Page 15 of A Call to Home (Women of the Resistance #3)

Cairo

June 1943

Leo had waited anxiously for any word from Deakin and his party. There had been one brief message saying they had landed safely and made contact with the Partisans, followed two days later by the laconic ‘Heavy enemy pressure’.

On June 5th, there was a new message. ‘We are running hard before the German attack. Have been forced to abandon most of the horses and cattle.’

On June 7th, another message arrived on her desk.

‘It’s only brief,’ she told Basil Davidson. ‘They are near some place called Suha and are aiming to cross the Sutjeska tonight. Tito’s plan is to fight his way back into Bosnia and join up with forces he has there. It says they are up against strong enemy opposition.’

‘It seems the Germans are taking Tito quite seriously,’ Davidson commented. ‘Intelligence sources tell us that they have committed six divisions to the operation to put him out of action. That’s six divisions that could be fighting the Russians on the Eastern Front.’

‘Seems like Bill Hudson was right,’ Leo said, with a pleasant sense of vindication on Bill’s behalf. ‘The Partisans are a better fighting force than the Chetniks.’

‘Well, the reports we’ve received from those missions we dropped into Serbia, with Mihailovic’s permission, seem to bear that out. They all say that they have had very little support from local Chetnik commanders and there is absolutely no prospect of getting them to co-operate with the Partisans.’

‘So where is Mihailovic now, I wonder,’ Leo mused. ‘We forwarded that message from the C in C to Bailey telling him to go back to Serbia, but we haven’t had any confirmation that he has done that. We’ve heard nothing from Bailey for several weeks.’

As if her words had conveyed themselves by telepathy to the British mission with the Chetnik leader, a message arrived the next day.

‘Mihailovic is now back in Ravna Gora. We have established ourselves in the village of Milanovici, on the Jahorina range.’

A message from Hudson told them that in Serbia most of the peasants were continuing to live in their villages and work the land as they had done for generations.

Mihailovic claims that he has impressive mobilisation lists and that thousands of men could be called up at a moment’s notice, in the event of an Allied landing. These would provide an effective force at the disposal of Allied forces. He also claims to have links with Chetnik units in the Sandjak, Montenegro and Bosnia and even as far afield as Dalmatia and Slovenia. But reports suggest that many of these groups have been ‘legalised’ by agreeing to co-operate with the quisling regime. Any Chetniks left in Montenegro are actively collaborating with the Italians and Mihailovic himself is standing still in Serbia.

Leo had just finished reading this when the FANY girl from the decoding department came in with a new message.

‘It’s bad news, I’m afraid.’

Leo read, ‘Stuart killed by a bomb on June 9th. Contact impossible. Air raids all day and walk all night.’

She put the paper down and bowed her head to her desk. It was not the news of Stuart’s death that struck cold terror into her heart. It was tragic, of course, but he had not come from SOE and she had not had time to get to know him well. It was the image that those words conjured up that was hard to bear. Alix was with these people. She was in danger from bombs all day. She was having to walk all night. Leo thought back to the girl she had said goodbye to in Paris back in the spring of 1939, excited by the prospect of starting her course at the Sorbonne. Rumours of war had seemed so distant that neither of them had doubted that they would meet again in a few months. She was so young! That was the picture that kept coming back into Leo’s mind. Just a girl! But now? How had she managed to leave occupied Paris? How had she got herself involved with Tito, of all people? She had asked herself these questions over and over again in recent months. She knew now that her daughter was not just a camp follower. She was a soldier, a bombasi , a heroine. So she would be in the thick of the fighting, running all the risks that entailed. She tried to imagine what she must be like now. She was twenty-three years old, a woman. Images of Joan of Arc crossed Leo’s mind. Perhaps she had a lover, another Partisan. She could be married, for all Leo knew. What sort of person would she have become when they met again? If she survived…

Leo swallowed her tears and went to report the bad news to Basil Davidson.

Milinklada, Montenegro. June 1943

All day Alix and the survivors of the bombing huddled in the cave while the enemy planes swooped and dived around the hilltop. Olga lay silent, white faced, with Vladimir crouched beside her. Alix sat with them, giving Olga occasional sips of water from her water bottle. Some of the time she seemed to have drifted into unconsciousness, but for long hours Alix could only watch impotently, seeing the suffering in her eyes mirrored in her husband’s.

From the far side of the valley German troops kept up a continuous fusillade of fire. Alix could see them moving about, looking brisk and well fed. Her stomach growled. Like all the others she had been reduced to pulling strips of bark from the birch trees for their sugary sap.

Tito said, ‘Those will have to be dealt with before we can move.’

As darkness fell, Nikola detailed a small party for that task. They slipped out of the cave and scrambled down the steep slope into the valley. The rest of the group climbed back up to the place where they had camped the day before. They were joined by Deakin and the two radio operators who had been sheltering on a rocky ledge nearby. The radio operators immediately started unravelling their aerials to report back to Cairo. Men were set to work to dig graves and Captain Stuart was laid in one of them. Deakin knelt by it and murmured the Lord’s Prayer and then the dirt was shovelled back over his body. The rest of the dead, over a hundred, were buried in two communal pits.

This done, the survivors assembled and prepared to move off. Once again, Tito divided them into smaller groups, better able to move through the forest without attracting attention. In Alix’s group there were only thirty, including Tito himself and the members of the Supreme Council protected by Nikola and some of the Escort Battalion. Most of the horses had had to be abandoned along the way, either lame or exhausted from lack of food. Those that had survived were hardly more than skeletons, but Tito still had Swallow and another was given to Captain Deakin, whose foot had been damaged by the same bomb that had wounded Tito. As they prepared to mount Tito slapped Deakin’s shoulder.

‘Brothers in arms, eh?’

The horses were camouflaged with green branches and their bits and any metal parts were wrapped in rags. Moving as quietly as possible they descended into the valley and followed a path up the far side. At the place where the German soldiers they had seen the day before had made camp there were only dead bodies, stripped of everything that might be of use.

There was only one route that would take them through the encircling German forces. It had been blasted through for them by the sacrifice of countless Partisan soldiers who, in small companies, had taken on and cleared the enemy gun emplacements, and fought their way through villages where they had set up strong points. Just before Alix and the others left, a message had been received from one such group. ‘ As long as you hear the firing of our rifles the Germans will not pass. But when you hear no more sounds you will know that there are no more communist proletarians alive. ’

Ahead of them, Alix knew, was the vanguard of the First Proletarian Division and following them the remnants of companies that had been decimated in the fighting along with small groups of walking wounded, but how many no one could be sure. And out beyond the circle, somewhere in the forests of Bosnia, were their colleagues of the Bosnian Corps; reinforcements, if only they could reach them.

Moving through thick forest they suddenly saw the glow of fire ahead. The column halted and a scout was sent forward. He reported that there were Germans encamped in a clearing. ‘It’s okay,’ he whispered. ‘I’ve dealt with the sentry.’

The body of the sentry lay by the path, his throat cut. His companions were huddled round the fire, asleep. Alix found herself holding her breath as the group skirted the edge of the clearing, but the Germans slept on, unaware. A few hundred yards ahead they entered a small defile that sloped down towards the plains of Herzegovina and freedom. Alix knew that on the hills on either side, small companies of her fellow soldiers were keeping watch for any sign of movement by the enemy. Almost unbelievably, the Germans seemed unaware of their presence, and they passed between the last emplacements and found themselves outside the circle. Fifteen minutes later they heard gunfire and knew that their companions had been overrun and the breach had been closed.