THOSE weeks were a time of frustration for me. The links with our friends on the Hungarian side of the river were broken, and although it was possible to get across the Danube, there seemed little point in going unless I could communicate with the movement on the other side and thus reach the people of whom I wanted news. A few stray individuals had come over the river in the past weeks, one or two peasants in search of members of their families, several volunteers, two or three Hungarian deserters, an odd Italian who had taught in a language institute in Budapest and was now bent on reaching southern Italy, but no-one who knew anything of Shatsa had come: and all reported a resumption of the terror that the Hungarians had first initiated in the Bachka in January, 1942. Thousands of men and women had been murdered in the neighbour­hood of Novi Sad for no better reason than that they were Serbian; hundreds of their corpses had been thrust through holes cut in the Danube ice, and all through the following spring these refrigerated bodies were being fished out of the water down stream as far as Belgrade, until the German authorities were obliged to declare the water unfit for drinking purposes. It was a noble monument to Hungarian civilization.

I spent New Year in Susek waiting for Shatsa to come over the river. The nights were long and dark and moonless; a multitude of bullfrogs sang all night. Until Shatsa came there could be no point in crossing. Snow fell: movement in the Bachka would be more difficult than ever, with every footstep shouting for enquiry. Days grew into weeks; I lived in Susek or Banostor or Nestin or wherever was convenient along the river-bank. The people were in a daze, still bewailing their dead of last October.

The weather turned fine again, and we could lie among the snowdrops on grassy banks beside the river and watch the German barge convoys puffing upstream behind their antiquated paddle tugs. Those tugs seemed of another age than ours, their beam broad and flat upon the water, their funnels long and thin and stiffly upright, with nothing of speed or streamline or raking structure. They were of an age with faded picture postcards bought in Baden-Baden long ago, with flounced skirts and bloomers and bewhiskered gentlemen m tight trousers, with kruegels of beer and Wandervoegel and green hats: and now, somehow terrible in their anachronism, they went up and down the Danube with trails of barges loaded deep with material for the German war-machine.

Whatever their peaceful origin may have been, Babenherg, Lichtenstein, Srpski Kralj, ancient paddle-steamers with wide sweeping paddles and long thin funnels, broad and flat and unwar-like, with blue and yellow painted upperworks and scrolling over the captain's cabin, flew the swastika in its blood-red field, and were useful to the German army. They sailed up and down the Danube, past the suburbs of Novi Sad and under the primrose castle of Petrovaradin upon its rock, coasting along beside the Frushka Gora green above them and turning northwards into the Hungarian plain, hooting and blowing upon their sirens as lustily as ever. Later on the R.A.F. would drop Piats to the partisans and magnetic mines into the Danube, and many of these old steamers would go to the bottom.

But in those early days there was no effective way of molesting the Danube convoys. Small arms fire would not answer and mortars were impracticable. We used to sit on the bank and watch them go by. Across six or seven hundred yards of water that reflected the pale blue sky the Hungarian frontier guards would sit on their side; and they would look at us with idle interest, and we at them.

Shatsa came at last, one biting cold night early in January, a tired nervous man who was on the edge of exhaustion. He came in darkness over the Danube to the Frushka Gora as Jonah might have come out of the belly of the whale, and he simply lay down on some­one's bed and slept for twelve hours. He reported fearful conditions on the other side, innumerable arrests, a temporary stoppage of all work; so that it was clear that we could consider no further infiltra­tion for the time being. Later experience proved to me how immeasurably more difficult conditions for illegal work became once one had crossed those few hundred yards of water; but it was disappoint­ing at the time, and meant that I must go back to my base in the Woods of Bosut empty-handed.

At the Odred they were celebrating Orthodox Christmas with two great chests-ful of kolache, pastries filled with jam or fruit or honey or poppy-seed; and everyone was talking with his mouth full and spouting crumbs whenever he spoke. The Odbor of Gregurievats had also contributed ten litres of red wine, and this was welcome because the pastries were a trifle stodgy. I had come in from the Danube the evening before, and told Sasha what I wanted.

"I've got two men leaving to-morrow afternoon, if you're not too tired?" From the Danube to the Odred was only ten or fifteen miles, and I was feeling fresh. I accepted Sasha's offer.

We left in the late afternoon so as to reach Divosh, the terminal villige of the plain and the last place we could safely pass in day­light, just as night fell. The Frushka Gora was bare, a cold wind racing down from the north through the leafless trees, and we walked at a good round pace to keep ourselves warm. We had about thirty-five miles to cover.

Along the crest of the Frushka Gora there was snow on the ground and little tree cover. In the late afternoon, when it was still light, we narrowly missed an Ustashe ambush: luckily for us, they had given it up a few minutes before we arrived, and we saw them, perhaps fifty in all, forming up along the track to go home. I always was struck on occasions like this, when I saw the enemy myself but was invisible to them, with the duality of our lives. The enemy inhabited one world: we the other. Normally we lived parallel lives, never meeting; only sometimes the lines would bend inwards and violently collide.

It was already dusk when we came down into Divosh, the last village before we stmck out across the plain for the woods of Bosut. An aged peasant of more than seventy, who was mending his gate and who turned out to be an Odbornik, directed us to a house where we could get something to eat and drink; half an hour later we were through the village and into the edge of the plains. It was a perfect night for walking, crisp and freezing underfoot, and the sky a cloud­less dome of stars. Orion was bearing due south; the Plough stand­ing on its head. The moon had not yet risen. We walked over endless miles of sown land, the furrows frozen hard, and by mid­night we were nearing the railway. Here we lost our way in a maze of canals, probably because we had gone too far to the right in leaving Divosh so as to avoid the enemy at Chalma, three miles to the left.

"Milosh, there was a bridge here?" they argued with each other. "No, it's a bit further up to the right there." "Well, but that takes you up to the Emiliyin Farm. Maiku! there's at least fifty Ustashe in that farm."

We stood in the darkness and argued our route. The land was dark and utterly deserted. There were no roads, only a web of cart-tracks. Near the railway the enemy had established himself in outlying farm buildings in order to make it more than ever difficult for our diversanti to creep down to the line and lay charges. As we walked up the canal we could see the spreading black shape of the Emiliyin Farm in its protective clump of trees. There was no light and no noise, but there would be sentries on the roof and possibly on the ground. We fell silent and walked on, making as little noise as possible. The only bridge across the canal, which otherwise we would have to wade, lay within easy range of the farm. We walked on, waiting for the dogs to begin howling; but whether they were locked up for some other reason, they neither heard us nor scented us and within a few minutes we had passed under the shadow of the trees, with the building dark and silent above us, and were tip-toeing over the wooden planks of the bridge.

Milosh said: "Can't understand why they don't have a sentry on it...."

Three miles later we were within sight of the railway line, a dark embankment drawn across the level horizon. We lay on the ground to rest, and could see the telegraph poles against the night sky. It was impossible not to feel a sense of triumph at the enemy's help­lessness. Protection of this railway, the mainline from Germany through Zagreb to Belgrade and the Balkan Peninsula, was of para­mount importance to him; and yet, do what he liked, he could not protect it and would never be able to protect it. In the previous month of December alone partisan demolitionists in Srem had blown up nineteen trains on this mainline, and they would have done better in January had not our supplies of explosive run out. The enemy had been obliged to maintain large repair gangs at points along the line, with much salvage equipment, to patrol the line by day and night, to build cement bunkers at regular intervals upon the line, to occupy outposts like the Emiliyin Farm, to undertake sporadic offensives in the partisans in Srem; and none of this pre­vailed to make much difference, and more often than not it made no difference at all. Trains continued to fly into the air.

We sat within sight of the embankment, perhaps two hundred yards away from it, and watched an approaching train. At first we could see only its glowing smokestack as it jolted and whistled at a cautious ten miles an hour downline. White flares shot upwards along the line towards Mitrovitsa.

"Shall we go over now or wait for it to pass?" Milosh asked.

"Let's go over now. It's coming very slowly." I was thinking of the distance we had yet to cover.

We lay still for a little longer, and then the other man, whose name I have forgotten, sat up quickly and pointed at the line. Once more we had been lucky. Barely visible in the darkness, we could just see a column of small black figures moving along the top of the embankment. They were going at a snail's pace and were very hard to see.

"They're an hour late. My God, they always pass here before eleven. The swine."

The train came rattling by, two wagons loaded with rubble in front of the engine in an attempt to save it from our charges that was vain, because it would be child's play to fix the necessary delay devices. It was a joyful sight to see its cautious progress. The engine driver and his fireman were earning huge wages for the danger they ran in taking this train downline at night; and even so they went at ten miles an hour, and stood still in every station and blew their whistles for half an hour so that patrols could come out on the embankment and scare off partisans. Once more, in seeing their nervousness, there was that sense of individual triumph.

But we had no charges on the line that night, and this particular train got by. We let it rattle half a mile downline and then crossed ourselves, jumping quickly over the double track and scrunching on the gravel of the permanent way.

On the other side we lost our way again. For a long time we walked with satisfaction, and then I chanced to look up and saw that we were heading for the Plough.

"We can't possibly be going north," Milosh argued, "because if we were we'd be going back to the railway."

"That's right."

"But look, we aren't going back to the railway. We're going to Bosut...." He was a good lad, but slow.

We gathered round my compass. Sure enough, we were heading north.

"Well, I've never seen a thing like that before," Milosh said with some contempt, "but if you say it's a compass and it works ... well, anyway, this isn't the right way.... We'd better ask."

But the scattered farms we came across, dark and silent, were deserted, or else the people were too frightened to open at our knock­ing. Once we stopped at a well, a stork-like affair with a long cross-arm balanced across an upright timber, and drank brackish water. At last we decided to march by compass; and away we went, across every piece of water, plough, sown and unsown, maize that lay uncut from last autumn and crackled dryly as we broke through it. Useless to hope for landmarks in this plain, for none existed. To­wards daylight we sighted the low-lying shadows of the woods of Bosut in their easternmost extremity beyond Grk, and knew that our reckoning had been good.

"You may be right about that thing, that compass," Milosh said, "but as I said it was simply that we should've turned left instead of right when we crossed the railway...." He was old-fashioned for all his twenty summers, and did not hold with change.