‘Me, too. Let’s take the opportunity while it’s offered. At least we can have an hour or two.’
An extra bed had been set up during their absence and they lay down, fully clothed, and both fell almost immediately into the first proper sleep they had had for forty-eight hours. They were woken by the steward calling to them from outside the tent. Leo sat up and realized that two things had changed. Darkness had fallen, and the guns had stopped firing. She called out to the steward to come in and he entered carrying a bucket of steaming water.
‘The general asks if you will do him the honour of joining him for dinner.’
Leo suppressed a laugh. The formality of the invitation was in such stark contrast to their circumstances that it seemed almost ludicrous. ‘Please thank the general and tell him we shall be delighted,’ she said.
They spruced themselves up as far as possible and the steward conducted them to a large tent which obviously served as an officers’ mess. As they entered Leo suppressed a gasp and looked at Victoria, whose eyes expressed the same mixture of surprise and amusement. The long table was covered with spotless linen, on which highly polished cutlery gleamed in the light of candles in silver candlesticks. Orderlies stood along both sides with white napkins over their arms. Leo was reminded of the officers’ mess at the Guards’ Chelsea barracks, where she had been Ralph’s guest more than once. The only item that might have looked out of place there was the huge samovar which stood, glistening, in one corner. She quickly realized that the formality of the invitation had not been out of place. Although the officers present were swathed in muddy greatcoats against the cold they behaved as if they were entertaining ladies in their mess at headquarters. Indeed, they were treated with a gallant courtesy which surpassed anything Leo had experienced anywhere in England.
They were served potato soup with soured cream, and then a goulash spiced with paprika and enriched with more cream and finally pancakes with a chocolate sauce.
Victoria pushed the last of hers to the side of her plate and muttered in English, ‘If I eat any more I shall burst.’
‘I know what you mean,’ Leo replied. ‘I wonder what those poor boys in the hospital tent are getting.’
‘Not this, I’m willing to bet,’ her friend grunted.
When the meal was over they all adjourned outside, where they sat round a huge campfire while a soldier sang to the accompaniment of the
gusla
, a kind of single-stringed banjo, which produced a curious, monotonous buzzing sound. The song, too, had a limited musical range, repeating the same pattern over and over again. When it had gone on for some time Leo leaned over to Major Dragitch and whispered, ‘What is the song about, major?’
‘It is an old legend,’ he whispered back. ‘Every family in Serbia tells such stories, of how their ancestors fought the Turks back in the fourteenth century, or other historic battles.’
‘It sounds a very sad song,’ Leo murmured.
‘We Serbs have a sad history,’ he replied.
Eventually the song came to an end and then, to Leo’s surprise, two soldiers rose to their feet and, linking arms, began to move in a slow, shuffling dance. Immediately the gusla began again and other men rose and joined the first two, until they had formed a circle. The pace quickened and the steps became more intricate, but the dance retained an inherent solemnity that seemed in keeping with the mood of the evening. With the ending of the bombardment a great silence had fallen over the camp and the skies had cleared to reveal stars that hung huge and lambent over the frozen plain. Leo looked up and drew a long breath. The discomforts of the journey and the horrors of the day faded and she knew that what she had said to Victoria was true. She would rather be here than in the most luxurious drawing room in London.
The following morning the general appeared at the entrance to the tent.
‘I have good news for you. I have a reply from the authorities in Sophia. Your friends are at Lozengrad – or Kirk-Kilisse, if you prefer the Turkish name.’
‘Where is that?’ Victoria asked eagerly.
‘I will show you.’ The general advanced to the table in the centre of the tent and unrolled a map. ‘Here is Adrianople. And here is Lozengrad, to the east and slightly north, about sixty kilometres away.’
‘They are not at Chataldzha then?’ Leo asked.
‘No, as I told you, foreign non-combatants are not permitted so near the front line. But the casualties from Chataldzha are being taken to Lozengrad. I am told that your friends have set up a hospital there.’
‘Then we must go and join them,’ Victoria said. ‘Only sixty kilometres. We can be there in an hour in the car.’
The general shook his head reprovingly. ‘My dear lady, I could not possibly allow you to set off alone. The countryside between here and Lozengrad has been devastated by the war and there are desperate people out there. Who knows what might happen to two unprotected women? You must allow me to send an escort with you. They will not have cars, but you will find that it is impossible to travel fast over these roads.’
They both realized that it would be foolish to argue, so an hour later they set off in a cavalcade with Georgi Radic and two troopers riding ahead and two more soldiers standing on the running boards of the car. The general had insisted on providing them with a tent, which was strapped on top of the trunk carrying their possessions and food supplies for two days.
‘This is ridiculous!’ Victoria muttered as they packed. ‘Anybody would think we were going six hundred kilometres, not sixty. Doesn’t he have any idea how fast a car can travel?’
They soon had their answer. The roads, if they could be called that, had been churned to liquid mud by the bullock wagons that were the main form of transport for the army. They had not covered more than two miles before the car stuck fast and they were glad of the power of the two burly soldiers to push them out. Another mile further on they stuck again and this time the two mounted troopers had to get off their horses and help. By the time the short winter daylight was fading they had covered less than half the distance and Georgi called a halt by a small copse of trees, whose upper branches had been ripped away by gunfire. The fallen timber was built up into a campfire, the tent was erected and a cooking pot was soon simmering for the inevitable soup. Conversation was difficult, since only Georgi spoke anything other than Serbian, but before long one of the men produced a gusla and this time Leo took comfort in the monotonous drone, which seemed to make the darkness beyond the fire less threatening. When the song finished they said their goodnights and crawled into their sleeping bags in the tent, snuggling together for warmth and comfort, while the men, except for one to keep watch, wrapped themselves in their blankets and lay down around the fire.
‘I say,’ Leo murmured, on the verge of sleep, ‘we wanted an adventure. Well, we’ve certainly found one.’
Victoria chuckled softly. ‘I don’t know about you, Malham Brown! Here we are, miles from anywhere, half frozen, with nothing but the hard ground to lie on, and I do believe you’re enjoying yourself!’
‘Do you know,’ Leo responded, ‘I believe I am.’
Eight
The two days after his arrest passed for Tom with frustrating slowness. He was half afraid to leave the hotel and when he did venture out the febrile wartime atmosphere of the city unnerved him, as it had not done before. He spent most of the time in his room, working up some of the sketches he had made from the train, being careful not to include anything that might conceivably be seen as useful to an enemy. He also tried to produce a reasonable likeness of Leonora, reckoning that it could be useful in his search, but as always he found it impossible to catch that indefinable essence that would make the picture come to life.
On their last evening in the hotel he knocked on Max’s door to see if he was ready to go down to dinner and was alarmed to find him cleaning and loading a revolver.
‘I didn’t know you carried a gun!’
‘Don’t you?’
‘No! No, it would be illegal in England.’
‘Oh yeah. I forgot your people’s funny attitude to self-protection. Believe me, I wouldn’t be without this baby.’
‘Have you ever used it?’
‘Never needed to. But there’s always a first time.’
Max reported that it was impossible to get tickets to travel by train as the whole rail network had been taken over by the military; so in the morning he and Tom loaded their belongings into the car and set off by road. It became clear very quickly that progress was going to be slow. The roads were clogged with troops moving towards the front, on foot and on horseback, and wounded being returned in slow-moving wagons drawn by oxen. By the end of the first day they had reached Nis, the second largest city in Serbia, and were lucky to find a small, bug-ridden room in an inn, where they had to share a straw-stuffed mattress on a rickety bed. The next day they headed south towards Kumanovo. As they drew nearer they encountered sights that turned Tom’s stomach. They passed through village after village that had been reduced to smouldering ruins and among the blackened buildings he caught glimpses of ragged, half-burned bundles that he tried not to recognize as human bodies. The fields on either side of the road had been churned to liquid mud and half submerged in the morass were the corpses of hundreds of men and horses. Upflung arms were stretched in pointless appeal towards the heavens and blackened skulls grinned up at them from the verges. As darkness fell, the sky was reddened by the flames of further conflagrations. That night, they reached Skopje and found a scene of total devastation. All the undamaged buildings had been commandeered by the military and they were forced to spend the night in the car, parked close to the River Vardar, which ran through the centre of the city.
Tom woke, chilled and cramped, as an unwilling winter dawn broke over the town. He had suspected for the last day or two that he was coming down with a cold and now he was sure of it. His nose was streaming and his throat felt as if it had been rubbed raw with sandpaper. He crawled out of the car to stretch his legs and wandered onto the bridge that crossed the river. He looked down and immediately doubled up in a fit of convulsive vomiting. The waters of the river were choked, as if by debris brought down by flood waters and caught up against the bridge, with the headless bodies of men.
Tom’s stomach was empty and he could only bring up acid bile. When the nausea eased enough to allow him to stand he staggered back to the car and woke Max.
‘Go and look,’ he gasped in answer to Max’s sleep-fuddled queries. ‘Look in the river.’
Max came back to the car after a few minutes, grey-faced but calm. ‘Tom, you should draw this. The world should know what is being done here. I can write it up, but only a picture will make people see the true horror.’
‘I can’t!’ Tom whispered.
‘Yes, you can,’ Max said. ‘You need to do this.’
Tom dragged himself back to the bridge and forced himself to look properly at the pitiful sight below. He got out his pad and began to draw and as he did so he understood the force of what Max had said. In confronting the horror and reducing it to planes and shadows on the paper it became no less real but somehow comprehensible. As he finished a few local men appeared from the shells of their houses and came to stand by the bridge. It was evident from their behaviour that this was not the first time they had seen the slaughter below them. Max questioned them in German and translated for Tom.
‘They say it happens every night. Some think it is local men, killed by the
Četniks
for resisting, others that the bodies have been carried down from higher up the river. No one knows for sure who is responsible.’
‘Who are the
Č
etniks
?’ Tom asked.
‘Serbian irregulars in the pay of the Black Hand. Most of the local population are Albanian and the Serbs and the Albanians have always been at daggers drawn.’
‘The what? It sounds like something out of a penny dreadful.’
Max gave a mirthless grunt of laughter. ‘See what you mean, but they’re serious enough. The proper name for the organization is Unification or Death but they are always referred to as the Black Hand. They are ultra-nationalists and their objective, as I understand it, is to create a Greater Serbia. It seems from these guys I’ve just been talking to that they pretty much run things around here at the moment.’ He looked down at Tom’s picture. ‘That has to be sent to the London
Times
, and I need to get the story out to my paper. People have to know what’s going on here. Let’s go find a post office or somewhere with a telephone, so I can file my copy.’
‘Maybe I can send a telegram to London in case Leonora has arrived home,’ Tom said. The prospect of an affirmative answer, which would allow him to return to civilization, dangled before him like a mirage in the desert.
Enquiries in the stricken town produced the information that all communications were under the control of the Black Hand, who had set up headquarters in one of the few intact buildings, which people were already calling the Black House. There they were received courteously by a Major Tankovic but told that the telephone lines between Skopje and Belgrade were down, as were those between the town and Salonika to the south. Normal postal services had ceased to operate and all messages had to be conveyed by courier and were confined to military bulletins. With little hope of success, Tom asked his usual question regarding the possible whereabouts of Leonora and Victoria and was met, as usual, with blank incomprehension. Defeated, they returned to the car and breakfasted on the last of the provisions they had brought with them from Belgrade.
‘I guess the only thing we can do is press on southwards,’ Max said. ‘If we can get through to Salonika we should be able to contact London and the USA, and maybe pick up some news of your lady friend.’