In the Light of Morning

by Tim Pears

  August 23

  THE SUN IS shining once again, summer has returned to the valley. The ground has dried out, exuding the humid odours of damp earth as it does so. And the mood everywhere is changed: the Partisans’ heavy mask of distrust has lifted, while the Englishmen’s resentment has dissipated as their freedom of movement is restored. News from elsewhere is good: the Soviets have attacked Romania. The liberation of Paris seems imminent.

  Ratweek is the codename given to the operation: the major target in the Fourth Zone is the railway bridge across the Sava at Litija, close to where Tom and his party crossed the river when they travelled north three months ago. The Partisans’ Seventh Corps will approach from the south; the Brigades in the Fourth Zone, including most of the soldiers in this valley, will attack from the north.

  Tom works without sleeping now, running between Dixon’s wireless, the Partisan HQ and the airfield, coordinating drops not only here in the valley but across the north of the country. Explosives are needed for the attack on the bridge, and for a number of smaller operations against rail lines and roads. Sid Dixon’s melancholia is put aside as he is caught up in the endless job of sending and receiving messages.

  Brigadier Maclean has also sent word of a promotion: Jack is to be Colonel Farwell, which will give him greater authority with the Partisan command. There is no word on any such promotion for Tom, but he cares little.

  After a week of breakneck preparations, in the middle of the day Tom tells Sid to grab a couple of towels. Tom is tired, and sweaty; dust has got under his clothes and stuck to his skin; he has smoked too many cigarettes. They walk down to the river in the valley, find a spot that is quiet and lined with trees, and strip off. The river is clear, gliding over blue stones. Sid’s face and neck, hands and forearms, are dark brown; but his torso is white; like some strange piebald human animal. Tom knows he must look the same.

  The river is not deep, it barely covers their knees, and they slide on the stones underfoot and, laughing, stumble with a splash. Sid sits in the shallows and throws stones into the middle of the river. Tom floats on his back in a channel towards the far bank, letting the sluggish current take him, feet first, slowly downstream. He hopes there are no leeches. The water is cool. It feels satiny on his skin. He closes his eyes. The sun is warm on his face. He is not moving fast enough to be hurt if he hits a boulder. He spreads his arms wide, and drifts. His mind empties…

  Tom wakes. It takes a moment for his situation to make sense. He has drifted towards the bank, is in shadow. He looks upriver: has probably floated no more than a hundred yards, been asleep a minute, or two at most. He hears voices, looks through the trees, and sees two figures. It is too far away to make out what they are saying, but it is clear that they are arguing. The woman turns and walks away. The man calls after her, something Tom cannot decipher, but he recognises the voice, and immediately the figure: it is Jovan. The woman is Marija.

  Turning onto his front, Tom swims a silent breaststroke towards them. Marija has stopped, or at least paused. Jovan watches her. She turns, slowly, shaking her head.

  ‘Don’t say no,’ Jovan says. ‘Give me hope, that is all I ask.’

  Tom reaches the bank, and watches. Jovan is no more than twenty yards away.

  ‘I don’t ask for any more, not now, not yet, how could I?’

  Without really looking in his direction, speaking instead as she turns from him, Marija says, ‘All right,’ and strolls away.

  Tom waits until Jovan lights himself a cigarette, stands and walks purposefully off in a different direction than Marija. Tom swims silently back upstream, or, when the water is too shallow, pulls himself along by the smooth stones on the riverbed. So, he thinks: Jovan has not waited for Tom to leave. He knows what he wants, and goes after it.

  Now information, opinions, rumours, all the spoken stuff of everyday life, is once again shared between the Partisans and all their allies. The British are told that even as this nest of operations is being planned, so the Germans are massing for their attack on the valley, despite news of their losses in Italy and Greece. ‘The problem with the Krauts is they don’t know when they’re licked,’ Jack reckons.

  August 25

  TOM WALKS FROM the airfield back to the Mission house. Explosives, rifles, PIATS have been delivered. The last of the hospital’s heavily wounded have been taken away, to Italy.

  Tom trudges the final half-mile back to the house. Birdsong mocks his tiredness. His hand reaches into the pocket where he put the note he’d written to Marija. He discovers with a shock that the pocket is empty. How can that be? Did he give it to Pero? Surely not. But he is so tired. Perhaps he did.

  Sleep is brief but deep. At breakfast, while Tom drinks the ersatz coffee and pretends it will revive him, Farwell holds forth. ‘No more silly pranks,’ he declares. ‘The Jugs are going to have at them. It’s neck or nothing now.’ He has persuaded base to send six fighter planes from Mediterranean Command to lead the attack on the bridge and soften up the German positions.

  ‘And the best news of all,’ he tells Tom, ‘is that you are going with them.’ He claps Tom on the shoulder. ‘I’m only sorry to miss the hullabaloo myself.’

  Tom hopes that his dislike of Jack is masked by the excitement he feels. ‘Does Jovan know?’ he asks.

  ‘The commissar is in full agreement,’ Jack assures him. ‘You go and see the job’s done, Freedman,’ he says. ‘Blow the bastards to perdition.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Attack on the Bridge

  September 2

  JACK IS STILL snoring when Tom slips out of the house. Their housekeeper got up before dawn to cook him ham and eggs. He wipes his plate with black bread; swallows the last of the coffee, brown and sweet.

  Sid Dixon shakes Tom’s hand. ‘Wish I were coming with you, sir,’ he says. Then, remembering what has not been mentioned these last frantic days, adds, ‘If you see her, sir…’

  Tom nods. ‘I will.’

  They set off in the early morning, trudging the sleepy stiffness out of their bones, odreds and companies coalescing bit by bit into a brigade of soldiers snaking through the woods. Few know where they are going. Each soldier follows the one in front. Company commanders were only given the location at dawn, couriers fanning out in the night from headquarters with battle plans.

  The soldiers travel light, each with a rifle or sub-machine gun over one shoulder, and ammunition. A small canvas bag or knapsack over the other: inside it a canteen, knife, spoon perhaps. At least all are now armed, Tom reckons, many bearing British weapons. They walk in single file along forest paths. No one speaks. The rustling and clinking of their clothes and arms, the tread of their footsteps, amount to little more than a murmur in the trees. It’s impossible to determine how many of them there are in front of and behind him.

  The pace is familiar: fast and unrelenting. Tom is galled to find it tough to keep up. It is a month since the last pokret – but he’s hardly been sedentary during these weeks. Yet he is breathing hard. He considers stepping aside from the path, the bustling pedestrian convoy, to take a rest. The mere notion shames him: from the next level of his character he detects, as if it has physical properties, determination rising. He will not yield. The exertion of will-power is also a familiar sensation from the forced marches, and it is soon followed by a corresponding response in his body: a second wind, his lungs becoming accustomed to the burden. Muscles loosen. Joints are oiled. Dependable mechanisms of a human animal.

  Pero marches in front of him, assigned to the role of interpreter for the Allied officer. He does not walk up on his toes any more, bouncing up off each tread; his stride is settled, and steadier.

  After a few hours they pause to rest on a hillside. Below them is a vineyard. The ripe green and yellow grapes hang in swollen bunches, tantalising the hungry foot soldiers. Tom is having a smoke with the company commander when a sergeant comes over with a request.

  ‘Permission to eat grapes, sir.’

  The comman
der looks lazily over towards his men, the vineyard, and around the surrounding hills. He nods. ‘Permission granted. Take necessary precautions.’

  Lookouts are posted along the ridge. The sergeant gives a signal. The soldiers place their weapons on the ground and rush down to the vines. They stuff themselves with grapes, handfuls at a time, the juice flowing down their jaws.

  The human snake of soldiers crosses open meadows. Peasants work in the fields, horse-drawn ploughs rattle along uneven furrows, the air is filled with the smell of freshly turned earth. The Partisans glance anxiously at the sky, prick up their ears, unprotected by the canopy of trees.

  They pass by a village. Two bullocks are requisitioned: the owner of one is recompensed with a promissory note at which he stares morosely as his beast is led away; whether he distrusts the promise or is simply illiterate Tom cannot tell. He glances back and sees more of the line behind him, before they re-enter the woods.

  The sun is still high when they come to rest in the fields and orchards of a hamlet. Great vats – of aluminium and copper – are boiling on open fires. A stew of beef, with little seasoning but herbs thrown in; potatoes, carrots. The bullocks that have come with them these last few miles are led away to have their throats cut. In an open barn, on a wooden table made of rough-hewn planks nailed together, a butcher divides a carcass ready for the vat. Small circles of men peel potatoes.

  A stout pair carry one of the vats, with a pole stuck through its two handles, into an orchard. The soldiers lying there rise from the grass like dead men. Holding their jerrycans they form a chow line. A cook doles out the stew. It is rich with meat. They know that a serious battle lies ahead.

  Tom comes across Marija and Stipe in the afternoon, in the corner of a field at one side of the village, a little removed from the main body of soldiers. He approaches slowly. Stipe sees him, and nudges Marija. She glances towards him, and a look of hatred flashes in her eyes. She stands. Tom feels for a moment a spasm of physical fear. He has seen her anger and knows it is beyond her control. Will she draw a pistol or a knife? She turns away.

  Tom collects himself, swallows, stiffens his weak resolve, steps towards her. ‘Marija.’

  She does not look at him.

  ‘Can we talk?’ he asks. ‘It is good to see you.’

  Marija lights herself a cigarette. She grasps the hand that holds a match, using one hand to stop the other shaking. When finally she looks at Tom her fury has been succeeded by contempt. ‘Talk, yes,’ she says. ‘Why not?’

  Tom cannot fathom what is going on, but Marija shakes her head, and enlightens him. ‘Do not worry. I am not some sweet young ingénue. I am a once-married woman, Tom. I am older than you. It is not your fault that when I opened your note I hoped you had written to invite me to your home in England. To share the life of a poor scholar in Oxford or a schoolteacher in some quiet market town. Of course you would be wrong to offer me this. Of course Jovan is a more appropriate man for me. Yes, he loves me. You think I do not know? What does it matter what I feel? Or that I met you?’

  So, she has read the note. ‘Marija—’

  ‘No, Tom, please.’ She drops the cigarette, half-smoked, to the ground, and stubs it out with the toe of her boot. There is a crack in the leather along the side, just above the sole. She glances up at him, then turns and looks into the distance, where two ponies are grazing by a pear tree. ‘Your honesty,’ Marija says, ‘is admirable. I do not care for it, that is all.’

  Marija turns, and walks away. Watching her, Tom finds himself overcome by a great sorrow. He is aware of a pressure in his throat, pricking behind his eyes, not known since childhood, the urge to cry. For Marija? For Jovan? For himself, in his confusion?

  Tom walks away from the village, hoping that movement might shift this sadness, this need to weep, from his body. There must be a ring of sentries to stop him wandering too far. What if an enemy plane flies overhead and spots all this activity? he wonders. He sees a team of soldiers. One looks as if he is kneading dough. Another is tying string around a finished loaf, as if wrapping a gift. As Tom comes closer he is struck by a sickeningly sweet smell, which he recognises as that of plastic explosives. They have been delivered shaped like black sausages: each soldier rolls eight or ten of these together, and then a length of fuse is attached.

  Back at the headquarters Pero is chatting with couriers who wait to be sent ahead. Tom takes him aside. ‘Did you give Marija my note?’ he asks. ‘Was it you?’

  Pero looks around, fearful that someone might overhear them. And understand English. ‘I should not have.’ He grins, is boyish once more. ‘One of the guards took it from your pocket, and passed it to me. I should have handed it to our intelligence chief. But I knew it had nothing to do with politics, or war. We could all see how Marija felt. She cannot hide her feelings.’ Pero smiles, is glad to have played the role of go-between. How can Tom be cross with him? Did he himself not want the note delivered?

  ‘Suppose you were found out?’ he asks. ‘I dread to think what punishment you would have received.’

  Pero nods, and then his eyes widen for a moment, as if he had not considered the consequences. Perhaps he really hadn’t. ‘You and Marija are my friends,’ he says, and he seems to Tom to become even younger again. He speaks like a child, his voice almost a whine, as if he is justifying what he did to a parent, or teacher; yet what he says has the moral authority of a man.

  In the late afternoon Tom tries to count the soldiers scattered in the grass, around the houses and barns. There are perhaps a thousand. Few will have eaten as well as this for a long time. They have slept, they doze, a long, lazy siesta. Some are delousing each other. A man sits on a tree stump and receives a shave from his unit’s barber. The barber wipes the lather off his cut-throat razor with a leaf. In one of the orchards a girl is singing. Others, unable to sleep, perhaps, unable to still their contemplation of what might lie ahead, clean their weapons; some roll green tobacco in strips of paper and smoke, passing the cigarettes to their companions. Tom loops his arm through the sling of his Beretta, lowers his head to the grass, closes his eyes and in moments sleep switches off his consciousness.

  They receive their orders at dusk and leave the hamlet, each soldier with two or three plastic charges in his knapsack. Tom watches them assemble in the meadow, take their place in line, move forward unquestioningly, dumb pilgrims to battle. He thinks, watching them, that surely every infantry in the world is and always has been composed of tough young men. But this one is augmented by schoolgirls; boys whose voices have not yet broken; bow-legged old men; peasants, some with their broad-beamed, heavy-bosomed wives beside them. Their smallholding and what little they owned burned in a moment of spiteful destruction by some enemy patrol on a Slovenian hillside. There are farm girls with big red hands; a tailor from Maribor; urban intellectuals and artists toughened in the fresh air; pretty women like Marija, cartridge belt slung across her chest, followed by Stipe carrying their light machine gun.

  The uniforms in the crocodile line have a comic variety of colour: the khaki of British battle-dress, Wehrmacht dark grey, Alpini light green, one man in the tight-fitting black britches of the Gestapo, camouflage canvas, tailored blankets. Many wear their own, civilian clothes, with only the Titovka cap on their heads the one binding, identifying mark they have in common.

  Weapons too are motley: Berettas, P38s, long-barrelled French Lebel rifles dating back to the early 1900s, Brens and Lee-Enfields, lobster-shaped Schmeissers. The occasional pistol: German lugers and American 45s. An army of amateurs; a revolutionary army.

  September 3

  THEY MARCH THROUGH the dark in single file. The exact route is known only to couriers at the front, runners at the rear. In spite of the chilly air Tom sweats profusely. In the woods there is little light and at times he holds the tail of Pero’s jacket; the man behind him grasps his. When they pass through fields and orchards the stars illuminate their passage. Beneath fruit trees Tom stretches up his arms, his fingers gr
oping for apples, but though he is tall the branches have already been stripped.

  Back in the forest it is as if they burrow through a black tunnel, their faces brushed and whipped by branches. The pace quickens. Tom stumbles, is yanked forward, he trots to keep up with Pero, and understands they are going downhill. In the darkness he knows they are ascending when his legs have to work harder and his lungs gulp for oxygen.

  ‘Stoj!’ They stop, clumsily, then wait. Sit down. Tom chews on a lump of black bread he’d stowed in his pocket, passes a piece to Pero.

  ‘Tisina.’ The word is passed along – ‘Silence’ – and they listen to the drone of vehicles on some road not far away that seem to be going in the direction from which they have come. Another order: ‘Naprej.’ They rise, and move forward.

  Despite the pace, they do not reach their destination before dawn. Tom realises that the trees amongst which he passes are differentiating themselves one from another, and trunks from branches, leaves, in shades of silvery grey. He has that uncanny feeling of light coming not from the sky but from the ground. As a child he loved adventure stories that involved journeys to the centre of the earth; folk tales set in underground worlds. The question of how light reached those kingdoms was essential to their wonder. So, too, there is magic at dawn in the forest.

  Once more the order for silence comes down the line. There is another German garrison to clear. Will it be the last? They climb a hill and look behind them on a fog-filled valley, the tops of trees emerging like stalagmites. The sun tinges the green hills a pale pink. The soldiers crest the ridge and reach a village that they learn is their destination: from here the attack will be launched. Forest stretches out below. Through it flows the Sava river. The Litija bridge is down there, two miles away.