Doris Lessing - Briefing for a Descent into Hell

I can remember very clearly my fantasies of those few days of waiting, the daydreams that are the most useful of preparations for forthcoming stress or danger. My day-dreams — or plans — might have come out of a boy’s adventure story, or Beau Geste. The sordidness, the dirty-cellar nastiness, the psychological double-twisting of modern torture would have taken me completely by surprise if I had had the bad luck to be caught.

I and Miles Bovey were dropped together on a dark and very cold night into a total darkness. We might have been falling into the desert of the sea — or upwards into the nothingness of space — instead of into mountains where, we knew, were villages, and which were full of groups of fighting men, the Partisans and their opponents, the Chetniks.

Bovey dropped first. He gave me a small nod and a smile as he jumped — it was the last human contact he had. I did not even see the white of his parachute below me as I fell into the dark. The tiny gleam from the aircraft fled into the black overhead, and I swung down and down until something black came swinging up — I missed the crown of a tall pine by a few feet and landed in a heap in a space between sharp rocks. I hurt my leg a little. It was four in the morning, and still night. It was cloudy: they had waited for a cloudy night. I did not dare call out to Miles. I piled the parachute behind a rock, where its whiteness would be hidden, and I sat on it. It was extremely cold. I sat on until the light came filtering down through high conifers. I was on the side of a mountain. It was still dark under the trees when the sky was flooded with a rosy dawn light. I saw a white glimmer high in the air about a hundred yards away and sat on without moving until I could determine that it was, as I thought, Miles’ parachute. But it could have been a layer of snow on a branch.

The parachute was hanging from a high branch, stirring and moving in the dawn wind. I emerged from behind my rock with caution, and found, a few feet away from the tree which held his parachute, Miles, quite dead. He had not been shot, as I first thought from the dark stain of blood on his forehead. He had crashed down through the tall pine. His parachute had caught in it. He had hung there like a fly in a web. Trying to unhitch himself he had fallen, and had knocked his head on a rock. The fall had not been much more than thirty feet, and all around the rock he had struck the forest floor was soft with old leaf mould and littered with pine needles. It must have happened no more than minutes before I landed. He had been as unlucky as I had been lucky.

The parachute was catching the light, making a beacon that could be seen for miles. I had to climb that tree and get it down. The trunk rose straight up without a branch for twenty feet or so, but had many sharp projecting woody bits. I went up it clinging with my arms and legs, trying to by-pass the sharp pieces, and trying, too, to keep a lookout for anyone who might be coming to investigate that high patch of glistening white. I got to the level of the first branch, when I heard a sound that might have been a twig breaking or the crack of a rifle, and I remained quite still in indecision before thinking that nothing was more dangerous to me than that heap of stirring white. I went up the remainder of that trunk as fast as I could, and, lying face down along the projecting branch that held the parachute, wriggled out towards it. I had just grasped the silk, and was tugging and jerking it to free it from the twigs that held it, when I saw coming down over the shoulder of the mountain, five soldiers, holding their rifles pointed at me. I had no means of knowing whether they were Partisans or Chetniks. I therefore sat up on the branch like a boy caught stealing apples, and went on wriggling and jerking at the parachute to free it. I saw that the second of the soldiers was a girl. She was the most beautiful girl I have ever seen. She had thick black braids falling down her back under her cap, black oriental eyes, and a face like Aphrodite’s.

I saw the Red Star on their breasts and said: I am a British soldier.

The leader said something to the others, who lowered their rifles.

He said, in French, We were expecting you.

I said: I’ll just get this parachute off. As I said this, it came loose and flopped to the forest floor.

The sun had come up. The forest was infused with a reddish golden light. The birds were singing. The five under me were staring up. They were smiling. I said: But my friend has been killed.

They had not seen Miles; their attention had been on me.

The girl went straight to him, to make sure he was dead. She was a medical student who played the part of doctor for her Partisan group. I will say here that her name was Konstantina and that I loved her from that first moment, as she did me.

By the time I had slid and scrambled down the tree, she had finished examining Miles, and now she examined my hands for scratches from the rough trunk, and saw to my leg, which was aching badly from the blow I had given it on landing. The others were already digging a grave in the forest. My first moment of meeting with the Partisans, with my love Konstantina, was a burial. They were scooping out the soft leafy soil with their hands, their belt-knives, their canteens. Before we laid Miles in the grave we took his equipment, very precious to those underequipped hand-to-mouth soldiers, and I took his poison pills from where I knew he had hidden them, in his belt.

The six of us left him there and walked down into a valley where a stream was swollen with melted snow, and across the stream and up into a mountain peak where the snow still lay thick and wintry, although the spring sun was hot enough to make us fold our great coats and carry them with our packs. There, just below the snow line, were caves, and in them the temporary headquarters of this Partisan group: they never stayed anywhere longer than a few nights.

In other countries occupied by the Nazis, there was the pattern of people fighting against them, and those who collaborated with them, out of a natural sympathy, or because of a belief that they must win. In some countries this pattern was very simple. People living in a town, a village, knew that so and so was a Nazi, and that so and so was not. Northern countries seemed more straightforward than the South. Norway for instance, or Holland. Information from occupied Holland might come that the Nazis had hanged or shot or imprisoned twelve members of the Resistance; that certain members of the Resistance had committed such and such acts of sabotage. But in Yugoslavia things were at the opposite extreme. The information was not: The Germans entered such and such a village and shot twenty Yugoslav Resistance members; but that: “The Croat collaborators entered such a Serbian village and exterminated all its inhabitants,” or “Moslem troops massacred all the people in the village of …” or, the Partisans entering such a village after sharp fighting found all the inhabitants murdered by — the Croats, or — but it was endless, with Catholics, Moslems, Montenegrins, Herzegovinians, Croats, Serbs, and so on and so on.

As I came out of the thick forest into the rock-surrounded space outside the cave, I saw a dozen or so soldiers, all of them watching our approach from where they squatted together eating their breakfast, bread and some sausage. They were all young, and some were girls. My presence was explained in a few words. I was handed a hunk of rough bread. A can of water was being passed around. For me it was a powerfully emotional moment: I was joining the famed Partisans whose exploits people were talking of everywhere. Their heroism had the simplicity of other days, a clean straightforwardness, like the heroes outside Troy. These were people like those. When I had time to look around, and examine their guns and equipment, I saw that this must be a very rough and simple fighting. If they had uniforms, they were taken from dead enemies, so that boots, caps, jackets, belts were of every sort of design. Some had no uniform, they wore anything that could serve as protection in these wild mountains, peasants’ boots, students’ winter knitted caps. The Red Star on their caps or on their breasts was what linked them.