We Die Alone: A WWII Epic of Escape and Endurance (18 page)

But Marius, back in Furuflaten, was not so optimistic. He felt
troubled in his mind at having left Jan all alone: he would much
rather have hidden him somewhere where he could have kept an eye
on him day and night. But he consoled himself by thinking that he
had done it more for his family's sake than for his own, and also that
it was in Jan's own interest to be in a place which the Germans were
very unlikely to search. He believed, just as Jan did, that in time he
would get fit again, but he thought it might be a very long time; and
he knew, although Jan did not, how difficult it was going to be to
keep him supplied with even the barest necessities of life across at
Revdal. He would never have grudged him anything, neither time
nor danger, nor money while his savings lasted out; but he was very
much afraid that keeping things secret, which was so difficult already,
would become impossible if it had to go on very long. If people
noticed him going off two or three nights a week in a boat towards
the uninhabited side of the fjord, there was no credible explanation
he could give; and besides, there was always the chance that the
Germans might yet make some sudden swoop which would prevent
him from crossing at all. They might come and arrest him, and in
case they did, he would have to find somebody who could not be
connected with the affair but who could take over his responsibilities
when he was gone. Otherwise, Jan would be left there till he starved. What it came to, in fact, was that there might be a crisis at any time;
and therefore there ought to be a plan to get Jan over the frontier if
the crisis came before he could go on his own feet.

Marius went to Herr Legland again, and they had a long discussion. They agreed that apart from being safer in Revdal, Jan was better placed there for an attempt on the frontier. If he had tried to go
straight from Furuflaten, there would have been valleys to cross, and
the main road; but from Revdal one only had to climb straight up for
3000 feet and one was right on the plateau. Once one was up there,
there was no road or habitation whatever before the frontier, and the
skiing was straightforward. But if Jan needed help on the journey, it
would have to come from one of the settlements on the other side of
the fjord.

Marius may have felt disappointed at the idea that he might have
to hand Jan over to somebody else, but he had to agree that if it came
to a dash for the frontier, he could not be of any help. For one thing,
he had never been up on the plateau; and besides, there was no
knowing how long the journey might take. It would certainly not be
less than four days, and if he was away from home for as long as that,
everybody would know it. But on the other hand, there was at least
one settlement on the other side where there was no German garrison at all. The men from there would know the plateau, or at least the
part of it near at hand, and it would be much easier for them to disappear for a few days.

When Marius had reluctantly agreed with this conclusion, Herr
Legland undertook to send a warning to people he knew on the other
side that an escort might be needed for the frontier. He meant to
arrange a meeting place and a code-word for the operation in case it
had to be undertaken in a hurry.

The name of the settlement they had in mind is Mandal. It lies in
a deep valley which penetrates for twenty miles into the plateau, and
it has a population of six or seven hundred. It is much more cut off
from the world than Lyngseidet or Furuflaten. There is no road to it, and not a single pass through the mountains to give access to it by
land. It can only be reached by climbs which are always dangerous in
winter, or else by a sea voyage of ten miles from Lyngseidet. But even
there the organisation had its contacts.

As soon as they began to think about Mandal, it brought them
up against a problem of money. If Mandal had to come into it, the
whole business of rescuing Jan was going to coast more than Herr
Legland or Marius could possibly find out of their own pockets or
their neighbours'. One is apt to forget that this sort of activity needs
money, but it does: or at least, it did in north Norway. People like
Marius were glad to stretch their own rations to feed Jan, and to
sleep with a blanket less on their own beds, and to give him their
clothes; but sooner or later he was sure to need something which
neither of them possessed themselves. Then there would be only
one option: either to go to somebody who could supply it, and let
him into the secret so that he would give it for nothing, or else to
buy it. The things Jan was most likely to need, the simple necessities of life, were rationed, and a lot of things he might possibly need
could not be bought at all except at black market prices; and of
course a man who was willing to sell on the black market was the
last sort of person one would want to know about Jan. The only
safe way to get what was needed would be to pay the price which
was asked, however high it was, and not tell anybody. Jan had
already had the last of all the brandy and cigarettes that Marius
could lay his hands on, and he needed more; or to be accurate, he
needed brandy, to keep him going in the cold, and cigarettes were
the only luxury he could enjoy. If Mandal came into it too, there
was going to be the question of diesel oil for boats. There was a telephone in Mandal, but all telephones were tapped. The only way to
tell the Mandal men what was happening would be to get a motorboat and go there, and if the owner of the boat could not give a
proper reason for the journey, the fuel would have to come from
the black market too.

There was also the question of paying people for the time they
spent on a job of this kind. Marius was his own master and could
afford to take time off to look after Jan, and so could the other
Furuflaten people. But a lot of men around there, especially in a place
like Mandal, lived from hand to mouth, and if they lost a few days'
work it really meant less to eat for their wives and children. That
might not prevent them from helping, but the organisation's principle was that nobody ought to suffer real financial hardship for anything he was asked to do. The state paid its soldiers, and the
organisation expected to do the same. Certainly if anyone had to be
asked to take Jan across to Sweden, he would have to have his income
made up for the days he was away. One way and another, the whole
operation might coast much more than the resources of Lyngseidet
and Furuflaten could afford.

Luckily, Herr Legland had to go into Tromso, and he promised
Marius he would take care of this question of finance. Thus for the
second time news reached the city of what was happening in
Lyngenfjord. Legland went to Sverre Larsen, whose father, the dismissed owner of the newspaper, was an old friend of his. He arrived
on a Saturday evening, and told Larsen the whole story from beginning to end, except that he left out all the names of people and places.
He had reckoned that he must have a fund of £150 for urgent
expenses which he could already foresee. Without it, or the certainty
of being able to get it quickly, he would not feel he could ask anyone
to go to the frontier.

Larsen accepted the request without any question. It was the kind
of thing which the Tromso merchants expected to pay for. But it was
a stern test of his organisation to find the money in cash on a
Saturday night. If Legland had come at a time when the banks and
offices were open, it would only have taken a few minutes. As it was,
Larsen himself put in all the money which he happened to have in
the house, and then went the rounds of his friends in the organisation. By Sunday morning he had collected it all, in varying sums from a lot of different people, and Herr Legland took it home, with
his money worries set at rest for the time being. But as things turned
out, this was only the very beginning of the expense of saving Jan's
life. Before the end, it cost £1650 in cash, besides the labour and goods
which were given freely by hundreds of people; and the whole of this
sum was contributed by business houses and individuals in Tromso
who regarded him as a symbol of the battle against the Germans.

Marius kept his promise to go back and visit Jan. Two nights after
he had left him at Revdal, he set off again and rowed across the fjord,
taking a new stock of food and some bottles of milk. Jan was still in
the bunk, exactly as he had left him. He was cheerful, and the rest was
doing him good. He had been amusing himself by pulling out the
moss which had been used to caulk the joints between the logs of the
wall of the hut, and rolling it in newspaper to make cigarettes. Marius
swore that before next time he would find something better to smoke
than that. Meanwhile, he cooked up some fish for him, and when he
had eaten it they both had a look at his feet. They seemed to be getting on all right, and they talked things over in the hope that Jan
would be able to put on skis again before very long.

They had already agreed that Jan ought not to know anything
about the organisation. Although his prospects looked a little
brighter than they had a week before, both he and Marius knew in
their heart of hearts that so long as he could not walk his chance of
avoiding being captured in the end was really very small. So Marius
still called himself Hans Jensen, and Jan did not know any names at
all for the other people he had seen, or anything about the activities
in Lyngseidet or Tromso. He had to be content not to know who was
helping him, but just to be grateful for the help when it arrived.

However, Marius did tell him that night, in order to keep his
spirits up, that people in Mandal were being asked to stand by in
case their help was needed; and he explained the geography of the
surrounding mountains and the plateau, so that Jan would have it
clear in his head if they had to take sudden action. It is not very far across the mountains from the hut at Revdal into the valley of
Mandal; only about five miles on the map, though it involves the
climb of 3000 feet up to the plateau level and down again. If Jan
needed help when the time came, Marius meant to come to Revdal
and lead him up the climb; and he would arrange for the Mandal
men to come up from the other side and meet them on top, so that
they could take over there and escort Jan southwards across the
plateau till he came to the frontier.

It was encouraging for Jan to know that some positive plans had
been made to get him away, and Marius left him that night in good
humour, and quite contentedly resigned to another two days of solitude and darkness.

It was soon after Marius left, not more than a few hours, that Jan's
feet began to hurt. It was nothing much as first, only a slight increase
in the pain which had been going on ever since they were thawed. It
came and went, and sometimes, that early morning, he thought it
was imagination. But by the time when sunlight began to come
through the holes in the roof, he was sure that something was happening. He struggled out of his blankets, when it was as light as it
ever got in the hut, and unwrapped his feet. The sight of them
alarmed him. They had changed visibly since the night before when
Marius was with him. Now, his toes seemed to be grey, and although
his feet as a whole were more painful than they had been, the ends of
his toes were numb and cold, as if he had pins and needles. He
rubbed them, but it only made them hurt more, and the skin began
to peel off them. The toe which had been wounded had begun to
heal, but the scar had a dark unhealthy look.

He rolled himself up again in the blankets and lay there uneasily,
wondering what it meant. He did not know what had gone wrong, or
what he ought to do to try to stop it. For the first time since he had
met Marius, he began to feel lonely. It had seemed so easy to say he
would wait for another two days alone, but now he regretted it. He
wanted very much to have someone to talk to about his feet. He knew that the thirty-six hours he still had to wait before he could hope to
see Marius were going to pass very slowly.

They turned out to be infinitely worse than he expected. The pain
grew with appalling quickness, hour by hour. It grew so that sleep
became out of the question and he could only lie there staring into
the darkness and counting every minute till Marius might arrive,
moving his legs in hopeless attempts to find a position which would
ease them. The pain spread up his legs in waves, and sometimes
seemed to fill his whole body like a flame so that when it receded it
left him sweating and trembling and breathless.

In the second dawn, when the light was strong enough, he
unwrapped his feet again. After the night he had just survived, what
he saw then did not surprise him. His toes were black and swollen,
and a foul-smelling fluid was oozing out of them, and he could not
move them at all any more.

He was shocked and bewildered, with nobody to appeal to for
advice or comfort. When the pain was at its worse, he could hardly
think at all. When it eased, he lay there, wondering what Marius
would do: whether he would take him back to Furuflaten, or whether
there was any doctor who would take the risk of coming to Revdal.
He wondered whether there was anything a doctor could do, without
taking him to hospital. He thought he had either got blood poisoning or gangrene. Either of them, he imagined, would spread farther
and farther up his legs. If he had been in hospital, he thought, they
would have given him injections and stopped it before it got too far;
but there in Revdal, without any kind of medical equipment, he
could not think of anything to do. He wondered whether he ought to
agree to go to hospital if he got the chance, and soon made up his
mind that he should not. In hospital, the Germans would certainly
get him in the end, and all kinds of people might get themselves into
trouble on his behalf. He knew it might be tempting to agree if the
pain went on, so he took a firm and final decision there and then, in
case he was not in a fit condition to decide when the moment came; he would not go to hospital whatever happened. He tried to think of
the worst that could possibly happen, so that this resolve would never
weaken, and after all, the worst was only death. He put all his faith in
Marius. Marius would know what to do: he would either take him to
a doctor or bring a doctor to Revdal; or if he could not do either of
those things, he would get advice and borrow medicine and come
and doctor him himself. This thought kept him going all through the
second day.