In the Light of Morning

by Tim Pears

  The cavernous nave fills up with Partisan soldiers. They stand in rows either side of the aisle, then cram into the side chapels, holding their caps. Tom and Dixon stand among them. Six rough-made deal coffins stand on trestles in a line at the opening of the chancel. The three-sided apse is filled with gilt-enamelled images and painted statues of Christ and his disciples, of the Virgin and another female saint whom Tom guesses is Elizabeth, mother of a man in ragged skins, John the Baptist.

  The Catholic priest, standing beyond the coffins, reads the funeral Mass in Slovene. A boy to his left holds a small silver altar bell; a boy to the priest’s right swings a censer whose aromatic smoky fumes reach Tom’s nostrils as they waft gradually towards all corners of the church.

  One of the coffins is smaller than the others: the bombashi Tom had seen fall, he assumes. He must have been little older than these servers with the bell and the censer. Bombashi are not chosen for their perilous role, they have to volunteer, and are treated with a special respect. From one of the other coffins blood has leaked through the planks, and drips with tiny red splashes on to the stone flags of the church floor. A man in a civilian suit comes forward and places a piece of brown paper on the spot, to blot it up.

  The priest intones the Mass, reading from a black-bound prayer book. One of the acolytes rings his bell. The other boy swings the fumigator.

  Blood from the coffin with the paper beneath it begins to drip from another plank. The men try not to watch it drip-drip onto the floor. Tom asks himself whether a dead body did not cease to bleed, but he doesn’t know the answer, and is too timid to ask. Once or twice a soldier near the front turns round, seeking out or appealing to the old man to bring forward another piece of brown paper, but he does not do so.

  People go up to receive the sacrament, including many Partisan soldiers. A month ago, Tom thinks, he would have, too.

  When the service is over, bearers carry out the coffins, one after another. Pero and Stipe are among six men carrying one coffin on their shoulders, which has to be Nikola’s, and Tom is pained to see that it is the one that is leaking blood. Franjo has been standing at the front of the congregation, obliged to watch. Now he follows his son’s coffin out of the church and, in a short procession, to the village graveyard. Follows, too, a sporadic tiny trail of blood.

  The bearers lay the coffins alongside graves freshly dug for them. Tom wonders where the enemy – executed or fallen in battle – are buried, for there is no sign of them here. Many villagers and peasants stand in the cemetery. Two of the bearers of the first coffin carried out jump down into the grave to help lift the coffin in. But then Jovan steps forward from a knot of officers whom Tom had not seen in the church and tells them that it is not yet time for this. Hiding their embarrassment by muttering complaint, they haul themselves out of the ground with the clumsy assistance of comrades.

  Jovan turns to face the multitude and speaks out, in a loud, clear voice. ‘These men and this boy,’ he says, ‘were killed yesterday in battle with the fascists. Their comrades know they were brave and steadfast soldiers.’ His voice carries across the crowd, surely reaches the furthest listener, on this calm, sunny day; he might have had an actor’s training in voice projection. He reads out the names of the fallen. ‘We are sorry to lose them,’ he says. ‘They died as an example to the rest of us. Death to fascism! Freedom to the people!’

  Six men in a line beside Jovan step forward and raise rifles Tom had not noticed before, resting on the ground beside them, and fire a volley into the deep blue summer sky.

  The formalities are over. The crowd shifts, swells, disperses. The coffins are lowered. Soldiers assemble around particular graves, and throw soil in. Gravediggers use long-handled shovels to do the work. Leaving the cemetery, Tom looks back and sees Franjo standing still at the head of his son’s grave, gazing at the mound of dark brown soil.

  August 10

  YOUNGSTERS FROM THE villages have gathered kindling for the beacons and now they are burning, but silently, for the noise of the aircraft has become a steady drone that overrides other sound. The plane appears in the silvery sky, flashing the identification signal, and comes in to drop its load. Twelve big containers are released simultaneously from the bomb-racks, and Tom thinks how beautiful a sight it is to watch a dozen parachutes open all at once like a white flower bursting into bloom. And then the wind blows the petals apart.

  While Partisan battalions occupy the liberated villages in the Savinja valley, the Fourth Zone Headquarters, wary of German air raids, remain in the hills above, in a hamlet that also houses the Soviet Mission. The British Mission has been given a large farmhouse a quarter of a mile away.

  ‘The Germans will strike back at any moment,’ Jovan says. ‘Any day they will retake the valley. But in the meantime we hope you will be comfortable.’

  Jovan leaves before they can ask him to whom the house had belonged. The two officers and their wireless operators inspect the premises. There are heavy wardrobes and chests of drawers made with dark wood; carpets and bedspreads in sombre colours. Lace curtains cover the small windows. The Englishmen feel like looters, plunderers of luxury. There are three bedrooms. Dixon and Morris will share.

  ‘Which one do you want?’ Tom asks.

  ‘I don’t give a damn,’ Jack tells him. ‘Wait. On second thoughts, you take the large bed. It would only make me miss my Cassie.’

  They stow their luggage then troop downstairs, made uneasy by this stolid opulence. Have we become ascetics in this short time? Tom wonders. In the parlour, two glass-fronted cases hold books in German. Goethe. Heine. His spirits rise at the prospect of reading something other than coded signals.

  In the kitchen they find a stout, matronly woman, with steely hair wound tight in a bun upon her head. Whether she is the mistress of the house or a servant is unclear: she says nothing, nor does she respond to their enquiries, in either Slovene or German.

  ‘Could be she’s a deaf mute, sir,’ Sid offers. ‘We had one in our village.’

  The woman wears a white pinafore over black clothes that are surely signs of mourning.

  The men unpack their few possessions, set up the wireless in the parlour. After an hour the woman sets four places on the table, with silver cutlery and a cut-glass decanter of white wine, and presently she serves them a delicious stew.

  ‘Pour the wine, Dixon, there’s a good chap,’ Farwell says.

  Sid reaches for the decanter only to find the woman has got to it first, and proceeds to fill each man’s crystal glass.

  ‘That what they call fast reflexes down in Devon, is it?’ Morris asks.

  ‘Does anyone else find something skittish about the old girl’s outfit?’ Farwell asks. ‘Uncomfortably reminiscent of a waitress in a Lyons teashop. Raise your glasses,’ he orders. ‘We can be proud to be a part of this, boys. Supplies are pouring in, on top of the machine guns, rifles and ammo that were captured. The airfield should be ready for landings tomorrow. Why the Krauts haven’t hit back I’ve no idea. Maybe they think there are more of us here than there are. But let’s make hay. Our Jugs can really hit the railways and the roads. Plug the Germans up in Italy. Bring the war down here to a conclusion.’

  The others murmur agreement, chink glasses together, and drink up the rough white wine.

  August 11

  SOLDIERS AND PEASANTS labour together getting the field ready: clearing away stones, levelling the ground, filling in holes. Jack Farwell oversees the enterprise with the Slovene commander. ‘This is more like it,’ he tells Tom Freedman. ‘Our own aerodrome inside the Third Reich.’

  Jovan is there too, in his impressive commissar’s uniform. While they are eating lunch, he invites Tom to take a walk with him: there is something he wants to show his British friend.

  They climb out of the valley, up forested slopes, in the shade of beech trees and tall pines. Beside the path moss grows, a thick and green carpet over great slabs of stone. After they have been walking for a little over an hour, climbi
ng steadily, Jovan stops suddenly, and begins to search for something amongst small trees to their right beside the track. He pushes his way through bushes and Tom follows. Jovan covers their tracks with dead branches and then carefully turns a mossy stone over; he steps on to its exposed underside, and does the same to a further stone, and all at once Tom sees ahead of them a series of stepping-stones. He follows, crossing from one stone to the next, turning back each stone behind him so that its mossy surface is once more visible.

  They advance in this way for almost fifty yards, until they are screened from the track, whereupon they find a new, narrow trail. This precautionary method of disguise is repeated a mile further on. Another mile and Jovan stops once more and searches in a nondescript clump of undergrowth. He finds two parallel tree trunks, long and thin, leading through the hidden greenery. They walk along these then step up onto an above-ground ladder – a series of tree trunks, suspended from the lower branches of trees. For over a hundred yards they cross this overhead bridge, before returning to terra firma.

  Here they meet a single guard, rifle at his shoulder, who after greeting them sets to covering the trunks with moss and leaves.

  Jovan leads Tom further, deeper into the forest, climbing higher in the heat of the afternoon. Sweat pours off Tom. They drink from a cold, clean-tasting stream, and hike on. ‘Here we are,’ Jovan whispers. He lifts an overhanging branch on the track to disclose a fallen log lying at right angles. They walk along the log and then down into a hollow between rocks, where a fresh track is visible. A little further on Tom makes out three half-buried log cabins, recently built, as evidenced by the smell of new-sawn lumber. They’ve been half dug into the ground, and are well hidden by the tall pines looming around and above them. The roofs are camouflaged by pine branches.

  Tom is introduced to the doctor in charge, a young woman, Olga, who shows him round her wards. The wounded lie on straw pallets in wooden beds, beneath sheets. The smell of iodine, and much else, human odours: urine, sweat, a faint putrefaction. Fractures are extended on home-made frames. The doctor shows him a wounded youth whose right leg she’d had to amputate. ‘I am not a surgeon,’ she says apologetically. ‘But there was no choice. I hope the stump will take an artificial limb.’

  Tom notices Jovan unload from his backpack a parachute, and hand it to a nurse: bandages and ligatures here, even curtains at the windows, he realises, are made of silk cloth.

  The doctor gives them a meal, beautifully tender venison, with a glass of rakija, fruit brandy. The small room she lives in could be in the middle of a great city: a rug on the floor, a shelf of books, a delicately stitched tablecloth. A picture of Mount Triglav on the walls, the highest mountain in Slovenia, Olga explains, the highest peak in the Julian Alps.

  ‘For three weeks,’ Jovan says, gesturing with his head in a general direction into the forest outside, ‘German soldiers were camped less than two hundred metres away. Olga stayed here with her patients while the Germans searched every day for our hospital, with their Alsatian dogs. Our High Command presented her with the Medal for Bravery.’

  Olga shakes her head, makes a face of modest dismissal, as if it were normal practice for medics to work in fear of armed attack, deep in hiding. Olga is slim, with dark rings around her brown eyes; she is certainly no older than Tom.

  ‘When they find a hospital,’ Jovan says, ‘the Germans wipe out everyone. Doctors, nurses. The patients are shot in their bunks, and the hospital is burned.’

  ‘Winter is bad, of course,’ Olga says. ‘The snow betrays those who cross it. It has become a Partisan skill to cover footprints with fresh snow.’

  Tom asks Olga more about her work, and what her medical speciality was. She raises her dark eyebrows. ‘I do not have one yet, I have not finished my medical studies,’ she says. ‘Now, I must learn by my mistakes.’

  ‘Let us raise a toast to this doctor for every one of her amputations,’ Jovan says, lifting his glass. ‘Our soldiers use the discarded limbs to lay false trails in the forest for the German dogs. But now we will be able to take these wounded men out of the country, to fully equipped hospitals in Italy, as your commanders have promised us. This is why your planes must land.’

  On the walk back down to the valley, in the relative, pleasant cool of the evening, Tom asks Jovan if it might be possible to allow Francika to leave, with Sid.

  ‘If there’s room in one of the planes,’ Tom says. ‘Not at first, when the injured must be got out, but later.’

  Jovan makes no response.

  ‘I mean,’ Tom says, ‘if there’s room.’

  ‘There is no problem,’ Jovan says. ‘No problem.’

  August 12

  THEY HEAR THE planes. Away over the mountains to the south. They pile wood high on the fires so the pilots will be able to see their signals. The planes sound as if they are directly overhead but they sweep away unseen. On the ground hope drains from those staring avidly, blindly into the dark.

  Then the Dakotas come around again, four of them in the clear mountain sky, and they sweep down, their lights turned on, like great fireflies in the night. Down, down, and in a rush they are bumping along the rough runway. Hundreds of Partisans sweep upon them like parasitic insects and in minutes the planes have been gutted, their precious innards spilled and piled in heaps on the grass.

  As each plane is emptied so the wounded embark: survivors of the battle, and others who have been brought down from hidden hospitals by stretcher and ox-cart; when the planes are full they taxi around and take off again the way they had come in.

  Tom keeps expecting the operation to be interrupted by a screaming Stuka, a firing Messerschmitt, but it does not happen. What are the enemy waiting for? This impunity is inexplicable.

  Stumbling back to their isolated farmhouse, Tom and Jack can hear the whisper of distant artillery, and feel minute tremors in the ground beneath them.

  ‘Where the hell’s that coming from?’ Jack mutters. Tom does not know.

  Returning, exhausted, to his bed in the strange house, Tom sinks into the horsehair mattress. For a moment as he is falling asleep he is jarred back awake by the sensation that the ground upon which he lies has become suddenly, hazardously, soft: it is about to swallow him. Then he recalls where he is, no longer on the forest floor but in a soft farm bed; and lets himself fall.

  Breakfast is served by their silent matron. Hard-boiled eggs and thin strips of cold meat, with a hot black drink that smells like an ill-remembered vegetable and tastes like something pretending, poorly, to be coffee.

  Sid Dixon sets up the new radio that has been delivered in one of the night’s planes. He sings as he busies himself, checking and fitting the valves and the batteries. It won’t be a stylish marriage. We can’t afford a carriage. Tom asks how he’s getting on.

  ‘Relieved to have this wireless, sir, I don’t mind tellin ’e. An I spent time with Francika yesterday.’

  ‘Have you got beyond single words yet?’

  ‘She’s doing better with English than I am with theirs. An if she can understand me she should have no problem back ome.’

  Tom tells Sid that he has requested a new radio operator, in the hope that both he and Francika can be taken out along with the wounded.

  ‘She was a bit funny yesterday, to be honest,’ Sid admits. ‘Scared. I couldn’t tell you if it was a fear of flying, what she’s never done before, or summat else. I told her not to worry. Not to be afeared a nothing with me there.’

  Tom gives Sid the enciphered signals to Base Operations in Italy. Sid makes contact, and when he is finished finds the BBC. The news is not so good. Fighting on the western front is going slowly, with the Germans putting up incredible resistance, just as they are in Italy: there, they’ve evacuated Florence but are defending a line a little north. It’s not clear what’s going on in Poland.

  Tom goes to the valley to liaise with the Partisan ground crews. He returns at midday, arriving at the same time as Jack Farwell, back from a meeting with the
commander of the Fourth Zone over targets to be attacked and the gathering of intelligence. Jack slaps his cap on the table in the hall. ‘Tomorrow!’ he exclaims, his nose thoroughly out of joint. ‘It’s still bloody well tomorrow when they’re going to hit the railway depots in Zidani Most. Never, Today, we’ve done it, bravo! The fact of the matter is, Freedman, I have no idea where our supplies are going. They disappear into the hills. The Jugs have a pretty dashing sense of accounting. They’re supposed to be attacking the roads and railways but I’m convinced they’re storing the stuff up for future use.’

  ‘What future use?’ Tom asks. The men hang up their coats and go through to the parlour.

  ‘They can see the end of hostilities in sight, and they’re saving their strength.’

  ‘But for what?’

  Jack frowns. ‘To sort out their internal enemies and their external borders, of course. You must have picked up at least a gleaning of reality on the ground while you were sitting out the war with those pansies in Baker Street.’ He looks askance at Tom. ‘Or one of those country houses you commandeered.’ He lights a cigarette, inhales, makes a face of disapproval. ‘I’ve requested that they place train watchers along the lines, and they say, “Yes, of course,” but I’m getting no more gen from them at all. Is there nothing to drink around here?’

  Tom fetches their hostess from the kitchen and, having become accustomed to the senior officer’s requirements, she pours Jack and Tom each a shot of brandy. Jack inhales the fumy scent with distaste, before he takes a sip.

  ‘Good God, Freedman, what I’d give for something decent.’