That night the air was full of parachutes and of “free-drops” whistling down like bombs. The anti-fascist youth retrieved them. They were loaded on carts, taken to a barn near the General’s headquarters and formally impounded.
Belgrade fell to the Russians, Bulgarians and partisans. A day of rejoicing was declared in Begoy by the Praesidium. The concert and the Vin d’Honneur, postponed in mourning, were held in triumph. The anti-fascist choir sang. The anti-fascist theater group staged a kind of pageant of liberation. Wine and Slivovic were copiously drunk and Guy through the interpreter made a formal little acknowledgment of the toast to Winston Churchill. And next day, perhaps, as part of the celebrations—Guy could never discern by what process the partisans from time to time were moved to acts of generosity—the Jews received their supplies.
Bakic greeted him with: “De Jews again,” and going into the yard he found it full of his former visitors, but now transformed into a kind of farcical army. All of them, men and women, wore military great-coats, balaclava helmets and knitted woolen gloves. Orders had been received from Belgrade, and distribution of the stores had suddenly taken place, and here were the recipients to thank him. The spokesmen were different on this occasion. The grocer and lawyer had gone ahead into the promised land. Mme. Kanyi kept away for reasons of her own; an old man made a longish speech which Bakic rendered “Dis guy say dey’s all very happy.”
For the next few days a deplorable kind of ostentation seemed to possess the Jews. A curse seemed to have been lifted. They appeared everywhere, trailing the skirts of their great-coats in the snow, stamping their huge new boots, gesticulating with their gloved hands. Their faces shone with soap, they were full of Spam and dehydrated fruits. They were a living psalm. And then, as suddenly, they disappeared.
“What has happened to them?”
“I guess dey been moved some other place,” said Bakic.
“Why?”
“People make trouble for them.”
Guy had business that day with the Commissar. When it was ended Guy said: “I see the Jews have moved.”
Without consulting his chief the intellectual young interpreter answered: “Their house was required for the Ministry of Rural Economy. New quarters have been found for them a few miles away.”
The Commissar asked what was being said, grunted, and rose. Guy saluted and the interview was at an end. On the steps the interpreter joined him.
“The question of the Jews, Captain Crouchback. It was necessary for them to go. Our people could not understand why they should have special treatment. We have partisan women who work all day and have no boots or overcoats. How are we to explain that these old people who are doing nothing for our cause, should have such things?”
“Perhaps by saying that they are old and have no cause. Their need is greater than a young enthusiast’s.”
“Besides, Captain Crouchback, they were trying to make business. They were bartering the things they had been given. My parents are Jewish and I understand these people. They want always to make some trade.”
“Well, what’s wrong with that?”
“War is not a time for trade.”
“Well, anyway, I hope they have decent quarters.”
“They have what is suitable.”
*
The gardens in winter seemed smaller than in full leaf. From fence to fence the snow-obliterated lawns and beds lay open; the paths were only traceable by boot-prints. Guy daily took a handful of broken biscuits to the squirrel and fed him through the bars. One day while he was thus engaged, watching the little creature go through the motions of concealment, cautiously return, grasp the food, jump away, and once more perform the mime of digging and covering, he saw Mme. Kanyi approach down the path. She was carrying a load of brushwood, stooping under it, so that she did not see him until she was quite close.
Guy had just received a signal for recall. The force was being renamed and reorganized. He was to report as soon as feasible to Bari. Word had gone to Belgrade, he supposed, that he was no longer persona grata.
He greeted Mme. Kanyi with warm pleasure. “Let me carry that.”
“No, please. It is better not.”
“I insist.”
Mme. Kanyi looked about her. No one was in sight. She let him take the load and carry it towards her hut.
“You have not gone with the others?”
“No, my husband is needed.”
“And you don’t wear your great-coat.”
“Not out of doors. I wear it at night in the hut. The coats and boots make everyone hate us, even those who have been kind before.”
“But partisan discipline is so firm. Surely there was no danger of violence?”
“No, that was not the trouble. It was the peasants. The partisans are frightened of the peasants. They will settle with them later, but at present they are dependent on them for food. Our people began to exchange things with the peasants. They would give needles and thread, razors, things no one can get, for turkeys and apples. No one wants money. The peasants preferred bartering with our people to taking the partisans’ bank-notes. That was what made the trouble.”
“Where have the others gone?”
She spoke a name which meant nothing to Guy. “You have not heard of that place? It is twenty miles away. It is not a place of good repute. It is where the Germans and Ustachi made a camp. They kept the Jews and gypsies and communists and royalists there, to work on the canal. Before they left they killed what were left of the prisoners—not many. Now the partisans have found new inhabitants for it.”
They had reached the hut and Guy entered to place his load in a corner near the little stove. It was the first and last time he crossed the threshold. He had a brief impression of orderly poverty and then was outside in the snow. “Listen, Signora,” he said. “Don’t lose heart. I am being recalled to Bari. As soon as the road is clear I shall be leaving. When I get there I promise I’ll raise Cain about this. You’ve plenty of friends there and I’ll explain the whole situation to them. We’ll get you all out, I promise.”
As they stood on the little patch before the door which Mme. Kanyi had cleared of snow they saw through the leafless shrubs the lurking figure of Bakic.
“You see you have been followed here.”
“He can’t make any trouble.”
“Not for you, perhaps. You are leaving. There was a time when I thought that all I needed for happiness was to leave. Our people feel that. They must move away from evil. Some hope to find homes in Palestine. Most look no further than Italy—just to cross the water, like crossing the Red Sea.
“Is there any place that is free from evil? It is too simple to say that only the Nazis wanted war. These communists wanted it too. It was the only way in which they could come to power. Many of my people wanted it, to be revenged on the Germans, to hasten the creation of the national state. It seems to me there was a will to war, a death wish, everywhere. Even good men thought their private honor would be satisfied by war. They could assert their manhood by killing and being killed. They would accept hardships in recompense for having been selfish and lazy. Danger justified privilege. I knew Italians—not very many perhaps—who felt this. Were there none in England?”
“God forgive me,” said Guy. “I was one of them.”
*
He had come to the end of the crusade to which he had devoted himself on the tomb of Sir Roger. His life as a Halberdier was over. All the stamping of the barrack square and the biffing of imaginary strongholds were finding their consummation in one frustrated act of mercy. He left Begoy without valediction save for the formal application at general headquarters for leave to travel. He took his small staff with him. His last act was to send by the hand of his orderly the pile of illustrated magazines to Mme. Kanyi. He gave the widows the remains of his stores. They wept.
The road to the coast was free of enemy and passable by jeep. It led through the desolate Lika where every village was ravaged and roofless, down into
the clement coast of the Adriatic. Forty-eight hours after leaving Begoy Guy and his men were under the walls of Diocletian at Split, where they found an English cruiser in harbor, whose company were forbidden to land. Partisans had the shore batteries trained on her. This, more than anything he had seen in Jugoslavia, impressed the sergeant. “Who’d have thought the Navy would stand for that, sir? It’s politics, that’s what it is.”
There was a British liaison officer at Split who gave him an order that had come, to drive on to Dubrovnik where a small British force, mostly of field artillery, had been landed and then held impotent. He was posted there as liaison officer between this force and the partisans.
His task was to hear from the partisan commander allegations of “incorrect behavior” by the British troops and convey them to the puzzled brigadier in command who had come under the supposition that he was a welcome ally; also to hear demands for supplies—the contrast between the fully equipped invaders and the ragged partisans was remarked by the townspeople—and to receive clandestine visits from civilians of various nationalities who wished to enroll themselves as displaced persons. On his first day he made a signal: Situation of displaced persons in Begoy area desperate, and received in answer: Appropriate authority informed, but his further lists of exiles received no acknowledgment.
At length, in mid-February the British force withdrew. Guy sailed with the advance-party. He was set ashore at Brindisi and drove up to Bari just a year after he had first gone there. The almond was again in flower. He reported to Major Marchpole. He dined at the club.
“Everything is packing up here,” said the major. “I shall stay on as long as I can. The brigadier has gone already. Joe Cattermole is in charge. You’ll be returning to U.K. as soon as you want.”
It was from Cattermole that he learned that the Jews of Begoy had escaped. A private charitable organization in America had provided a convoy of new Ford trucks, shipped them to Trieste, driven through the snow of Croatia, and, leaving the trucks as a tip for the partisans, brought the exiles to Italy. It was indeed as though the Red Sea had miraculously drawn asunder and left a dry passage between walls of water.
Guy got permission to visit them. They were back behind barbed wire in a stony valley near Lecce. With them were four or five hundred others collected from various prisons and hiding places, all old and all baffled, all in army great-coats and balaclava helmets.
“I can’t see the point of their being here,” said the commandant. “We feed them and doctor them and house them. That’s all we can do. No one wants them. The Zionists are only interested in the young. I suppose they’ll just sit here till they die.”
“Are they happy?”
“They complain the hell of a lot but then they’ve had the hell of a lot to complain about. It’s a lousy place to be stuck in.”
“I’m particularly interested in a pair called Kanyi.”
The commandant looked down his list. “Not here,” he said.
“Good. That probably means they got off to Australia all right.”
“Not from here, old man. I’ve been here all along. No one has ever left.”
“Could you make sure? Anyone in the Begoy draft would know about them.”
The commandant sent his interpreter to inquire while he took Guy into the shed he called his mess, and gave him a drink. Presently the man returned. “All correct, sir. The Kanyis never left Begoy. They got into some kind of trouble there and were jugged.”
“May I go with the interpreter and ask about it?”
“By all means, old man. But aren’t you making rather heavy weather of it? What do two more or less matter?”
Guy went into the compound with the interpreter. Some of the Jews recognized him and crowded round him with complaints and petitions. All he could learn about the Kanyis was that they had been taken off the truck by the partisan police just as it was about to start.
He took the question to Major Marchpole.
“We don’t really want to bother the Jugs any more. They really cooperated very well about the whole business. Besides the war’s over now in that part. There’s no particular point in moving people out. We’re busy at the moment moving people in.” This man was in fact at that moment busy dispatching royalist officers—though he did not know it—to certain execution.
Guy spent his last days in Bari revisiting the offices where by signal he had begun his work of liberation. The Jewish office showed little interest in him when they understood that he had not come to sell them illicit arms. They showed no interest in the Kanyis when they learned they were bound for Australia and not for Zion. “We must first set up the State,” they said. “Then it will be a refuge for all. First things first.”
An old Air Force acquaintance from Alexandrian days had a flat in Posillipo and asked Guy to stay. For a journey such as his it was a matter of being fitted into an aeroplane at the last moment when someone more important failed.
On the day before he was due to leave for Naples, he was accosted by Gilpin who said: “I hear you’ve been making inquiries about a couple named Kanyi.”
“Yes, I’m interested in them.”
“I thought you might be. It didn’t sound like Frank de Souza exactly.”
“What didn’t?”
“The confidential report. The woman was the mistress of a British Liaison Officer.”
“Nonsense.”
“He was seen leaving her home when her husband was away on duty. They were a thoroughly shady couple. The husband was guilty of sabotaging the electric light plant. A whole heap of American counter-revolutionary propaganda was found in their room. The whole association was most compromising to the Mission. It’s lucky Cape had handed over to Joe before we got the report. You might have found yourself on a charge. But Joe’s not vindictive. He just moved you where you couldn’t do any harm. Though I may say that some of the names you sent us as displaced persons at Dubrovnik are on the black list.”
“What happened to the Kanyis?”
“What do you suppose? They were tried by a People’s Court. You may be sure justice was done.”
Once before in his military career Guy had been tempted to strike a brother officer—Trimmer at Southsand. The temptation was stronger now, but before he had done more than clench his fist, before he had raised it, the sense of futility intervened. He turned and left the office.
Next day he settled in Posillipo.
“For a chap who’s on his way home you don’t seem very cheerful,” said his host and then changed the subject, for he had had many men through his hands who were returning to problems more acute than any they had faced on active service.
Eleven
Unconditional Surrender
I
In 1951, to celebrate the opening of a happier decade, the government decreed a Festival. Monstrous constructions appeared on the south bank of the Thames, the foundation stone was solemnly laid for a National Theatre, but there was little popular exuberance among the straitened people and dollar-bearing tourists curtailed their visits and sped to the countries of the Continent where, however precarious their condition, they ordered things better.
There were few private parties. Two of these were held in London on the same June evening.
Tommy Blackhouse had returned to England in May. He was retiring from the army with many decorations, a new, pretty wife, and the rank of major-general. In the last years he had advanced far beyond his commando into posts of greater and greater eminence and responsibility, never seeming to seek promotion, never leaving rancor behind him among those he surpassed; but his first command lay closest to his heart. Meeting Bertie in Bellamy’s he had suggested a reunion dinner. Bertie agreed that it would be agreeable. “It would mean an awful lot of organizing though,” said this one-time adjutant. It was left to Tommy, as always, to do the work.
The officers who had assembled at Mugg were not so scattered as those of other wartime units. Most of them had been together in prison. Luxmore had made
an escape. Ivor Claire had spent six months in Burma with the Chindits, had done well, collected a D.S.O. and an honorably incapacitating wound. He was often in Bellamy’s now. His brief period of disgrace was set aside and almost forgotten.
“You’re going to invite everyone?” asked Bertie.
“Everyone I can find. What was the name of that old Halberdier? Jumbo someone. We’ll ask the seaweed eater. I don’t somehow think he’ll come. Guy Crouchback of course.”
“Trimmer?”
“Certainly.”
But Trimmer had disappeared. All Tommy’s adroit inquiries failed to find any trace of him. Some said he had jumped ship in South Africa. Nothing was known certainly. Fifteen men eventually assembled, including Guy.
The second, concurrent festivity was given in part by Arthur Box-Bender. He had lost his seat in Parliament in 1945. He rarely came to London in the succeeding years but that June evening he was induced to pay his half share in a small dance given in an hotel for his eighteen-year-old daughter and a friend of hers. For an hour or two he stood with Angela greeting the ill-conditioned young people who were his guests. Some of the men wore hired evening-dress; others impudently presented themselves in dinner-jackets and soft shirts. He and his fellow-host had been at pains to find the cheapest fizzy wine in the market. Feeling thirsty, he sauntered down Piccadilly and turned into St. James’s. Bellamy’s alone retained some traces of happier days.
Elderberry was in the middle hall reading Air Marshal Beech’s reminiscences. He, also, had lost his seat. His successful opponent, Gilpin, was not popular in the House but he was making his mark and had lately become an under-secretary. Elderberry had no habitation outside London. He had no occupation there. Most of his days and evenings were passed alone in this same armchair in Bellamy’s.
He looked disapprovingly at Box-Bender’s starched front.
“You still go out?”
“I had to give a party tonight for my daughter.”
“Ah, something you had to pay for? That’s different. It’s being asked I like. I’m never asked anywhere now.”