Читать книгу We Die Alone - David Howarth - Страница 10

CHAPTER THREE

HUNTED

IF JAN had stopped to think, everything would have seemed hopeless. He was alone, in uniform, on a small bare island, hunted by about fifty Germans. He left a deep track, as he waded through the snow, which anyone could follow. He was wet through and had one bare foot, which was wounded, and it was freezing hard. The island was separated from the mainland by two sounds, each several miles wide, which were patrolled by the enemy, and all his money and papers had been blown up in the boat.

But when a man’s mind is numbed by sudden disaster, he acts less by reason than by reflex. In military affairs, it is at moments like those that training is most important. The crew’s training had been nautical, the sea was their element, and when their ship disappeared before their eyes and they were cast ashore without time to recover themselves and begin to think, their reaction was to lose hope and to surrender. But Jan had been trained to regard that barren hostile country as a place where he could live and work for years. He had expected to go ashore and to live off the land, and so, when the crisis came, he turned without any conscious reason to the land as a refuge, and began to fight his way out. If his companions had not been wounded or overcome by the icy water, no doubt they would have done the same thing, although none of them knew then, as they learned later, that any risks and any sufferings were better than surrender.

For the moment, his thoughts did not extend beyond the next few minutes. He thought no more than a hunted fox with a baying pack behind it, and he acted with the instinctive cunning of a fox. It served him better, in that primitive situation, than the complicated processes of reason. On the southern slopes of the island there was less snow. Here and there, where the rocks were steep, he found bare patches, and he hobbled towards them and crossed them, leaving no track, laying false trails, doubling back on the way he had come, jumping from stone to stone to leave the snow untrodden in between. But there was no cover. Wherever he went, he could be seen from one part of the island or another; and as the shock of the battle faded and his heart and lungs began to recover from the effort of his climb, he began to believe that although he had escaped, it could only be minutes before the Germans ran him down.

Running blindly here and there among the hills, hampered by his wounded foot, he had no idea how far he had come from Toftefjord, and before he expected it he found himself facing the sea again. Below him on the shore there were some houses and a jetty, and from Eskeland’s description he recognised the shop. He had crossed the island already. He remembered that the shopkeeper had a boat, and he thought of trying to steal it. But the water in front of him was wide and clear, and the Germans would be over the hill behind him at any moment. He knew he could not get out of sight in a boat before they came.

He went on, down to the shore a little way from the jetty. There at least was a narrow strip of beach which was free of snow, and he could walk along it, slowly and painfully, without leaving any tracks at all. He turned to the left, away from the shop, back towards Toftefjord. He felt intolerably lonely.

There were two little haysheds by the shore. He wanted to creep into one and hide there and burrow in the hay and get warm and go to sleep. They were obvious hiding places. But even as he began to think of it, he knew they were too obvious. They were isolated. He pictured himself hidden there in the dark, hearing the Germans coming along the beach, and their expectant shouts when they saw the sheds, and himself trapped in there while they surrounded him. The very uselessness of the haysheds impressed upon him that there really was no hiding place for him in that dreadful island. If he stayed on the island, wherever he hid he would be found.

As he scrambled along the beach he was coming nearer, though he did not know it, to the sound which Eskeland and the others had passed through on their way to the shop. It is called Vargesund, and it is full of rocks, in contrast to the wide open waters to the north and south. The largest of the rocks is about half an acre in extent. As soon as Jan saw this little island, he knew what he had to do, and for the first time he saw a gleam of hope. He hurried to the edge of the water, and waded in, and began to swim again.

It was only fifty yards to the rock, and in spite of his clothes and his pistol and his one sea-boot, he had no difficulty in swimming across. But when he dragged himself out of the mixture of ice and water, and climbed over to the far side of the rock, the effect of this second swim began to tell on him. He had to begin to reckon with the prospect of freezing to death.

There was a minute patch of peat on top of the islet, and someone had been cutting it. He got down below the peatbank and started to do exercises, keeping an eye on the hills of the main island. His bare foot was quite numb, although running had made an unpleasant mess of the raw end of his toe. He took off his sea-boot and moved his one sock from his left foot to his right. It seemed a good idea to have a boot on one foot and a sock on the other. He stamped his feet, crouching down below the bank, to start the circulation and try to ward off frostbite.

It was only a very short time before the Germans came in sight, and for the next two hours he watched them, at first with apprehension, and then with a growing sense of his own advantage. They came slowly, in straggling line abreast, pausing to challenge every stone, with a medley of shouts and orders and counter-orders; and Jan, watching them critically in the light of his own field training, remembered one of the many things he had been told and had only half believed: that the garrisons of that remote part of Norway were low-grade troops whose morale was softened by isolation and long inactivity. Gradually, as he watched their fumbling search, he began to despise them, and to recognise beneath that formidable uniform the signs of fallibility and even fear. They were probably clerks and cooks and batmen, dragged out unwillingly at a moment’s notice from comfortable headquarters billets in the town. He could guess very well what they would think of having to hunt a desperate armed bandit among ice and rocks and snow.

It was dusk when the first party of them came along the beach, but he could see them clearly because they were using torches which they flashed into dark crevices. They passed his island without a glance behind them out to sea. So far, it seemed not to have crossed their minds that he might have swum away.

When it was dark, the confusion increased. They were scattered in small groups all over the hills. Each group was signalling to others with its torches. Men were shouting their own names, afraid that their friends would mistake them for the bandit. Now and then a single shot echoed from hill to hill. That could only mean that nervous men were firing at fancied movements in the dark. Slowly it dawned on Jan, with a feeling of instense elation which gave him new strength and courage, that for all their numbers, they were afraid of him.

That opportunity to study the German army at its worst was worth months of military training, because after it he never again had the slightest doubt that he could outwit them till the end.

At the same time, he was becoming more aware of the dangers of his natural surroundings. A human enemy, however relentless and malevolent he may be, has human weaknesses; but nobody can trifle with the Arctic. In immediate terms, Jan knew that if he stayed where he was in his wet clothes, he would be dead before the morning.

Of course, there was only one alternative: to swim again. He could swim back to Ribbenesöy, among the Germans, or he might conceivably swim across the sound, to Hersöy, the next island to the eastward. One way or the other, he had to find a house where he could go in and get dry and warm. He had only seen two houses on Ribbenesöy, the shopkeeper’s and the one in Toftefjord, and both of them were out of the question. He knew from the chart that there were others farther west, but by that time they were probably full of Germans. Across the sound, on Hersöy, he had seen a single lonely house, but he had no idea who lived there.

He looked at Vargesund, and wondered if it was possible. In fact, it is 220 yards across, but it was difficult for him to guess its width in the darkness. The far shore was only a shadow between the shining water and the shining hills. The surface of the sound was broken here and there by eddies: the tide had begun to set. In health and strength he could easily swim the distance; but he could not judge the effects of the tide and the cold and his own exhaustion. He stood for a long time before he made up his mind. He did not want to die either way, but to drown seemed better than to freeze. He took a last look behind him at the flashing torches of the soldiers, and stumbled down the rocks and waded in and launched himself into the sea again.

It is a mercy that the ultimate extremes of physical distress often get blurred in memory. Jan hardly remembered anything of that third and longest swim, excepting an agony of cramp, and excepting the dreadful belief that he was just about to die; an experience most people encounter once or twice in a lifetime, but one he had had to face so many times on that single day. It was after he had given up any conscious struggle, and admitted his defeat, and was ready to welcome his release from pain, that some chance eddy swept him ashore on the farther side and rolled his limp body among the stones, and left him lying there on his face, groaning and twisted with cramp, and not able to move or to think of moving.

Seconds or minutes later, in the mists of half-consciousness, there were voices. There were footsteps on the beach, and the clink of stones turning. He wondered with a mild curiosity whether the words he could hear were German or Norwegian, and from somewhere outside himself he looked down with pity on the man who lay beaten on the shore and the people who approached him; because if they were German, the man was too weak to get away. But slowly his dim enfeebled brain began to accept a fact which was unforeseen and strange on that day of death and violence. They were children’s voices. There were children, coming along the beach and chattering in Norwegian. And suddenly they stopped, and he knew they had seen him.

He lifted his head, and there they were, two little girls, holding hands, wide-eyed with horror, too frightened to run away. He smiled and said: “Hullo. You needn’t be afraid.” He managed to turn round and sit up. “I’ve had an accident,” he said. “I do wish you could help me.” They did not answer, but he saw them relax a little, and he realised that when they had seen him, they had thought that he was dead.

Jan loved children; he had looked after his own young brother and sister after his mother died. Perhaps nothing in the world could have given him strength of mind just then, except compassion: the urgent need to soothe the children’s fear and make up for the shock which he had given them. He talked to them calmly. His own self-pity and despair had gone. He showed them how wet he was, and made a joke of it, and they came nearer as their fright gave way to interest and wonder. He asked them their names. They were Dina and Olaug. After a while he asked if their home was near, and whether they would take him there, and at the idea of bringing him home and showing their parents what they had discovered they brightened up and helped him to his feet. The house was not far away.

Two women were there, and the rest of their children. They exclaimed in horrified amazement at the frozen, limping, wild dishevelled man whom the little girls led in. But the moment he spoke to them in Norwegian their horror changed to motherly concern and they hurried him into the kitchen, and took him to the fire and brought him towels and put the kettle on.

Of all the series of acts of shining charity which attended Jan in the months which were to come, the help which these two women gave him on the first night of his journey was most noble, because they knew what had happened just across the sound, and they knew that at any moment, certainly by the morning, the Germans would be pounding on their door. They knew that their own lives and the lives of all their children would hang on a chance word when they came to face their questioning. Yet they opened their door at once to the stranger in such desperate distress, and cared for him and saved his life and sent him on his way, with no thought or hope of any reward except the knowledge that, whatever price they paid, they had done their Christian duty. Their names are Fru Pedersen and Fru Idrupsen.

The first thing Jan did was to warn them all that the Germans were after him, and that when they were questioned they must say that he came in carrying a pistol and demanded their help by force. He brought out his pistol to emphasise what he said. As soon as he had made quite sure that they understood this, and that even the children had a clear idea of what they should do and say, he sent two of them out as sentries, and told them to warn him at once if they saw a boat coming into the sound.

Fru Idrupsen, it turned out, was the woman from Toftefjord. She had run to the hills with her children when the shooting started, and she had seen most of what happened from the top of the island. She had rowed across the sound to take refuge with her neighbours. Fru Pedersen had a grown-up son and daughter and two young children. Her son was out fishing, but she expected him back at any minute. Her husband, like Fru Idrupsen’s, was away for the Lofoten fishing season and would not be home till it ended.

All the time Jan was talking, the two women were busy with the practical help which he needed so badly. They gave him food and a hot drink, and helped him to take off his sodden clothes. They found him new dry underclothes and socks and a sea-boot Herr Pedersen had left behind, and they hung up his uniform to dry, and rubbed his feet and legs till the feeling began to come back to them, and bandaged the stump of his wounded toe.

Twice while they worked to revive him, the sentries came running in to say that a boat was coming. Each time Jan pulled on his steaming jacket and trousers and the sea-boots, one his own and one Herr Pedersen’s, and gathered together everything which belonged to him and ran out of the house and up into the hills. But each time the boat passed by.

Between these alarms, he rested and relaxed. That humble Norwegian kitchen, with the children gathered round him speaking his native tongue, was more homely than any place he had seen in the three years he had been abroad. The warmth, and the sense of homecoming, and the contrast of family life after the fearful tension of the day, made him drowsy. It was difficult to remember that outside in the darkness there still were ruthless men who would shoot him on sight, and wreck that home if they found him there, and carry the children off to captivity and the mothers to unmentionable torment. Such violence had the quality of a dream. And when he dragged his mind back to grapple with reality, Jan found himself faced with a doubt which often came back to him later: ought he to let such people help him? Was his own life worth it? Was he right as a soldier, to let women and children put their lives in such terrible danger? To save them from the consequence of their own goodness, ought he not go out, and fight his own battle alone? But for the moment, these questions went unanswered, because he was not fit to make any such decision. Fru Pedersen and Fru Idrupsen had taken him in hand, and they treated him as an extra child.

When he had been there half an hour or so, the eldest son of the Pedersen family came home. He had heard the explosion in Toftefjord, but did not know what had happened. They told him the story, and as soon as he had heard it he took it as a matter of course that a wounded survivor should be sitting in his mother’s kitchen while the Germans scoured the islands round about. As his father was not at home, it was up to him to get Jan away to safety. He began to debate the question of how to do it.

The first thing was to rest. For one thing, there was no knowing when Jan might get another chance, and for another it would be madness to go out in a boat while the Germans were still there. And after that, the boy said, when he had rested, he ought to get away from the islands altogether, to the mainland. Any island, however big it was, might be a trap, not only because you might find your retreat cut off, but also because everyone on an island knew everyone else’s business. If he stayed another day in Hersöy, everyone would know he was there. But on the mainland, if they did come after you, you could always go on a stage farther; and gossip did not spread there quite so fast. Altogether, he would be safer there. Besides, that was the way to Sweden.

This was the first time Jan had paused to think of an ultimate escape. Up till then, it had only been a matter of dodging for the next few hours, and he had still thought of north Norway as his destination. That was where he had set out for, and he had arrived; and although he had lost his companions and all his equipment, he had not admitted to himself that the whole expedition was a failure. He still hoped to do part of his job there, at least, as soon as he had got his strength back and shaken off the Germans. But the people who lived there, as he now began to see, all thought at once of Sweden for a man in such serious trouble. It was a difficult journey, but not a very long one; about eighty miles, in a straight line; if you could travel in straight lines.

The trouble was, the boy went on, he only had a rowing-boat himself, and they could never row to the mainland. Just south of them was the sound called Skagösund, which was two miles wide. On the other side of that was Ringvassöy, an island about twenty miles square, and south of that again you had to cross Grötsund itself, which was the main channel into Tromsö from the north and was four miles wide and full of patrol boats. The best he could do himself was to row Jan across to Ringvassöy before the morning. But he knew a man there called Jensen who was all right, and he had a motor-boat and was meaning to go into Tromsö some day soon. His wife was the midwife over there, and he had a permit and was always moving about with his boat. He could easily put Jan ashore on the mainland.

Jan listened gratefully as this plan unfolded. He was glad for the moment to have everything thought out for him, and was ready to fall in with any idea which would take him away from Toftefjord.

When it was all decided, and he was resting, the eldest son of the Toftefjord family went out in his boat to see what had happened at his home, and to find out for Jan if there was any sign of the rest of his party. He was away for a couple of hours. When he came back, Jan knew for certain that of all the twelve men, he was the only one who was not either killed or captured. Toftefjord itself was quiet. There were still parties of Germans searching the distant hills. The slopes of the fjord were littered with scraps of planking. The boy had found the remains of a petrol barrel, and seen an ammunition belt hanging in a tree. But there was no one, alive or dead, on the beaches. The German ship had left. It was steaming slowly up the north side of the island, using a searchlight. Jan’s friends, or their bodies, must have been taken aboard it. Eskeland and Per Blindheim and all the others were gone, and he could never expect to see them again. There was nothing he could do except to go on alone.

He left the house on Hersöy very early in the morning, well before it was light. Fru Pedersen and Fru Idrupsen watched him go and brushed aside his thanks, which could certainly not have been adequate for what they had done. The boy took him down to his boat and they got aboard and pushed her off into the sound. Jan felt fit again and ready for anything. They turned to the southward and began to row, past the place where he had landed from his swim, past the shop, and then out across the open water, heading for Ringvassöy, with Toftefjord astern. Everything was peaceful.