We Die Alone: A WWII Epic of Escape and Endurance (12 page)

But of course the guard on the roadblock in Lyngseidet was a
more unfortunate encounter. They certainly knew he was up to
something illegal, because he had run away, and they knew fairly
exactly where he had gone. That incident was bound to be reported,
at least to battalion headquarters. He could not be sure if they had
seen the uniform, or whether headquarters would put two and two
together and guess that the man who had been seen in Lyngseidet
was the one who had escaped in Toftefjord. It depended how many
other people in the district, for one reason or another, were on the
run. At the worst, it meant they had picked up his trail again, and if
they thought it was worth it, they might put extra patrols in the
country he had to pass through. He wondered how badly they
wanted to catch him.

In any case, the best thing, as ever, was speed: to travel faster than
they would think he could possibly travel. And now he had the
means to do this, because people who do not know much about skis
can often hardly believe the distance an expert can go on them in the
course of a day. The Germans would not know much about them
unless they were Bavarians; and even people who ski in the Alps are
inclined only to think of skiing downhill, and going uphill by lifts or
even railways. Cross-country ski-running, uphill and down, is a particularly Norwegian activity, and a Norwegian skier on holiday, or
merely on a journey, thinks nothing of fifty miles a day.

So Jan set off with confidence, and even with a certain amount of
pleasure, in anticipation of the run. He imagined himself staying at
about 3000 feet, following the contour along the fjord and keeping
the water in sight. But of course no mountainside, even the side of a
fjord, is quite so regular and simple. He had only gone a few miles
along the slope of Goalesvarre when he found a side valley in front
of him which ran deep into the mountains. As he approached it and
the head of it opened up, he saw the smooth snow surface of a glacier in it, and even the glacier was below him. Rather than try to cross
it, he went right down to the valley bed below the ice and climbed up
it again on the other side.

Beyond the valley there was another minor hazard of a different
kind. The side of the fjord became steeper, and finally sheer. To get
past this cliff he might have gone over the top; but it was very high,
and to the right of it, on the inland side, there was a col which seemed
a more sensible line for the summer track to follow. It looked as
though it would lead back to the fjord five miles or so beyond. So he
headed for the col, and very soon he lost sight of the fjord.

By then it must have been about eleven o'clock in the morning,
and he had covered something like twenty miles since he left the
boat at Kjosen. It was good going, and everything looked promising; but it was just before he reached the col that the weather
changed again.

It came over the high summits on his right, first the white wisps
of clouds like flags on the highest peaks, and then the stray gusts of
wind and the darkening of the sky. The sun went in, and the snowfields lost their sparkling clarity and detail and became monotonous
and grey, and the air at once struck chill. And then the snow began to
fall, softly at first but more heavily minute by minute as the wind
increased and the clouds descended. With the same abruptness that
he had seen in Ringvassoy, the storm swooped downward and
enveloped him in a whirling white impenetrable wall.

It had happened before, and it gave him no cause to be alarmed,
because all the sudden storms he had seen in the last few days had
been short, and had ended as suddenly as they had begun. It was
annoying, the more so now that he had skis. In his rubber boots the
storms had not made much difference to his speed. He had plodded
on all through them. But now he could not make use of his extra
speed. He could hardly see five yards in front of him, and any slight
downward grade might lead to a sudden drop. He had to be able to
stop at any moment, and on slopes which he might have run at full
speed he now had to check, and creep down circumspectly. It was not
only slow, it was twice as tiring.

Nevertheless, he pressed on, hoping and still expecting to see the
lightening of the cloud which would be the sign that the squall was
passing and that a few minutes more would bring sunshine again
with the snowcloud whirling away towards the fjord.

But no sign came. On the contrary, the wind went on increasing.
It was getting worse than anything he had experienced before, and as
hours passed he had to admit to himself that this was not merely a
squall. It was useless to rely upon its ending. He ought to act as
though it might last for days. That meant that he must find shelter,
and to find it he must get down to the fjord again.

But before he had come unwillingly to this decision, a new aspect
of storm began to manifest. The surface of the lying snow began to
creep, first in whorls and eddies, and later in clouds which forced him to shut his eyes and put his hand over his mouth to keep the driving
snow-powder out of his throat and lungs. When the very surface he
stood on began to move, there was nothing stable left for his eyes to
be fixed upon, when he stood still, the snow silted into the tracks
which he had made, and then it was only by the wind that he could
have any idea which direction he had been going. Each little slope
which faced him then became a new problem in itself. Each one
which he saw from the bottom vanished into the shifting mists a few
feet above his head, and each of them might be the foot of a great
mountain or the whole of a tiny mound. From the top of a slope he
could not tell whether it was five feet in height or a thousand. He
only knew that somewhere about him the surface plunged down in
sheer chasms to the fjord waters three thousand feet below, and that
somewhere it rose three thousand feet above him to the soaring crags
he had seen in the light of the dawn.

He guided himself by the wind, keeping it on his right. The right
side of his body was coated with ice; it matted his hair and his weekold beard, and his right hand grew numb. He had tried to keep on in
the direction he had been going when the storm came down, because
he believed it would lead him to lower ground. But after some hours
he began to doubt even the wind. He would sometimes have sworn
that he had travelled for fifty yards in a straight line, and yet the wind
which had been on his right swooped down on him from ahead. It
seemed to be eddying down from the higher mountains, perhaps following valleys which he could not see. He stood still to test it, and
even while he stood still it changed direction. Without the wind to
guide him, he was lost.

Some time during that day he stopped and tried to dig himself
into the snow to wait for the abatement of the storm, because he
despaired of finding the way out of the mountains. But as soon as
he crouched down in the little hollow he scraped out, the cold
attacked him with such violence that he knew he would die here if
he rested. He had often read that if you lie down and sleep in a blizzard you never get up again. Now he knew it was true: it would
not take very long. He got up and put on his skis and struggled
onwards, not caring much any more which way he was moving, but
moving because he did not dare to stop. Towards the end of the day
his wandering became quite aimless and he lost all sense either of
time or space.

One cannot say whether it was the same day or the next that he
first perceived a continuity in the slope of the mountain. He was
going downhill. By then he had devised a plan for descending slopes
which had probably already saved his life. When he came to a void,
he gathered a big snowball and kneaded it hard and threw it in front
of him. Sometimes, above the sound of the wind, he heard it fall, and
then he went on; but more often it vanished without any sound at all,
and he turned aside and tried another way. Now, edging cautiously
down a slope and throwing snowballs, he saw rock walls both to right
and left of it. It was a watercourse. He knew it was possible, or even
likely, that it led to the top of a frozen waterfall and that he was running a serious risk of stepping on to the ice of the fall before he could
see it. But at last it was something to follow which must lead in the
end to the sea. He crept down it with infinite caution, testing every
step for hidden ice. He saw little bushes and knew he was getting low.
And then, directly below him, there was a square block which
loomed dark in the snow. He ran joyfully down the last few yards
towards it, because he thought it was a house. But it was not. It was
only an enormous isolated rock. But it had a hollow underneath it,
like a cave, and he squeezed in there, lying down because it was not
high enough to crawl. As soon as he lay down, in shelter from the
wind and snow, he went to sleep.

That rock is the first identifiable place which Jan came to on that
journey. It stands in a narrow valley called Lyngdalen. It is only about
ten miles in a perfectly straight line from Lyngseidet, where the roadblock was: but nobody knows where or how far he had been before
he got there.

At the rock he made a mistake which was nearly fatal. There is an
acute bend in the valley just there. As he approached it, down the
northern side, the valley led on in two directions, one only a little way
to the left and the other equally little to the right. Downstream was to
the left, and that way the valley ran without any hazard straight down
to Lyngenfjord, five miles below. To the right the valley led gently up
to the foot of the highest mountain in north Norway, the peak of
Jaegous; in fact, Jaeggevarre towers over the upper valley and closes it
with a sheer bastion 3000 feet high and three miles long. But in storm,
when neither the mountain nor the valley walls were visible, the place
was a trap. A great moraine nearly closes the valley at that point. The
summer river passes it through a gorge. But in winter the gorge is full
of snow, and the immediate foreground of the valley floor slopes
down to the right, upstream. When Jan woke up and crept out of the
crevice below the rock, the storm was still raging. He saw nothing
except the foreground, and he put on his skis again and set forth,
downhill, towards the right, away from Lyngenfjord and all possible
help or safety, into the very heart of the highest hills.

He was beginning to suffer from exposure by then, and one cannot deduce how long he had been stormbound, or whether it was
night or day. When one's body is worn by a long effort at the limit of
its strength, and especially when its function is dulled by cold, one's
mind loses first of all its sharp appreciation of time. Incidents which
are really quite separate become blended together; the present and
the immediate past are not distinct, but are all part of a vaguely
defined present of physical misery. In a person of strong character,
hope for the future remains separate long after the past and present
are confused. It is when the future loses its clarity too, and hope
begins to fade, that death is not far away.

Jan's mind was certainly numbed and confused by then, but so far
he had not the slightest doubt about the future, and he was still
thinking clearly enough to use the common sense of the craft of
mountaineering. Now that he had found what he knew was a river valley of considerable size, he did not expect any trouble in following
it to the sea; and so he was astonished and baffled when he found the
ground rising in front of him again. He had come to what he thought
was a frozen lake, though in fact it is only a level part of the valley
floor, and he followed what seemed to be the shore of it, with the valley wall above him on his right. He came to the end of it expecting to
find its outflow; but there was still a steep slope above him and he
could not see the top. He went right round the lake till he came back
to the moraine where he had started; and there for the second time
he missed the snow-filled gorge. Search as he might, he could not
find the outlet. He seemed to be in the bottom of a bowl, with the
lake on his left as he circled round it and unbroken snow-slopes
always on his right. There was nothing for it except to give up the
hope of going on downhill. He had to start climbing again.

His choice of direction then, if it was not at random, was probably governed by the light. In the thickest of cloud and snow one
sometimes has an impression of greater darkness where a steep rock
face is close above. The side of Lyngdalen may have thrown extra
darkness, and so may the sharp bend downstream in the narrow valley. But upstream Jaeggevarre stands farther back, and in that direction there is less to obscure the light. Jan may have concluded that
this was south, or that it was really the lower reaches of the valley. At
all events, he began to climb that way. He went up diagonally, hoping
and expecting all the way to find an easing of the gradient and a sign
that the valley went on beyond. Very soon he lost sight of the bottom,
but although he climbed on and on, he could not see the top. He was
on a slope of snow which in his restricted vision seemed eternal; on
his left it vanished into invisible depths, and on his right it merged in
the cloud above. In front of him and behind him, it was exactly the
same: his ski tracks across it disappeared a few seconds after he made
them. It was a world of its own, dizzily tilted on edge, full of the tearing wind, with himself for ever at the centre and the farthest edges
diffuse and ill-defined.

Suddenly with lightening speed the snow slope split from end to
end and the snow below his feet gave way. He fell on his side and
snatched at the surface, but everything was moving, and the snow fell
upon him and rolled him over and over. He felt himself going down
and down, faster and faster, fighting with roaring masses of snow
which were burying him alive. It wrenched and pounded his helpless
body, and choked him and battered him till he was unconscious. He
fell limply in the heart of the avalanche and it cast out his body on
the valley floor below. Down there he lay still, long after its thunder
had echoed away to silence.