The parachute was hanging from a high branch, stirring and moving in the dawn wind. I emerged from behind my rock with caution, and found, a few feet away from the tree which held his parachute, Miles, quite dead. He had not been shot, as I first thought from the dark stain of blood on his forehead. He had crashed down through the tall pine. His parachute had caught in it. He had hung there like a fly in a web. Trying to unhitch himself he had fallen, and had knocked his head on a rock. The fall had not been much more than thirty feet, and all around the rock he had struck the forest floor was soft with old leaf mould and littered with pine needles. It must have happened no more than minutes before I landed. He had been as unlucky as I had been lucky.
The parachute was catching the light, making a beacon that could be seen for miles. I had to climb that tree and get it down. The trunk rose straight up without a branch for twenty feet or so, but had many sharp projecting woody bits. I went up it clinging with my arms and legs, trying to by-pass the sharp pieces, and trying, too, to keep a lookout for anyone who might be coming to investigate that high patch of glistening white. I got to the level of the first branch, when I heard a sound that might have been a twig breaking or the crack of a rifle, and I remained quite still in indecision before thinking that nothing was more dangerous to me than that heap of stirring white. I went up the remainder of that trunk as fast as I could, and, lying face down along the projecting branch that held the parachute, wriggled out towards it. I had just grasped the silk, and was tugging and jerking it to free it from the twigs that held it, when I saw coming down over the shoulder of the mountain, five soldiers, holding their rifles pointed at me. I had no means of knowing whether they were Partisans or Chetniks. I therefore sat up on the branch like a boy caught stealing apples, and went on wriggling and jerking at the parachute to free it. I saw that the second of the soldiers was a girl. She was the most beautiful girl I have ever seen. She had thick black braids falling down her back under her cap, black oriental eyes, and a face like Aphrodites.
I saw the Red Star on their breasts and said: I am a British soldier.
The leader said something to the others, who lowered their rifles.
He said, in French, We were expecting you.
I said: Ill just get this parachute off. As I said this, it came loose and flopped to the forest floor.
The sun had come up. The forest was infused with a reddish golden light. The birds were singing. The five under me were staring up. They were smiling. I said: But my friend has been killed.
They had not seen Miles; their attention had been on me.
The girl went straight to him, to make sure he was dead. She was a medical student who played the part of doctor for her Partisan group. I will say here that her name was Konstantina and that I loved her from that first moment, as she did me.
By the time I had slid and scrambled down the tree, she had finished examining Miles, and now she examined my hands for scratches from the rough trunk, and saw to my leg, which was aching badly from the blow I had given it on landing. The others were already digging a grave in the forest. My first moment of meeting with the Partisans, with my love Konstantina, was a burial. They were scooping out the soft leafy soil with their hands, their belt-knives, their canteens. Before we laid Miles in the grave we took his equipment, very precious to those underequipped hand-to-mouth soldiers, and I took his poison pills from where I knew he had hidden them, in his belt.
The six of us left him there and walked down into a valley where a stream was swollen with melted snow, and across the stream and up into a mountain peak where the snow still lay thick and wintry, although the spring sun was hot enough to make us fold our great coats and carry them with our packs. There, just below the snow line, were caves, and in them the temporary headquarters of this Partisan group: they never stayed anywhere longer than a few nights.
In other countries occupied by the Nazis, there was the pattern of people fighting against them, and those who collaborated with them, out of a natural sympathy, or because of a belief that they must win. In some countries this pattern was very simple. People living in a town, a village, knew that so and so was a Nazi, and that so and so was not. Northern countries seemed more straightforward than the South. Norway for instance, or Holland. Information from occupied Holland might come that the Nazis had hanged or shot or imprisoned twelve members of the Resistance; that certain members of the Resistance had committed such and such acts of sabotage. But in Yugoslavia things were at the opposite extreme. The information was not: The Germans entered such and such a village and shot twenty Yugoslav Resistance members; but that: The Croat collaborators entered such a Serbian village and exterminated all its inhabitants, or Moslem troops massacred all the people in the village of or, the Partisans entering such a village after sharp fighting found all the inhabitants murdered by the Croats, or but it was endless, with Catholics, Moslems, Montenegrins, Herzegovinians, Croats, Serbs, and so on and so on.
As I came out of the thick forest into the rock-surrounded space outside the cave, I saw a dozen or so soldiers, all of them watching our approach from where they squatted together eating their breakfast, bread and some sausage. They were all young, and some were girls. My presence was explained in a few words. I was handed a hunk of rough bread. A can of water was being passed around. For me it was a powerfully emotional moment: I was joining the famed Partisans whose exploits people were talking of everywhere. Their heroism had the simplicity of other days, a clean straightforwardness, like the heroes outside Troy. These were people like those. When I had time to look around, and examine their guns and equipment, I saw that this must be a very rough and simple fighting. If they had uniforms, they were taken from dead enemies, so that boots, caps, jackets, belts were of every sort of design. Some had no uniform, they wore anything that could serve as protection in these wild mountains, peasants boots, students winter knitted caps. The Red Star on their caps or on their breasts was what linked them.
This group of young soldiers contained Serbs, Croats, Montenegrins, Catholics, and Moslems. Nowhere but in these mountains, among these soldiers, these comrades, could it be possible for two people to meet, take each others hands, call each other by name, Miro, Miloš, Konstantina, Slobo, Vido, Edvard, Vera, Mitra, Aleksa take the Red Star as their bond, and forget the rest.
Now, re-creating in imagination that moment, when I came out of the forest with that group, and sat down with them all eating the peasant bread and drinking cold mountain water, I think most of all of something that I took for granted then their extreme youth. No one was more than twenty-five. I was not myself. Among them, and among those I met in the mountains in the next few weeks were men and women who after the war became the rulers of the new Yugoslavia, a nation fought for and created by the very young.
I believe that a man who fought with those young people who now has to stand up on a platform in a big hall to lecture, or teach, must often, a quarter of a century later, look down on the upturned faces of students who are rioting and sullen and critical and undisciplined and who in every country of the world reject what their society offers them this man, a professor perhaps, with responsibility, a place in society, looks at those faces and thinks how young people exactly like them, children to their elders, fought the most vicious and terrifying army in history, Hitlers, fought short of weapons, short of warm clothes, often without food, always outnumbered fought and won, and created a new nation.
I was with them for I could say three months. It is only in love and in war that we escape from the sleep of necessity, the cage of ordinary life, to a state where every day is a high adventure, every moment falls sharp and clear like a snowflake drifting slowly past a dark glistening rock, or like a leaf spinning down to the forest floor. Three months of ordinary living can be not much more than the effort of turning over from one side to another in a particularly heavy uncomfortable sleep. That time in the mountains with that band of young soldiers it is as if I remember every breath I took. Remembering that time is as if a friends eyes rest in loving curiosity on your face, and you feel your face spread in a smile because of the warmth the two of you generate.
The band remained in numbers between twelve and thirty. A man, or a girl, would come quietly into the camp with a handshake, a smile, slide off his or her pack and rifle, and become one of us. Or someone would leave quietly to take a message, or to reconnoitre, or to slip back to a home village to fetch food or supplies. We stayed on that mountainside outside the caves for not more than two days. I had to be taken to the H.Q. of the Partisans, to transfer messages and to collect their messages and news to take back to North Africa. We had to move carefully, because the mountains were full not only of Chetniks but of ordinary villagers who had fled away from their homes to live the life of outlaws until the coming winters snows would force them down again, to death, or to servitude under the Germans or Chetniks.
To stand on a high mountains shoulder, and look down and around over hundreds of miles of mountains and valleys and rivers and hillsides: it was the wildest scene on earth, with nothing moving there in all that space but a bird hanging on the air, or, very far away, the smoke rising from a village too distant to see if it was the smoke of pillage, or from an ordinary hearth. Empty. Emptiness. The world as it was before man filled and fouled it. But, as you stood there and waited and watched, a different conviction took hold. On the slope of a mountain high on the other side of a racing mountain stream there was a flash of metal which, no matter how you stared and peered, was not repeated: the sun had caught a rifle barrel, or a knife. Trees two miles away that were painted yellow sage and viridian and blue-grey by spring had a smudge of indistinctness over them that was a tree late-in-leaf, a green so lightly spread over the structure of bough that it seemed grey? or was it smoke from a Partisans fire? The binoculars brought the hillside opposite close into the eye, and the smudge was indeed smoke, not new leafage, but the people under the trees, who had made the fire, were wearing grey indistinct clothing, and it was hard to say whether they were villagers, Chetniks, or Partisans. Or, at night, keeping our cooking fire low behind an earthwork or a pile of cut branches, making the flames clear and bright to forbid the sight of smoke to an enemy on a near slope, a quick leap of red faded out again into the dark opposite and we knew that a mile or half a mile away another fire had escaped the shield of banked earth or brush or branch and had been caught and confined again but by whom, friend or foe? One of us would then, with a smile and a nod, or the stern dedication of the very young, whose duty forbids smiling and lightness, slide away from our low circle of flamelight into the trees and reappear an hour or five hours later with: People from the village. Or, Croats. Or, with him (or her) would come in from the trees a group of soldiers wearing the Red Star, greeting us with the handshake that was the promise of the life we would all live after the war, when the fighting was over.