Those vast mountains, in which we moved like the first people on earth, discovering riches at every opening of the forest, flowers, fruit, flocks of pigeons, deer, streams of running splashing water full of fish, these mountains were host to a hundred, no, a thousand groups, all moving quietly, beneath the great trees, eyes always on the alert for enemies, people who slept with their hands on their rifles, and who were skilled to know a friend as much by an instant recognition of comradeship and optimistic heroism as by the Red Star.
When this war was over, we all knew, and our trusting hands, our smiles, our dedication promised this this land that was so rich and so beautiful would flower into a loving harmony that was as much a memory as a dream for the future. It was as if every one of us had lived so, once upon a time, at another time, in a country like this, with sharp sweet-smelling air and giant uncut trees, among people descended from a natural royalty, those to whom harmfulness and hate were alien. We were all bound in together by another time, another air. Anything petty and ignoble was an outlaw. We could remember only nobility.
If I say all this and put my love in a sound place it was because it was a love that flowered from the time and the place. No, of course I dont mean that if I had met her in an ordinary way, in peace, we would not have recognised each other. But our love in those weeks was an aspect of the fine high comradeship of the group, whose individuals did not matter, because an individual could only be important insofar as he or she was a pledge for the future, and where individuals came and went and were always the same, being by shared nature high and fine and foreign to the consciousness of ugliness of race or region or a hostile religiosity. Our love was carried, or contained by the group, a flower of it, and this although some comrades did not approve of it, thought and said that a war of this kind was no place for love. But such criticisms were made within the spirit of comradeship, with a simple frankness, without spite or need to hurt. There was nothing we could not say to each other. There was no criticism we could not make and which, thought over, and followed or resisted, did not become of a conscious growth which this was assumed by every one of us, was the greatest of our contributions to this war which was a war not only against the bad in our own nation (while I was with them I felt with them, felt Yugoslav) collaborators, Chetniks, the selfish rich, but against all the evil in the world. In those high mountains we fought against Evil, and were sure to win, for the stars in their courses were on our side, whose victory would be at last when the poor and meek and the humble had inherited the earth, and the lion would lie down with the lamb, and a loving harmony would prevail over the earth. We knew all this because it was as if we remembered it. And besides, did we not live like this now, loving each other and the world? With rifles in our hands, grenades in our pockets, gelignite in our packs, moving as silently as thieves among the towering trees of those magnificent forests, we knew ourselves to be pledges for the future, and utterly unimportant in ourselves, because as individuals we could have no importance, and besides, we were already as good as dead. Of the men and women I lived with, fought with, during those months, very many were killed, the majority as they knew they would be. It did not matter. What was spilt could not be lost, because at last love had come to birth in man, communism and its Red Star of hope shone out for all the working poor, for all the suffering everywhere, to see and to follow. Within that general Love, I and the Partisan girl loved each other. We hardly spoke of it, were seldom alone, were soldiers, thinking soldiers thoughts. When we did find ourselves together and alone, it was not because it had been planned by us. An accident of our group life had sent us off to forage for food in an abandoned village, or we were put together on guard duty. But we were on duty and so had to be responsible. I do not remember when I kissed her first, but I remember our jokes that it had taken us so long to kiss. We slept together once in the frenzy of sorrow after I was told that in a week I would be finished with my mission and with Yugoslavia and with Konstantina.
That was after I had been taken to Titos headquarters, had given and taken information had done what I had come to do. It was then a question of how I could get away again. That could not be by air. It was dangerous enough dropping men in, but at that stage impossible for aircraft to land. I had to make my way to the coast, from where I was taken in a small boat by fishermen to an island where I met up with others who had been on missions in Greece and Yugoslavia. And how we got back to North Africa from there is another story.
The weeks before I made liaison with the guide who was to take me to the coast were full of dangerous fighting. Our group blew up a railway, destroyed a couple of bridges, fought two bloody battles with groups of Chetniks much larger than ours. After these battles we were weakened and depleted. Some of us were wounded. Vido, the leader, was dead, and Miloš, who was an old school-friend of Konstantinas, became group leader. She became his second-in-command, and was even more busy than she had been. For there was much more to do, and many fewer people to do it all. But new people kept coming in. I remember one evening we were on a mountain flank above a village which we knew to be occupied by German and Croat troops. It was a village where Miloš had friends or rather, had had friends. He was talking of how, next day, he might slip down, with one of the girls, to the village, in disguise. It was a question of getting hold of an ordinary peasant dress and kerchief. Vera, one of the girls, had had such an outfit, but it had been lost in recent fighting. As we sat there that night, talking in whispers, huddled in together, very hungry and cold because we did not dare light a fire, we saw two people move out of the bushes towards us. Rifles flew up, but Miloš shouted out, Noand it was just in time. Two boys ran forward silently over the grass, smiling. Miloš embraced them. They were from the village, had heard of our presence near them in the mountains, had come to join us. They were brothers, sixteen, and seventeen. Neither had so much as held a rifle before. They had brought with them two old revolvers from the 1914 war. Also some bread and sausage even more welcome than the revolvers. That night we began training them in the art of guerrilla warfare and in a couple of weeks these two boys were as skilled and resourceful as any one of us. If memories of wartime are frighteningly precious, the main reason is that in wartime we learn again that peacetime should never allow to be forgotten. That every cook can learn to govern the state. In wartime every little clerk, every confined housewife, learns what he or she is capable of. In peacetime these two schoolboys would have become what the pettiness of village life would have allowed them to become. In England boys of that age, or certainly middle-class boys, are spoiled children. In war, in our guerrilla group, they were trackers, crack shots, brilliant spies, thieves and pilferers, able to march twenty-four hours at a stretch remaining lively and alert, able to find berries, mushrooms, edible roots, able to track down a deer or a pheasant and kill it silently without wasting precious ammunition. What could possibly happen to them in the life after the war to them and the millions like them in the countries where guerrillas and partisans and the underground operated to match up to what they were given in war? That is, unless they went to prison (where many still are) and learned a different kind of skilled endurance. In the less than a month that I was with the two boys, I had learned again what I had already understood in my first day with the Partisans that any human being anywhere will blossom into a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to use them. Both those boys survived the war. Both are now high in the government of their country. They had their education with the guerrillas in the mountains and the forests.
They were not the only ones to come secretly from the villages. By such recruitment, our group went up again to nearly thirty, seeming always to get younger and younger. The old ones would joke about the children. Miloš was the old man. He was twenty-four.
Although it was summer, we were always short of food, and our medical supplies were low. Konstantina was reduced to a few bandages and ointment. It was decided that she and I would go to a village where her aunt lived, to try and get supplies. The plan was for us to move up to the edge of a field above the village, where the women would be at work among the maize. Konstantina knew the village well, and the habits of the people. She knew they were sympathetic to us, and hated the occupying Croats. The women would bring a skirt, a blouse, a kerchief. Konstantina would put them on, join the working women, return with them to the village at midday, and go to her aunts house. There she would get her aunt to find bandages, disinfectants, medicines, and food. There was only one point of danger that we could foresee, which was that at this time of the year the women often did not return to their homes for the midday meal, but took it in the fields as they worked. But one of them could run back to the village and fetch Konstantinas aunt to us in the forest. Or, if all this was too dangerous, if the occupying troops were too alert, then we would have to stay at the edge of the field above the village, and one of the women would take the message down to the aunt, and the supplies could be brought to where we were.
But it all went off very simply. We left our friends early, before the sun was up, and had reached the village by mid-morning. We slid on our stomachs to the edge of the field. Often fields were guarded. But it was apparently a pleasant peaceful scene. The women were hoeing among the tall maize plants, talking and laughing. Konstantina called out to a woman who looked up, startled, and who then showed how well she had been taught by war she took in the situation at once, gave us a single gesture, I understand, keep quiet, and worked her way slowly towards us, while keeping up her chat with another woman ten yards away. When she reached us, she and Konstantina talked in low voices, one from the field, the other from thick bushes at the edge of it. The womans lips scarcely moved. In this and in her quickness and her caution we could see very well the state of that village under its occupying troops. She said that with the women in the fields was the wife of a man known to be sympathetic to the Germans. It was necessary to think of a plan to get rid of her. But luck was with us. After we had lain hidden in the bushes for not more than an hour, watching the lively women working, this dangerous woman of her own accord went back to her house. She said she had bread to be baked. After that it went fast. One of the women slipped back to her house, and fetched a bundle of clothes, which was thrown into the bushes where we lay. In a few moments Konstantina had changed from a soldier to a young girl. She walked out in a full blue skirt and a white blouse and white kerchief from the trees, and joined with the women, bending and making the movements of someone who held and used a hoe. In a few minutes all the women went off together to the village, Konstantina among them.
The field that sloped down to the village was quite empty. The maize plants were a full strong glossy green. All the trees and bushes around the field were in the lush fullness of early summer. The sky was deep and blue. It was rather hot. The maize plants were at that stage when they have reached their full growth, but still seem as if the push of the sap is sending them up. They were very straight and the stems were as crisp as sugarcane. The tassel on each plant had turned white, but only just. The acres of tall green plants were topped with waving white braided tassels, but they were a greenish white still. The cobs pushing out heavily from the stems were not filled out yet, and the soft silk that fell from the end of each cob was fresh and new. None had dried. Each cob had its tongue of gleaming ruddy silk, a welling of soft red. That morning it had rained. The tips of the arched leaves and the dangling red floss dripped great glistening raindrops. The earth smelled sweet and fresh. A lively steam went up off the field. Everything in that field was at a peak of young but mature liveliness. Even a week later, the curve would have turned, and begun to sink, with the arching leaves just tingeing yellow, the crests on the plants very hard and white, the dark red of the tassels drying and clotting. It was like looking at a wave just before it turns over and breaks.
Down in the village some smoke went up into the blue. There was no one to be seen. It was absolutely silent. Yet the village was occupied, and we knew that two weeks ago a dozen people had been shot in the main street. They had sent supplies to the Partisans, and for this adventure today, people might be killed, if we bungled it. But things continued to go well.