IT started badly.

On June 8th, Kolya's intelligence had it that Colonel Bauer, German security police commander in Srem, whom we thought a high-grade war criminal, had received heavy reinforcements for operations in the Frushka Gora. Chika Pera had hurried up the night before with news of this. Signs of it were evident in an over­night doubling and trebling of the garrisons along the main-line to the south, and along the river to the north, of the Frushka Gora. The familiar outline of an encircling cordon became visible again. At the same time, considerable bodies of troops began to pass up the main­line from Belgrade; so that it seemed that this offensive on the Frushka Gora might be linked up even with a general movement of enemy forces out of the Balkans.

We walked up and down the limits of our camp, talking this over. There were Kolya and I, and one or two others. Through the trees to the south we could look out across the plain of Srem, the wide green and yellow land with the smoking chimneys of Mitrovitsa ten miles away and far beyond them the blue hills of Serbia. Over the hump of hill at our backs lay another vastness of green and yellow plainland beyond the broad frontier stream of the Danube. The weather was clear and warm. In the plains at our feet the corn was ripening and the maize already waist-high, a green and yellow patchwork on the face of the flat land.

Kolya was clear on what was necessary. This was a familiar situation. The enemy would have, it seemed, five or six thousand men at his disposal; with these he would make a simultaneous push over the woods from north and south so as to hem us in between converging lines of fire. He would box us in laterally by seizure of the two north-south roads across the Frushka Gora; Lezhimir-Svilosh-Susek on the west, Irig-Kamenitsa on the east.

For the time being the Frushka Gora would be untenable. And, from several points of view, that might be serious. The fighting units that we had were well able to look after themselves: in the Frushka Gora there was the Odred itself, reduced at the moment by transfer to the brigades to about 250 effectives, with one battalion of sixth brigade having about 150 effectives. That was a total of four hundred men. The remainder of sixth brigade, with the 2nd Srem Odred, was in the Woods of Bosut. In Lower Srem there was a company of 1st Odred. They were all highly mobile. Our wounded were few, and could be hidden. The serious question was that of the recruits. Of these there were about 2,000 in the Frushka Gora and another 500 in the Woods of Bosut, waiting to be sent into Bosnia. They were without arms or experience, and could not disperse.

The enemy would chop Srem into three compartments: the Frushka Gora itself. Lower Srem, and the Woods of Bosut. It seemed Bauer thought that we were concentrated in the Frushka Gora. Therefore he would encircle us there and try to liquidate everything he found. After that he would turn to the other two compartments, and clean them out. Our tactics were to find means of crossing from one compartment to the next, disperse the recruits, and rob the enemy of his target. Ideally, we would move always into the enemy's rear.

We knew that time was on our side. Bauer's reinforcement would not be allowed long in Srem: there was other and even more urgent work for them further to the north. By the end of June we should be masters again in Srem. It was a question of survival until then.

"This is their last offensive," Kolya said.

He decided to go down into the woods of Bosut himself with a large part of the 2,000 recruits who were then in the Frushka Gora. Lala would remain in command in the Frushka Gora: the 400 fighting men would disperse, or, if the Frushka Gora became too hot to hold them, make their way down into Lower Srem in the enemy's rear. It might be that we had a day or two to complete this dispersal. On the question of supplies, we decided that I would arrange for Kolya to receive drops in the Woods of Bosut, that we would call off all drops to the Frushka Gora until the offensive was past, and that Lala and I would see what could be done about receiving supplies in the plain of Lower Srem, should we be driven there by pressure of the encirclement. We had taken in about five tons of explosive in the previous seven weeks, however, and good supplies were distributed to all the demolitionist groups in Srem; smaller lots had been sent over the Danube into the Bachka and the Banat. These train-blowing operations would be continued as and when they were possible, without regard to the general situation; each small group of five or ten specialists would operate independently, and on its own resources.

That afternoon we said good-bye to Kolya. He crossed the main-line into the Woods of Bosut, with most of the recruits, on the same night; and that was the last we should see of him for many weeks. By the following day it was certain that we were in for trouble; reports of fresh concentrations came in thick and fast from our informants in the plain. The weather was fine and warm and it did not rain.

We used the interval for burying our spare equipment. George Armstrong and Sava Mihaylovitch, who was the Staff's wireless engineer, a pleasant, garrulous creature, contrived to bury the spare transmitters, charging engines and accumulators; we kept with us only a few essentials of personal kit, one transmitter, and one charged accumulator. With these we could make shift for half a dozen short contacts with Base, and that should be enough. If more were needed the situation would be black indeed. Lala thought it certain that we should have to hide for five or six days only, for the troops that were attacking us were clearly in transit; it was simply a question of deciding where it would be best to hide. In the end we opted for a new baza which Doctor Doda had had dug for himself (or other members of the Staff) in the woods near Grabovo. Another possibility was to hide in Kolya's baza at Jazak; we decided against that because Jazak would be occupied by the enemy during the offensive, and there were pleasanter things than sitting under a privy for several days.

Three days after Kolya had left, just as we were beginning to convince ourselves that the whole thing might be a false alarm after all, an AFV (probably a tank, though accounts as usual were confused) came up the road from Mitrovitsa in the full light of after­noon and charged into Gregurievats. By mischance, the lockouts in the church-tower of Gregurievats failed to see it coming (though its dust trail must have looked like the passage of a regiment) and before anyone knew what was happening the tank had swung into the village and opened up with a machine-gun on the cross-roads. This was a new technique, and it caught everyone napping. Luckily for us, the tank-crew had evidently not been instructed on the precise location of the Podrucha offices, the telephone exchange, battalion headquarters, or any of the other services, and the reduced staffs left there during "the state of alarm" were able to slip out through back gardens and run up into the woods. The tank then moved uphill and smashed the former Odred headquarters with a couple of shells fired over open sights. At much the same time, we in the woods heard firing from east to west along the whole slope of the Frushka Gora, and it was evident that operations had begun.

In the camp on Venats we hurried to clear away the last signs of our habitation. The Odred took down its few remaining parachute shelters and moved off into better positions to the east. That left our own little headquarters party, Lala and Nela and George-from-Chalma, two other couriers, myself and George Armstrong. By nine o'clock we had packed our gear into a cart and were ready to move off. It was dark by that time. The enemy would wait for dawn and then rush the positions along the hill-crest that he thought we were holding. He would reckon that his surprise (a cherished illusion he would never give up) would catch us before we could move. We had seven hours to make good our disappearance. The night was over­cast and very dark.

We blundered about with torches between the tree-trunks, hoping that we had left nothing behind. This calculating of movements by the clock was all very well; it needed, I found, great faith in the enemy's stupidity.

"It's a pity about that aerial," George said. It was the best aerial we had ever had, mounted ten days before on two young pine masts, thirty-five feet high so as to clear the tree tops on the southern slope; an aerial which was unobstructed by any obstacle for eighty miles or so to the south. It would give Bauer's people some notion of our technical efficiency. They would find our pine masts, care­fully sunk like telegraph poles, and later a solemn report would be forwarded to army command: "... it appears that the bolshevist criminals were in possession of skilled wireless engineers ..." Much good it would do them. The skilled wireless engineers would by that time be safe in a hole in the ground, wet and stiff and hungry perhaps, but unfindable. To make it more interesting, I broke the aerial by mistake as I was pulling it down, and had to leave a short length of wire hanging to its insulator high up on the mast. Much good it would do them.

We sat on the shafts, waiting to go. Our horses were put to and stood restlessly in the shafts. Their harness creaked a little as they moved, and the shafts squeaked in their unoiled bearings. In the trampled ring of our main shelter, scattered with straw but shelterless now, Lala sat in a circle of torchlight and dictated last orders to certain supply units. Nela tapped the orders on her typewriter as Lala spoke.

Lala was not feeling very well. For some days he had had a temperature, and he was still afflicted with boils.

"I'm not fit to be a partisan any longer," he had said a few days beforehand. "Three years of this is a bit too much."

I still had dysentry and hated the prospect of being chased for days and perhaps weeks. After the Bachka I had hoped for a rest. I remember how I cursed this absurd offensive that night, absurd because it could achieve nothing to the enemy's advantage except a momentary dislocation of our plans; because it must fail; because, very soon, the enemy would himself be on the run.

"Now, for God's sake," said Lala in exasperation, "have we forgotten anything?" I strolled over towards him. I liked him very much: even his bad temper and appalling manners were with him an act of grace. Integrity is worth having under those circum­stances, in almost any guise.

The woods were very quiet. Only from somewhere beyond the trees came the muffled echo of single shots fired at measured inter­vals. Six, seven, eight, nine ... They were shooting the prisoners. One shot each in the back of the head, and then tumbled into a common grave and the earth shovelled hastily on top of them, crumpled and bleeding from the back of the head. Ten, eleven, twelve ... In the morning the enemy would find the fresh brown earth.

From nearby came the noise of the telephonists who were dis­mounting their branch-exchange at what had been Odred head­quarters a few hours beforehand. The telephone wire ran along a line of well-sunk poles from one end of the Frushka Gora to the other with branch lines to the Danube and to Divosh; they had put them lip the month before. In the old days the partisans had cut down the enemy's telephone poles: now the enemy cut down ours. After the war, tourists in the Frushka Gora would read in their guide-books that the stumps along the crest of Venats were the telephone poles of the partisan government of 1944. Possibly they would think back a little across the years on heroes who were dead. But the heroes that night were cold and out of temper: they shivered in the night air and Lala dictated last instructions, and the tele­phonists took away their equipment to hide it with them in the hole they shared with the news-hounds of Agitprop.

We listened to the last news. Orvieto had fallen to the 8th Army. German counter-attacks in Galicia had failed to dislodge Rokossovsky's principal gains. In Normandy they were fighting before Caen.

To-morrow they would be fighting in the Frushka Gora. But only Bauer and ourselves would bother about that. It had the status almost of a private duel.

Lala finished at last. We packed the last few odds and ends into the cart. George-from-Chalma climbed in, called to the horses, and drove the cart before us along the track through the woods. The night now was pitch-black. I walked with my torch on the path in front of me. Even so I fell down several times. It was the only amusement that the others got; and I got none at all. We were walking all night.

For the next few days we were not very sure of what was happen­ing. At dawn, in fact, the enemy did put in a general attack from all round the boxed-in Frushka Gora. Two or three AFVs rushed up into Lezhimir, and thence across Frushka on the road which led to Susek on the Danube. They put infantry into the woods along Venats. We sat outside our hole and listened to the desultory firing as they beat the woods. It was said that Banoshtor was burning.

The hole we had was not a very good one. Lala grumbled that Doda had misled him. During the first few days we did not sit much underground, but lay within the cover of a copse of growing sycamores, their leaves yellow-green and fluttering a little in the air. The hole was fifty yards away from us in the red-mud bank of a brook which trickled in a small canyon down the valley towards Banoshtor. Its entry was concealed by an overhanging bank and a mask of undergrowth, but badly concealed: and by the time that we had gone in and out once or twice, crawling in headfirst with only just room for our shoulders, our legs kicking out behind us in the red-mud gulley, the camouflage was useless. Anyone who searched systemati­cally would find it. And the enemy, we knew, had both troops and system for his searching. The disadvantages of our hole began to prey a little on our minds. We sat in the wood of saplings and George made contact in the afternoon with base. Gone to ground, I signalled, confirm you cancel all drops. Enemy dispositions as foils: We laid the aerial across a gorse bush and George made an excellent contact. "Coming up fives," he said, pleased as he always was. We thought a little scornfully of what the text-books said about aerials, and of our two tall masts at Venats. At base, in Bari, they would be going to lunch.

The next morning everything seemed quiet. We had scrambled into our holes at dusk and slept deeply in the bad air inside. Techni­cally, no doubt, it was a magnificent hole. It had two chambers with a passage so arranged that a grenade flung through the entry would have no effect on anyone sitting in the inner chamber. Stout timbers supported the roof a good three feet from the floor. We lay like sestuplets in a womb, squeezed up and folded over ourselves like unborn babies. Or like concertinas in a cupboard. It was not comfortable. At dawn, Lala decided that we had better know what was happening to the enemy pushing towards us from the Danube.

Dukla, one of the couriers with us, got out of the hole and went over the hill in the direction of Svilosh, a village two miles away that was held by the enemy. He whispered into us through the entry before he went. His voice seemed to come from far away, from another world. A shaft of light came back again through the entry as he took his head away.

One by one we crawled to the biscuit tin and relieved ourselves: all but Nela, who was too shy.

Dukla was stuffing a screen of fresh-cut branches into the entry, and the light was no longer brilliant and sunny, but green like sunlight seen through water. Pale-green light seeped through into our darkness. Nela opened a packet of biscuits; we ate these with slices of pork-fat she had cut. There were also cherries and straw­berries picked the day before.

"My God," Nela said, "it's like last year."

"Were you in that one, too?" Lala asked.

"In it? Of course I was. We had a company in the woods above Lezhimir, on Gypsy's Hill, and we dodged about for a week while they looked for us."

One didn't run away: one dodged about. It was one's way of asserting moral superiority even if, at the time, one's teeth were chattering.

Nela talked in a shrill whisper about the early days. She was pale-faced and little robust, strained to the limit of her strength, worried at her responsibilities yet determined to see a joke in all that. The pale green sealight coming in through the hole made her seem sicklier than ever. She wore a battle-dress blouse and an old pair of plus-four trousers which she buckled about her ankles; yesterday we had noticed a large rent in the seat of her trousers. Lala had said:

"It's disgraceful the way you go about with a hole in your trousers."

Nela had been a typist before the war. Now they had taken away her rifle and given her a typewriter instead. She felt this an affront to her self-respect, and grumbled continually about it.

"Lala, when can I have my rifle back?"

"They've taken it away? It's a shame," he put her off. "But you shouldn't have let them." In his own way, even Lala liked a quiet life.

We lay on our backs, our knees doubled up, the warm air inside the hole making us drowsy. There was the close dank smell of earth, wet clothes, stale breathing. It was better to go to sleep.

Lala was lying next to me and woke me when Dukla came back. We heard him scrambling about outside. He would be making horrible tracks in the mud.

When he pulled the mask of undergrowth aside the warm day­light came flooding in to us again, and it seemed easier even to breathe. Dukla began talking, but none of us could make out what he was saying. He must have been running.

We got it out of him in the end. It seemed that he had been running, and his voice trembled, but not only, I guessed, because he had been running.

He had gone up over the crest of the hill intending to look down on Svilosh and find, if he could, a peasant who could say what they were doing in Svilosh. But they had seen him, coming over the crest of the hill, before he them and had sniped carefully at him as he came off the skyline.

Lala was angry. "What the devil do you go strolling about up there for?"

"Druzhe Lala, I wasn't. How could I know they'd see me?"

"And you came straight back here, of course?" Lala asked hopelessly.

"No, I didn't. I know better than that." He was a dreadfully self-satisfied youngster. "No, I came back right round the corner of the hill, so they saw me disappear towards Banoshtor."

"Good," Lala said. "No one would guess you had as much sense as that."

"Oh, my God," Dukla gushed. "Of course I wouldn't have come straight back."

After that there was nothing to do but sit in the hole for the rest of the day. It was commonly said that the nearer to the enemy one hid, the safer it was. But that day I found this unconvincing. We lay in the hole on our backs, folded upon ourselves like unborn babies, like concertinas in a cupboard. It was hot and the air was bad. Green submarine light filtered through the screen of branches. We slept and fidgeted and whispered by turns to each other. In the afternoon we heard more shooting from over the hill; or rather Lala, who was sitting just outside the hole, heard it. Inside we could hear nothing but our own slow breathing. Lala whispered in to us what he thought was happening. A little later we heard him talking to someone who had come over near to the mouth of the hole. Their voices were agitated. Lala sounded more upset than ever.

Later on, towards dusk, Lala whispered to us to come out of the hole. We scraped out through the narrow entry.

"Don't make such a mess," Lala said, standing aside on the top of the bank and looking down at us as we came out of the ground. "There's enough footmarks as it is. Go the other way round."

So we slithered down to the brook and splashed along the bottom of the canyon until it drew level with the surrounding meadows. Here we pulled aside the willow thicket and stepped out into the open.

Lala was talking to his wife.

We greeted each other. It seemed that Militsa had been con­valescent at Shulyam until three days ago, and had come up into the woods only when the offensive was imminent. The past two days she had spent in a neighbouring hole with four nurses from Doctor Doda's training school at Grabovo. She was a handsome dark-skinned girl from Grk in the Woods of Bosut. She wore a dark green dress; and she had eyes for no-one but Lala.

Lala had made up his mind to move, news having come that the enemy patrols advancing up the valley from Banoshtor were beating the woods for bazas, and had already found three. That would be enough to make them eager to find more. With all the traces we had left from our comings and goings, there would be little difficulty in finding ours. He thought we had better move back into the woods until we saw what direction their patrols would take. We agreed. Anything was better than going back into that hole. Dukla and George crawled inside again for the wireless set, the accumulator, and a few other essentials. We trailed away across the hill to Grabovo in the gathering dusk.

There we discovered George-from-Chalma and the horses. It was like a village of ghosts. The walls of ruined houses, skeletons in their faded whitewash, gleamed in the darkness. Horses strayed about and cropped the weeds that grew everywhere. George and I had carried the accumulator for three miles, and were tired, so we sat on a broken-down wall beside the prostrate church and waited until Lala could find Doda and warn him of our withdrawal. This evacuation had now become general. More and more little groups came creeping into Grabovo until there must have been nearly fifty of us altogether. The nurses came; couriers appeared in the dark­ness, and a few terrain-workers from the Danube bank. They sat beside the road and whispered to each other. It seemed a company of shadows. The hour was midnight, and we had still a little time; in the morning the enemy would look for us here.

Before dawn we were encamped by threes and fours in the woods behind Grabovo. Doctor Doda had been scornful. "Move?" he had mocked. "What's the sense in moving? My God, all you've got to do is to get into a hole and stay in it."

And he did; but we were better pleased with the open woods. George threw the aerial wire over some trees and made a contact with the last gasp of the accumulator. Base was unmoved. Please note, they said, taking their time, that from the first of July we shall use cipherbook number — and the cipherenes added for good measure : Love from Irene and Doris.

"Anything interesting?" Lala asked.

"Not very."

We caught the news at one o'clock. Spoleto had fallen to 8th Army. News of coming offensives in Galicia were rumoured by Paul Winterton from Moscow. All that seemed shockingly irrelevant. Jesus, we said, what about Svilosh and Banoshtor?

Nela found wild strawberries. Lala and Militsa teased each other. "Fine partisan you are, " he grumbled. "Can't sleep because the ants bite you." There were millions of ants in the short grass, attracted by the crumbs we dropped; and they invaded us as we slept and bit us all over.

Rumours came in hour by hour. Troops were being moved up the Danube from Bulgaria. They were crossing the Danube on two pontoon bridges. They were in general retreat. We sat in the woods and resigned ourselves to not knowing what was happening. The only thing that was clear was that the enemy was not behaving as he ought to have behaved, for instead of rushing the Frushka Gora and plunging about in the woods for two or three days, he was stay­ing put and taking his time.

All day long his small-arms fire continued to rattle round the edge of the woods. This showed undue respect for his own safety— for he thought us in strength, reckoning the number of trains we had blown up lately and the volume of stores we had taken in on Glavitsa—or possibly (but not probably) a more conscientious approach to his work. Usually the enemy's commanders were only too pleased to have done with their searching after a day or two's uncertainty, and then to issue a glorious communique announcing our total annihilation. This new tactic of lingering in the villages round the fringe of the woods was unnerving; for it meant that we could get no food. It was a tactic that he might have learnt long before, if he had been willing to learn anything but the lessons of brute force. There is only one way to annihilate peasant partisans (when the partisans, that is, know their business) and that is to occupy the sources of food, the villages, for hunger is a greater deterrent to resistance than all the measures of terror and arbitrary killing that were ever thought of. In the Frushka Gora that summer we had reckoned on a push of several days and our provisions were calculated for that; these were now eaten, and it was hard to know where our next meal was coming from. Two days later we were really hungry.

It began to look a little serious. In the afternoon of the third day after that, two couriers brought a sheep they had found wander­ing in the clearings beyond Grabovo, and this Lala said should be killed and eaten. It was a large sheep and the preparations took all day. People came out of the woods in threes and fours, and they were hungry. We ate the sheep in the evening. It was very good as far as it went, but the enemy was still sitting in comfortable strength in all the surrounding villages—and the villages within the woodland fringe were all in ruins from the previous October's expedition. Down at Svilosh, three miles away, there were about five hundred men beating the woods. It seemed likely that very soon they would come to beat our woods, too.

Then it began to rain. It rained for two days until we were wet through as well as hungry. Only the ants were dry; they stopped molesting us and went underground. It went on raining. The woods glistened with rain, and water fell in showers on us from the laden leaves and ran in runnels across the bark of tree-trunks.

Lala and I rode over the next day to the southern side of the Frushka Gora, where the telephonists and many others were still in hiding. Here we had a half-company in position on the hillside facing down towards Gregurievats: they reported that the enemy opened up regularly with small fire arms at seven o'clock in the evening and went on with it until dawn. As we rode along the crest of Venats three machine-guns started in the plain below, firing up blindly into the woods. Clearly they had ammunition to burn.

The situation was not good. The Odied, Staff and all, had crossed the night before into Lower Srem, unable longer to conceal themselves from a tightening cordon many times their strength in men. Part of one company remained together with supply and other services amounting to about one hundred men. All these were living in the woods or underground. Food was running out. A mile or so along Venats the enemy had found our camp and were said to be sounding the ground with poles: it was rumoured that two or three bazas had been found. (This later turned out to be true.) Seven pack-horse men were reported to have been taken prisoner. The telephonists looked gloomy: their central exchange system here in the woods was intact, but all their branch-lines were held by the enemy. The telephonists said that they would try to charge my accumulator, and we left it with them.

Lala and I rode back across Frushka in the pouring rain. The detonations of a thunderstorm added natural effects to what was already a lively rattle of noise. Every now and then we dismounted to save our beasts from slithering off the streaming muddy path. Branches heavy with rain licked at us coldly as we went by, and the water cascaded down our necks until we were sodden to the skin When we got back to our camp in the woods above Grabovo we found that the parachute canopy had long since ceased to hold out the rain. Nela and Militsa and George and George-from-Chalma and Dukla were lying in a row with the rain dripping through on to them. There was nothing to eat.

We lay down in our clothes beside them.

Early in the morning, long before it was light, one of Doda's men came to our shelter and waked up Lala. He waked up the rest of us, stiff in our sodden clothes. He looked upset, and said that the column at Svilosh had begun to move in our direction half an hour ago.

We scurried. Lala sent George-from-Chalma and Dukla to warn the other groups to come to us at once. We collected everyone, removed all traces of our presence—even to making the sodden grass where we had camped stand up on end, which it never would—and moved in silence deeper into the woods. Various opinions were put forward on what might be the thickest copse. Lala said: "It's undergrowth we need." A doctor in charge led us to a place he said would be safe from the most careful search. (The next day he was killed by a stray bullet from a machine-gun ranging these woods.)

We climbed up through dense oak and thorn bushes into the inmost part of a thickly-grown knoll. Here we stopped all day. They began to shell the woods with small artillery stuff, probably seventy-fives. The shells crashed down all over the place. God knows how many men they thought we had; their intelligence was abominable. Once an aircraft circled over and dropped a few bombs, aimlessly, as if it had nothing else to do. One might have thought there was no Russian offensive, no Second Front, no battle in course in Italy, to see the way they took their time. Along the Danube the magnetic-mine sweeping aircraft flew up and down all morning. We heard it humming and droning as it came and went. (Sasha told me afterwards that the Odred from its position above Cherevitch had watched a big tug go up on one of our mines that week.)

The small-arms fire continued, desultory as the rain, all day. Altogether it seemed a mad fuss to make about a hundred and fifty men and women who so far had not fired a shot. The bushes dripped with rain. Later in the afternoon Lala shared out our only remaining food, some sugar, and decided we could do no good by staying here. It would be better to chance a crossing of the main-line into Lower Srem. There at least we might be able to take in stores; the fighting men were already there. Let the enemy bungle about in the woods in his stupid way, looking for something that was no longer to be found: we would attack him in Lower Srem where, for the moment, he had little or nothing to defend himself with.

Lala and I had a private konspiratsia about wireless transmission.

"You can't take your set with you: it's too far. We'll have to hurry."

"What about your transmitter in Lower Srem? Have you got accumulators there?"

"No, it works off the mains from Belgrade. You could borrow it and bury yours here."

We buried the set under a pile of leaves, wrapping it first in three blankets and a groundsheet. George took his crystals with him, so that he could use the set in Lower Srem. (Three weeks later I retrieved the set but the damp had ruined it.) Nearby Nela buried her archives in a tin box, taking with her the more damaging of the papers. If the enemy found what remained he would benefit by a statement on shirts, underclothing, pack-horse saddles, and so on. We wished him well of that. At five o'clock we set out across Frushka by little-used paths.

On the crest of Venats we found Mihailoff and Vlaiko with some others from the ancillary services at Gregurievats. Lala explained what was happening on our side of the woods and proposed that they should come with us down into Lower Srem. It was not much better with them, although people from Shulyam had slipped through the night before with food, so that they were not as hungry as we were. They gave us some of the bread they had. Further along Venats, twenty minutes' march away, the enemy was encamped in con­siderable strength, and there was nothing but their own excessive nervousness to stop his patrols from ranging the whole woodland crest. We sat down and waited for dusk.

Lala was in his element: not since the year before had he directly commanded so many men. He stumped up and down and barked orders at everyone he could see, and sometimes twice at the same person.

"But, Druzhe Lala, you told me——"

"Nonsense, man, don't stand there arguing! Do what I say."

In the end we had assembled everyone within reach. There may have been about a hundred and fifty of us, of whom three-quarters were armed. The telephonists objected to going because they said that if they did they would lose all their equipment; four of them stayed behind. (Of these, three were found by the enemy and shot.) Then the horses were unsaddled and led off into the woods to wander until we could find them again. We could not take them with us for fear that their stumbling and neighing or simply their tall shadows in the darkness would give us away. Most of the nursing probationers came with us, but two or three were to stay behind with Doda and his assistant, and these we had left on the northern side of Frushka.

George-from-Chalma sat beside me on a bank of grass as we waited for darkness. It is good to know that George-from-Chalma is still alive; one day he will be a ripe old peasant with a fund of stories and a fondness for the bottle. In those days he was twenty-five, tough, obstinate, enduring as one of the oaks of the Frushka Gora. In time of peace he might have been by that age the father of a family of three or four and a thrusting dealer in sheep and grain. He would have had his gig, smart-painted, and a prancing two-year-old to take him down to Mitrovitsa on a market day. In his stables there would have been half a dozen riding horses, and two or three pair of oxen; and his dairy would have boasted a good herd of milch cows. He would have consumed more good food in one day than the average townsman of England gets through in a week; and he would have reckoned to grow, or to buy if he could not grow it, his hundred gallons or so of wine each season. There are some Serbs who have no taste for hospitality, but they are rare, and George-from-Chalma, if I know him, would have belonged to the majority. He would have reckoned his self-respect in terms of what he could offer to his guests: and the more guests the better.

He sat beside me on the grass and talked slyly about marriage. He has a strong face, a broad firm nose, heavy cheek-bones, large brown eyes, a tremendous physique. He loved talking, and had a taste for understatement, preferring to play the idiot and then to measure to himself your own conceit, or, if you had none, to clap you suddenly on the back and say: "Come on, man, tell me something!"

Lala and he, as master and man, were greatly attached to each other; Lala said that George was the only man he knew that could handle horses properly, and George-from-Chalma said that Lala was a man one could respect. Anyone who is in Chalma and asks for George will find, as I say, a man of means and presence, and a rare welcome. But in those days George-from-Chalma possessed nothing but what he stood up in. He had joined the partisans in the Frushka Gora in 1942, just before the big offensive of that summer; an informer in Chalma had known of this and his father and mother were taken and shot, the house burnt down, and the stock confis­cated. George was branded as an outlaw, and very shortly as a Bolshevist criminal. The memory of it weighed heavily on his peasant soul.

"Now I'm all alone," he would say, "and nothing I can do will put things back where they were." If his case had been exceptional he might have grown desperate; as it was, he merged his own in the general sea of wretchedness and individual loss that had submerged these people, and saw in what had happened a common grief. He was fond of saying that he ought to get married. He said it now.

"Why don't you?" I asked him. "You're old enough, aren't you?"

We sat on the grassy bank in the falling dusk. In front of us the hillside sloped away into the grey shadows of the plain. There were George-from-Chalma, myself, and two young probationers from Doctor Doda's school.

George said: "Yes, but Lala won't let me. Lala says there's no time now to get married. People die too easily." He made a face at the two girls, who were giggling. "There's Cheerful, now. You won't find a nicer girl than Cheerful, not in the whole Frushka Gora, you won't. She can cook and she's a peasant like us all. Cheerful, why don't you get married?"

"My God, we're going to get married after the war's over," she said. She was round-faced, rubicund, blue-eyed, and she was called Cheerful because she was never seen to be anything else. She was eighteen and she had been with the partisans for thirteen months.

"And you don't want to get married before that. Not even to a man like me?" George asked incredulously.

"Not I, my God." Cheerful had a lovely smile, round and sweet and dimpled. As comfortable as a cat, and as sure of herself, she was able to walk twenty miles with her little medical pack, not wincing; and then go into action with the men.

Down in the plain a machine-gun began firing in long wild bursts. The evening serenade had started up.

Cheerful took no notice of the machine-gun. She said: "We're going to wait until the war's over. This isn't any time to talk about getting married." She had a husky, competent voice. Cheerful will have at least seven children, cook and keep house for them all, and manage the accounts, bully her husband, and take a leading part generally in village affairs. Cheerful has the vote and she will know what to do with it.

The machine-gun went on firing, as if desperate for notice to be taken of it. Nobody took any notice of it.

"There you are," George said, "that's peasant sense for you. She's right."

The twilight was now well advanced. Magnesium-white para­chute flares began to shoot up and hover along the main-line as the enemy's night patrols set off on their first beat. They shot up from the darkness of the plain and hung for a few trembling seconds on a level with our eyes, hung and hovered and trembled and then died away without a sound. It was somehow strange that they made no sound. All along the line, at two-mile intervals from one end of Srem to the other, flares shot up and hovered and died away. We watched them with idle interest, as if they had been fireworks.

The AFVs in Gregurievats and Shulyam began to fire off odd shells into the woods. They landed behind us, where the trees were thickest. We heard the crack of their detonation, and then, three or four seconds later, their landing crash. Cheerful was combing her hair; it was bobbed, tied with a bow on her brow, and rather pretty. The AFVs fired hopelessly into the woods.

A little later, Lala was ready at last, and we formed up our column in silence. Smoking was forbidden. Tishina. Everyone understood that it would be a narrow business at best, and might end badly for us all.

We moved in silence across the crest towards the southern slope. The lights in the plain were going up, one after another; Mitrovitsa, Ruma, the garrison stations along the main-line, yellow points of light far away in the darkness. The AFVs in the villages along the southern slope went on yapping away at us; now and then a few machine-guns joined the chorus. But their fire was blind and damaged nothing but the trees.

We knew that we could not afford to be marked down at this point and held, for here we could neither go back nor stay still. Whatever happened we must go forward, break the cordon, cross the main-line, and gain the temporary freedom of Lower Srem. And it would be costly if we had to shoot our way through.

Behind us in the Frushka Gora there remained Doctor Doda and a few assistants, some of the telephonists, two or three couriers for espionage, perhaps a total of fifty people. Engaged in holding the cordon and in beating the woods, the enemy was thought to have upwards of four or five thousand men. These troops were partly German para-military police (Sicherheitsdienst), partly Ustashe, partly General Neditch's militia brought in from Serbia and particu­larly dangerous in that they were Serbs and would know our habits as they knew their own. What they did not know—or not yet—was that the birds had flown. Their searching was to go on for five days after our departure; and the beauty of it was that Bauer, their commander, could not afford to admit a failure and would therefore once more proclaim our annihilation. The German High Command would have to believe him (they were in no condition, at that time, to be willing to disbelieve him). They would formally congratulate him and—what advantaged us—would allocate him no more troops. Within a week or two we should have established our status quo ante, and that without loss to ourselves. Bauer, of course, was not fooled, and knew perfectly well that he had done anything but annihilate us. The proof of this came the following month, in July, when he again sent troops into the Frushka Gora. But that time he suffered several hundred casualties for his pains. For then the birds did not fly.

Tonight, though, the situation for us was bad enough. A check here and anything might happen. Once an alarm was given the Germans encamped along the crest of Venats would close in behind us; and we should be held in a narrow belt of woodland until the dawn; and with daylight we were lost. It was no wonder that Lala was a bit excited, that each of us trod quietly and used every hint of fieldcraft that he knew.

As our single column went silently over the crest of Venats and began the downward slope, a rumour went whispering up and down the line that the British had landed in Dalmatia.

Iskrtsali su se Inglesi!

So-and-So had actually heard this from someone who had actually listened-in, that the landing was actually in three places, and actually with tanks, actually ... God knows where these rumours came from. They would flare up like a forest fire in the drowth of our hopefulness, and as quickly burn themselves out. They had a lovely refinement, too: not just landings in Dalmatia, but in three places, and with tanks. Actually ...

"It's not true!"

"S-sh, so-and-so heard it."

"Well, I don't believe it."

"Don't you?"—pause—"Well, nor do I, actually ..."

And the flame would go out. But it was warm while it lasted. It made one feel less dirty, and less tired, and less ridden with lice. It reminded me, soft bourgeois, that one day I might be able to take off my clothes and throw them away, and bath myself in a white-tiled bathroom, where the taps were silver and the shaving-mirrors beaded with steam. It was five weeks since I had last washed myself all over. It was all but a year since I had slept in safety in a soft bed. And it reminded me of other things: of things which this partisan life, no matter how important it might seem to me, could not provide. Yet the comparison was a manly one: it made me think that at least I had suffered the war, not let it pass over my head. I felt old; tired beyond words. I was weak with months of dysentery. But for a moment, then, I was proud of myself and intensely happy. I knew that I would not have missed it for any­thing.

In a little we had reached the crucial point. Here, the couriers said, the cordon was intermittently broken: to right and left of us were Shulyam and Beshenovo, villages held by the enemy, lying about two miles apart. Patrols linked the two at regular intervals throughout the night. In day time they had direct fire-cover of the whole hillside.

We had reckoned well, and slipped through unheard and unseen. Every few yards as we went the night was brilliant with magnesium light, blinding, blueish, all-revealing, as nervous patrols fired off flares into the darkness. Each flare would hover for seconds-long like a high candle held by a trembling hand, waves of blue-white light rising and falling and quaking in the darkness, and then would sink towards the ground like a spent star.

And we who had doubled-up in the waist-high corn would scramble to our feet again and file downwards into the plain. Within a quarter of an hour we were clear of the trees and abreast of the two villages. If they could not stop us here, they would never be able to stop us. Flare after flare flew upwards and hovered quaking for a moment in the sky. In Shulyam and Beshenovo the AFVs fired desultory bursts into the darkness of the woods above them. Their tracer streaked like scars across the overcast, lividly red. To the left of us now, and close by, were the houses of Beshenovo on the sky­line.

We went through the waist-high corn in a dark and silent column. The corn was wet with dew and swished against us as we went. In the momentary light of flares the corn seemed overlaid with blue-white mist as if slow rain were falling. The hard young sheaves struck against us as we went, cold and wet and shaken for a moment, swish-swish, swish-swish.

Ten minutes later the detonation of machine-gun fire had changed in tone. No longer it cracked. Now it was firing away from us.

We were clear of the woods; beyond us in the plain lay hundreds of square miles of standing corn, a forest of cover they could never beat.

Now it was they who had reason to be nervous. We listened to their mad volleys behind us. They needed no telling. Already they were frightened out of their wits.

What fools they were, I thought. We laughed to each other as we went: for this outwitting of the enemy was sheer joy.

We came down through the growing harvest into the plain of Lower Srem. On the railway we discovered nothing; only the quaking flares of patrols farther up and down the line revealed our passage and threw our shadows along the tracks as we went across; and lit up the rails like quick-silver.

Beyond the line we were in Lower Srem, and safe.

We passed the night in Sashintsi, where the people loved us, and we filled our empty stomachs and talked happily of what we had done. Dozens of people turned out to see us leave the next day: they knew that this was part of a general evacuation of the Frushka Gora, and they were as pleased and triumphant at the enemy's inability to catch us as we were. Boys from Sashintsi found their families; cousins recognized aunts; there was a lively hum of talk and explanation.

Through a throng of faces in the market-place I cought sight of Juritsa. He was lying in a cart, one of a little column of wounded who had come over the line from the north the night before. I pushed my way through the crowd. He was lying on his back, watched over by a nurse, and he was fully conscious.

"Juritsa! What happened?"

He could talk a little although he looked pale. It seemed that he had been shot through the lung while leading a party across the main road on the north bank of the Danube. He was cheerful and resigned, chiefly glad that he had been able to get back across the Danube and down from the Frushka Gora before the cordon finally closed in. He grinned at me. "We Bachka chaps," he said weakly. It had been a joke between us. We shook hands.

All through the following night we travelled farther into the plain, driving south-eastwards along dusty roads. The weather was clear and there was a moon to see by. Far to the north lay the black ridge of the Frushka Gora with its single light in the hills above Irig, the light of a sanatorium which was still in use for favoured patients of the "Independent State." Summer lightning flashed low-down along the eastern sky like anti-aircraft fire. (Perhaps it was anti­aircraft fire: the British and Americans were bombing Belgrade regularly in these weeks of summer.) We sat in a cart and jolted through the night. George-from-Chalma was driving, not to be tired, with my George beside him in front; then Lala and Militsa, Nela and myself. As the night wore on we slumped over in the straw and drowsed off to the jerk and rhythm of the cart-wheels. The stars were brilliant in the cold night air. Half-asleep we heard the creak and jingle of harness and the hard breathing of our horses. Around us on every side was an endless sea of wheat and waist-high maize.

We found the Odred in the woods of Ashanye near the Sava, far to the south. They had with them the better part of two battalions and half of Sixth Brigade; and with these they began to beat up local German garrisons deep in the plain. These were helpless, and sent urgently to the troops in the Frushka Gora to come back and protect them. We reckoned that we had seven to ten days before this would happen, and made shift to put the interval to good account.

The peasants began to reap. The harvest turned out to be one of the heaviest for many years. They covered the plain with dust and golden straw. The Odred began to illuminate the night with huge bonfires of German-farmed wheat.

"It's getting a habit," Sasha said. "We've burned their wheat for three years running now. I daresay we'll miss it after the war."

Lala and I were very happy together. We lived in friendly villages wherever we had business. Here the movement was at its most effective, each village having an effective Odbor elected by show of hands with daily changes of duty, guards who were usually girls on every entrance to a village, no travel without signed permits, and a highly organized system of bazas.

Our base headquarters for that brief interval we made in Popintsi. Lala lived in one house, George and I next door, and the others were distributed about the village. From here we could travel through the whole enclave of "liberated territory," comprised by Serbian villages in which we could completely trust. In Popintsi we were very comfortable. Our old gaffer was a real Sremats, a tough old man with a pleasant and riotous life behind him, wearing huge whiskers, his face wrinkled like over-ripe fruit, blue eyes, a lasting sense of fun. He stood four-square with arms and hands hanging limply: all his movements were jerky and abrupt as if he could no longer get his nerves and muscles to function smoothly; he was a little like a frog. He passed for a rich man.

"Obstinate as a mule, he is," his second wife would say. She was a quiet little woman whose whole life, we found, was taken up with ministering to his enormous appetite—and, while we were there, to ours.

"Now, old woman, you shut up," Gaffer would say teasingly. "Women don't know anything."

"Fine time you'd have without women," she would mutter, retreating into her kitchen.

"Hm, hm, hm," our old man laughed to himself, pivoting rigidly on his feet. "Women! " he said. "Women!"

A few ripe old memories he liked to talk about. The chief amongst these concerned the 72nd Regiment of Foot of the Imperial Austrian Army in the year 1897. It seems that Gaffer had been a sergeant.

"First we had flint-locks. Maiku, and they were dangerous. Then they gave us a new kind—you know, that rifle we had in the last war. Hm, hm, what times we had.... My God, I can remember the Kaiser coming down to see us.... Franye we used to call him. Franye on a big horse, hm, hm, hm...." He had this trick of chuckling to himself; we stood in the middle of his yard and talked about the 72nd Regiment of Foot in the year 1897. "Our captain lined us all up, and there was Franye on a big horse—my God, I saw him myself—and he says to us, he says"—Gaffer would tap you on the chest if you weren't listening as you should—"he says—'Very proud I am to greet my old and loyal 72nd Regiment of Foot'—he says, and off he goes. My, what a time we had afterwards! Wine ..." Words would fail him. "Hm, hm, hm...."

When the last war came Gaffer had refused to serve in the Austrian army, and for that they had taken him away to Zagreb and locked him up. He was amazed to this day at the consideration they had afforded him.

"My God, nothing of that to-day. No lawyer to defend you, no court, no trial, no nothing. Hm, hm, hm.... Just an arrest and hop! you're dead."

Another great event of Gaffer's life was the coming of the parti­sans. For him this was apparently the culmination and the sum of all things. He referred to partisans always as "our army," and saw in them the right and natural successors of the 72nd Regiment of Foot, only this time Serbian and peculiarly his. A long series of partisan billetees had passed through his house, people from nearby Belgrade, refugees from German-held villages, men, women and children: and, finally, us. He took full responsibility for military affairs and felt obliged to keep up with the times. He always had to be told the wireless news.

Gaffer: "So the Schwabs are running, eh?"

Me: "Yes, they are. Like hell they are."

Gaffer: "Lemberg, did you say? Where's Lemberg? Eh, that one in Poland?"

Me: "That's right."

Gaffer: "Hm, and haven't they taken Warsaw yet? What, not taken Warsaw?"

Me: "Not quite. But they soon will."

Gaffer: "Hm, well, what's the name of Goering's man again? That general, eh?"

Me: "Stumfph."

Gaffer: "Damned if I can catch it. Stumfph, eh? Stumfph, Stumfph, Stumfph...."

In those days the Red Army by-passed Vilna and pressed onwards into Poland. In France severe fighting continued against weakening German resistance: already it was clear that the bridge­head must soon become a deep pocket, and the deep pocket the greater part of western France. In Italy the summer's advance continued. On our own front the partisan army was pushing out victoriously in every direction. Waverers began to come over to us by the thousand. It was rumoured even that certain Bulgarian units in Serbia were deserting to them by parachute....

Lala and I began to take in stores at a place near Ashanye. We had always thought this impossible because of the enemy's nearness — he was everywhere in these plains; but we profited now by the absence of Bauer's mobile troops in the Frushka Gora, put strong ambushes on all approach roads, and took as much as Base could send us. Belgrade was thirty miles away; news of our parachute supplies was regularly exchanged in the capital the day after we received them. There was an added zest in making fools of the Germans so nearly under the noses of their High Command.

Lala and I became close friends. This wasn't difficult, for Lala could make friends whenever he chose and wherever he went. People trusted him at once, partly for his position in the movement, but more perhaps for his forthright peasant manners. He said exactly what he thought, and was respected for it. Not for nothing had he spent ten years in Mitrovitsa prison for "political activity against the State," his having been one of the earliest arrests the people of Pera Zhivkovitch had made in 1929. Lala had finished his term just before the war broke out, and had scarcely had time to go home to his village before the Germans came to arrest him. In Mitrovitsa "University" he had read medicine for four years; he came out and went into the woods, and was the first partisan doctor in Srem. He was hard, uncompromising, sometimes bombastic, famous for his choleric temper and critical eye; at other times he could be kind and even gentle. He was much in love with his wife, whom he had lately married and over whom he fussed like a father and mother; thought­ful in small ways for my peace of mind and comfort; and he was a great friend of George Armstrong's, with whom he was forever hatching wild plots of murder and sudden death.

"Now, you George!" he would say, "as soon as the war's over you and me and Nela'll be off to Berlin and shoot all the Schwabs. Yes, but particularly the little Schwab girls. I don't think we can leave out the little Schwab girls, can we? Eh, what d'you say?"

And George would grin and slowly understand. Lancashire would throw a gesture to the Voivodina. Incongruities that were wildly funny would make us all laugh.

"Shoot them all, Lala? I don't think we can quite do that."

"What, not shoot them? Nonsense!" Lala loved to pretend the limits of Balkan ferocity: and lived in the constant (and some­times realized) hope of shocking us. "Of course we'll shoot them. We'll cut their throats. My God, you don't know what we Balkan people are like."

Nela liked to listen to the two of them. She would sit and giggle quietly, her pale face suddenly alive again, blushing if Lala said more than was remotely proper, which he often did.

"Don't listen to him, George. He doesn't mean a word of it."

"Yes, I do. Every word of it. Shall we take her, too, George? What, and shoot all the little Schwab girls? I think we could—— Gaffer would come in, pivoting rigidly on his stiff old body.

"Stumfph, eh? Hm, hm, hm ... Stumfph!"

These were warm summer days and nights. The Odred was very active in the plain. At our place near Ashanye we took in parachute stores for several hundred men. Things were prospering.

But they did not leave us long unmolested. Having drawn blank in the Frushka Gora, the troops that Bauer had came hounding back into the plain to catch us there.

Just as this was happening, the Odred ambushed a lorry on the road south of Ruma and killed a German major. This annoyed the local Command so much that they sent down a punitive expedition to the nearest village to exact reprisals. The unlucky village—which had nothing to do with the ambush—since the Odred was camping in the open fields, and independent of any village—happened to be our neighbour, Pechintsi, three miles away.

Gaffer brought me the news. I was cyphering. He came jerking into the room and stood with his arms hanging loose.

"They're burning Pechintsi," he said.

I went out with him into the yard. Across the fields we could see spirals of smoke rising above the trees of Pechintsi.

"Maiku! The rascals," Gaffer said. "That baza's no good that I've got, you know. What'll happen to Mother and me if they come here?"—He swung his arms helplessly—"They'd finish us off, you know, hm, hm, hm ... finish us off!"

He was a little too near the truth, although he didn't know it then, for comfort. The same night Lala and I moved to another village, and the next day Popintsi was searched. After that we were hiding for days, for the hunt was up. Once or twice they nearly had us. In Golubintsi they searched a farmyard without finding us, though they walked over our heads as we lay in a hole under the stable. Back at Popintsi they murdered half a dozen people, but no one, it seemed, who had known of us.

We decided that we had better break back again into the Frushka Gora, empty by now of enemy troops. The Odred and Sixth Brigade had already gone back, moving in the night round the troops which Bauer had brought back again to use against them in Lower Srem.

The next day we crossed the main-line northwards in full day­light. Half a mile away the garrison at Golubintsi station sat and smoked in the sun. Lala and an Odbornik from Golubintsi sat on the box of our cart with George and me hidden under a pile of fresh grass. Nela and Militsa, and George-from-Chalma and Sava came behind us in another cart, all of them trying hard to look like honest peasants going to reap. On the line itself we met a couple of sentries. George and I, sweating under the grass on that summer's noon, heard them passing the time of day.

"Nice weather for the time of year," Lala said.

"Too bloody hot," they grumbled.

And so it was.

The cart moved over the line and down the ramp on the other side. Lala was whistling quietly to the horses.

The next three weeks were a riotous success. All our units flowed back into the Frushka Gora from Lower Srem—where the enemy was now vainly looking for us—and began to operate against every target they could find. A number of Piats were dropped to us and used with huge effect. The partisans called them "John Bulls" and swore they had a legendary performance.

In the second week of July we had got back all we had lost and were on the offensive again. Bauer once more collected troops to­gether—this time less than two thousand—and sent some of them into the Frushka Gora—"just to clear up a few that are left," as we heard afterwards that he told them. But this time they got better than they gave. The Odred and Sixth Brigade stood firm and rolled them back into the plain with heavier losses than they liked. They took themselves off.

In that battle we had some thirty serious casualties. We decided to get them out by air if we could (another thirty had just been evacuated by air from the Woods of Bosut where Kolya and our liaison officer there, Basil Irwin, were busy). These wounded in­cluded Dule, commander of the Odred, and it would be a great relief if we could get them off our hands. Also Base had lately ordered me to return to Italy to report.

I went back into Lower Srem and arranged with Lala for a land­ing-ground to be got ready in a clearing between the villages of Karlovchitch and Ashanye, twenty-five miles from Belgrade. The wounded were brought down from the Frushka Gora by Ilia and his battalion of Sixth Brigade. As they could not walk, they were trans­ported in carts. Getting carts over the main-line was likely to be a noisy business.

Ilia was a determined young man. He knew that taking carts over the main-line would mean enfilading fire from the nearest bunker. If that were to happen he might lose his wounded. This being so, he brought his column of wounded, in their carts, to within half a mile of the railway. There he halted them and went on him­self until he came within shouting range of the nearest bunker. Hidden by the darkness he shouted to them that he had three hundred partisans and some wounded. Would they let him over the line unmolested? Or did they want to be wiped out? They did not want to be wiped out. The column came over without incident.

The next night completed all our preparations. At about twelve o'clock the two aircraft came, circling high at first and then spiralling down as they recognized our signals.

There were two of them. They came in one after the other and lined up together at one end of our strip, looking huge and im­probable although they were only twin-engined Dakotas. There was terrific excitement. The crews were R.A.F., casual in khaki shorts and open shirts, unmoved by the fact that the nearest enemy garrison was four miles away and Belgrade only twenty-five.

"I daresay you've got them taped," the first pilot said, "though I must say this doesn't look like my idea of partisan country." Nothing seemed to worry these crews.

They were on the ground for more than an hour, until in the end I began to get nervous. The wounded were filing slowly into the aircraft, first the stretcher-cases, then those who could sit or lie down without help. At last they were all ready. Fifty-six wounded in both aircraft.

One Dakota got away. I said good-bye to everyone, and Djokay embraced me on behalf of the others. "I'll be back in a fortnight."

The door was slammed at last, tight.

A few minutes later we were off the ground. It took us two hours to reach southern Italy.