We Die Alone: A WWII Epic of Escape and Endurance (19 page)

At long last the evening came. The little shafts of light inside the
hut began to fade, and the darkness he had longed for all day set in.
Marius could not begin to row across till it was dark, so that an hour
and a half of night must pass before he could be expected. But long
before that, Jan lay and listened for the footsteps outside the door,
and the cheerful greetings which Marius always gave him before he
came in, so that he would know it was a friend who was coming. The
minutes of the night dragged on and on till the first light of the
dawn, and Marius did not come.

A period of time began then which Jan remembered, after it
ended, with the utmost horror. It was the first time that he sank into
absolute despair of coming through alive, and he had not really
resigned himself yet to dying; at least, not to dying the lingering,
lonely agonising death which seemed to be all he could expect. At
first, he waited for each night with the hope of hearing Marius; but
as each night passed and nothing happened the hope slowly died
within him. After five days, he could only believe that Marius and
everyone who knew he was there had been arrested and shot, and
that he was quite forgotten by the world, condemned to lie in the
desolate hut till the poisoning killed him, or till he wasted away
through starvation. Revdal, which they had chosen because it seemed
safe, had turned into a trap. He was walled in by the barren mountain which hung over him, and by the sea and the miles of lonely
shore on either side. He could not believe any more that he would go
out into the fresh air to start on his journey again. He knew his own feet would never carry him to the nearest friendly house, and he
knew that so much of his strength had ebbed away that he would
never be able to swim or even to crawl there.

In his loneliness, he wished he was able to pray, and lying there
waiting to die he tried to set his religious beliefs in order. But like so
many young men of his generation, he had grown up without the
habit of saying prayers. It was not any fault of his. He had been given
a technical, scientific education, and there had not been much room
in it for religion. It had given him, at the age of twenty-six, a materialistic view of life. He had done his best to live in accordance with
Christian ethics, but nothing he had ever been taught could help him
to believe in a personal God who watched over him in Revdal. He did
not despise that kind of belief, and he knew to the full what a comfort it would be to him; but nobody of a clear and serious turn of
mind can change his beliefs to suit his circumstances. After living
without prayers, he thought that to pray when he was in such desperate straits would be hypocritical, and an offence to any God he
could believe in. Neither did he believe at that time in a future life.
He believed he was already forgotten or assumed to be dead by everyone who knew him, except his father and brother and sister, and that
when the last painful tenuous thread was broken he would not exist
any more, except as a rotten corpse in the bunk where he was lying.

So day followed day, each merged into another by the mists of
pain. On one day, he was aware of the sound of wind, and of snow
sifting through the holes in the walls and beneath the door. On
another, when he put out his hand to feel for the food on the table,
he found it was all gone. On all of them, when he fell into a doze,
even after the last of all reasonable hope had gone, he dreamed or
imagined that he could hear Marius outside the door, and he started
awake with a clutch at his heart. But nobody came.

IN FACT, there was nothing wrong with Marius. The Germans had
not made any new move, and everything was quiet in Furuflaten.
What had stopped him coming to see Jan was simply another storm.
Just after his previous visit, it had started to blow up from the south,
and before the night when he had meant to cross the fjord again
there was such a sea running that the crossing was quite impossible.

While Jan was lying groaning in the hut on the eastern side,
Marius was fretting impatiently on the west, and between them four
miles of furious sea made an impassable barrier. Nobody could get to
Revdal. Every day, Marius watched the grey scudding water which
was streaked with spindrift, and every evening at dusk he went down
to the beach at Furuflaten to make sure that there was really no
chance of going; but it was hopeless even to try to launch a boat. At
night he lay and listened for any easing of the shrieks of wind.

But he was not really worried. There was no reason why he should
be. When he had left Jan, his health had been improving. He had not
been able to leave as much food as he would have liked, but he reckoned that if Jan could spin it out, there was enough to keep him from
starving for some time yet. He knew Jan would be disappointed and
would be wondering what had happened, but he was sure that he
would guess it was the storm. He did not realise that inside the log
walls of the hut, with the snow banked up all round them. Jan could not hear the howling of the wind. Also, he still thought Jan was some
kind of seaman and would imagine for himself the fearsome effect of
a southerly gale in those narrow waters with a clear fetch of twenty
miles to windward.

So although Marius was naturally upset by the feeling that he was
letting Jan down, he had no immediate anxiety, and what worried
him most during the storm was the increasing menace of the daylight. So far as his own help was still concerned, the rescue of Jan was
becoming a race against the midnight sun. It was the beginning of
the last week in April, and already it was twilight all night. While the
storm lasted, the nights were dark enough, but when the sky cleared
there would not be more than a couple of hours in which he could
sneak away from the Furuflaten beach without being seen by the sentry; and if he left the beach at the time when the twilight was deepest, he would have to run the risk of landing again in broad daylight.
In a fortnight's time it would be so light all night that anyone with
binoculars would be able to watch him the whole way across the
fjord, and if the German motor-boat was still patrolling it would be
able to pick him up from miles away. Before then, whatever happened, Jan would have to move on from Revdal.

It was exactly a week after Marius's second visit to the hut when
the storm began to show signs of ending. During that day, when he
and his family could see that the evening might bring a chance of
crossing, he collected everything he had to offer Jan and packed it in
his rucksack: food, and paraffin, and bottles of milk, and a few cigarettes. At nightfall he put on his skis and went down to the beach
again. Two of his friends were there to meet him. There was still
some sea running, but not enough to make the passage dangerous;
when the wind drops in that landlocked water, the sea calms very
quickly. They quietly launched the boat, and began to row away.
During the storm, nothing had been seen of the motor-boat, but
that made it seem all the more likely that it would be out on patrol
again that night.

However, the crossing was peaceful. Marius himself was happy
because he had some good news to bring to Jan. He had just heard
that Herr Legland had sent a message to the schoolmaster in Mandal,
and that a favourable answer had come back. There had evidently
been some kind of a meeting in Mandal, and there had been plenty
of volunteers who would stand by to come up to a rendezvous on top
of the range between Mandal and Revdal where they would take
delivery of Jan. Mandal was willing to take over the responsibility of
looking after him, and the schoolmaster thought they would be able
to escort him to the frontier. Marius imagined, in that brief moment
of optimism while he crossed the fjord, that Jan might be in Sweden
before a week had passed.

The shock when he got to Revdal was all the worse. Before he
opened the door of the hut, he called "Hullo there!" But there was no
answer. He went in. It was pitch dark inside, and it stank of decay. In
alarm, he called Jan by his name, and stooped over the bunk as the
thought flashed through his mind that the Germans had been there
and taken Jan away. But he felt the bundle of blankets and then, to his
relief, he heard a faint sound as Jan turned his head.

"What's the matter?" he said. "What's happened?"

"There's the hell of a pain," Jan said.

Marius hastily shut the door and lit a lantern. The sight which he
saw appalled him. Jan's face was as white as the face of a corpse
beneath the dirt and the straggling beard. He slowly and wearily
opened his eyes when the light fell on them, and made a feeble movement. The blankets round his legs were dark with blood.

Jan was too far gone to be pleased that Marius had arrived. It had
happened to him so often before in dreams. For a few moments he
was even unwilling to be dragged up out of his coma and forced to
make the effort to live again. But when Marius boiled some water
and made him take a hot drink he revived a little. He said that he had
not had anything to eat or drink in several days. This puzzled Marius,
who thought he had left enough; but the fact was that three or four days before, what was left of the food had fallen off the table, and Jan
had been too bemused to realise what had happened. Since then, he
had lain there growing weak with hunger, while bread and dried fish
were lying on the floor beside him, just out of his sight below the
bunk board.

When Jan had come to himself enough to be able to talk coherently, Marius set himself to the unpleasant job of looking at his feet.
Even before he saw them, he knew that it was gangrene. It was perfectly obvious that although Jan was alive, the toes of both of his feet
had been dead for some time. Most of the blood on the blankets had
come from cuts which Jan had made himself. Some days before,
while he still had the strength to do it, he had started to operate on
his feet with his pocket-knife. In the belief that it might be blood poisoning, he had reasoned that the only thing he could do was to draw
off the blood, as people used to do with snake bites; and so he had
pulled up his legs in the bunk, one by one, and stabbed his feet with
the knife and let them bleed.

Marius washed them as best he could and bound them up again.
Both he and Jan knew, without having to say it, that Jan would
never walk or ski to Sweden. Marius privately thought there was
nothing to be done except to amputate both feet. He did not say so
to Jan, for fear of depressing him; but Jan had also come to the same
conclusion.

Marius could not stay long that night because of the daylight, but
before he left he promised Jan that he would either get a doctor, or
else arrange somehow for him to be carried to Sweden, and that in
any case he would come back in two or three days. Then he left him
again to his solitude. But now that Jan knew that he still had active
friends who were trying to help him, he felt he could face another few
days in that abominable hut with equanimity. The mere sight of
Marius had brought back his will to live. During the days that followed, between the bouts of pain, he began to come to terms with the
idea of living as a cripple. At first he dwelt morbidly on all the active pursuits which he would lose, but by and by he began to look forward to the simple pleasures he would still be able to enjoy. The
height of his ambition at that time was to get back to London and go
into Kensington Gardens in a wheel-chair on a sunny day and watch
the children playing.

Marius, rowing back across the fjord in the light of dawn, knew
he had just made promises to Jan without any idea of how he could
fulfil them; but he had great faith in the idea that if you are ready to
give up everything to the solution of any problem, you will always
find an answer. He did not know of any doctor who he was sure
would risk his life to go to Revdal, and he did not really believe that
a doctor could do much without taking Jan to hospital, which Jan
had refused to hear of. Still less did he know, at that moment, how
Jan could be carried bodily across the mountains to the frontier. But
one or other of these alternatives had got to be arranged, not only
because he promised it, but also because without either of them, Jan
was obviously going to die.

As soon as he got home, he told all his friends in the organisation
about the new and apparently insuperable difficulty that Jan was
absolutely helpless. Herr Legland and the three Furuflaten men who
had carried Jan over to Revdal all discussed it with him. Bit by bit
they pieced together a not impossible plan. Messengers were sent to
Tromso and to Mandal and to a valley called Kaafjord even farther
east. The news of the problem spread far and wide, whispered from
one to another of the trusted people who might have help to offer.
The dormant patriotic club went into action, inspired at last by a situation which was going to test its efficiency to the utmost. During
the following evening, the messengers began to return, one by one,
bringing criticisms and new suggestions and new offers of help back
to the main conspirators. The plan took shape.

The man who had been to Tromso brought back a message from
Sverre Larsen simply promising financial support, without any qualifications. The one who had been to Mandal had a more complicated message, but it was almost equally welcome. A party of four of the
Mandal men was ready to make the climb to the plateau at any
moment and to take the responsibility of keeping Jan alive. If Marius
and the Furuflaten men could get Jan up there and bring a sledge,
they were also willing to try to haul it to the frontier. But this they
regarded as a last resort. None of them had ever tried to haul a sledge
across the plateau. It might take a long time, and if the weather broke
again it might end in disaster. Furthermore, none of them knew the
Swedish side of the mountains, and they had to point out that
although the frontier was only twenty-five miles away, a man who
did not know the country might easily have to go another hundred
miles down into the forests towards the Baltic before he found any
human habitation. If that happened, the journey would take so long
that their absence could not possibly pass unnoticed, and that would
mean that none of them could come back. They would have to go
into exile, and this they were most unwilling to do because all of
them had dependents. But they had a better proposal: to get the
Lapps to make the journey.