by Tim Pears
Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Tim Pears
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Map
Chapter One By Parachute to the Slovene Lands
Chapter Two Into the Third Reich
Chapter Three Attack on the Viaduct
Chapter Four Supplying Units Attacking Railway Tracks
Chapter Five Off the Mountain
Chapter Six In the Valley
Chapter Seven Attack on the Bridge
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Copyright
About the Book
A powerful and devastating novel of war, love and loss by one of Britain’s finest writers.
It is May 1944 and in Eastern Europe the Second World War is reaching a dramatic and bloody crescendo. High above the mountains of occupied Slovenia an aeroplane drops three British parachutists – brash MP Major Jack Farwell, radio operator Sid Dixon, and young academic Lieutenant Tom Freedman – sent to assist the resistance in their battle against the Axis forces.
Greeted upon arrival by a rag-tag group of Partisans, the men are led off into the countryside. It is early summer, and the mountains and forests teem with life and colour. Despite the distant crackle of gunfire, the war feels a long way off for Tom. The Partisans, too, are not what he was expecting – courageous, kind, and alluring, especially Jovan, their commander, and the hauntingly beautiful Marija. Yet after a series of daring encounters, the enemy’s net begins to tighten. They find evidence of massacres, of a dark and terrible band of men pursuing them through the wilderness. As the Partisans stumble their way towards a final, tragic battle, so the relationships within the group begin to fray, with Tom finding himself forced to face up to his deepest, most secret desires.
About the Author
Tim Pears was born in 1956. He grew up in Devon, and left school at sixteen. He has worked in a wide variety of jobs and is a graduate of the National Film and Television School. His first novel, In the Place of Fallen Leaves, won the Hawthornden Prize for Literature and the Ruth Hadden Memorial Award. His second novel, In a Land of Plenty, has been adapted for television and is now a major BBC television series. Tim Pears is the author of eight highly acclaimed novels including Landed, Disputed Land and A Revolution of the Sun.
Also by Tim Pears
In the Place of Fallen Leaves
In a Land of Plenty
A Revolution of the Sun
Wake Up
Blenheim Orchard
Landed
Disputed Land
To the memory of my father, Bill Pears, and all those who fought for the liberation of Yugoslavia (1941– 45) and dreamed of a better world
‘It is for your sake that I am dying.’
Slovene peasant Partisan,
calling to German firing squad, 1944
CHAPTER ONE
By Parachute to the Slovene Lands
May 15 1944
THEY STAND ON the sweltering tarmac in Brindisi, leaning into the wind of the Halifax engines. The air is thick and fumy with the sour-sweet smell of aero-petrol.
‘Storms in the Med,’ the navigator yells. ‘Going to take you blokes up the spine of the country.’
Sid Dixon gives the man a thumbs-up. ‘That’s a relief, innit, sir?’ he says to Tom. ‘Least us won’t be coming down in the drink.’
‘Don’t fancy a night swim?’ Tom asks him.
‘Can’t swim, sir,’ says Dixon.
‘Are there no rivers in Devon?’ Jack Farwell queries, pointing his cigar in a general direction north-west.
‘They’re for cows to cool down in, sir,’ Sid tells him.
‘What about the sea then, you country bumpkin?’
‘Never seen the sea, sir. Not until this war.’ Sid shakes his head. ‘Still can’t see the point of it.’
Farwell rolls his eyes in theatrical despair. Tom smiles. The badinage, he thinks, of nervous men.
The plane rumbles along the runway, roars and whines forward, gaining speed, then heaves itself into the air. It climbs laboriously; gradually levels off. The engines even down to a steady hum of efficiency.
It was balmy in the heel of Italy. They were told it would be cold in the plane, so Tom Freedman pulled on layers of clothes. A vest, a shirt and two pullovers, scratchy and sweaty. An extra pair of thick woollen socks. They aren’t enough. The plane is rising once more. There is rain and thunder, the peaks of the Apennines light up beside them – nature’s mirror, Tom reckons, to what is happening far below, where the Allies and the Germans bomb each other’s men to bits along the Gustav Line. The plane climbs ever higher, ever colder. The dispatcher gives them Sidcot flying suits, which they each clamber into, but still they sit there shivering, the three of them.
Major Jack Farwell, thirty-eight. A corpulent man, with thinning sandy hair. He looks at Tom and says something that is lost in the noise of the plane, then looks away. He only joined Tom on the language course in the last few days, and paid little attention. Jack was a Member of Parliament when he joined up. He went to the same school as the Head of the British Mission; signed up to this jaunt rather as he’d agree to a hunting expedition: looking forward to some sport. Downed his first gin of the day punctually at six and devoted the rest of the evening to boozy conviviality. Cards, gossip, argument. He yells again, frowning. This time Tom draws nearer.
‘You look petrified, Freedman.’
‘Are you not worried, Jack?’ Tom asks.
Farwell looks at him askance. Jack’s eyes are the palest blue imaginable, light and depthless. ‘If anyone tells you they’re not scared before a drop,’ he says, ‘they’re either a liar or a bloody fool.’ His acrid cigar breath.
‘Are you scared?’ Tom asks him.
‘Me?’ Jack says. ‘Of course not.’
It is a joke, surely, but Jack is deadpan, there’s not the slightest twinkle in his eye. Perhaps he is serious. They sit close enough for their flying suits to touch, but still they have to shout above the din. Jack has dry, lizard-like skin; white bushy eyebrows. ‘What I want to tell you, Freedman,’ he says, ‘is that we don’t have to like each other.’
Tom is taken aback. He had guessed that Farwell considers him bookish, dull; and that’s about the sum of it. Lieutenant Tom Freedman is twenty-six. The first in his family to go to university. He was looking forward to his third year in the Honour School of Modern Languages, when war was declared. Apart from a brief bout of artillery training he has spent the war in libraries in country training schools, and in offices in Baker Street, helping to make sense of intelligence sent back from the field or of German transcripts intercepted.
‘I’m sure you don’t like me,’ Jack continues, lurching close to Tom to make himself heard, ‘any more than I like you.’
Tom wonders what he’s done to earn Jack’s antipathy; does not wish to acknowledge how mutual their feelings might be.
‘You got to Oxford,’ Jack says, ‘because you deserved to. I went because my father did, and his before him. But that’s not it. There’s something shady about you, Freedman. You’re not a man’s man. But you’re too bloody handsome. And quiet! You don’t say enough, that must be what it is. You’re the kind of cad, Freedman, who instead of talking to men prefers to listen to women. Let them witter their way into bed with you, is that it? I’ll bet they eat you up, don’t they, with those doe eyes and those soft lips? I’ll bet they bloody well devour you. Well, I wouldn’t trust you with my wife, but the point is that we’re both British officers, Freedman, do you see? That is the point, man. And so I trust you with my life.’
What nonsense. How wrong could he be? Tom wonders
how many drinks Farwell bagged before they left.
Jack Farwell reaches inside his flying suit and pulls a fresh cigar from his jacket pocket. He’s pretty pleased with his little speech. ‘Nice irony, eh, Tom?’ he says, holding up one hand with the cigar, the other with his lighter, props to emphasise his point. ‘Wouldn’t trust you with my wife, yet trust you with my life.’ He slaps Tom on the shoulder, as if out of gratitude for the minor role Tom has played in furnishing this profound couplet. Jack lights his cigar, inhales, blows out the pungent smoke in triumph. ‘What we both have to do, of course, is to look after Dixon there.’
Tom can hardly imagine anyone less in need of care than their radio operator, Corporal Sid Dixon, who is leaning against a strut, looking around. A Devon farmer’s boy, twenty-two. Short, wiry, tough. Dark-haired, brown-eyed. His sharp nose, and air of alertness, put Tom in mind of some keen bird of prey. Dixon signed up for this, ‘to get back in to green valleys, sir. Couldn’t stand all that sand.’
They are shivering. Dixon fumbles inside his jacket and locates a small flask of rum. He passes it with quivering fingers to Farwell, whose own hand shakes so much he can barely keep the rim of the flask to his lips. The sight is too comical: Tom is unable to stop himself from grinning. He realises his mouth must be a strained simian rictus over chattering teeth, the effect no doubt grotesque. Thus, he thinks – trembling, grimacing – we are taken to this remote theatre of war; this sideshow, as Jack Farwell resentfully dismisses it.
Night falls. The dark confers a stillness upon the scene, and seems to mute the roar of the engines, as if the men are no longer thundering through the sky but hovering in some higher dimension of space. Up in the cockpit the pilot appears as if he is made of stone.
Farwell demands a torch from the sergeant dispatcher and studies a map by its light. Sid Dixon lies back against his pack, closes his eyes, and within moments, to Tom’s astonishment, is sleeping like a baby.
Tom tries to read, from his regulation pack New Testament, but cannot concentrate. He ponders their destination. His mind ratchets around information they’ve been given, the fragments of things he knows, in the dark unknowable void of what awaits him.
The Slovene Lands, or Slovenia, is a country the size of Wales. With fewer inhabitants. Even more varied terrain.
Slovenia is lapped by the sea in the south. The Julian Alps loom over it to the north.
Every Slovene has his smallholding; his vegetable plot, his fruit trees.
Over and over, Slovenia, in a repetitive mental stutter, revising cogent facts as if for an exam.
Slovenia is the most heavily wooded country in Europe. No, that can’t be right, surely there are Scandinavian countries with more forest?
Slovenia has been slashed in two in a line from east to west. The south was occupied by the Italians – until their capitulation last September – but the north was annexed by Austria in 1941: it became part of the Third Reich. That is where Tom and the others are ultimately headed. They are destined for the vipers’ nest.
Suddenly there is light shining in his eyes. ‘What are you looking so worried for now, Freedman?’
Tom shields his eyes with his arm. Jack Farwell lowers the torch. ‘You know what worries me?’ he asks. ‘What gut-rot are they going to give us down there? They tell us we’re to avoid politics like the plague. Strict orders. Fine. I’ll say nothing! But what kind of booze will the Reds provide? And what’ll they make us smoke once my cigars run out?’
Jack does not expect or desire reassurance; without waiting for a reply, he resumes his study of the map. Tom glances over. Jack’s finger rests on a spot in the Alps, between Slovenia and Austria: the Ljubljana Gap. He is like the Dutch boy, Tom thinks, with his finger in the dyke.
Jack says, without looking up from the map, ‘I wouldn’t worry if I were you, Freedman. We’ll be lucky to survive the bloody jump.’
The dispatcher, a Royal Air Force sergeant, interrupts Tom’s brooding. Dixon wakes and gives him a shot of rum.
‘Wouldn’t fancy your job,’ Sid tells him, ‘being stuck in this heap a metal.’
The sergeant, Scottish, red-faced, shoots back, ‘Wouldnae fancy your job jumping out of it, pal.’
‘I thought you lot had to?’
‘Not us. It’s the parachute packers got to jump, once a month, keep their minds on the job.’ He has a sip of liquor. ‘Here, have you heard the one about the plane full of German paratroopers over Greece?’
Dixon shakes his head.
‘The dispatcher, right, he guides each parachutist to the door and pushes him oot. “Achtung, achtung. No time to mess about! Out with you cowardly schwein! Go! Go!”
‘But one a these blighters resists. Kicks and screams, tries to jam his legs against the doorframe.
‘“Out! Schweinhund! Zer is no place in ze German army for cowards!”’
The sergeant’s German accent is vehement and absurd. Sid Dixon nods, smiling.
‘Finally, the dispatcher gives him a kick up the arse and he flies oot the door.
‘The parachutists still waiting to jump start to laugh.
‘“So, you sink that vas funny, you schwein?”
‘“Funny? Ja, sir,” says one a them, as he jumps out. “Zat vas the pilot.”’
Dixon chuckles. He and the sergeant each take another pull from the flask of rum. Tom lights cigarettes for the three of them.
Smoking, they become pensive once more. Tom tries again to concentrate, to keep fear of the unknown at bay by considering the known. The Balkan war, as it moves towards its no doubt bloody culmination, is shifting geographically. Armies are sliding northwards. Slovenia is assuming the greatest importance of the Yugoslav territories.
Reciting the facts is soothing, until Tom remembers he is not in a library but in this plane. The moment he has been dreading approaches. Three hours into the flight the sergeant dispatcher suggests they go aft to the rear of the fuselage. They waddle back, and it is only then that they realise how the height has been affecting them, for the short journey from the flight deck, along the catwalk, and into the bomb bay, is exhausting. The dispatcher helps them pull on their parachutes, and they sit down heavily, like three large slugs.
The altitude sickness is added to the queasiness in Tom’s gut and makes his head throb and swim. The Halifax suddenly bucks and jumps. Caught in down-draughts, the aircraft begins to lurch and yaw. Then it is turning, circling.
‘Skipper’s seen the fires,’ the sergeant informs them. They themselves can see nothing from the windowless bomb bay. ‘Dropping to four thousand feet.’ Wearing a body harness tied to the plane, the sergeant removes a wooden cover from a hole about four feet in diameter in the floor.
Large metal containers of explosives, guns and ammunition are attached to the undersides of the wings. They have been cut loose. The red warning light on the ceiling comes on as the pilot starts his second pass. They hear the engine power cut: the aircraft slows, rapidly loses altitude. Then the engines come back on full power, they feel the plane lunge forward, climb steeply, then bank in a sharp turn. The dispatcher moves two cargo containers with the mission’s radio and batteries, backpacks, medical supplies to the edge of the hole, and clips the ends of static lines to rings on the parachutes for each one.
When the green light comes on the sergeant pushes out the containers. It will be our turn next, Tom can see. His mind is so woozy he wonders if he will faint. The static lines, having pulled open the container chutes as they fell away from the plane, rattle drily against the underside of the aircraft. The sergeant pulls them in as the plane circles again.
How uncanny it is, it strikes Tom, that I am here, in this clattering lump of leaden deadweight metal, in the night sky high above a strange country. How unlikely. How odd. His mind is detaching from him.
Sid says something, and Jack nods, but they seem, bizarrely, to be twenty or thirty feet away from Tom. They are like little copies of themselves, homunculi mocking him. He realises that he cannot foc
us on what is happening. Jack Farwell’s reptilian face appears childlike, fragile, adrift, that of a despised, overweight schoolboy; Tom feels a sudden, immense pity for him. Sid Dixon looks back at him now, and smiles, as if he knows what is passing through Tom’s mind for it passes through his, in union.
The sergeant hooks static lines to the parachutes strapped on Jack and Tom’s backs. Perhaps these are really wings. Jack and Tom take their positions sitting on the edge of the hole across from each other. Its sides are some feet deep, to keep their legs from the plane’s rushing slipstream. Sitting there on training jumps, his eyes fixed on the ground far below, Tom was often paralysed by fear, and had to be given a shove. Now he stares into a black night void below him. He is freezing cold, yet he can feel a neat line of sweat trickling down his spine.
Again the engines are throttled back and the flaps lowered, and again Tom’s stomach is in his mouth as the plane seems to plummet hundreds of feet.
Tom glances across at Farwell: Jack gazes placidly into the dark. The coloured lamp is on again, red for Action Stations. Tom pulls on the end of the static line attached to the plane to make sure that it is tight. Then he reaches over his shoulder and tugs on the end attached to his parachute. The thought occurs to him that the crew are Axis spies, tipping parachuteless Allied soldiers out of planes. They want to kill him. Jesus Christ. The light is green for Jump.
‘Go!’ yells the dispatcher, and Jack Farwell, as senior officer, disappears. A moment later the sergeant repeats his command. Tom closes his eyes, grits his teeth, and shakes his head. ‘No,’ he whispers. He feels the sergeant’s boot between his shoulder blades.
Tom plummets into a whirlpool of cold wind. It rips and tears at his clothing. He is tossed and buffeted. He is both a dead weight dropping and a tumbling speck of fluff. Mountains, stars, clouds whirl around him. He catches a single glimpse of the big plane, going away over his right shoulder, before he is yanked up by the shoulders, and held in the secure grip of the harness. The swaying canopy of the parachute cuts a dark circle out of the sky above. Relief washes through every exultant pore of his flesh.
