Page 5 of A Call to Home (Women of the Resistance #3)

Prozor

March 1943

A courier galloped in to Gornji Vakuf and was admitted to Tito’s presence.

‘Good news, comrade!’ he gasped. ‘The Italian garrison has been driven out of Prozor and we have captured their weapons.’

‘What weapons?’ Tito asked eagerly.

‘Howitzers, anti-tank guns and mortars, and best of all, we have taken eight tanks.’

‘We shall form our own tank company,’ Tito gloated. ‘They will be an invaluable addition. We shall move to Prozor immediately.’

They found Nikola unhurt, directing his troops as they loaded weapons onto trucks. For a moment Alix could not see Drago. Then he appeared from one of the bunkers carrying a machine gun. There was no opportunity to talk but his smile told Alix all she needed to know.

Tito established new headquarters in Prozor, but the triumphant mood was short lived. Reports from Tito’s spies told them that the Germans were pushing in from the north and west while the Italians, aided by the Chetniks, were advancing from the south. To the east was the River Neretva in its canyon, a fast-flowing torrent eighty metres wide, and on the far side of that the sheer cliffs of the Prenj mountain.

Tito called his council together.

‘My friends, there is no denying the fact that we find ourselves in a perilous situation. We risk being trapped. And in places the Germans are within two kilometres of our wounded. The time has come for drastic action.’

‘What action?’ Arso Rankovic demanded. ‘We are outnumbered, and the men are exhausted. What can we do?’

‘I have despatched the Fourth Montenegrin and the Third Krajina Brigade to hold them back and they are fighting day and night,’ Tito said. ‘But there are times in conflict where one must summon up the courage of a lion and others where you need the wiliness of a fox. This is time to think like a fox.’

‘What do you have in mind?’ Djilas enquired.

‘We must first fool the Germans into thinking that our objective is not to advance into Montenegro but to push north towards Bugojno. To this end I have given orders for the sappers to destroy all the bridges across the Neretva.’

‘Destroy the bridges! So how are we supposed to reach Montenegro?’ Rankovic looked confused.

‘There is no way we can move forward in that direction at the moment,’ Tito said. ‘The left bank of the river is controlled by the Chetniks. Our priority now is to prevent the Germans from advancing any further. I am ordering all brigades to concentrate here in Prozor to prepare a counter-attack.’

As the meeting broke up Alix gathered her notes together. She was feeling depressed and battle weary. After the euphoria of their victory at Prozor the course of the war had changed. Now, as Tito had said, the enemy were closing in from all sides. If he was going to throw everything into the counter-attack, that meant the Escort Brigade, and once again Nikola and Drago, would be in danger.

At dawn on March 2nd, the Fourth Proletarian Brigade, reinforced by the Escort Brigade, marched out to confront the advancing Germans.

Alix could only wait, sick with anxiety. Then, as she was crouching over a tiny fire in the room Tito had given her, Drago appeared at the door.

She leapt up and threw her arms round him, forgetting all restraint. For a moment he held her tight, and then let go and stepped back.

‘You’re wounded!’ she exclaimed. His head was bandaged and there was blood on his cheek.

‘Only a scratch,’ he said. ‘A glancing blow from some shrapnel.’

‘And Nikola?’

‘He’s exhausted. We all are. But we did what we were sent to do.’

‘You won?’

‘I wouldn’t call it winning. There doesn’t seem to be anything as definite as defeat or victory in this war. But we pushed them back almost as far as Bugojno. It means we have a breathing space to organise the defence of Prozor.’

‘Tell me about it,’ she urged. ‘No. What am I thinking about. Come and sit by the fire. Have you eaten?’

‘Not yet. I came straight to tell you. I knew you would be worried.’

‘That was thoughtful.’

‘Well, I was obeying orders. Nikola sent me.’ He smiled briefly. ‘But I would have come anyway.’

She drew him over to the fire and he sank down on a dilapidated easy chair that she had rescued from the rubble.

‘Was it terrible?’

‘One of the worst battles I’ve been in. But one thing above everything else made us all determined to succeed. We had to climb Radusa mountain and on the way up we were passing the last columns of our walking wounded, heading here. Most of them were in a bad state. One of the medics told me they ran out of bandages days ago and were having to bind up wounds with bandages they took from the dead. Some of them didn’t have proper boots, and the snow is knee deep there.’

‘Poor creatures!’ Alix murmured.

‘Anyway,’ he went on, ‘we reached our objective and dug in, building up ramparts of snow as defence. Almost immediately we were attacked, but we held out and then counter-attacked and pushed them back down the slopes of the mountain. But it was at a cost. I don’t know how many, but we lost a lot of good men. There were a lot of wounded, too, and many cases of frostbite.’ He shivered and stretched his hands to the fire.

‘And what now?’ Alix asked.

‘We are to join all the available troops to form a defensive line round Prozor. That’s as much as I know.’

She took his hands and rubbed them. ‘Now you must rest and eat. Come along. I’ll walk with you to the canteen.’

Next morning Tito said, ‘Come with me. We will visit our wounded.’

It was part of the ethos of the Partisans that commanding officers visited their wounded men and Tito was always punctilious in carrying out his duty. With Luks at his heels, he set out for the tents occupied by the Central Hospital.

He went from one tent to the other, carrying a small folding stool, which he set down beside some of the most seriously wounded, talking to them about how they had received their injuries, praising their courage and encouraging them with the prospect of ultimate victory. Alix followed, making notes of special requests and names for particular commendation. It was a painful task. The sight of so many hideous injuries and the smell of blood sickened her, and she felt ashamed of her weakness. She told herself that her mother must have seen men in even worse condition when she nursed them at the front line in the last Great War and that strengthened her resolve to be a positive, smiling presence, whatever her private feelings.

In one tent Tito stopped to speak to one of the medical staff. It was a woman in her thirties whose white coat was stained in many places with blood. After exchanging a few words Tito turned to Alix.

‘This is Olga, Vladimir’s wife and one of our best surgeons.’

Alix remembered then that she had seen her before. Vladimir Dedijer was a Lieutenant Colonel on Tito’s Staff and she remembered seeing them together in Bihac, but since then Olga had been with the Central Hospital.

‘You must have had a terrible time on the journey here,’ Alix said.

Olga smiled. ‘Bad enough, but not as bad as these poor chaps,’ she said, indicating the men lying on the camp beds around her.

Alix smiled back. Olga’s face was drawn with exhaustion but there was a warmth in her eyes that Alix found very appealing.

Tito mounted his horse, Swallow, and gave the signal to advance to the nine brigades of Partisans that had concentrated in front of Prozor in the prior few days. Alix watched them leave. A few months ago she would have marched with them, her rifle on her shoulder and her friend Mitra by her side. But Mitra was dead, killed in a skirmish with the Ustashe outside Bihac just after Christmas; and somehow she herself had ceased to be a soldier. She was not sure how that had happened, except that Tito had chosen her as his secretary and apparently that meant she was no longer expected to fight. Since leaving Bihac she had endured the forced marches, the short rations and the constant awareness of danger but she had not fired a shot or thrown a grenade. Had she become a coward?

The army marched back two days later. There had been a violent confrontation, with losses on both sides, but the Germans had been forced back and had withdrawn to regroup and lick their wounds. Alix watched as the Escort Battalion led by Nikola cantered triumphantly into the town centre. Nikola drew rein and swung down from his horse.

‘Here we are, back in one piece, more or less. Are you pleased to see me?’ His tone was almost cheerful, all trace of bitterness and self-pity vanished. He was in his element, and it made him almost attractive. To most other women, it occurred to Alix, he would be.

She smiled and leaned up to kiss his cheek. ‘Of course I am. And you are unhurt, as always?’

‘So far,’ he agreed.

Already her eyes were going beyond him. ‘He’s all right,’ he said. ‘He stopped to pick up one of the men who had his horse shot from under him. He’ll be along shortly.’

As he spoke Drago rode in with another man riding pillion behind him. He dismounted and helped his passenger down and then came to join them. His head was still bandaged and there was a jagged tear in his breeches, but apart from that he seemed unharmed. Alix quelled the impulse to embrace him and greeted him with a smile.

‘So, the messengers said the attack was a success.’

‘We routed the bastards,’ Nikola said. ‘And what’s more we took prisoners, some of them officers.’

‘I wonder what Tito will do with them,’ Alix mused. It was not unheard of for enemy prisoners to be summarily tried and then shot.

It was an aspect of Partisan warfare that made her deeply uncomfortable.

The following morning Tito called a meeting to discuss their next move.

‘We have earned ourselves a brief respite,’ he said. ‘But it will not be long before the enemy regroups and we still have the Italians and the Chetniks to deal with.’

‘The Italians are not a great danger.’ The speaker was General Koca Popovic, commander of the First Battalion and a veteran of the Spanish war. ‘They will not attack us unless they are pushed into it by the Germans. Their hearts are just not in this fight. But the Chets are a different matter. It seems Mihailovic has finally got control of things and they are massing in large numbers along the Neretva. And then there are other bands that seem to be functioning independently between us and the river.’

‘If only we could persuade the Germans to hold off for a week or two while we deal with the Chets,’ Tito mused.

‘I have a suggestion,’ Djilas said. ‘It is an idea I have been mulling over for a while, but I am afraid you may not like it.’

‘Go on,’ Tito encouraged him.

‘You remember how last year we took that German engineer prisoner?’

‘Hans Ott. Yes, what about him?’

‘We sent him through German lines to discuss a prisoner exchange.’

‘And it worked. Go on.’

‘We have just captured several German officers, including a Major Stoeker. Why don’t we get him to send a letter suggesting that in exchange for him and the other officers they should give us some of our people who are currently in jail in Croatia? While the negotiations are going on there would have to be a pause in the fighting.’

Tito’s eyes gleamed. ‘Brilliant. I like that idea very much. They might release Herta.’

‘The question will then arise, of course, of who we send to do the negotiating,’ Djilas said. ‘It will be risky. If the Germans don’t keep faith, they could end up in the hands of the Gestapo.’

‘True,’ Tito agreed. ‘But I believe the German officers, on the whole, have a sense of honour. If they agree to talks and a temporary ceasefire I think they would keep their word.’

‘Then let’s do it,’ Djilas said. ‘I’ll speak to Stoeker and get him to write the letter.’

‘Who is Herta?’ Alix whispered to Lola Ribar as the meeting broke up.

‘You don’t know?’ The young man grinned at her. ‘She’s Tito’s common law wife. They have a son, born just before the invasion.’

‘I had no idea,’ Alix said. ‘So where does that leave Zdenka?’

Zdenka was Tito’s mistress. She was heartily disliked by all his friends for her bad temper, but Tito seemed to be completely in her thrall.

Ribar winked. ‘No doubt we shall find out, if this prisoner exchange works out.’

The letter was duly written and sent and two days later a reply came giving a time and place where a delegation from the Partisans would be received and agreeing to a temporary ceasefire. There was some discussion about who should go but the final choice fell upon Vladimir Velebit, a lawyer who spoke fluent German, and Koca Popovic as a representative of the army. Milovan Djilas was to go as well, but because he was well known as one of Tito’s closest colleagues it was decided he should assume an alias. His German was rudimentary but as he joked, ‘We are not going there to discuss Kant and Goethe.’

On March 11th, the three men, carrying a white flag on a stick, passed through the German lines, where they were blindfolded and transported to Sarajevo.

‘So now we head for the Neretva!’ Tito declared.