“Do you smell that?” Ferry said in great awe.
“A tannery, I rather think,” one of the lieutenants said.
“Maybe,” Ferry said, and his voice was strained. He drew a long breath, as if to steady himself. “But it’s free air to me.”
The rest were silent. They huddled together as the lorry swung down the mountainside. The only sounds came from the wheels grinding over the loose stones on the surface of the road. The engine had been switched off. The lorry was running silently, depending on its brakes and Johann’s skilful driving, down towards the town.
6
Johann snapped his fingers to attract attention, and then pointed. The men’s eyes followed the quick movement of the boy’s outstretched arm, black against the dark-blue sky. The lorry was coming well down into the valley now. The road had twisted in long, serpentine loops as it descended through the vineyards. Homes had been few, and silent. All around were the dark silhouettes of heightening mountain peaks. Below them was the river Eisak, which the Italians had named Isarco, with its flat, narrow valley broadening as it reached the scattered lights of a town.
“Bolzano,” the colonel said.
“Bozen,” Johann insisted. Over his shoulder he said, “We shall halt the lorry soon, north-east of the town. The English officer and Lennox will come with me to see the man. That will only take ten minutes. The lorry will wait for us until we have seen him.”
“And the barracks?” asked the colonel. Quick work, Lennox thought approvingly: the colonel was picking up Johann’s way of speaking. He didn’t need a translator now to help with the South Tyrol dialect twist in the words. Then why, Lennox demanded of the dark sky, why did he bring me down here? To reassure Johann? Or had Stewart’s premonition been right? Lennox kept his gloomy silence, and listened to Johann’s polite but adamant refusal to go near the barracks.
The lorry should be left on a side road on the outskirts of the town. It was just there that this man from Bozen was waiting for Johann. And the man would be able to tell them whether it was safe to try to reach the barracks. (For the barracks, seemingly, lay on the south side of the town at the river’s edge. To reach it, they would have either to pass the station, which certainly had been in German control this afternoon, or to make a detour through the centre of the town.) Perhaps, Johann suggested with a smile, the barracks had even already been emptied of its arms and ammunition. The man at Bozen would know.
The colonel said nothing. But when Johann stopped in the shadow of some trees just where a rough track, emerging darkly from a small wood, joined the road they had followed Lennox could almost feel the colonel’s unwillingness to leave the lorry guarded by the four other men. His plan, like most bright ideas, seemingly excellent at the moment of discovery, was beginning to tarnish with each minute of delay. The colonel had started worrying again. The barracks were his chief objective: he disliked having them made into secondary importance.
“If anyone starts asking questions just remember to keep talking German,” he said to the men. “Your story is that the lorry has broken down on your way back to the station after delivering the officers to the prison camp. Don’t shoot, unless you are desperate. Get rid of any curious stranger quietly.” The colonel looked round him. The countryside was peaceful, the isolated houses were dark and seemingly asleep even at this early hour. The lights in Bozen itself were scattered and dim: there were no shots, no shouts, to break through the deep silence of the night. The lorry was swallowed up in the trees’ shadows. Anyone passing along the road wouldn’t even notice it. All was well, so far. And yet his worry grew.
The colonel looked at the faint green numbering on his watch. “We’ve taken exactly six minutes to reach this point from the prison courtyard,” he said. “If Lennox and I aren’t back at the lorry in fifteen minutes flat, return to the camp. Remember to signal with your headlights as you approach it so that our guards will recognise you at once. Lieutenant Simmins, check the time.” The two officers compared their wrist-watches. There was a tightening in the faces of the waiting men.
Johann moved impatiently, and the colonel slowly left the lorry’s shadow. Lennox, at a sign, followed with equal reluctance. Johann was leading them into the wood by a well-marked path, so carefully cleared of trees and branches that Lennox realised it was as well-used as it was marked. It was only the black blanket of night, smothering recognisable shapes and distorting them into ominous shadows, which made this small wood seem so mysterious and dangerous. In daylight it would probably seem a very simple and innocent place.
When they had travelled less than a hundred yards (at first slowly, then more surely as their eyes became accustomed to the depths of shadows around them) and found themselves in a clearing Lennox knew his guess had been accurate enough. The path had been merely the entrance to a beer-garden. For in the clearing before him were wooden tables and benches, and beyond these lay a two-storeyed wooden house built in the Tyrolese manner with broad eaves overshadowing its side walls. An inn. That’s what it would be: a nice, woodland place for a picnic or a family reunion.
A family reunion. Lennox’s lips tightened, and he stared at the chalet, still and shuttered, lit only by the clear stars which shone so brightly above the clearing.
The colonel had halted too, but he was watching Johann. “Is this the place?” he asked.
Johann nodded. He was already walking over the stretch of soft, fine grass towards the house. He motioned impatiently with his hand for them to follow.
“Stay here,” the colonel said quietly, grasping Lennox suddenly by the arm. “Keep in the shadows. I’ll do the bargaining. I think I’m getting the hang of the boy’s dialect now. If I need you I’ll call you. If I meet trouble I’ll fire a shot. Then you will get back to the lorry and tell them to make for the camp at once. All quite clear?”
“If you are expecting trouble, sir, then I’d better—”
“No. You get back to the lorry to warn them.” The colonel’s voice was gloomy. His thin face was white under the starlight, but there was a determined cheerfulness in the smile he gave Lennox. Somehow it depressed Lennox still more. But his resentment against the colonel was disappearing. He was beginning to understand the colonel. He was even beginning to feel sorry for him.
Lennox settled back into the shadow of a group of trees, watched the tall, thin figure hurry after Johann, and then stared at the wood around him. “Rather he than I,” Lennox said to himself, as the officer followed Johann into the inn. He thought of the colonel’s gaunt white face, lined with perpetual anxieties, tight-lipped and cold-eyed with worry. That’s what responsibility did to a man. You could never make a decision without worrying whether it was the best one; you could never refuse a possibility without thinking of a lost opportunity. Whichever way you chose, you worried. Now the colonel was probably beginning to wish he hadn’t started on this plan of Johann’s. And yet, as Lennox waited, more nervously than he was willing to admit, he couldn’t see what else the colonel should have done. For the men in the prison camp had little chance as matters stood now: they hadn’t enough arms, they had wounded among them who couldn’t travel or fight, they didn’t know much about this countryside. The only alternative, as far as Lennox could see, would be for the band of prisoners to scatter and to look out each for himself. That would have been all right for Lennox or any who had been planning escape, but the others wouldn’t have much of a chance. And if any were captured then there would be no chance at all for them. The dead Germans in the little castle, up there on the hill behind him, would decide that.
Lennox stared at the wood’s shadows around him. He stared at the door of the silent chalet. He stared at the faintly glowing numbers on his wrist-watch. He held the revolver in the German coat pocket so tightly that his weakened hand grew quite numb. Six minutes, eight minutes. He shifted his weight and tautened as a twig broke under his foot. Eleven minutes. The door opened at last. He raised the revolver slowly, supporting his hand with his left fist. The colonel
was there all right. And Johann. And two other men—young men by their easy stride. As the group approached him he could see the strangers were wearing the usual dress of the South Tyrol—leather breeches, light-coloured wool stockings, shapeless felt hats, tweed jackets.
Lennox could see by the way the men walked that much had been decided. It didn’t need the colonel’s quiet “Everything laid on” to tell him that it had been thoroughly decided.
As they left the clearing to plunge into the wood the colonel was saying, “These chaps have already moved all guns and ammunition from the barracks—they knew the Germans would occupy it as soon as the railway was secured. The guns have been hidden in this wood, and these men are going to help us load the lorry with what it can hold. They say they’ve enough ammunition, too. They will take care of our wounded, and shelter them until they are strong enough to follow us. They will give us guides to help us bypass the German troops in this valley. After that we fight on our own to the south. If we move quickly enough we have a sporting chance to reach the Allied front before the Germans can reinforce the gaps which the Italians have left in their defence lines. God knows where our front will be before we reach it; it may be in Rome and moving northwards before the month is out if the Italians really rise up against the Germans. But wherever they are we’ll make a stab at finding them. We can’t go far wrong if we keep going south.”
Lennox said nothing for a full minute. Everything was settled, then; as fully settled as it could be. The men up in the castle had now, at least, a fighting chance. Sporting was the word that the colonel had used. Fighting would be nearer the truth. After his years of experience with the Italians Lennox wasn’t so sure that the Allies’ path to Rome would be made easy for them. He was willing to bet that the colonel had not been fighting long in the Mediterranean theatre. The colonel still believed in the milk of human kindness.
“What’s the guarantee of good faith, sir?” he asked quietly. These Tyrolese had given too much without demanding something in return.
“You are. You are going up there with the boy, Johann.” The colonel pointed north-east where the black mass of jagged peaks rose beyond the river Eisak. “There is a plateau up there which they call the Schlern. You will stay there, keeping your ears and eyes well open, until some of our men can be dropped in to join you.”
Lennox stared through the darkness. The colonel must have felt his amazement, for he said quickly, “When we reach the Allied lines we’ll get Intelligence on to the job. They’ll send some of their men by parachute on to the Schlern to join you. We’ll build up something there that will jolt the Huns.”
Lennox thought of several observations to make on such optimism, but none seemed suitable to a superior officer. He said, more quietly than he felt, “Very good, sir.”
The men round the lorry listened to the colonel’s instructions. Below them the lights in the town pin-pricked the darkness. The three Tyrolese stood quietly competent, eagerly ready. Everything was, as the colonel had first said, everything was laid on.
* * *
The lorry had started back up the hill with its load of men and guns. (“Enough,” the colonel had said, “enough for a starter, anyway. We’ll collect more on our way south.”)
Johann touched Lennox’s arm. The Englishman was watching the crawling truck, already part of the night’s blackness. Then he turned to follow the boy. To the north-east the mountains were still as remote and fantastic as they had seemed to Lennox staring at them through the barbed wire of a prison camp. Then they had been remote and fantastic because they had symbolised freedom. Now they themselves had become a prison, from which there was no escape. And he was walking into that prison, if not willingly then certainly without a revolver at his back.
“Why do you laugh?” Johann asked curiously. “It isn’t wise to laugh yet. We are too near these houses. Tomorrow, up on the Schlern, you can laugh all you want to.”
Lennox was suddenly serious. “Yes, I’ll laugh then,” he said grimly. He followed the boy’s sure steps, and wondered how many weeks it would take his comrades to reach the Allied lines. But he didn’t let himself think of the feeling they would have when they could be back with their own people again.
Johann’s quiet voice held its own revolt. “I had other plans too, for tonight,” he was saying, almost reprovingly. “My girl is down in Bozen, and when I don’t turn up to see her as I promised she will start worrying about the stray bullets which were flying this afternoon. And I don’t know whether she is safe either. She is not the kind to stay at home and hide under the bed. So,” his voice sharpened, “let’s start moving.”
Lennox thought how easy it was to forget that other people had their own private worries and disappointments. To appease this sudden twinge of conscience, he said politely, “Is she from the Tyrol too?”
“Eva?” Johann asked quickly, and by that quickness and that pleased note in his voice he showed that he wanted the other’s friendship. “Yes, she’s from my village. Now she is living in Bozen with relatives.” The boy talked on, quietly, interminably—about his village, which had been called Montefierro for the last twenty-four years, but which now reverted to the name of Hinterwald that had suited it very well for over three hundred years; about Eva Mussner.
Lennox followed him obediently, imitating his short plodding step up the steep incline of hillside. But Lennox said nothing at all. He began to regret his simple questions. The friendly warmth in this boy’s voice beat against the cold wall which imprisonment had built round his emotions. He had learned to live within himself. Miller’s death tonight only proved that affection and human liking brought deeper sorrow. The man who lived alone could laugh at life and tell it to do its damnedest. That way, a man was less vulnerable. What he wouldn’t allow himself to enjoy, he couldn’t be afraid of losing. Lennox stopped listening to Johann; his uneasiness turned to resentment. Hell, he thought irritably, what’s this Hinterwald or Eva Mussner to me? He scarcely noticed when the boy’s mumbling words grew farther spaced, and the sudden burst of confidence became a frozen block of silence.
Far to the south of them came a sudden burst of rifle fire. Lennox halted instinctively and looked back. It wasn’t an attack on the prison camp, for the machine guns, now firing heavily, were down in the valley.
Johann pulled his arm impatiently. “It is only the Germans and some angry Italians shooting it out,” he said. “And that will be good for your friends. The Germans have many worries tonight.”
Lennox watched the distant flashes of light, the sudden flaring of some ammunition or petrol dump. It was not an unpleasant feeling to turn his back on the skirmishing, to walk away into the darkness and leave those who had killed and mutilated so many of his friends now tearing at one another like the traitors in Dante’s hell.
7
The Schlern is really the highest of a group of mountains in the Dolomite Alps, but its name has come also to mean the high plateau of rolling meadows and forests over which the steep face of this rocky mass rises like some enormous fortress.
The road up to the Schlern begins in the Eisak valley, which leads southward to Italy and northward through the Brenner Pass to Austria. The road ascends steeply, by sudden twists and sharp turns. It cuts through cliffs of rock by narrow tunnels; it holds precariously to the precipice edge; it arrives at last—much to the relief of the traveller—on what seems to be the top of the world. But relief gives way to amazement, for up here lies still another world: one of villages and scattered farms and churches, of winding roads and streams and green meadows, of forests and mountain peaks challenging to still greater height. This is the Schlernland, an island of Alpine scenery pushed into the sky. It isn’t a naked, jutting kind of island, for the deep valleys surrounding it have their rugged waves of mountains too. On every side the sea of precipices is unending.
Perhaps it was because this road up to the Schlern was so treacherous in winter, or because the Germans found they had enough to worry about in keeping o
pen the supply route in the Eisak valley, that the Schlern had had one of its most peaceful winters. The Italian policemen, post-masters, soldiers, schoolteachers, and hotel-owners had gone. The skiers had not come this winter, just as the mountain-climbers had been absent last summer. The larger chalets and villas, which the wealthy Italians from Rome and Milan had built to give their children pleasant holidays, were now as empty as the small cottages abandoned by those Tyrolese who had listened to Hider in 1939, and had moved into Austria. The people of the Schlern who had clung to their heritages, who had refused to put their trust in politicians’ promises, called themselves—with their own grim smile—the survivors.
The winter had been hard. High on the Schlern a thick frozen blanket of snow had covered the grey peaks and the green slopes. The small villages, the scattered houses of forester and farmer, had fallen into a seeming sleep among the white mountains. Down in the valley below the Schlern, where the gap in the Dolomite highlands led north to the Brenner Pass, there was snow and sleet and cruel winds to huddle the people into their houses. There were other reasons too. The Germans had taken possession: their soldiers patrolled through alternating ice and slush, as they guarded the railway line and the flow of supplies to the German armies in Italy. German edicts, German puppets, controlled the towns on the railway line. Allied bombing-planes attacked them. Far to the south, in Italy, there was driving rain and earth so sodden that the fighting-fronts churned into delaying mud. The hope that October had brought had become as frozen as the earth from which the Dolomite Alps rose so steeply. The winter had been hard.