Horizon (7 page)

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.

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 open 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.

In the houses high on the Schlern it was whispered that the Allies couldn’t approach the Brenner until autumn now. Perhaps not even then. This spring would come too quickly to be of any use to people who waited four hundred miles north of the Allied lines. But hope was like the earth: it was frozen, but it was not dead. The old men, the gaunt-cheeked women, the remaining young men (who had escaped from the recruiting interest of any German ski-patrol by vanishing into the thick pine forests which fringed the mountains’ base), didn’t talk very much. But they had their own thoughts. They listened in to the forbidden Allied broadcasts, and they were making their decisions. Here was a third group of foreigners who would come to invade the Dolomites. Would they be like the Italians or the Germans, who, once they came to a country, claimed possession? Or were these foreigners, who called themselves “The Allies,” different? Were they really fighting for other people’s freedom as well as their own? After twenty-five years of Italian domination the people on the Schlern, like all the Tyrolese on the other Dolomite slopes, were waiting for the autumn of 1944. If it couldn’t be this spring which would end this waiting then let it be the autumn. It was more than a hope; in many hearts it had become a prayer.

The people went about their daily tasks as if there were no war. But they measured their food carefully, they listened eagerly to the radio, they hid their men from the German patrols, they pretended ignorance in reply to all the regulations
and proclamations of the newly named “Alpenvorland.” They never forgot that in the village of Kastelruth at the edge of the Schlern, where the road from the valley below came to rest on a gentle green slope, there was a token German garrison. They never forgot that these armed foreigners were there, not to give them a feeling of “protection,” as the Germans said in the best gangster fashion, but to police the Schlern plateau and keep it under informal observation.

The Germans didn’t expect trouble. The people of the South Tyrol were Austrians, after all. And Austria was now a part of Greater Germany. So the garrison was small, and its periodic patrols were less thorough as the winter severity increased. And if the Tyrolese up on this plateau had shown no response to the February proclamation, that all men between eighteen and fifty-five years of age must report to the German Military Headquarters in Bozen, then the Germans at Kastelruth blamed that on the slow and stubborn nature of the highlander. They would deal with him, once the more accessible districts of the South Tyrol had been brought into line. The Germans were quite content to play a waiting game.

But the peace of the mountains is a deceiving thing: the impassive face of the highlander is equally baffling. Neither the mountains nor the people who live among them are so simple as they look.

Peter Lennox watched the pools of green grass appear through the melting slush. With the same impatience, he had watched the first blanket of snow on the Schlern. But now there was a bitter feeling of failure added to the impatience, turning its edge to knife-sharp disappointment. The inactivity of the long winter months frayed his nerves. The people who had sheltered him had been decent and kind. He would admit that. But their very quietness, their acceptance of the fact that no message had come from any Allied Command, only added to his sense of failure. He had helped no one. He had been of no use to anyone. And the colonel and Jock and Ferry and all the others—whose names were even beginning to fade from his memory (he could only remember those of his fellow prisoners whom he had either liked or disliked very much)—had been either captured or killed. For that must be the explanation of this silence. There could be no other reason: that damned colonel
couldn’t have meant him to sit up here all winter, watching the snow clouds bank against a string of rocky teeth. Or could he have? When they had parted eight months ago down on the roadway outside of Bozen the colonel had talked of action, of urgent necessity. Action...urgent necessity—sugar-coating on a bitter pill, so that his inflated pride would let him swallow his disappointment about being left up here among a lot of women and boys and old men.

And now it was May. The last blot of snow had soaked into the sodden fields. Lennox had made up his mind. As he dressed in the small room which had become so familiar—with its narrow window tucked under the broad overhanging roof, with its carved wooden bed and thick soft mattress, with its one small table and chair, and white scrubbed floor—he was rehearsing the speech he would make.

“Frau Schichtl!” he would say. “What’s the use of staying here any longer? The plan, which your highly esteemed brother in Bozen made, has definitely not come off. The only sensible thing now—begging your esteemed brother’s pardon, for he seems a most determined man—is for me to leave your house and end the worry you’ve had ever since Johann brought me here. I had a plan for escape, and I haven’t forgotten it. I’ll reach the Allied lines. And I’ll tell the Whosits all about you here on the Schlern. I’ll tell them about the man from Bozen whom I have never met, and about the hatchet-faced old boys, who come on a Saturday evening to drink your homemade wine around the kitchen table and talk and talk and talk. And the Whosits will send the right men up here. Men who will talk and talk and talk, and feel perfectly happy because they know what they are doing. They won’t have guilt every time they look at
the mattress on a most comfortable bed; and they’ll have so many plans inside their specially trained brains that they won’t mind sitting in a room all day and every day. They enjoy hiding. That’s part of their job. And they’ll be really helpful. They’ll parachute all over this place.” He paused while he crossed over to shut out the cold morning air.

“You are getting soft,” he told himself angrily. “Now, where were you?” He stared at himself truculently in the small square of mirror. He saw a white-faced young man with even features, and strong eyebrows now drawn together in a bad-tempered frown. His hair was too long, his chin needed a shave. The grey eyes were clear and direct, but their look was hard enough to jolt him away from the mirror. He didn’t like his looks. He picked up the loose jacket of grey tweed, and pulled it over his white shirt and black waistcoat as he started to descend the bare staircase. His heavy shoes, low-cut, ugly, and strong, struck angrily on the white-scrubbed wood. He slowed up, and set his feet down more quietly. In the kitchen below was a bright wood fire in a neat stove, the smell of newly baked bread, the early sun streaming through the small windows, and Frau Schichtl.

She had poured out a cup of new milk as she heard him leave the room upstairs, and she was now measuring the careful spoonfuls of homemade jam on to his plate. The newly baked bread was wrapped in its white cloth on the dresser: on the table was a staler loaf. (New bread was too uneconomical: it sliced extravagantly and was eaten too quickly.) The rough linen cloth on the table was clean; the large white coarse cups were clean; the room was clean. Everything was neat and clean, from the well-scrubbed face and well-brushed hair of Frau
Schichtl to the stiff little curtains of white lace above the precise row of ivy pots on the sill.