CHAPTER 21

Of the next three hours there is no record whatever. Twelve o'clock and a rap on the door seemed coincident with the delicious abandon of falling asleep, almost a part of the experience rather than something that succeeded it. We dressed hastily and were given food sent down for us from Headquarters. Then we set out with our guard along a narrow foot-path that led to the broken building where the Colonel waited. On our right was the bright blue sea—for the sun had come out while we slept, and on our left were the towering mountains, so close and high as almost to give one claustrophobia. The Colonel had come down to us from somewhere beyond them, in the interior. I wondered if he had lowered himself down the side with a rope, like an alpinist. . . .

A powerful young man—probably in his middle thirties-greeted us at the door and introduced a still younger officer: they were Pavle Hie and Kukoc Ivo, the Colonel and his Commissar. The five of us proceeded at once to a back room on the second floor, passing, before ascending the stairs, through a hall that was used as a mess and where the remains of a meal were still in evidence. The building was of rugged construction and had been pierced here and there by artillery fire. None of its rooms and chambers appeared intact, but the

one in which we came to rest around a small kitchen table was almost weather-proof. The window was broken and patched and the door sagged on its hinges. Blasts had shattered the latch mechanism, but this failed to worry the Colonel who propped his German sub-machine gun against it at an angle and thus kept it closed. . . . We seated ourselves around the table.

Both Ilic and Ivo wore Partisan uniforms—the first we had ever seen. They were made of heavy grey material and consisted of breeches and tunics with a comfortable turn-down collar fastened up to the neck. Heavy black boots laced only at the instep completed the martial but comfortable-looking attire. Both wore Sam Browne belts and German pistols—no hand grenades. Both carried leather map-cases slung diagonally across the shoulder against the line of the Sam Browne on heavy leather straps.

The Colonel had a big frame and broad shoulders. His fair head was massive and resolute. He moved in a leisurely and deliberate way as he opened his map-case and spread several pages of its contents on the table before us, together with two sticks of charcoal. I watched his steady hands and noted his clear blue eyes and the firm set of his features, thinking that at a glance I would take him for a Dane or a Swede instead of a Slav.

Commissar Ivo appeared a less open character. He was short and broad shouldered, dark, tense. His face was triangular and suggested astuteness. His hands were small. His eyes were less direct than his chief's.

Both officers were Communists and, of the two, the Commissar would be the one to take a doctrinaire, intellectual line. He would be the intransigeant revolutionary, the Trotsky; the other would be the adaptable soldier. But it was the soldier, the Colonel, who wore the hammer and sickle emblem on the red star of his cap. The Commissar wore the red star without adornment. Both men had been school-teachers.

"Where shall we start?" the Colonel said in French, with a charming smile.

"What shall we send you . . . what do you need the most?" I answered. So we began with the problem of priorities. Automatic weapons and mortars, boots and woolen clothes, medical supplies and fats—those were the items most urgendy

required.

Steve functioned as interpreter, the Colonel and his Commissar speaking Serbo-Croat most of the time. Tim kept a note-book open on his knee and scribbled furiously when I translated Steve's replies, which came to me in French. The process was cumbersome and slow, but thorough.

When we had worked out our priorities and discussed the best ways of handling each item I drew from my despatch case a set of naval charts and spread them over the Colonel's maps. Before us were the familiar contours of the Adriatic. "Where are the mines along your coast?" I asked. The Colonel searched his map-case for charts and records of the coast, its mine-fields and fortifications, then, with his pen, carefully plotted in each danger zone on our maps, marking in the boundaries of the channels through which a ship might pass. The Italians laid most of the mines and the Partisans had acquired their charts after capitulation, but there were other mines that had been placed by the Partisans

themselves.

"Where did you get the mines?" I inquired. "Did you capture them from the Italians?"

"No," Hie laughed. "We have a technique of our own for making mine-fields which has caused the Italians a good deal of inconvenience at one time and another. It's like this: we find a good swimmer and send him down beside a mine, with a rope in his teeth. He fastens the rope to the cable between the mine and its anchor, then, being careful not to let the line foul the detonators he comes back aboard and we tow the whole business away. When the bottom is flat, we can move them about as we please."

We needed the fullest possible information about German troop movements in Jugoslavia and their positions in the region of the coast. We wanted to know just what divisions were operating there, how they were armed, how strong they were, over what routes they moved their supplies, whether they were well equipped with anti-aircraft batteries, whether they held any important airports and how many planes were based on each, and a great deal more of the same sort, all comprehensively known in the technical language of warfare as the enemy's "order of battle."

Colonel Ilic had infinite patience and answered our questions quietly with absolute precision. He appeared to be making few guesses, to be relying upon accurate and extensive knowledge; but there were some questions about the enemy which he was unable to meet. Tim wrote furiously, recording the unanswered questions as well as those with replies. With a stick of soft charcoal the Colonel inscribed data on the maps before us. We copied off these boundaries of enemy occupying forces and transferred everything he set down for us with pencil to our own maps. This was information that would go to the chiefs of staff in London and Washington, that would be pored over for long hours by the experts in Algiers and Cairo, that the field commanders of sea and air and ground forces in Italy would study and memorize.

When we had seemingly gleaned from the Colonel all the information of this sort that could be drawn from his fine memory or his carefully written note-books we turned to the second order-of-battle problem, the strength and disposition of the forces of Tito's National Army of Liberation—the Partisans. Here progress was not nearly as easy. The Colonel showed a tendency to answer in generalities rather than figures and charcoal drawings. I pressed him sharply, eager to determine just how far he would go, what he would and what he would not tell us. Again the charcoal stick came into play and traced for us the irregular outlines of the liberated territories, indicated concentrations of Partisan strength, recorded the position of battle-fields where the contest was still undecided. ... I gave him no quarter.

"How many in this force? How are they armed? How do they communicate with their headquarters? Where do these troops come from . . . ?"

The Colonel's evasions became conspicuous and I looked up from the map to catch his eye squarely. There was an unhappy expression on his face but when our eyes met, we both leaned back and laughed.

"All right," I said.

"The truth is you embarrass me a little," Ilic observed. "It is not my place to impart such information about the other commands. You must get that from the Chief."

"From Tito?"

"From him ... or from his staff. . . . Would you like to go up and see him?"

"I would indeed! But there is no time to do it now. We will have to hurry back to Bari with the information you have already given us and act to get the supplies you want moving. We must arrange for the naval and air support that will clear out these inter-island waters so that the supplies can move down the second leg of the route, from Vis to the coast."

"Quite right," he said. "That's the first thing to do. But there is a great deal more information that I would like to give you—if I felt free to do so. Perhaps you can return after a few nights and we can meet again. Meanwhile, I'll go up to Jajce and report to Tito—and obtain permission to answer a few more of your questions."

The plan was adopted at once. We agreed to meet again on the coast on the night of Wednesday to Thursday, October twentieth. As it was then Sunday afternoon, we would both have to move fast, but by travelling night and day we could succeed.

Evening had overtaken us while we were talking and the bare little room in which we sat had grown so dark it was difficult to see by the time an orderly came in with a carbide lamp from the top of which there spurted a naked yellow flame. He set it before us in the middle of the table and retired, with a word to the Colonel, leaving the door ajar. A few minutes later two young Partisan women entered with coarse plates, spoons, and a big bowl of steamed buckwheat. A great pitcher of wine and five chipped cups followed, then they retired and the Colonel propped his machine gun against the door again.

"This is a poor country for food," he said. "In the interior

we eat better. We regret that there is nothing else to offer

jj you.

We waved his apologies aside. The food was, in truth, coarse and dull almost beyond belief, but the wine was superb, pale ruby-red and cool, a heavenly vintage.

"I could live on horse-droppings if there were plenty of this to wash it down," Tim said aside in English to me.

"I'm not sure that's not what we're doing," I answered.

It was completely dark before we finished dinner. The stimulus of the wine was wonderfully welcome to both Tim and me. Neither of us felt any mental fatigue, but our bodies ached. My shoulders seemed made of lead and sinking slowly into my thorax. Steve looked utterly exhausted and I encouraged him to drink freely, keeping his cup full. I had not yet found time to learn from him what was in the note Radicic had given him, and I could see his thoughts often returned to it.

Rakjia was served to us when the plates had been carried away and after a round or two all tension suddenly was gone from that little conference room. We felt close to one another and happy, with the bulk of our work, for that day, done. Even the Commissar, who had said little during the afternoon and had appeared increasingly unhappy during the period in which I questioned his chief too closely about the Partisan forces, relaxed and looked content. The moment seemed opportune to investigate Steve's predicament a little, and I began by opening a conversation with Ilic about our work in Bari.

"It is wonderful, what you have done there," he commented. "We have a report from Commander Radicic about Mladineo's work, and it is clear that his mission would have come to little or nothing without you."

That provided the opening and I told him of Steve's indefatigable efforts and how pleasant it had been to work with him. As we spoke French, Steve understood and broke in several times to protest, blushing like a school-girl.

"It's a magnificent record," Ilic said, looking at Steve with admiration and affection. "I am certain the Commander will be very pleased when he has a full report."

So that was it! That was what I thought. Steve was in trouble for having gone to Algiers and had been asked to turn in a full report. He was conscious of having angered Tito himself and hardly dared believe he would be forgiven. Partisan discipline is as hard as flint and its normal technique is the firing squad. What gloomy ideas might the poor tired lad not be harboring behind those worried blue eyes!

In the conversation that followed I managed to indicate that had not Steve been virtually kidnapped by General Mason Mack and Admiral Power and sent down to Algiers where we ran into him in Colonel Mann's office, we would still be in Algiers attending conferences and our sixteen Jugoslav ships instead of being safe in our hands would probably all have been confiscated now by "some other authority."

The Colonel listened very carefully, nodding and approving. I" felt sure the arguments would all be relayed to Tito and that Steve's troubles—except for his anxiety, which survived in diminished form—were over. The Colonel translated it all very carefully for his Commissar, who nodded approbation throughout.

Before leaving we devoted another hour to careful planning of the naval and air attacks against German positions on the coast to safeguard the second leg of our supply route. The German patrols came out from a secret Snell-Boat base in the mouth of the Neretva River, only a few miles south of the village we were conferring in. The best way to clean them out would be to strafe them to hell from the air.

The only regular source of supplies available to the big German garrisons at Mostar and Metkovic, just up the Neretva River a few miles from the sea, was a steamer called the Rah, which made a trip or two each week from Split. She was well armed and invulnerable to attack by any means the Partisans could devise.

We worked out a detailed plan for her destruction. The Partisans possessed a very powerful searchlight which would be erected on the heights almost above the point on the coast we now occupied. The MTB's would hide between the islands in the narrow water way down which we had chugged in The Chetnik the night before. When the Rah came by, following the channels along the coast, the searchlight would pick her out. Her guns would open fire at long range on the light, and while they were wasting their time in this fashion the MTB's would dash out and sink her with torpedoes. It was perfect!

During the last hour of our conference, dinner was being served to fifty men in the mess below and as soon as they had finished eating they began to sing. Their battle-songs shook the walls of the building, for when the Partisans sing they resemble in no way a polite congregation getting through Sunday morning's hymns. They throw their heads back and pour forth the largest volume of sound they can produce. When we walked out through the mess hall, they were still singing but they paused as we came through and stood up in a body, not stiffly and at attention, but in easy, natural attitudes. Ilic smiled kindly and introduced us. "Zhivio!" they answered, bowing and smiling.

The scene was unforgettable. There were three long tables with two carbide lamps on each. The remains of a supper comparable with our own cluttered the tables. Deep black shadows engulfed the walls and corners of the room, so that it had no boundaries and the naked yellow flames flooded the wild faces theatrically.

"Zhivio Americans!" one of them shouted, and the company repeated it after him in chorus.

"Zhivio Roosevelt!" another led, and again they all joined.

"Zhivio Tito!" was next, and we joined them heartily in that one.

A guard was waiting for us at the door, where we said good-bye to the Colonel and the Commissar after promising again to be back three nights later, then we set off through the darkness and a drizzle of rain to return to the house where we had rested in the morning and collect our things and our two escaped prisoners of war before embarking for the return journey to Vis.