WE FOUND the staff of the Odred of the Bosut Woods and part of the Voivodina staff in occupation of a few hovels at Serkvishte, a clearing in the woods beside the dyke a little downstream from Jamena.

The woods at Serkvishte thinned out into several great clearings two or three miles broad. The hovels lay within the shadow of surrounding trees. They were the poorest sort of cottages, affairs of two small rooms with scarcely any light, patched up with clay, leak­ing through the roof. In one of them, a little better than the others, the staff had established itself; and in another (the worst of all) Stanley and Steve and the wireless set as well as Golubitsa and half & dozen members of the kitchen party; in a third Dragutin and the Agitprop; in a fourth the escort company; in a fifth a few men from the Odred. Black lanes of mud led across the open pasture from one hovel to the next. There were wells with superstructures like giant storks standing on one leg, but the water, like all the water of the plain, was brackish and thick with limestone. The place was cold wet and comfortless.

And yet it was very pleasant to be there, and to have company once again of one's own kind, and to chat about the news from Bosnia. Frushka Gora had felt isolated in spite of the sense of individual triumph in survival; and in those lonely weeks along the Danube bank, waiting for news from Hungary, it had often seemed to me that I had reached the end of the world. A large element of partisan morale rested on the fact of companionship, of sharing evils, of enjoying interest in the same affairs no matter how obscure; the pressure of war had brought us so close together that we drew strength and encouragement from each other, and cursed the same misfortunes, and nourished the same hopes. The individual had sunk his identity into the group, and from that moment onwards he could feel himself neither desperate nor alone.

Steve was bubbling over as usual with the gossip of the day. I sat in our hovel in the litter of the wireless set and the codes and the cooking pots and Golubitsa's spare skirt and Stanley's spare washing, and someone's saddle, and someone else's shotgun (for there were plenty of hares to be had), and rested my feet and washed them and sighed with relief. Everybody talked at once.

There were the messages from Base to be considered and replied to, and all the pleasure of being in contact again by wireless. And the others had much to say. During my absence in the Frushka Gora they had been far into Bosnia, marching day and night for five days to avoid the enemy's sudden rush at Bijeljina and our access to the Majevitsa. Stanley's blue eyes were alight with the astonishing memory of it: "There's nothing that didn't happen to us. First we nearly marched till we dropped. God knows where we went to. We marched and marched and marched. And then we got cut off and old Lekitch had to send a company to get us out. And then the horse that was carrying the set went over the bleeding cliff, and we bleeding nearly after it, but we got the set back okay; and then we got mortared good and proper...." It seemed that they were lucky to be there at all.

Further to the south, another British party had fared still worse. In the course of an ambush from which Kosta and the staff of Third Corps escaped only by a supremely good rearguard defence on the part of the escort company, Sgt. Enis and Sgt. Pavichich were killed, and Capt. Jeffries and Sgt.-Major Evans and Sgt. Chudich were taken prisoner. All of them were good men, and it was par­ticularly bad to lose Enis, a first-class guardsman who had volun­teered for this operation rather than act stooge in a training camp in Palestine, and Mike Pavichich, one of our interpreters, who had come all the way from Canada to work with us in spite of his fifty years or so.

By the time I reached Serkvishte, though, the position in Eastern Bosnia was returning to normal. The enemy had Tuzla, it was true, but Lekitch was already back within five miles of Brtchko, and one of his brigades had occupied Bijeljina a few days before upon its evacuation by the enemy. Kosta retook Kladanj and established himself once more in the mountains between the Sprecha and the Drina. One more enemy offensive had beaten wildly at the air and found nothing.

Steve suggested the following morning that we make a cere­monial tour of the military establishments at Serkvishte. We traipsed from hovel to hovel; Steve provided a running commentary.

At staff headquarters everyone was in the stage of boot-cleaning when we arrived. This was part of a morning routine to which all who claimed respect were bound to adhere. The necessary filth one lived in was never allowed to promote the belief that partisans need not be clean if they could, or that virtue lay in the natural oils of the body and other Tolstoyan remedies affected by those who did not care to wash. Standing orders were not pinned on the door, but were none the less binding for that. One slept in one's clothes (whether one took off one's trousers or not was the nicest test of the tactical situation), anywhere that there was room but usually on the floor, huddled together for warmth and companionship; and when all needs were common there could be no call for privacy. Even if they could have achieved privacy their instinct in those days of group-pressure would have told against it.

But such conditions do not make for refreshing sleep, and in months of that kind of living men were permanently weary; this explained why it was that partisans had one over-riding spare-time interest, which was sleep. They slept when and where they could, and the night was set aside for sleep simply because it was tradi­tional and convenient, there being no light; but the ancient barrier between night and day had long since broken down and it was just as natural to sleep all day and be active all night. The night in any case would be disturbed with late arrivals, the eruption of news, the noise of changing sentries, the tapping of a typewriter which some­body was using by the light of a candle that guttered and finally went out, and left the wretched man to stumble over you in the dark in his search for another.

The normal waking hour was shortly after dawn; and the motions of getting up men went through were established by un­written rules. You would wake in that cold misery of after-light that accompanies the dawn; the room would be darkened and the twice-breathed air hot, acrid, stifling, the product of a dozen slow-breathing lungs, and the blanket over your face wiry and stiff with other men's sweat. The whole of your body would tingle and itch so that you felt a wild desire to throw off your clothes and rush into an ice-cold bath; but this temptation, of course, did not last for long. The hum and whir of men and women snoring would be all around you. All your bones would ache; it seemed that you had not rested properly since the month before.

The primary need and duty was to lessen the insect population that you inevitably carried; and this could be done with due respect to partisan conventions by retiring into shelter of the trees and stripping to the waist. Only this method was finally effective. Every self-respecting unit saw that its common blankets were boiled at least once every two or three weeks, and sometimes more often, but nothing could reduce the plague of lice except personal attention every day.

"Stray lice? Yes ... stray but never isolated," was Stanley's dictum, and it was truth. After that those who had toothbrushes might use them, if possible with toothpaste; and it was thought decent to wash the hands and face. Shaving was absolutely obliga­tory once every two or three days; beards were a chetnik device, and clean-shavenness in any case a sign of redemption, of self-respect. All units down to company strength must do their utmost to acquire a barber. Then some effort must be made to clean boots. These were the unwritten rules. Personal variations might be introduced; but nobody who valued his good name would omit these essentials.

Shooting at hares with Steve was another pleasant way of spend­ing idle afternoons. Sometimes we even killed a hare. Those glades of Bosut were deep in water-laden grass, the clearings green wastes of marsh water with pools that gleamed with emerald scum and were blackly turbid when the weed was stirred aside. The tall woods lay all around. Occasionally we put up a stray snipe; for some unaccountable reason they were rare, though, as were also ducks, and we saved our ammunition for slow-lolloping hares that got up from under our feet with a scurry of sudden fear and ran away between the thorn-bushes. By the end of the afternoon we were tired and wet through, and more often than not empty-handed.

"Come on," Steve would then say, "let's go over to Agitprop."

Agitprop and all its staff and machinery, the source of so much mental and mechanical invention, is established in the smallest but one of the hovels of Serkvishte. There is scarcely room to move, and the only way of coming to terms with the laws of space is for everyone to sit down exactly where he is standing, and then, not moving, there is just room. Inside the hovel there is Dragutin and Milan, Sesherinats, Militsa, Bula, half a dozen others. It is in­credible how they get there at all. "Come on, come on," they say, "there's plenty of room." Vesti is being licked off a box-duplicator in one corner, Militsa is typing a text of some kind or another, to one side there is a tall and precarious pile of manifestos produced on the Adana handpress which was dropped last month, Dragutin is sitting on the handpress itself, Sesherinats on the boxes of type (sorted by Stanley with insuperable care, and used sometimes by me for Hungarian "material"); on a table beside the door are the cook­ing pots and billy-cans belonging to the section, and three spoons (which is two more than is necessary, perhaps in tribute to the intel­lectual character of the group). Bula is sitting between the table and the manifestos with a pile of darning. Everyone is listening to the wireless, and even Militsa has stopped talking and typing which, with her, are well known to be contemporary activities.

"... In the Sanjak our units are on the offensive. On the sector of the front around Banja Luka there is savage fighting in progress. The Germans have received from Slavonia reinforcements amount­ing to one hundred tanks and armoured cars, as well as strong infantry units, and are now attacking in several columns towards our liberated territory. The first of these columns has succeeded in reaching ..."

They listen with set faces, not talking. For the last five days the news from Central Bosnia says the same thing: mounting enemy activity and all the signs of a big offensive on the way. The question only remains: when will it strike Srem and Eastern Bosnia? These obscure movements in the wilds of Bosnia have a personal interest to everyone at Serkvishte. We do not yet know that the blow, when it falls, is to be ten times harder and more disastrous to lives and property than we feared.

"... The second is pushing up the right bank of the Vrbas, the third from the direction of Teslitch towards Banya Luka, the fourth from Konyits towards Pryedor, and the fifth from Travnik towards Yaytse ..."

There is no doubt now that the enemy is once more at full stretch to wipe out the formations in Bosnia.

"We have thrown back the fifth of these columns into Travnik, inflicting heavy losses on the enemy; and in this fighting men of the 13th Brigade have accounted for some two hundred of the enemy. In Eastern Bosnia our units are in action with the S.S. Division "Prinz Eugen"; and our 5th Brigade has torn apart two battalions of this division. The enemy left over a hundred corpses on the battle­field, including that of a major. Much warlike booty has been captured ..."

And so it goes on, an infinite confusion of fighting in every part of Jugoslavia, a wealth and intricacy of detail that no one can properly assimilate, a total of sacrifice and suffering that is immeasurable.