Mallory shifted in his seat and looked at the girl. Her eyes, dark and unmoving and unwinking, were fixed on him and their expression was less than encouraging. Mallory turned back to Neufeld.
‘Who did it? To her parents, I mean.’
‘The Partisans,’ Droshny said savagely. ‘Damn their black souls, the Partisans. Maria’s people were our people. Cetniks.’
‘And the singer?’ Mallory said.
‘Her elder brother.’ Neufeld shook his head. ‘Blind from birth. Wherever she goes, she leads him by the hand. She is his eyes: she is his life.’
They sat in silence until food and wine were brought in. If an army marched on its stomach, Mallory thought, this one wasn’t going to get very far: he had heard that the food situation with the Partisans was close to desperate, but, if this were a representative sample, the Cetniks and Germans appeared to be in little better case. Unenthusiastically, he spooned – it would have been impossible to use a fork – a little of the greyish stew, a stew in which little oddments of indefinable meat floated forlornly in a mushy gravy of obscure origin, glanced across at Andrea and marvelled at the gastronomic fortitude that lay behind the already almost empty plate. Miller averted his eyes from the plate before him and
delicately sipped the rough red wine. The three sergeants, so far, hadn’t even looked at their food: they were too occupied in looking at the girl by the fireside. Neufeld saw their interest, and smiled.
‘I do agree, gentlemen, that I’ve never seen a more beautiful girl and heaven knows what she’d look like if she had a wash. But she’s not for you, gentlemen. She’s not for any man. She’s wed already.’ He looked at the questioning faces and shook his head. ‘Not to any man. To an ideal – if you can call death an ideal. The death of the Partisans.’
‘Charming,’ Miller murmured. There was no other comment, for there was none to make. They ate in silence broken only by the soft singing from the fireside, the voice was melodious enough, but the guitar sounded sadly out of tune. Andrea pushed away his empty plate, looked irritably at the blind musician and turned to Neufeld.
‘What’s that he’s singing?’
‘An old Bosnian love song, I’ve been told. Very old and very sad. In English you have it too.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘Yes, that’s it. “The girl I left behind me”.’
‘Tell him to sing something else,’ Andrea muttered. Neufeld looked at him, puzzled, then looked away as a German sergeant entered and bent to whisper in his ear. Neufeld nodded and the sergeant left.
‘So.’ Neufeld was thoughtful. ‘A radio report
from the patrol that found your plane. The tanks
were
empty. I hardly think we need await confirmation from Padua, do you, Captain Mallory?’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘No matter. Tell me, have you ever heard of a General Vukalovic?’
‘General which?’
‘Vukalovic.’
‘He’s not on our side,’ Miller said positively. ‘Not with a name like that.’
‘You must be the only people in Yugoslavia who
don’t
know him. Everybody else does. Partisans, Cetniks, Germans, Bulgarians, everyone. He is one of their national heroes.’
‘Pass the wine,’ Andrea said.
‘You’d do better to listen.’ Neufeld’s tone was sharp. ‘Vukalovic commands almost a division of Partisan infantry who have been trapped in a loop of the Neretva river for almost three months. Like the men he leads. Vukalovic is insane. They have no shelter, none. They are short of weapons, have almost no ammunition left and are close to starvation. Their army is dressed in rags. They are finished.’
‘Then why don’t they escape?’ Mallory asked.
‘Escape is impossible. The precipices of the Neretva cut them off to the east. To the north and west are impenetrable mountains. The only conceivable way out is to the south, over the bridge at Neretva. And we have two armoured divisions waiting there.’
‘No gorges?’ Mallory asked. ‘No passes through the mountains?’
‘Two. Blocked by our best combat troops.’
‘Then why don’t they give up?’ Mallory asked reasonably. ‘Has no one told them the rules of war?’
‘They’re insane, I tell you,’ Neufeld said. ‘Quite insane.’
At that precise moment in time, Vukalovic and his Partisans were proving to some other Germans just how extraordinary their degree of insanity was.
The Western Gap was a narrow, tortuous, boulder-strewn and precipitously walled gorge that afforded the only passage through the impassable mountains that shut off the Zenica Cage to the east. For three months now German infantry units – units which had recently included an increasing number of highly-skilled Alpine troops – had been trying to force the pass: for three months they had been bloodily repulsed. But the Germans never gave up trying and on this intensely cold night of fitful moonlight and gently, intermittently falling snow, they were trying again.
The Germans carried out their attack with the coldly professional skill and economy of movement born of long and harsh experience. They advanced up the gorge in three fairly even and judiciously spaced lines: the combination of white snow suits, of the utilization of every scrap of
cover and of confining their brief forward rushes to those moments when the moon was temporarily obscured made it almost impossible to see them. There was, however, no difficulty in locating them: they had obviously ammunition and to spare for machine-pistols and rifles alike and the fire-flashes from those muzzles were almost continuous. Almost as continuous, but some distance behind them, the sharp flat cracks of fixed mountain pieces pinpointed the source of the creeping artillery barrage that preceded the Germans up the boulder-strewn slope of that narrow defile.
The Yugoslav Partisans waited at the head of the gorge, entrenched behind a redoubt of boulders, hastily piled stones and splintered tree-trunks that had been shattered by German artillery fire. Although the snow was deep and the east wind full of little knives, few of the Partisans wore greatcoats. They were clad in an extraordinary variety of uniforms, uniforms that had belonged in the past to members of British, German, Italian, Bulgarian and Yugoslav armies: the one identifying feature that all had in common was a red star sewn on to the right-hand side of their forage caps. The uniforms, for the most part, were thin and tattered, offering little protection against the piercing cold, so that the men shivered almost continuously. An astonishing proportion of them appeared to be wounded: there were splinted legs, arms in slings and bandaged heads everywhere. But the most
common characteristic among this rag-tag collection of defenders was their pinched and emaciated faces, faces where the deeply etched lines of starvation were matched only by the calm and absolute determination of men who have no longer anything to lose.
Near the centre of the group of defenders, two men stood in the shelter of the thick bole of one of the few pines still left standing. The silvered black hair, the deeply trenched – and now even more exhausted – face of General Vukalovic was unmistakable. But the dark eyes glowed as brightly as ever as he bent forward to accept a cigarette and light from the officer sharing his shelter, a swarthy, hook-nosed man with at least half of his black hair concealed under a blood-stained bandage. Vukalovic smiled.
‘Of course I’m insane, my dear Stephan. You’re insane – or you would have abandoned this position weeks ago. We’re all insane. Didn’t you know?’
‘I know this.’ Major Stephan rubbed the back of his hand across a week-old growth of beard. ‘Your parachute landing, an hour ago. That was insane. Why, you –’ He broke off as a rifle fired only feet away, moved to where a thin youngster, not more than seventeen years of age, was peering down into the white gloom of the gorge over the sights of a Lee-Enfield. ‘Did you get him?’
The boy twisted and looked up. A child. Vukalovic thought despairingly, no more than a child: he
should still have been at school. The boy said: ‘I’m not sure, sir.’
‘How many shells have you left? Count them.’
‘I don’t have to. Seven.’
‘Don’t fire till you are sure.’ Stephan turned back to Vukalovic. ‘God above, General, you were almost blown into German hands.’
‘I’d have been worse off without the parachute,’ Vukalovic said mildly.
‘There’s so little time.’ Stephan struck a clenched fist against a palm. ‘So little time left. You were crazy to come back. They need you far more –’ He stopped abruptly, listened for a fraction of a second, threw himself at Vukalovic and brought them both crashing heavily to the ground as a whining mortar shell buried itself among loose rocks a few feet away, exploding on impact. Close by, a man screamed in agony. A second mortar shell landed, then a third and a fourth, all within thirty feet of one another.
‘They’ve got the range now, damn them.’ Stephan rose quickly to his feet and peered down the gorge. For long seconds he could see nothing, for a band of dark cloud had crossed the face of the moon: then the moon broke through and he could see the enemy all too clearly. Because of some almost certainly prearranged signal, they were no longer making any attempt to seek cover: they were pounding straight up the slope with all the speed they could muster, machine-carbines and rifles at the ready in their hands – and as soon as the moon
broke through they squeezed the triggers of those guns. Stephan threw himself behind the shelter of a boulder.
‘Now!’ he shouted. ‘Now!’
The first ragged Partisan fusillade lasted for only a few seconds, then a black shadow fell over the valley. The firing ceased.
‘Keep firing,’ Vukalovic shouted. ‘Don’t stop now. They’re closing in.’ He loosed off a burst from his own machine-pistol and said to Stephan, ‘They know what they are about, our friends down there.’
‘They should.’ Stephan armed a stick grenade and spun it down the hill. ‘Look at all the practice we’ve given them.’
The moon broke through again. The leading German infantry were no more than twenty-five yards away. Both sides exchanged hand-grenades, fired at point-blank range. Some German soldiers fell, but many more came on, flinging themselves on the redoubt. Matters became temporarily confused. Here and there bitter hand-to-hand fighting developed. Men shouted at each other, cursed each other, killed each other. But the redoubt remained unbroken. Suddenly, dark heavy clouds again rolled over the moon, darkness flooded the gorge and everything slowly fell quiet. In the distance the thunder of artillery and mortar fire fell away to a muted rumble, then finally died.
‘A trap?’ Vukalovic said softly to Stephan. ‘You think they will come again?’
‘Not tonight.’ Stephan was positive. ‘They’re brave men, but –’
‘But not insane?’
‘But not insane.’
Blood poured down over Stephan’s face from a reopened wound in his face, but he was smiling. He rose to his feet and turned as a burly sergeant came up and delivered a sketchy salute.
‘They’ve gone, Major. We lost seven of ours this time, and fourteen wounded.’
‘Set pickets two hundred metres down,’ Stephan said. He turned to Vukalovic. ‘You heard, sir? Seven dead. Fourteen hurt.’
‘Leaving how many?’
‘Two hundred. Perhaps two hundred and five.’
‘Out of four hundred.’ Vukalovic’s mouth twisted. ‘Dear God, out of four hundred.’
‘And sixty of those are wounded.’
‘At least you can get them down to the hospital now.’
‘There is no hospital,’ Stephan said heavily. ‘I didn’t have time to tell you. It was bombed this morning. Both doctors killed. All our medical supplies – poof! Like that.’
‘Gone? All gone?’ Vukalovic paused for a long moment. ‘I’ll have some sent up from HQ. The walking wounded can make their own way to HQ.’
‘The wounded won’t leave, sir. Not any more.’
Vukalovic nodded in understanding and went on: ‘How much ammunition?’
‘Two days. Three, if we’re careful.’
‘Sixty wounded.’ Vukalovic shook his head in slow disbelief. ‘No medical help whatsoever for them. Ammunition almost gone. No food. No shelter. And they won’t leave. Are they insane, too?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I’m going down to the river,’ Vukalovic said. ‘To see Colonel Lazlo at HQ.’
‘Yes, sir.’ Stephan smiled faintly. ‘I doubt if you’ll find his mental equilibrium any better than mine.’
‘I don’t suppose I will,’ Vukalovic said.
Stephan saluted and turned away, mopping blood from his face, walked a few short swaying steps then knelt down to comfort a badly wounded man. Vukalovic looked after him expressionlessly, shaking his head: then he, too, turned and left.
Mallory finished his meal and lit a cigarette. He said, ‘So what’s going to happen to the Partisans in the Zenica Cage, as you call it?’
‘They’re going to break out,’ Neufeld said. ‘At least, they’re going to try to.’
‘But you’ve said yourself that’s impossible.’
‘Nothing is too impossible for those mad Partisans to try. I wish to heaven,’ Neufeld said bitterly, ‘that we were fighting a normal war against normal people, like the British or Americans. Anyway, we’ve had information – reliable information – that an attempted break-out is imminent. Trouble is, there are those two passes – they might even
try to force the bridge at Neretva – and we don’t know where the break-out is coming.’
‘This is very interesting.’ Andrea looked sourly at the blind musician who was still giving his rendering of the same old Bosnian love-song. ‘Can we get some sleep now?’