WE crossed the Bosna late in September. The crossing was difficult.

Until twilight we were safe in our march from enemy intelligence because we were masked by the trees behind Doboj. We skirted round Teslitch and then moved northwards along the crest of the tree-covered hills until Doboj lay behind us. Our approach to the river was as secretive as all their experience could make it; for a brief moment we should emerge from our anonymous ubiquity into an exact position on the enemy's lines of communication; and Hauptmann K—— in Brod could come to­morrow if he cared and trace from his security reports the exact place where we had crossed the river he and his patrols were thought to guard. As always on those occasions when we passed through enemy controlled territory on other than fighting missions, it seemed to me that we went from one dimension to another, from one set of values into an entirely different set of values,, impinged upon the enemy in an exact, physical sense of which he was seldom aware, preferring as he did to see us as a disembodied evil he could never really grasp. But every now and then he could mark where we had been, and tremble like a man who finds the footsteps of a ghost.

That night there was more than ever need for silence and conceal­ment. The random shooting of half an hour before, far away in the woods to the right of our line of march, meant that chetniks had alerted the German garrison at Doboj of partisan forces nearing the Bosna; they had been expecting something of the kind ever since Seventeen Division had rushed into Modritch several days before, and Eleven Division had tried for Teslitch; and they were now furiously telephoning the security posts along the railway line beside the river. Very soon we could expect the whole boiling of them, from the mouth of the Bosna at Brod to the shivering outposts in the iron mountains below Zenitsa, to be standing to and waiting for us to stick our noses under their guns.

Already there had been air reconnaissance, apparently a coinci­dence but disturbing all the same, in the shape of a little Henschel zooming overhead, buzzing and humming and circling in the after­noon air and freezing us into immobility beneath the trees. It seemed afterwards that the Henschel was looking for another plane which had crashed here the day before; but we did not know that. He might so easily be looking for us, and we were not taking chances. After a little he went zooming away, fluttering like a leaf in the currents of air that rise and fall within the Bosna valley, and dis­appeared in the direction of Derventa. At Derventa there was an armoured train.

I remember thinking how the pattern of our lives was governed by the constant presence of the enemy. The restless counterpoint of partisan warfare imposed on us unceasing movement, so that our very mobility gave us a conviction of superior strength, intelligence, and courage. The enemy sat up in his garrisons and was blind. He would see and hear at secondhand, and would feel permanently unsafe. Only when in obviously superior strength, or new to the business, would he overcome this feeling of insecurity; otherwise he would be slowly worn down in his nerves and grow so jittery that any slight alarm would set him to telephoning angrily up and down the line for news, for reinforcements, for reassurance. He would spend the night in a more or less permanent stand-to, shooting up flares and signal rockets that kept his courage warm, and covering the least suspicion with a wild tornado of fire from the automatic weapons with which he was so liberally supplied.

The enemy lived in an atmosphere of taut apprehension; and all his thoughts were overshadowed by the beastly horror that lurked behind the encroaching woods, and came at nightfall creeping down towards him. The individual enemy, brought here from his pleasant German village, from the gentle forests of Bavaria or the long quiet Apulian hills, was taught by all he heard and read and saw that his life would hang now by the brief moment between waking and sleep­ing, between the keyed-up fingering of a gun and the nervelessness of drowsy inattention; his waking moments would be supercharged with tales of murder and sudden death; the letters and the news­papers that he had from home would be full of warning that he was fighting beasts, not men, creatures of blood and hate, incapable of mercy or restraint. His superiors would build up in him a deliberate desperation that undermined his own goodwill and left him ready to take part in any foulness. He would begin to burn and murder and rape and steal, and very soon his corruption was no longer reparable. He had become what the partisans called him: "a bloody Fascist beast"; and there seemed little left to do with him but to take him and shoot him.

The bulk of the enemy thought of the partisans, whom they ailed "Bolshevist bandits," exactly in the terms which Lawrence aresaw, "an influence, an idea, a thing intangible, invulnerable, without front or back, drifting about like a gas ..."—an enemy who was everywhere and yet was almost never seen; so that anyone yho had once caught sight of a partisan could talk of it in terms if wonder, and describe the horridness of his clothing and the way le slavered at the jaws, and the knife perhaps that he had between ds teeth.

Few of the tens of thousands of Germans who occupied Jugoslavia had ever seen a partisan no matter how many times they were in action against partisans; or at least not a partisan at large, for sometimes they would catch a man too drugged with weariness to remain awake, come upon him in the early morning as he lay under a tree, and bind him and bring him back to their garrison, and torure him and make him talk, and take pictures for the Muenchene Illustrierte of this poor, wretched, unterirdische Hetzarheiter with his sodden rags and mutilated face, and then crucify him and throw him on a dungheap. And even his corpse would be a matter of remark, and they would take pictures of that, too, the stinking ousy corpse crumpled on the ground, and poked at with a bayonet ay our stout-hearted, cheerful, Hansi in his fine field-grey and jack soots, so that Gretel at home might rejoice in the sane normality of Hitler's race and the awful filth and beastliness of that filthy and beastly partisan corpse.

As time went by the enemy came to understand the need to kill, and kill, not to show mercy or restraint. They would think of parti­sans as more than human enemies supplied with every device or information and means of making war. They knew nothing of our improvising need, of our lack of everything that soldiers normally required, of our thin numbers and pitiable equipment.

The enemy commanders make a show of understanding what we do. They have their Sicherheitsdienst in gamekeepers' green and russet, a corps of military policemen the partisans call "Gestapovsti," whose job it is to collect information on partisan move­ments and intentions, who turn in documents that we have later captured, patient with irrelevant detail, solemn in their missing of the point.

"Hermann at J—— reports from local sources that five hundred bandits crossed the Boria on the night of the 5th / 6th in the direction of the Mayevitsa. They are said to be commanded by one Sheshennts and to be part of the Third Bosnian Corps. Their intention is not known...."

And Hauptmann K—— at H.Q. in Slavonski Brod collates this with another report he has just received: "Police post on patrol between Z—— and S—— reports clash with seventeen bandits from the company commanded by Shesherinats. Peasants say they are part of a group of seven hundred who are massing for the attack we expect on Maglay. They have twelve machine-guns, three heavy mortars, and much ammunition...."

And the garrison gets a telephone call from Hauptmann K—— telling them to initiate fighting patrols between Maglay and Doboj and to penetrate the outskirts of the Boria. The local chetnik odreds are mobilized and sent scouting in the forest.

Yet all the time poor Hauptmann K——, the silly fool, doesn't know that Shesherinats is our intendant and went across the Boria to take delivery of some cattle he had been given by sympathizers in Bosanski Brod, and was merely coming back with bloodthirsty intentions limited to the butchering of cattle and the dividing of it amongst the brigades.

On other occasions Hauptmann K—— and his fellow policemen will lean back in their office chairs and feel assured that banditry is on the wane. "Two thousand bandits are reported on the march from Mayevitsa towards Montenegro, where they will disperse...." And in that moment there is a quick rattle of gunfire round some isolated garison, and in the morning there is no one left to tell the tale.

When it is our turn to catch them they come before us with their pale and fearful faces, and their eyes are wide with the shape and human bearing of us, and they break down and are hateful in their self-pity and submission. They stand there with their heads low, their uniforms stained, dirty, and no longer an occasion for pride but now a mere addition to the certainty of death; and they whimper and say it was not them, it was someone else, they were not there, they had heard about it, they had seen the corpse after it was already dead. And they are wretched beyond words as soldiers merely beaten in the field are never wretched. Their pocket books are stuffed with pictures of home, of Gretel in her bathing costume last time they went to Ruegen, of Albrecht and Wilhelm and Peter in their baby nakedness, of parades in Potsdam, of citations for good conduct, of bordello tickets scrawled with the moronic marks of Mimi and Suzi and Fifi and Flo, of letters and picture postcards thumbed and greasy with weeks of handling. And they answer questions like men in a trance, weary with overstrung emotion, suddenly seeing that there is no sense in anything that they have done, no sense in fighting, no sense in being married and having children, no sense in high-flung talk and masterly ideals, no sense in being where they are, no sense in being shot.

"You'll be shot."

"Yes, I see. I understand." They take it as logical and sensible; they agree with us in this extremity of reaction.

"Because you've killed our women and children, and you've burnt our villages."

He shakes his head wearily. Perhaps he did, but that was in another world, a world of cruel make-believe, a world in which he and Gretel and the children, and holidays at Ruegen, and parades in Potsdam, have no part. But the thing is past explaining. "No, no," he protests, sadly, "that wasn't it...."

"But the documents, the photographs, the evidence?"

"I know, I know. But look, you see ... I didn't ... I didn't know ..."

And he is shot a little later, standing there alone beside a tree.

Nadja is chattering at me, and I forget this distressing train of thought.

As we come down from the hilltops into the valley the column begins to move more quickly and there is a growing atmosphere of tension. Only occasional whispering is allowed now; someone who drops his rifle with a crash is sworn at ferociously for a fool. The minds of all of us are on the crossing we shall make within an hour or so. Various opinions have been given on the depth of the water; some say it is only ankle deep, some that we shall have to swim.

Ahead of me in the darkness there is Nadja, prancing about and whispering back instructions for my inexperience. She has done seven months with the big formations in Bosnia, is eighteen, and considers that she knows all that is essential about the art and craft of guerrilla warfare. She certainly knows at this time more about it than I do. I find this galling.

"You've never been a partisan before, have you?" she says. "Well, now you'll see how it's done." This cheerful independence of spirit, a refusal to be condescended to or be driven off the sure belief that the army owes nothing to anyone but herself and people like her, is a major factor in her point of view; later on she will be offended by the pompous efforts of Allied politicians who claim the credit for her success.

Nadja, a strong-minded young woman, shoos me about like a hen; in the end I get tired with this and tell her to shut up and look where she's going, and I daresay, though I can't see, she looks at me with wide reproving eyes and thinks how badly I have been brought up. She makes me feel dull and middle-aged, an unpleasant sensation even in the middle of the night in Bosnia.

We are now over the crest of the hill and moving in darkness into the broad bottom of the valley. The path is complicated, made by scouts the day before; and at doubtful places men are posted to make sure that no one goes astray. Nothing could be easier than for a break in the column to cause the following part to lose direc­tion and so plunge off at a tangent. And everything depends upon the column being exactly where it ought to be, for only in that way will the flank guards be effective. The column will cross the railway which runs through the valley, and then it will cross the river; and after that, with 17 Division waiting for it on the other side, the column will be safe. But not before then.

Nearing the railway the whispered call comes down the column, Otstojanje\—ten-^*e intervals between each man—and then the column halts abruptly, and round the bend, clanking and rattling, and throwing up clouds of sparks and fiery smoke from the engine, comes the armoured train from Derventa. It has been down to Doboj once already, looking for some sign of us, and now it is on its way back, taking it easy, waiting for something to happen. The engine with the armoured unit is in the middle of the train, two coaches forward and two aft of it so as to take the brunt of possible partisan mines; and the whole of it rattles along at about ten miles an hour, crossing as it does the culvert which the head of the column has already passed through.

The column moves on as soon as the train is out of sight, this time at the double, for no one knows exactly how much the Fascists know, and the moment has come to make a dash for it. Most of us are through the culvert when there is a dull thud of explosion from down-line; the left-hand flank guard, hating to see the train escape, has hurriedly mined the track in the few moments left before the train's coming.

A minute or two later the train comes clanking back again, thoroughly alarmed this time and looking for trouble. Another thud from upline means that the right-hand flank guard has guessed what has happened, and cut the line towards Doboj. The train is now restricted to a mile of permanent way, and knows that we are somewhere hiding on that stretch.

As it comes over the culvert it opens fire at the tail of our column that is doubling over the meads towards the river. The train has four machine-guns on fixed bearings, and two medium mortars. It opens up with all of them. The rearguard sits down near the far end of the river-meads and lets fly in retaliation. There is little good in this except that it will distract the train from ranging for the river-crossing.

By this time the moon is up in an unclouded September sky; and the head of the column, dense-packed, is already across the first branch of the river and is out on the shingle spit that divides the stream. As they go they twitter like a cloud of migrant sparrows, and the moonlight sparkles in the water, and away behind us, a couple of hundred yards from the brink, the armoured train is spout­ing mortar bombs and bullets as if the last trump had sounded. As they come to the edge of the river the horses neigh to each other and lower their heads to the water, and their riders chirrup nervously at them, and they go sliding into the black stream and send silver waves churning. The water is not very deep, but some of us are not very tall; and I can remember as clearly as if it were yesterday that there is a little cook three places ahead of me who goes in right up to her neck, she is so small, and has to hang on desperately to the man in front of her to stop herself from swimming away with the current. We crunch across the shingle spit and plunge into the stream again.

From the shingle spit in the middle of the river there is an un­forgettable scene in black and silver. The pebbles are pale with moonlight, pale beside the black stream; the men and women as they cross in single file, slowly, carefully, without haste, twittering as they come like clouds of sparrows on a summer's day, splash drops of phosphorus into the river's smooth ebony until the black line of them sparkles with silver light. The few who have horses ride them into the river and cross in a shower of silver sparks. Back beyond the Bosna the mortar bombs are dropping: woof! woof! and machine-gun bullets are whipping over us in the darkness.

Five hundred yards to east of the river, Kosta is waiting for the end of the column to emerge.

"Any casualties?" I ask him.

He bends in his saddle and peers at me. "Ah, there you are. Almost everyone's across. One man badly wounded, one light." It is extraordinary. The enemy must spend a hundred thousand rounds for every man of ours they hit.

The flank guards are now getting down to the real business of the night. They are drawn from the Fifth Kozara, a brigade of almost legendary prowess, and now they have got the temporarily non-combatant column off their hands they can start on the job of knocking out the armoured train. As we march northwards along the road there is crash after crash of explosion as railway halts, sidings, signal boxes, culverts go up; at this rate the line will be out of use for at least a week. Another group blows up road-bridges ahead and behind us to discourage patrols from Brod or Doboj. Every time the line goes up the air hums with the vibration of parts of rail spinning in space at colossal speed. The armoured train, understanding at last the full measure of what is happening, begins to throw bombs into the river, spouting up great towers of spray; but they fall ten minutes too late. We are over the Bosna. The campaign in Eastern Bosnia has opened with a tactical success.

In the hills above us the guiding bonfire we had seen three hours ago is now a leaping conflagration; from the valley-bottom it looks like a village on fire. Covering parties from 17 Division accompany die party from the water's edge back into the darkness of the mounting hills. On the road there is Tosha, Kosta's deputy in Eastern Bosnia, waiting for us with the rest of the staff and the commanders of the two brigades of 17 Division that have taken part in the operation. Everyone is nervously happy.

Nadja is explaining how we managed it. Half a dozen lads from 17 Division gather round her and bombard her with questions. "It only goes to say," she says, hopping from one foot to the other in excitement, "that konspiratsia's the most important thing. They sent the train out because some of our chaps ran into chetniks, and the chetniks told Doboj, and Doboj told Derventa. and God knows how many others they didn't tell."

"You needn't bother about that," they interrupt indignantly. "There's a terrific ambush up there towards Brod, and another one over towards Doboj. Maiku! The whole German army wouldn't get through it."

''I'm not bothering, silly. I'm only saying that we had bad luck with those chetniks." There is no need to instruct Nadja on the niceties of the political situation. She knows an enemy when she sees one; she has General Mihajlovitch taped.

'I say," says someone, grounding the butt of the machine-gun he is carrying. "I say, is it true that you've got some Englishmen with you?"

"That's right," says Nadja, not to be drawn. The English are still konspiratsia.

"What, prisoners?" asks someone else. "When did they escape?"

This is too much. "Of course they aren't prisoners. They've come from Africa. They jumped out of aeroplanes with parachutes. We're going to get a lot of stuff that way."

"With parachutes? What, you mean when they didn't have to? The aeroplanes didn't crash?"

"Bozhe Maiku! they didn't crash. They went back to Africa." Nadja collapses at the side of the road and laughs her head off.

"I've got a brother in Germany," someone volunteers. "He gets Red Cross parcels from the English. They're really on our side. It's all a mistake about the chetniks. And this proves it."

The extraordinary fact of Englishmen arriving in parachutes adds to the general hilarity. "Perhaps they'll send me a pair of boots. Nadja, d'you think they'll send me a pair of boots?"

They turn to me, wanting to pull my leg: "Ask for some boots!" turning them up, the uppers gaping from the soles like the mouths of dead fish: "Do ask for some boots...." They are all laughing now with this huge joke; but Nadja sees impropriety rearing its ugly head and scolds them: "You chaps are politically uneducated. You can't go shouting for boots, like that. Maiku! What will they think of us? Everything's arranged between the English and Tito; there's no need for you to go poking your nose into it."

She says all this in a tone of superior virtue and offends every­one, and they go off into the night grumbling and annoyed. But Nadja is irrepressible. "By-ee ..." she screams.

After a brief pause for the column to reassemble and empty the river out of its boots (of those, that is, who have any boots) the march back into the eastern hills starts again. The order of silence is rescinded and singing begins.

Na Kozari, grob do groba.

The chant is taken up by those within earshot.

Trazi majka sina svoga ...

Deep in the valley behind us three railways halts are in flames, glowing dull red down there in the darkness. The singing goes in a growl along the line.

Otac plasi, majka cvili:

Otvori se, grobe mile!

This is a song that is peculiar to Bosnia, the melody a simple^arrangement of a dozen notes, the words recalling a battle on the Kozara hills in 1942 when both partisans and Ustashe suffered heavy losses; and an old couple pick over the dead afterwards and look for their son who has been killed. When they find the grave they beg it to open and show them their son.

Kad je grob se otvorio,

Sin je majci govorio:

"Ide, majku, domu svomu,

Ne dolazi grobe momu.

Teze mi je suza tvoja

Nego crna zemlja moja."

The grave opens and the son tells his mother to go home and not come to his grave, for her tears lie more heavily on him than the black earth.

"Ide, majku, reci rodu,

Da sam pao za slobodu...."

He tells her to go and tell her neighbours that her son is dead for freedom's sake.

We walk up into the hills, shadows in the darkness. Far behind us now the firing dies down for a time, the rhythm of explosions grows less, and there is silence. Beyond us the hills stretch out in limitless dark shadows and we plunge into them and are lost again to the knowledge of the enemy.

Back in Brod, to-morrow morning, Hauptmann K—— will be presented with another headache when the news comes in from the nearest Sicherheitsdienst post: "A strong band of Bolshevists with numerous machine-guns forced a crossing of the Bosna last night above Modritch. Our forces engaged them. The Bolshevists blew up rail and road bridges and disappeared in an easterly direction. Their intentions are not known, but it is feared ..."