CHAPTER 4

I WAS SHAKEN BY THOSE WORDS—"JlTST LIKE HOME"—AND they rang in my head as I began to undress in the room Mladineo and I were to occupy that night. The broken window-panes admitted the soft night, and a flood of moonlight. Mladineo, after taking off his GI shirt and turning it admiringly in his hands, feeling the soft warmth of the material, hung it carefully on a doorknob and turned to his musette bag, seeking something in its depths. Suddenly a beautiful tenor voice filled the street below. Someone serenading? Half-clad, we both stepped across to the balcony to look for the singer.

There was only one phrase of the song. We were high and could see far up and down the street as well as deep into the broken buildings that lay across from us, but there was no sign of the singer. Tim and Radic shouted a good-night from their room down the hallway. We answered together. No other words were spoken as we lit cigarettes and stood soaking ourselves in the warm, shining night. The magical silver light imparted to the scene before us a quality of indescribable, forlorn beauty, an atmosphere as specific and evanescent as a strong perfume.

"Just like home!" The phrase obsessed me.

"What made you say that?" I asked Mladineo after a few

minutes. " 'Just like home' . . . was it the look of the streets or the woman with the whimpering child ... or what?"

For him too there had been no break in the continuity of his impressions and his thoughts. He answered: "I don't know. There's a sameness about war, an emptiness in the streets, women hugging their children in the ruins. ... It was just a fleeting impression, a spectator reaction I have felt before. It is more than two years since I have been a real spectator, although I have often pretended to be one. . . ."

"That must be hard to do. ..."

He had been leaning on the balcony rail, his face toward the street. My words turned him toward me. A strange expression hardened his delicate features, set them in a grim mask-like rigidity. What awful scenes was he witnessing again in his mind? I waited, hoping he would speak, but he turned again toward the street.

"How was it on the islands under the Italians?" I asked, trying to draw him out.

"We did little fighting and there was not much to eat. For a long time we used the islands as a place of refuge and convalescence for our wounded, ferrying them over from the mainland at night. The Italians tried to stop this traffic and searched for boats in every cove and backwater from low-flying aircraft. When they found even a tiny rowboat they threw a bomb on it. We had to keep our boats submerged under five or six feet of water during the day and raise them every night."

"How about patrols at night. Were there no patrols on the narrow waters between the islands and the shore?"

"Oh, yes. There were many patrol boats. We often brushed with them in the darkness and invariably got the worst of it

as they were fast and heavily armed with machine guns. But they never stopped the traffic in wounded men."

He paused, then added: "The patrols were bad but the rheumatism from being wet and cold twenty-four hours of the day was considered worse by the boatmen. They could at least hope to avoid the patrols. They had no hope of keeping dry or getting warm. They filled the boats with rock and sank them when the night's work was done, then dove into the icy water to get the rocks out and salvage the boats when darkness came again; but they saved hundreds who would have died had they been left on the mainland."

"I should think it would have been easy for the Italians to find your wounded once you got them there," I said.

"Not as easy as you think. Some of the islands are very wild and mountainous. There are lots of places to hide. Of course they did find them, sometimes."

"Then what. What would they do?"

"Shoot the men, burn down the village guilty of harboring the enemy. You'll see when we go over. There are burnt villages everywhere. . . . But they didn't like patrolling the islands," he added, grinning meaningfully. "Most of the time they stayed in the larger towns where their barracks were. Then things would be pretty quiet unless we molested them."

"Were you ever strong enough to attack a whole garrison?"

"Yes, if there was some reason for it. On the island of Vis, for example, we captured the entire Italian garrison only three weeks before capitulation—about six weeks ago."

Somewhere nearby reverent fingers stroked the strings of a guitar. Mladineo paused to listen. Suddenly, the tenor voice filled the street again, exquisitely tracing the frivolous pattern of a Neapolitan love song. We listened breathlessly. He was just below us somewhere in the depths of silver ruins on the

far side of the street. He might be in some moonlit room without a roof—or in a courtyard, sitting on the rubble. There could be no partition between him and us.

"Wonderful!" Mladineo said, ecstatically, when the song ended. He was waiting for another song, but now there was only the voice of the guitar, a thoughtful, aimless strumming.

"Tell me about Vis," I said to him.

"We needed arms," he began. "The only place on the island where they could be obtained was the little fort which the Italians occupied on the southern side of the island. It was a very old fort—perhaps four hundred years old—and not terribly strong, but it would be easy to defend with automatic weapons against attack by men on foot. We knew that but decided to storm the place and accomplish by surprise what we could not hope to do by siege.

"One night we rushed them. There were only seven of us in the attacking party, as we had but five rifles and twenty hand grenades on the island.

"The fort was occupied by a colonel, a major, one captain, two lieutenants and about forty men. . . ." He broke off to listen again to the guitar, then when he noticed that I was watching him, went on: "That's the way guerrillas operate . . . against Italian garrisons. It would have been a different story if we were attacking Germans or Ustasha. . . ." (The fascist troops of the Croat Quisling—Pavelic.)

'Well, we had decided to approach from all four sides simultaneously, shouting and throwing hand grenades into the little walled court that surrounds the old fortification. There was a sentry at the gate but he never fired a shot. All he wanted to do was get back into his compound. By the time we reached him he had the door unlocked. My cousin knocked him out with a rifle butt and we went in. . . ."

"O, questa, o que-e-a. . . ." The singer's voice rose again, this time in the opening tenor song from Rigoletto. . . . Mla-dineo waited for the last note to die away before resuming.

"My cousin and I went in," he said. "The other five stayed outside and kept on screaming and shouting and shooting and throwing hand grenades. I fired two shots close together to indicate that we were in and that no further grenades should be thrown, and we shouted for the garrison to surrender.

"Getting into the courtyard had been just too easy; it was hard to believe that we'd get away with it; but the officers began to file out with their hands in the air and I motioned with the barrel of my rifle for them to line up against the wall on the north side of the courtyard. They looked terribly frightened. I guess they thought we planned to shoot them all. Even if that had been our intention we would have had to kill them with clubs. We had no ammunition left.

"The rest of our 'attacking force' then worked its way around to the front of the courtyard and came in through the gate. My cousin made the prisoners stand facing the wall and they began to blubber and beg for their lives. I told them no one would be hurt if they followed orders and kept their faces to the wall, their hands in the air, then I went into the little fort to see what weapons I could find. We needed some grenades and machine guns and we needed them immediately, before our prisoners could realize we were almost unarmed. The men standing guard had eight rounds between them, and only one grenade. But we found the arsenal at once and hurried back to the courtyard with a sub-machine gun and two grenades for every member of our party."

Mladineo reached over suddenly and touched my elbow. He looked at me and laughed.

"Do you know what the toughest part of that raid was?" he said earnestly. "It was keeping a straight face. We all wanted to laugh hysterically. It was too ridiculous!"

'What did you do with your prisoners?" I asked.

"We just left them there, in the end; but first we carried away twenty-four sub-machine guns, twelve pistols, a hundred rifles, lots of ammunition and six cases of grenades. It was a nice rich haul. And we got a lot of other valuable stuff, too, including several big boxes of spaghetti, maps and official documents.

"Our attack had been launched while they were having dinner. We finished the food in the officers' mess. By eight o'clock we had completed our search of the premises. The prisoners were still standing with their faces to the wall, but as they had now all been searched for arms they were no longer obliged to keep their hands in the air. My original instructions to the guard, after we found the machine guns, had been to shoot any man in the line who spoke or turned around, but I had made it clear by a wink and a grin that the words were for effect only. We wanted to get our job done without spilling any blood to avoid reprisals, if possible. When the men in the line got restless the guards roared or fired a short burst over the wall. The prisoners must have been wondering how many of their number had been cut down. When the job was finished the instructions to our guards were loudly renewed as we worked our way silently out of the courtyard. We just left them standing there. I have often wondered how long it was before they discovered we were gone."

He paused and stared into the moonlight, the expression of amusement fading from his boyish features, then he added: "We should have shot the whole pack of them."

I gave him another cigarette, watching his face as he lit it. He was excited and tense. The singer was silent and Mladi-neo's mind was on his storv.

"We waited then to see what would happen," he continued. "Everyone on the island knew about the raid. It's just a little island and the men in the garrison had been there for some time. We had worn no masks and all seven of us had been recognized, of course, so we stayed in the hills, keeping some of our loot and sending the rest of it off to Hvar, another island about twenty miles away.

"We were all right but we were worried about the civilians. Suppose there should be reprisals after all. . . .

"Well, the Italian patrol boat called two days later. Until then we saw no one from the garrison. Perhaps they were still standing at the wall where we had left them. . . . The Colonel reported that hundreds of Partisans had attacked . . . the little garrison had never had a chance against the overwhelmingly superior numbers of the heavily armed raiders. . . . No, his men had recognized none of the guerrillas. . . . He supposed they had come from some of the other islands, or even from the mainland. . . . You see, they feared reprisals too.

"In the end they solved the problem in a way that was typical. They picked up ten citizens at random in the town of Vis and ten more in Comisa and announced that if the arms were returned within three days the prisoners would be released: if the arms were not returned the hostages would be shot."

"My God! and what did you do?"

"There were meetings in both towns attended by the families of the hostages. We agreed to do whatever was decided at those meetings, after explaining to the people that Tito

wanted us to arm ourselves well so that we would be ready to strike on the coast when he gave the signal, which might come at any moment now. The deliberations were brief. In Comisa we were told: 'Keep the arms. And when the time comes use them well. Remember what they cost.'

"In Vis we were simply told: 'Keep the arms.' "

The fragile-looking story teller stared straight before him. His whole person was tense as he spoke the last words. The young prophet for whose head Salome danced ... he must have looked like that. . . .

After a moment he turned and smiled sadly, the tenseness going out of his face, adding in a tone of resignation:

"All twenty of them were shot nine days before the Italians became our allies, just nine days before the armistice which was signed last month on the third. I was a 'spectator' at the shooting in Comisa. . . ."

We smoked a while in silence, then I asked: "What happened to the garrison?"

"The Colonel was relieved before the executions and one of the other officers was left in charge. When news of the armistice reached us we disarmed them all again and let them go home to Italy on the first boat that crossed. What else was there to do? They were not responsible for the executions."

There was a strange quality of acceptance in Mladineo which came of long familiarity with the horrors of war. It was puzzling, at first. He could tell the most appalling tales, always with a wan smile as he completed them, and it was not until later that I understood this. He and his kind burn almost visibly with the intensity of their purpose, but they are seldom indignant, never outraged, never righteous or complaining. These are moods reserved for men of milder feelings.

"Smrt Fashizmu!" Mladineo said, reading my thoughts. "That means 'Death to Fascism' in our language. We find all the comfort we need in that phrase, which is the Partisan salutation."

I was to acquire a fuller knowledge of his meaning soon in Jugoslavia.

Catania was as still as a graveyard now. There seemed nothing further to talk about and we went to bed. Mladineo fell asleep but I lay long in my bunk, listening to his regular breathing and thinking of the island of Vis.