – I had to keep him awake. So I sang. My voice sounded reedy and hoarse, but I kept going anyway. I sang “Ten Green Bottles”. Then I tried “All Things Bright and Beautiful”, but that somehow sounded ridiculous here. So I thought of something Christmassy and moved on to “Hark the Herald Angels Sing.”

  But Lars was not rousing. In fact his breathing was becoming heavier. As I sang, I tapped out the rhythm on his shoulder and rocked him vigorously to and fro. If he fell asleep that would be the end.

  “Come on. Can’t you feel you’re getting warmer! Don’t give up!” I cried. I shook him good and hard, partly because I was angry. “Why’d you do it, Lars?” I gave him another sharp shake. “Why did you go out like that?”

  Lars’s right eye opened just a slit.

  “Couldn’t stay inside,” he murmured.

  “But it’s mad to go out in a blizzard! You of all people should know that!”

  “I have this dream.” Lars closed his eye again. He took a big breath, as if gathering his strength. I waited.

  When he did eventually begin to speak he sounded more awake. “I’ve had it before,” he said. “I think I dream it every night. It won’t go away.”

  “What is this dream?” I asked.

  “Oh, it’s the same every time,” he said wearily. “I’m buried alive. I’m lying in the darkness all tied up – earth all around me, no air, and I can’t get out.”

  “So that’s what happened tonight?”

  “Well, it was worse, wasn’t it? I woke up and I was buried in a hole. I was in this horrible snowy grave. I had to get out. I can’t remember what happened after that.”

  “You took off your glove, that’s what!” I replied. “Give me your hand now, Lars. I need to warm it up.”

  “No point,” said Lars. “It’s gone.”

  “Rubbish!” I pulled his right arm out of the sleeping bag. Lars didn’t resist. He just lay there with his eyes closed, while I held his frozen hand up close to my mouth and breathed on it.

  The fingers were waxy and white, and the nails bluish. I didn’t want to look too closely because his hand felt like a dead thing. And Lars was possibly right. He might lose his hand – there were two fingers that felt very hard indeed.

  I realized that warm breath wasn’t going to be enough. I undid my shirt jacket and put Lars’s hand under my armpit and squeezed hard with my arm. It felt as if I was hugging a shard of ice.

  Lars’s eyes were open now – open, but not seeing. His mind seemed far away.

  I watched him carefully. Maybe now, after all these weeks together, it was finally time to talk.

  “Lars?” I asked tentatively. “This dream, what’s it about?”

  Lars took a deep breath and then, fixing his gaze on the snow above him, he began speaking in a low, level voice.

  “Just before I came to Scotland, I was living with my uncle by the coast, near Egersund, to the south of Stavanger. One a
fternoon I was out in the woods. My cover, if I was caught, was that I was hunting squirrels. But in fact I was doing a bit of reconnaissance – we knew that a German patrol had been in the area that morning and I was sent along to see if they’d been up to anything. I hadn’t gone far – I was only about a hundred metres from the road – when I came to a small clearing where a long, deep trench had been freshly dug.

  “I couldn’t work out what the trench was for. Now, looking back on it, I’m amazed I didn’t guess. We’d had plenty of experience of the Gestapo. And we were only a few kilometres from the prison camp at Slettebø.

  “In any case, I was standing there trying to work it all out when a lorry drew up at the side of the road. Then I heard footsteps. I ran to the far side of a mound a few metres away and ducked down behind some undergrowth.”

  Lars’s voice was getting stronger.

  “Along came this German patrol with a line of British soldiers dressed in army uniform, though some were only half-dressed, and had blankets wrapped round their shoulders, as if they’d been pulled out of bed.

  “They were in a terrible state, filthy and bloody and bruised and ill-looking. They’d clearly been brought here in a hurry. Some didn’t even have shoes on or belts and were holding up their trousers. Some were wounded and couldn’t walk properly – they stumbled along, and if they got too slow the Germans would prod them with their bayonets.

  “When they came to the clearing one of the Germans shouted something and the prisoners huddled into a ragged kind of line. With the trench in front of them, they must have known what was going to happen, yet they still formed a queue. I suppose that’s Englishmen for you – they’ll queue for anything, even death.”

  Lars gave an ugly little half-choked laugh, then he went on.

  “The soldiers grabbed the first prisoner in the line and stood him up by this huge maple tree. The commander shouted ‘Achtung!’ and they shot him. Then two soldiers dragged his body by the legs and flung it to the side.

  “Then they moved on to the next prisoner and did exactly the same. Then the next man, and the next man, and the next. Again and again and again. And each time the pile of bodies beside the ditch grew and the queue shuffled forward a little more. The prisoners were so crushed and resigned. Nobody tried to escape, and nobody talked. I saw one prisoner fingering a rosary and another looking up at the sky for a long time. But mostly they just huddled along, shivering. A couple of the men had dark patches on their trousers where they’d wet themselves.

  There was one poor fellow I’ll never forget. He crumpled to the ground before they’d fired any bullets into him. I don’t know if they noticed because they hauled him on to the pile all the same.

  “Then, when they’d finished shooting, they got to work on the pile of bodies, flinging them into the ditch one by one. Afterwards they took out a few shovels and, while the commander had a cigarette, the others filled in the ditch.”

  “Are you saying that they buried one of the men alive?” I whispered. I don’t know why – nobody was going to hear us down in our little hole.

  “Well, they were in a hurry, weren’t they?” said Lars. “People are often in a hurry when they’re doing evil things. I don’t know how anyone could throw a warm body into a grave. But they didn’t feel for pulses or anything like that. They just threw the bodies straight in.”

  Lars propped himself up a little, leaning on one elbow. “Because I was uphill from the clearing, I had a good view. I watched that pile of bodies and I saw one man blink. I’m sure of it. I looked at him and I think he looked at me. His eyes were so shocked – he thought he’d be dead, that the worst would be over, and of course it wasn’t. Then he blinked again.”

  Two rivulets of tears ran down the sides of Lars’s face into his hair. “So that’s what I saw,” he continued, “that man’s eyes. And that’s what I seem to see every time I open my own eyes. And every time I close them at night.”

  Lars lay very still for some time. Then he gave a sudden jerk and grimaced.

  “Hey! You’re squeezing my hand.”

  “No. I’m not,” I said. “That must be the blood coming back into your fingers.”

  Lars screwed up his eyes. I’d read enough about frostbite to know that the pain would get worse. I took Lars’s hand out from under my armpit and looked at it. Poor Lars. The fingers were still so white and hard.

  “What happened next?” I asked.

  “When the Germans left, I got up and I ran and I ran and I ran. I suppose, in a way, I’ve been running ever since. Uncle Rurik wanted to put me on a fishing boat to Scotland. He told my parents he thought it was best if I left. He didn’t like the way I was behaving – I kept going back to those woods. I don’t know why, but I couldn’t keep away. The Germans caught me there one night and took me in for questioning. I don’t want to tell you what that was like, but I’m sure the only reason they didn’t kill me was because I was a kid. After that, Rurik said I had to go. I needed to get away and there was work to be done in Britain. He said the Germans might recapture me and interrogate me all over again.

  “So I was stowed away on a boat and taken to the Shetlands. Sergeant Sneyd met me off the boat and brought me to Drumincraig…”

  Lars’s voice trailed away. After a while, I heard his breathing change and realized he’d fallen asleep. This time I didn’t try to wake him, for he no longer seemed to be in danger – it was just his fingers that were bad. So I sat there with his frozen hand still lodged in my armpit.

  I felt fidgety and not at all in the mood to sleep. My mind kept returning to Lars’s story: those prisoners and that ditch in the forest.

  Then a terrible thought struck me. How slow-witted could I be? This wasn’t the first time Lars had spoken of woods. This wasn’t the first time he’d mentioned Egersund. When we got lost out on that reindeer hunt and he gave me Father’s button compass he said he’d found it in a wood near Egersund!

  I felt slightly sick and took several deep breaths. I simply couldn’t afford to be ill or upset.

  I shuffled round to face the other way and moved Lars’s hand from one armpit to the other. His skin didn’t feel quite so cold now.

  Lars flinched. Then he opened his eyes. “My hand’s burning,” he said.

  “Can you feel all the fingers?” I asked.

  Under my arm, I felt his hand twitch.

  “No. The little finger and third finger are numb.”

  This was not good news – those were the fingers that had felt hardest when I found him.

  “At least it’s not your foot,” I said, trying to sound cheerful. “Then you wouldn’t be able to ski and we’d be lost.”

  But the burning sensation seemed to be getting worse. Lars’s features were soon clenched with pain. His breath came in short, sharp bursts. I squeezed his hand all the tighter.

  “I think I’m paying for what happened,” said Lars.

  “What do you mean?”

  “That prisoner. I should have tried to save him.”

  “But what could you have done? There was a whole troop of German soldiers there,” I say.

  “I could’ve told someone,” Lars replied. “We could’ve dug the grave up that night. But I didn’t tell anyone. I was too frightened. I didn’t have the courage to think it through.”

  “Lars.” I paused. I didn’t know for sure. Did I really want the answer? Well, I suppose I had to know the worst. I had to be sure.

  “Lars, that little button compass you gave me? You said you found it in a wood near Egersund. Was it in that wood?”

  Lars unscrewed his eyes for a minute and looked at me warily.

  “Yes,” he said. “The compass must have belonged to one of the prisoners. I found it lying in the mud just where they’d queued up.”

  So that was it. My father wasn’t missing. He was dead. Mother always said we must assume the worst, but there was a mighty difference between assuming and knowing.

  And now I knew. No Father, no long walks with him
on the beach, no fishing trips, no cosy feeling at home at Christmas with the three of us together round the fire. I’ll never hear his voice again, or see his smile. I can no longer save up stories to tell him. I can no longer hope.

  Which of the prisoners was he? Most likely he was the prisoner looking up at the sky. He always was clear-headed. He’d have been thinking … and thinking fast. And he would have wanted to leave a message or a memento.

  I turned back to Lars.

  “I think he dropped that compass on purpose.”

  Jakob P. Stromsheim

  17TH JANUARY 1943

  The storm was over by dawn and, when we crawled out of the hole, the valley was spookily silent with a great pale sun shimmering in the sky. There was no sign of Lars’s right glove – by now it had probably been blown all the way to Finland. So I cut up part of a shirt and wrapped strips of cloth round his fingers. Then, using two rather dank spare socks, I improvized a new glove (of sorts). But I didn’t know if it would do the trick, for Lars’s hand looked terrible. It was all puffy and the fingers still felt wooden. His face also looked a fright – he was so gaunt and yellow.

  I lit a fire and Lars huddled beside it. We were down to just four raisins each for breakfast. We were weak and cold and tired and lost in the snow and Lars needed a hospital for his hand. I felt panicky and close to tears, but I divided the raisins out, trying to give Lars the ever so slightly bigger ones (and this was ridiculous – how can you tell two raisins apart?).

  Lars gulped down his raisins in one go (I nibbled mine one by one). “What about the syrup?” he said.

  “The what?” I looked at him blankly.

  “You know,” Lars persisted. “The tin of syrup. The one with all the ants. It’s in the top right-hand pocket of your backpack.”

  The syrup! I’d completely forgotten about it.

  I took out the tin and prised the lid off with my combat knife. Inside the syrup was black and lumpy – almost more ants than syrup. We dipped our spoons in and as the syrup went into my mouth I shut my eyes.