We Die Alone: A WWII Epic of Escape and Endurance (23 page)

They all took it for granted that it had something to do with the
plot which was afoot. It seemed certain that the organisation in
Furuflaten had been broken up, and that the Germans knew that
Mandal was involved in it; or else that somebody higher in the organisation, in Tromso perhaps, had been arrested and that the Germans
were planning a simultaneous raid both sides of the mountain. At all
events, it would have been crazy to make the climb that night, before
the Germans had shown some sign of what they meant to do. Herr
Nordnes himself knew that his own name was the only one in Mandal
so far which anyone outside could connect with the affair, and he did
the only thing he could do: he told all the others to stay at home and
say nothing; and for himself, he resolved that if he was arrested he
would try not to give them away whatever was done to him.

That evening, the people of Mandal watched every move which
the Germans made; but they seemed to be in no hurry to do anything
at all. The second wave of news which spread up the valley reported
that there were only six soldiers and an n.c.o. This seemed to suggest
that they had come to arrest one single individual. But later rumour
said that they were taking over a house as a billet, down by the jetty.
Nobody knew whether it was for one night or for good, but obviously if there was going to be an arrest, it was not going to happen
before nightfall. That night while Marius and his party were hauling
the sledge up Revdal and searching the plateau, nobody was sleeping
soundly in Mandal, except perhaps the Germans. When Amandus
looked down from the top of the buttress in the early morning, the
silent houses he saw far down below him were kept silent by anxiety
and fear.

But during the night nothing happened at all. The Germans
stayed in their billet, and in the morning they sallied forth and began
a house-to-house check of all the inhabitants of Mandal. On the
whole this relieved the tension. It pointed to a general vague suspicion of Mandal as a whole, rather than something definite against a
particular person. But it meant that nobody could go away from
home until the check of his own house had been completed, and to
judge by the desultory way the Germans went to work, this would
put a stop to any journey to the frontier for several days. It also made
it impossible for the present for anyone to go over to Lyngseidet by
boat to find out what had happened; and even to ring up Herr
Legland would be asking for trouble, in case he had been arrested.

The whole thing remained a mystery all that day. Whatever way
Nordnes and the other conspirators looked at it, it was hard to
believe that after years without a garrison, the sudden arrival of
even a section of Germans on the very evening when the ascent of
the plateau was planned could be simply a coincidence. Yet nothing
the Germans did, once they had landed, seemed to have any bearing on the plot, or to suggest in any way that they knew what was
going on.

This particular mystery, as it happened, was never solved. To this
day it still seems incredible that the Germans arrived there by chance;
yet there is no reason to think they had any suspicion, at that particular moment, that Jan had been taken across to the east side of
Lyngenfjord. The last time they had seen him was when he was skiing through Lyngseidet, and that was nearly three weeks earlier. But
perhaps the fact that he had slipped through their grasp and disappeared had brought it home to somebody in the local command that
the routes to the frontier were not very well controlled. Perhaps
somebody else had had a rap on the knuckles. The somewhat
pathetic little garrison sent to Mandal, as well as the motor-boats
which suddenly appeared on Lyngenfjord, may have been part of a
general tightening of the grip on the frontier, an indirect result of Jan's journey rather than a deliberate search for him. If anyone
knows the answer to this, it can only be some German officer.

However, the immediate mystery for Herr Nordnes was cleared
up to some extent by an urgent message which arrived that night. It
had come by a devious route, but it had originated from Marius, and
it told Nordnes that Jan had been left at the meeting-place on the
plateau and begged him to have him collected without delay. It also
told him, by the mere fact that it had been sent, that there was nothing wrong in the rest of the organisation and that they did not even
know that the Germans had come to Mandal. He went out to round
up his team again, and to see whether they thought it was safe to start
at once. But before the point was decided, it began to snow.

Standing outside the schoolhouse in Mandal, one can see almost
the whole of the route to the plateau which they intended to use. As
Marius and Amandus had expected, it lies up the side valley which
leads out of Mandal on its southern side. This lesser valley is called
Kjerringdal, the word kjerring meaning an old woman or hag, to correspond with the man of Mandal. Kjerringdal rises steeply, in a series
of gleaming curved terraces of snow, and in spring almost the whole
of it is swept by avalanches; but there is one route up it clear of the
avalanche tracks which is known to the local men. It ends in a wide
couloir. From Mandal the rim of the couloir stands against the sky,
three thousand feet above; and two miles beyond the rim is the place
where Jan was lying.

That night, the snow clouds gathered first above the head of
Mandal, and then, even as Nordnes and his men were watching them
and debating the weather, the clouds swept up from the south across
the plateau, and poured over the edge of the couloir and down into
Kjerringdal. Minute by minute they grew thicker and nearer, blotting
out the high terraces one by one, till the clouds from Kjerringdal
joined with the ones from Mandal and swirled round the vertical
crag which divides the two valleys. A few moments later they were
overhead, and the snow began to fall, softly and thickly, on the floor of the valley where the men were standing. Soon there was nothing
but snowflakes to be seen.

None of them liked to think of a man lying ill and unprotected
and helpless up there in the heart of the clouds; but falling snow put
an end to whatever hopes they had of reaching him for the present.
The German garrison might have been avoided, and even in snow
the ascent of Kjerringdal might not have been impossible; but to find
the meeting-place would have been out of the question. Nobody in
Mandal knew exactly where it was. They would have to depend on
seeing the steep bluff which the Furuflaten message had described,
and to begin to search for it when they could not see more than a few
yards in front of them would be futile and suicidal. There was noting
for it but to wait till the snowstorm ended.

It went on snowing all night, and all the morning. Going about
their business in the valley the following day none of them had much
hope for the man on the top of the mountain. Perhaps they regretted
then they had not gone up on the night that the Germans came. As
it turned out, they could have done it without being caught; but
nobody could have known that at the time. Now, everything
depended on the snow. They were ready to go the moment it showed
the first sign of easing. It was simply a question of whether the man
would survive till then.

The chance came on the third night after Marius had left Jan up
there. There were breaks in the cloud that evening, and the local men,
with their knowledge of Mandal weather, believed it would be clear
before the morning. The party of four volunteers assembled. The
Germans had been watched and counted to make sure they were all
out of sight in the billet at the foot of the valley. Everything seemed
auspicious.

The ascent of Kjerringdal went off without any serious trouble,
though under the best of conditions it is not a safe or easy climb at
that time of year. From time to time Nordnes caught sight of the men
foiling on up the valley, picking their course to avoid the avalanche tracks. After four hours, on skis all the way, they got to the rim of the
plateau. The snow had stopped by then, as they had hoped, and they
struck off right-handed to make the level trek across the watershed
and then down towards Revdal.

They saw the steep bluff well ahead of them. A series of gentle
gullies and frozen lakes led down to the foot of it, and they ran
down into the shallow valley which Marius and his party had
reached three nights before. The fresh snow which had fallen lay
thick over everything. The valley seemed just as deserted and still as
the rest of the plateau. There were no tracks and no sign whatever
that anyone had ever been there. They searched the foot of the
bluff, and the whole of the valley bed above it and below, but they
could not find anything at all. They scoured the plateau round
about, shouting, but there was no answer. For two hours they
hunted far and wide; but then they had to give it up and make back
for the head of Kjerringdal again, in order to be at home before the
Germans began their day's work of checking the houses. The skirun down Kjerringdal was very fast, and they were back in Mandal
by the time the place was stirring.

When they all talked over this night's expedition with Nordnes,
the only conclusion they could come to was that the man who had
been left up there had gone off somewhere by himself. They still knew
very little about him. They had heard he was crippled, but for all they
could tell, he might still have been able to drag himself along. It
seemed most likely that when the snow had started, he had tried to get
down again on the Revdal side to look for shelter. It had also crossed
their minds, of course, that he might have died and been buried by the
snow. In fact, they thought anyone who had stayed on the plateau for
the past three days would almost certainly be dead; but they dismissed
the idea that he had died anywhere near the rendezvous, because they
thought they would have found his body. There had not been any avalanche up there, and there was very little drifting, and they would have
expected a dead man's body to show as a visible mound on the snowfield. Even if he had dug himself in and then been buried, there
should have been something to show where he had done it. But there
was nothing at all. He had simply disappeared.

For all practical purposes, Mandal just then was entirely cut off
from the outside world. The Germans had been making strict
inquiries about anyone they found was not at home, and they
expected an explanation of where every man was and what he was
doing. Until they had finished their slow and laborious progress from
house to house up the whole of the valley, it was obvious that they
would not let anyone leave it; and Nordnes could not send a messenger over the fjord to tell Herr Legland what had happened. He could
not use the telephone, either. It had always been tapped on and off,
and it was sure to be tapped, or simply cut off, while the German
search was going on; and the whole mystery was too complicated to
discuss in disguised language without any prearranged code. If
Nordnes had been able to have five minutes' conversation with
Marius, everything would have been easy, but they might as well have
been on different continents; and besides, at that time neither of
them knew who was the organiser of the other village's part in the
affair. The only way of communication between them was through
Legland, and for the present that way was blocked.

Without any help or advice from outside, the only thing the
Mandal men could do was to try again. A second party therefore
made the long climb on the following night, the fourth since Jan had
been abandoned on the plateau. They regarded it as almost a hopeless effort; but Mandal, in the person of Herr Nordnes, had promised
it would do its best, and besides, while there was any chance at all that
there was a man alive up there, none of them could have slept easily
in their beds.

This time, when they got to the valley below the bluff, it was still
covered with the ski-tracks from the night before. They extended
the search father down towards the edge of the drop into Revdal,
and inland across the plateau. Every few yards they broke the oppressive silence of the plateau with a shout, and listened while it
died again to silence.

Somebody had decided on a password which had been given both
to Jan and the Mandal men. Presumably as a tribute to Jan's English
training, the Mandal men were to identify themselves to him by saying "Hallo, gentleman." People in Norway often suppose that the
word gentleman can be used as a form of address in the singular, as
indeed it could if there were any logic in the English language. That
night the plateau rang with this repeated cry but nobody in either
Mandal or Furuflaten spoke any English at all, and so there was
nobody there who would have thought it odd or ludicrous; except
Jan, and he could not hear it. Towards morning, the party retreated
again by way of Kjerringdal without finding anything. As they went
down, the weather was worsening.

This second sortie had made it clear that it was no use to search
any more without some kind of consultation with Furuflaten. To put
a final end to any thought of another expedition, the snow began
again, and during the day the wind got up and increased to a blizzard. This was far worse than the calm snowfall of two days before.
In the sheltered valley, the temperature fell abruptly and visibility
was restricted, and any outside work became impossible. On the
plateau, as the Mandal people knew from generations of experience,
no search party would have a hope of finding anything; it would be
all they could do to move at all against the wind, or in fact, after a
very short time, even to keep themselves alive.

But the blizzard did have one helpful consequence, in that it hampered the German troops as much as anyone. They could not keep
their eye any longer on the whole of the foot of the valley, even if they
did venture out into the blinding snow; and under the unexpected
cover of this storm, a skier slipped out of the valley and brought the
news of Mandal's plight to friends in Kaafjord. From there, after a
day's delay in which a boat was found which could cross the fjord in such wild weather, the news reached Herr Legland, and he sent a
message at once to Marius.