BY the winter of 1943/44 the partisans had grown into an army and to political maturity. In November, 1943, there assembled at Yaitse in Central Bosnia the second session of the anti-Fascist Council for National Liberation, formed twelve months beforehand at Bihatch. The Council at this second session decided to transform itself into a Temporary Parliament, of which Tito pro­claimed Marshal of the new army, was made the head.

Their military progress kept in step with this political advance. Contacts with the Western Allies were now numerous, and soon the Russians were to send a military mission to Tito's headquarters that would give official sanction to the secret liaison the partisans had long possessed with Moscow. The movement, both militarily and politically, had come of age.

After crossing from Central Bosnia into Eastern Bosnia the partisan formations commanded by Kosta Nadj made themselves master of the whole central area of mountains and, in October crowned their success by the capture of the principal town of Eastern Bosnia, Tuzla.

My own part was to go northwards over the Sava into the plain of the Voivodina and to cross the Danube if I could into territory occupied by the Hungarians. Conditions in the plain were bad; and it was. hard to remain alive or at liberty. On some six occasions I was all but taken by the heels.

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BIRTH OF A MOVEMENT

Sve sto bilo pod pepelnm,

Nadnu nasih srca skrito:

U vatru je razbuktao....

From a song by Vladimir Nazor.

What was thrust beneath the cinders

And laid up in our hearts :

The fire has tempered bard.

THIS was the winter which would confirm the coming downfall of Germany and measure too, for those inside the imprisoned continent, the probable duration of the war. Any who had wildly hoped that some internal miracle within the Nazi structure might bring the war to a close before the winter set in could now grit their teeth in the certainty that they must wait at least until the spring;

perhaps they must wait longer, but to think beyond the coming of spring, when the days would lengthen at last and the grey falling drizzle lift again, was unwise and perhaps impossible. The resistance movements, wherever they were, could prepare for the winter with what ingenuity they had; there could be no second front, and there­fore little easing of their burden, at least until the weather lightened with the spring. The months between would be a weary looking-forward.

But still the winter, in all its bitterness, would be decisive. Before it had closed the Russians would have fought their way into the great towns of the Ukraine and have crossed the frontier of the Balkans into Bessarabia and gained sight of the Carpathians; the armies in Italy, wearily pushing forward over river after river, would have toppled through the vaunted "winter line" along the Sangro; and on the diplomatic front the talks in Teheran and Moscow would have cast the shadow of the Second Front into 1944. In France small groups of men sodden with rain would still be holding out in the high country of the south-east; and in every great urban centre of western Europe the secrets of nderground resistance would be exploited, explained, acted upon.

In Italy the earliest committees of national liberation would be formed and plans laid for developing guerrilla warfare in the moun­tains of the north. In the Balkans the war would go on with undiminished savagery. The youngest Odreds in Bulgaria and Albania would grow into formations comparable with the brigades of Greece and Jugoslavia, and before the spring came the Germans would be facing the best elements of a total population of more than thirty millions.

In Jugoslavia the Germans would put forth one more great effort to crush the partisan army before the spring made this finally un­thinkable; at the beginning of December they were to launch what the British Secretary of State for War, speaking in the House of Commons on January 18th, 1944, was to call a "widespread offen­sive," and this sixth offensive, like its predecessors, was to fail. And Eastern Bosnia, by October almost entirely in the hands of Third Corps, was to be the scene again of long and bitter fighting against a background of snow and rain and wind and wretchedness. The winter would remain in our memory as a time of grey misery, of driving rain or the cold brilliance of snow, of unending nights when the moon was unseen above a leaden sky and darkness utter and complete, of savagely adhesive mud, of frostbite and of fever, of groups of shivering men round inadequate fires, of the dull yellow flame of cottage lamps, of marching and fighting in a wilderness of grey obscurity. The trees would go barren on the hillside, and there would be no cover on the face of the land but the hanging veil of mist and rain; and warmth would live only within the walls of cottages where sodden sticks would sizzle and smoke and refuse to burn.

It happened that my own part was to go into the Voivodina, to cross the Sava and if possible the Danube, and to examine the validity of certain plans which the Allied General Staff had formu­lated for the stimulation of resistance in Hungary. It was thought possible at this time that the good fortunes of resistance in Jugoslavia might lead to the crystallization of certain opposition tendencies among the Hungarians; and colour was lent to this belief by recent stirrings to the north of the Danube. In Slavonia, too, men and women drawn from the Hungarian minority of that area had formed a small unit which they called after the Hungarian revolu­tionary poet of 1848, Shandor Petofi; and Jugoslav sources from Budapest reported that Hungarian participation in Hitler's war was anything but popular. These new orders meant that I would now leave the mountains and sojourn in the plains across the Sava, far beyond the limits of "liberated territory," where the movement was at its weakest and most strained, with the roots still above the ground, and where, for that reason, the motives which drove men to resist were clearest.

On the grounds of geography alone the movement in the Voivodina appeared to hold a quite exceptional interest. No other part of Europe had produced a movement in any way comparable to it (and, with the possible exception of resistance in the plain of Lombardy in 1945, this was to remain so until the end of the war). Here were no mountains or deep forest for men to hide in while they gathered their strength and formed their plans. The territory con­cerned covers the richest agricultural area in that part of Europe, running north from Brod on the Sava to the Danube at Vukovar, and then upstream as far as the old frontier of Hungary, and thence eastwards along this frontier and across the Tiza as far as the frontier of Roumania, and then southwards again to the Danube above the Iron Gates. In all this vast plain there is only one little run of hills, the Frushka Gora, rising in a gentle hump along the south bank of the Danube in Srem; all the rest is as flat as a man's hand, and almost as bare. There is a thriving population, in density greater than any other part of Jugoslavia, for the most part a wealthy peas­antry owning much land and stock and farming with methods which, in comparison with the wooden plough of Bosnia, are highly up-to-date. Main-line railways connect Belgrade with Budapest and Zagreb; no other part of the Balkans has a better system of second­ary lines; and roads are plentiful and relatively good. On the score of geography, conditions could not be less favourable.

Nor were political conditions more encouraging. The Danube and its tributary, the Tiza, divide this territory into three parts:

Srem, the Bachka, and the Banat. Each of these parts was under different occupation, and the Germans in one form or another occu­pied them all. Srem was part of Pavelich's Independent State of Croatia, and was therefore stiff with Ustashe and Domobrantsi as well as German troops. The Bachka, bounded by the old Hungarian-Jugoslav frontier, the Danube and the Tiza, was part of Hungary. The Banat, bounded by the Tiza, the Roumanian-Jugoslav frontier, and the Danube, had been declared a special area of German military government and was also occupied by troops of the quisling General Neditch. To make matters worse the whole area was historically a frontier zone and a zone of colonization, and nowhere else in Europe could show a more complex ethnographical pattern. There were large German and Hungarian minorities in all three parts; in Srem and the Bachka the Jugoslav population was hopelessly mixed between Serbs and Croats; in the Bachka there were Slovaks and Ruthenians as well; and in the Banat a substantial number of Roumanians. In a war that split more sharply than any before along the grain of national loyalties the effect was to splinter these minori­ties out of the common structure they had grown into, and to produce not one conflict but half a dozen. And in this civil war every man looked for himself, neighbour turned on neighbour, and people lived from one hour to the next, in daily fear of their lives.

The extraordinary nature of this civil war was difficult at first to understand. These rich peasants of the Voivodina were by all their circumstances cut off from the flow of ideas common to the rest of Jugoslavia. Not only were they only partly Slav, but their political tradition was different: until 1918 they had come within the frontiers of the Dual Empire, and they tended to look towards Central rather than towards South-Eastern Europe. This meant in practice that they were less keenly aware of the issue at stake in national resist­ance; and their political backwardness in this respect combined with their long-standing prosperity to hold them aloof from the conflict. In the Bachka and the Banat, north of the river, they lived on the fat of the land. They lacked the spur of desperation which pricked so hard in the rest of the country. Only here and there were they driven by the cruelty of the occupying authorities into open resist­ance; for the most part they remained in cowed obedience until the end.

But in Srem, to the south of the Danube, this was not the case. The movement in the Voivodina, it is true, made its first appearance in the Banat (then under German military government) in June, 1941, where little groups of communists took to the woods of Deliblat and underwent their earliest lessons in the art of shooting gendarmes and burning enemy foodstocks before they were scattered in the autumn, and then, when the tall maizefields were cut, were driven across the Danube into Serbia or into Srem. After they had gone there was, effectively speaking, no resistance in the Banat until 1943. In the Bachka, occupied by the Hungarians, resistance did not begin in more than the most passive form until the same year, 1943, and then only in a very minor way. But in Srem the case was different.

In Srem, thanks to good leadership and the woods of the Frushka Gora, there had been unbroken resistance ever since the winter of 1941/42. On several occasions these little Odreds—whose principal business was the shooting of patrols and the wrecking of trains, had been chased by large enemy concentrations; but they had managed to stay alive. In the autumn of 1942 they were encircled in the Frushka Gora by several regiments of SS-Prinz Eugen Division, but came off without loss; and again in October, 1943, they were beset by over 10,000 men of Vlassoff's so-called "Cossack" Division, a gang of criminals and murderers who burnt and killed wherever they went. The "Cossacks" mined the villages of the Frushka Gora but they failed to ruin the partisans. By the time of my arrival in Srem, October, 1943, the Odreds in the plain of Srem were in good communication with the big formations in Bosnia and had actually succeeded in building up a division of three brigades (the 16th) from recruits sent southwards over the Sava.