We Die Alone: A WWII Epic of Escape and Endurance (24 page)

This message undoubtedly was a terrible shock to Marius. It
reached him in Furuflaten when the blizzard was still at its height
and had already been blowing for days. It meant only one thing to
him: that after all Jan had suffered, and all that had been risked for
him, that he was dead. It was exactly a week since Marius had said
good-bye to him when he put him in the snow-grave on the plateau.
All that time, as he had not heard any more, he had taken it for
granted that the Mandal men had found him and he had even
thought of him safe already in a Swedish hospital. It was dreadful for
Marius to think that nobody had ever come to take him out of the
hole again. His own knowledge of the arctic mountains, and the wisdom he had learned from older people, all made him certain that
nobody had ever survived, or ever could survive, a week of snow and
storm on the plateau, under the open sky. He could have wept to
think of that pitifully inadequate protection Jan had had: two blankets, and a canvas bag which was not even waterproof, and not more
than a day's supply of food. He hated to think what Jan must have
thought of him when he knew his end was coming.

Marius's imagination would not let him rest on the day when he
got the message. He took the news round to all the people he could
tell, those who had helped in different ways. They were all of the
same opinion: that it was a pity it had to end that way, but after all,
everyone had done his best. Nobody even suggested that Jan might
still be alive. Yet Marius knew all the time, in the back of his mind,
that he would have to go up to the plateau again that night, whatever
the weather, and whatever the risk of being seen and arrested by the
Germans when it was really too late to matter. Of course he had not
forgotten the solemn promise he had made to Jan; and assuming that
Jan was dead, the promise had been broken. He had to go, if only to
see for himself. He disliked the idea of leaving Jan's body up there where it lay, till the spring thaw exposed the last remains of it. He
wondered if Jan would have left him a message, written on paper perhaps, which the thaw would destroy. Perhaps he had some idea, as
people do when the death of a friend leaves them remorseful, of
making his peace with Jan by going to look at his body. At any rate,
whether it was rational or not, and whether it was suicidally dangerous or not, he knew he was going.

It was a question who would come with him. To go alone would
have added a lot to the danger: two people on a mountain in a blizzard are always more than twice as safe as one.

But of the three men who had been with him before, Alvin Larsen
and Olaf Lanes were away again fishing, and probably storm-stayed
somewhere down the coast, and Amandus Lillevoll was having such
pain with his broken ribs that it was foolish to think of him making
the climb again. There were no other men in the village in the know,
only women: his own sisters and his mother, and families of the men
who had come with him.

Olaf Lanes had several sisters, and one of them was called
Agnethe. Agnethe knew Marius well, and she was fond of him, and
so was he of her. When she heard that he was determined to go that
night, she knew quite well that if nobody else would go with him, he
would go alone; and rather than let him do that, she went and told
him firmly that she was coming too. Probably if any other girl had
said the same thing, he would have refused her offer without a second thought. It was certainly not an expedition for a girl. But
Agnethe was as good as any man on skis, and she was strong as well
as pretty; and, perhaps even more important, she was the only person that day who really understood the whole depth of what he was
feeling, and agreed with him that it was right to go. He possibly
needed sympathy just then even more than physical help. She offered
him both, and he was grateful; and because there was really no sensible alternative, he agreed to let her come.

At dusk, which was all that was left by then of the vanishing
nights, these two embarked on what was to be the last crossing of
Lyngenfjord to Revdal. Amandus had come with them to help them
to handle the boat and to look after it at Revdal. The crossing was wet
and wild, and the small boat under sail was beaten down by heavy
squalls from the mountains. But at least it was hidden from German
eyes as long as the snow went on falling. They reached the other
shore drenched and cold but safe, and beached the boat about half a
mile south of Revdal. Agnethe and Marius landed.

They took a new route up the mountain. It looked easier for
unladen climbers than the one which Marius had taken with the
sledge, but it included some pitches of simple rock climbing, in narrow chimneys, on which the sledge would have been a hopeless hindrance. Marius looked after Agnethe with affection and admiration,
but she needed no help from him. On rock she was more agile than
he was, and perhaps she was even more anxious to reach the plateau
and see the worst, so that his mind would be set at rest.

They climbed the first steep two thousand feet very quickly. But on
the steep face they were more or less in shelter. When they had almost
got up to the rim of the plateau, they began to hear a new note in the
wind above them, and when they looked up through the murk they
could see the snow blowing over the edge. It looked like hard grey pellets, and it shot over in jets with a power and speed which warned
them that the dangerous part of the climb was only beginning.

When they crossed the rim and stood up on the level surface
beyond it, the wind snatched at their clothes and threw them off their
balance and drowned their voices. The air was so full of whirling particles of snow that it took their breath away and they felt as if they
were suffocating. Both of them, of course, were properly dressed, in
windproof trousers and anuraks with hoods; but the snow lashed the
exposed parts of their faces with such violent pain that they could
not bear to turn unprotected into the wind. Marius shouted to
Agnethe, half-persuaded himself that what they were doing was madness; but she was already untying her skis, which had been
bound together for carrying. She dropped them on the shifting surface, and bent down to buckle on the bindings.

The way for the last three miles from there to the rendezvous was
against the wind. If it had not been so, it certainly would have been
more than foolish to go on, because of the danger of over-reaching
themselves and being unable to return. They pulled their hoods
down as far as they would go, and covered their mouths with their
hands to ward off the snow and make breathing possible. Marius set
off in the lead, because he knew the way, and marched on with his
head bent low, snatching a painful glance ahead of him now and
then. Agnethe followed close after him in his tracks. Neither of them
could see normally or hear anything but the howling of the wind,
and their sense of touch was numbed by cold. When the senses are
numbed, a mental numbness cannot be avoided. In this state they
went on and on, yard by yard into the wilderness, thinking no farther
ahead than the next step and the one after that. They climbed with
that thoughtless stubbornness, against all reason, which is often the
mainspring of great deeds: Marius driven on by his own compelling
conscience, and Agnethe by her sympathy and love.

When they came to the bluff they could see the loom of it above
them through the snow-mist; but even Marius had to hesitate before
he could find the boulder where Jan had been laid. Everything was
changed. The fresh snowfall and the high wind had made new drifts,
exposed new rocks and hidden others. The boulder which had stood
conspicuously clear of the surface was almost buried, and in the lee
of it, where the open hole had been, there was not a smooth
windswept surface. The puzzle of why the Mandal men had found
nothing there was solved: there was nothing whatever to be seen. Yet
Marius felt certain of his bearings. He was sure he had found the
right boulder, and that Jan could not have moved, and that therefore,
his body was buried far down below that virgin surface. He took off
his skis and went down on his knees in the soft snow and began to dig. He scratched the snow away with his hands. Agnethe crouched
beside him in an agony of cold. She was exhausted.

When Marius had dug away three feet of snow, the rest collapsed
into a cavity underneath, and he knew he was right. He cleared it
away, and saw Jan's ghastly waxen face below him. The eyes were
shut, and the head was covered with rime.

"Don't look," he said to Agnethe. "He's dead."

At the sound of his voice, Jan stirred.

"I'm not dead, damn you," he said, in a feeble voice but with every
sign of indignation.

Then he opened his eyes, and saw the astounded face of Marius
peering down at him, and he grinned.

"You can't kill an old fox," he said.

NOBODY CAN give an exact account of what happened to Jan during
all the weeks he spent lying alone on the plateau. By the time he had
leisure to look back on it, his memory was confused. He had the same
difficulty that one has in trying to bring back to mind the events and
one's feelings during a serious illness; and in fact, of course, he was
seriously ill all the time. Some incidents and impressions were perfectly clear to him, but as he remembered them they had no context;
they were isolated, like distant memories of childhood, and he had
only a hazy idea of what had led up to them, or what followed after.
But most of the episodes he remembered were confirmed in one way
or another by the people who visited him up there from time to time.
In general, oddly enough, he had no impression of being bored.
Once when somebody asked him how he had passed the time, he said
he had never been so busy in his life. And one thing, at least, which
is perfectly certain is the length of time this extraordinary ordeal
lasted. He lay in the sleeping-bag in the snow for no less than 27 consecutive days, from the night of 25th of April, when Marius took him
up to the plateau, till the night of the 22nd of May, when they were
to carry him down again in despair.

That first week, in the snow grave, was the worst in some respects,
partly because he was not so used to that way of living as he became
towards the end, and partly because he was forced to believe, for the second time, that his friends had abandoned him, or lost him, or all
been killed themselves. He did not think he would ever get out of the
grave again.

At first, he had been so relieved to be allowed to lie still that he
said good-bye to Marius and the other three men without any fear of
another spell of solitude. He settled down in the sleeping-bag on the
sledge, with the wall of snow on one side of him and the rock on the
other, and the small segment of sky up above, and he thought he
would go to sleep. But only too soon this mood of contentment was
driven away by the cold. It was much too cold to sleep. During the
climb the sleeping-bag and the blankets had got wet, and in the hole
in the snow the moisture froze them stiff. They were to remain either
wet or frozen for the whole of the time he was there, and he discovered one thing at once which was to plague him through all those
weeks: he could never sleep, because the cold always woke him and
he had to keep moving inside the blankets to ward off another attack
of frostbite. At the best, he could only fall into an uneasy doze.

Apart from the cold, the sledge made a very uncomfortable bed.
It had been a mistake to make the top out of narrow slats with spaces
in between them. There were only two layers of blanket and one of
canvas, besides his clothes, between him and the wooden slats; and
because he had to keep moving he soon got sores all over his back
and sides which made the discomfort infinitely worse.

During the first two days and night, before it began to snow, he
kept imagining that among the occasional whispering sounds of the
plateau he heard the hiss of skis. Sometimes he shouted to the people he thought were there. But this was not the kind of hallucination
he had had after the avalanche. On the plateau, his brain was quite
clear. Perhaps the sounds were made by little snowballs rolling down
the snow-covered scree at the foot of the bluff above him.

As soon as it started to snow, on the second night he lay in the
hole, he knew that his chance of being found was very small, at least
till the snow stopped falling; and there was an extra worry added to this, because at about the same time he finished the few bits of food
they had left him, and he was beginning to get very hungry.

By that time his movements and the heat of his body had made
a cavity in the snow, and the sledge had sunk deeper than it had
been. The fresh snowfall soon covered his body. He could brush it
off his face and his head, but in the narrow hole he could not throw
it off the rest of him. Slowly it sifted over his trunk and legs till they
were encased in a kind of tunnel, bridged over by a thickening layer
of snow which he could not move. For some hours he kept a hole
clear to the surface above his head, so that he could still see the open
air above him. But the snow grew deeper and deeper till he could
not reach up to the surface any more even with his arm stretched
out above him. Then the snow closed over the opening, and buried
him alive.

He was buried for either four or five days. What kept him alive is
a mystery. It was not hope, because he had none, and it was not any
of the physical conditions which are usually supposed to be essential to human life. Perhaps it is nearest to the truth to put his survival down to stubborn distaste for dying in such gruesome
circumstances.

He lay on his back in a little vault in the snow. At the sides and
above his body there were a few inches of space, and above his head
there was over a foot, but there was not enough room for him to
draw up his knees or reach down to touch his feet. A dim light filtered down from above, like the light below the surface of the sea. He
had no trouble in breathing, because the snow above him was fresh
and porous, but he lay all the time in fear that the roof would fall in
and pin his arms down and cover his mouth and choke him.