We Die Alone: A WWII Epic of Escape and Endurance (25 page)

He could imagine quite well the change that had taken place on
the surface of the plateau in such a heavy snowfall, and he knew that
even if the Mandal men did come to look for him, it was very
unlikely that they would find him before the summer thaw exposed
his body. Of course, he knew he could not live till then, because in the first stages of the thaw the snow would become compacted and
impervious and he would be very, very slowly suffocated.

The only vestige of physical comfort he had in all this time was
the dregs of the bottle of brandy. There was not very much in it when
he was left there, but as he was weak and starving, less than a mouthful of it was enough to make him slightly drunk. He made it last out
for some time after the food was gone. When everything became
intolerable, he had the bottle to think about. He would put off taking a sip for hours, so that he could enjoy the anticipation of the
warmth going down his throat; and when at last he grasped the precious bottle, and wrestled weakly with the cork, and struggled in the
confines of the grave to tilt it to his mouth, the spoonful of raw spirit
dulled his pains and made the next hour or two slip past more easily.
At times he was even struck by the humour of lying buried in one's
grave and swigging a bottle of brandy. But of course the moment
came when there was only one more spoonful in the bottle. This he
kept as if it were his only link with life, and it was still there when
Marius relieved him.

There was one benefit of being buried. Certainly it prevented the
Mandal men from finding him and thereby was nearly the end of
him; but to compensate for this, it protected him from everything
that happened on the surface. If he had been exposed, the blizzard
after the snowfall would have killed him; but in his grave he was no
more aware of the howling wind than he was of the shouts of the
Mandal party. The blizzard blew over him, but down in the vault in
the snow it was always perfectly silent and perfectly calm, and the
temperature was always steady, a few degrees below zero.

So he lay while the days and nights passed over. He had no inclination by then to indulge himself with daydreams, or to philosophise
as he had in the hut at Revdal. His mind was occupied with the
minute details of physical existence: to keep moving, to be on the
watch for frostbite, to try the impossible task of keeping his body in
some state of sanitation; to stop the snow roof from falling down, to prevent the bottle of brandy from falling over. Each of these tasks
became an absorbing activity which occupied him for hours on end,
and each one of them was an important part of his conscious effort
not to die. He added to them, typically, the task of cleaning the
revolver which he still wore in its holster. When any of the tasks were
accomplished for the moment, he felt he had warded off death for a
few more minutes. He sometimes visualised death as a physical being
who prowled about him. He parried the lunges this creature made at
him, and he was proud of himself when he thrust off another of its
attacks. It did not occur to him then that he might have welcomed
death's more compassionate advances.

When Marius broke through the snow above him he was dozing,
and he heard his voice in a dream, as he often had before. In the
dream he was annoyed that the voice said he was dead. It seemed too
bad of Marius to suggest that he had lost the battle with death, when
he had been trying so hard to win it, so he denied it hotly. Then he
opened his eyes and it was real: and Marius looked so surprised that
he laughed and, half-conscious, he said out loud the Norwegian
proverb which had been running in his head. "You can't kill an old
fox, you know. You can't kill an old fox."

This voice from the dead did in fact almost paralyse Marius for
a moment while he reorganised his thoughts. A surge of relief
made his heart beat faster; but immediately after it came the foreknowledge of the problems which had come to life again with Jan.
Jan himself was beyond being surprised by then by anything that
happened: it did not strike him as particularly strange, though it was
pleasant, to see a hooded and yet unmistakably feminine and attractive face looking down at him by the side of Marius. Marius and
Agnethe scraped away more snow till Marius could climb down into
the hole and clear a space round Jan so that he had a little more freedom to move about. He had brought food with him, more as an
offering to fate than with any hope of using it. He fed Jan with bread
and bits of fish, while he was explaining how the Mandal men had tried to find him. He had also brought more brandy and some
tobacco. Jan could not eat much, but he had a craving for a cigarette,
and Marius rolled him one and crouched over him to shelter him
while he lit it.

Puffing at this cigarette, while the snow drifted into the hole and
the wind shrieked overhead in the grey half-darkness, Jan began to
feel almost himself again. It was the belief that he was forgotten that
always brought him down to his lowest depths. Now his own hardships faded, and he noticed that Agnethe was in terrible distress. By
then, in fact, she was so cold that she could hardly speak. As soon as
Jan realised what she was suffering, and all on his behalf, he insisted
that they should leave him and get down to the fjord again while they
were still able to do it.

Marius himself knew he could not do any good by staying. The
only useful thing he could do was to go down and make perfectly
certain, as quickly as possible, of getting a large enough party up
from one side of the mountain or the other to move Jan away from
where he was. The message from Mandal had said they would make
the climb again as soon as the weather allowed it. Marius told Jan of
this, and to help them to find him if they did come he made a flag
by tying a piece of cloth to a ski-stick which he stuck in the snow by
the side of the hole. So, after staying with Jan for only half an hour,
they left him again with this forlorn signal flapping wildly in the
storm above him.

As ever, Marius's unrelenting conscience asked him whether he
had done all that was humanly possible, and this time he had to
admit to himself that he had not. There was still the slight chance
that the Mandal men might be on their way up at that very minute.
It was true that the weather had not improved at all, but he felt that
he ought to be there, just in case they had chosen to come that night,
to make sure that they found the flag. He could not afford to waste
time by waiting. The only way to make sure of it quickly was to go on
towards Mandal and see if they were coming. Accordingly, instead of turning back down the wind and downhill towards Revdal and
home, he and Agnethe faced up into the wind again and climbed on
towards the watershed.

In those awful conditions, this was a very brave thing to do, and
like many brave and admirable deeds it was also fool-hardy. Agnethe
agreed with it willingly when Marius proposed it, but she very nearly
died as a result. They reached the watershed, fighting against the
wind for every step. Up there, they lost their way, but were saved by
a sudden momentary clearance. They pressed on and got right across
to the rim of the couloir at the head of Kjerringdal. Here there is a
small isolated rock from which one can see in clear weather right
down to the bottom on Mandal. Marius clung to the lee of this rock
and peered down into the depths below. This was the point at which
the Mandal men would come up out of Kjerringdal on to the plateau.
But that night, although it was light by then, he could only see a few
yards down the valley through the scudding snow. There was nobody
in sight. While he was searching over the edge, Agnethe collapsed by
the side of the rock behind him. When he saw her and turned back
to her in alarm, he found she was unconscious.

Both their lives depended then on whether he could revive her,
because of course he would never have left her. He set about it in the
most drastic way. He shook her limp body, and hit her and slapped
her face. He believed, he said afterwards, that apart from anything
else this would make her angry, and that anger would improve her
circulation. Whether this was the way it worked or not, it did bring
her back to consciousness, and as soon as she gave any sign of life he
dragged her to her feet and started off, half-carrying her, determined
whatever happened to keep her on the move.

Luckily, going down-wind was infinitely easier than going
against it, and once they had got back the first mile across the watershed the rest of the way was downhill. Luckily also, although the
climb and the cold had used up the last of Agnethe's physical
strength, she had an unlimited strength of will. Many people who are exhausted by exposure lose even the will to help those who try
to rescue them. If Agnethe had resisted the rough treatment Marius
gave her as he hauled her and bullied her along, or if she had ever
succumbed to the insidious temptation to give up, neither of them
would ever have been seen alive again. But there was a tough arctic
quality in the girl which kept her going, and between them they won
through to the head of Revdal and staggered down to the shore
where Amandus was keeping the boat.

The climb did her no permanent physical harm, but the memory
of the sight of Jan lying in the hole was to haunt her for years. It had
been such a terrible sight that she thought when she saw him that he
had nothing left to live for and would have been better dead.

WHEN A message reached Mandal to say that Jan was still up on the
plateau and still alive, they began to make final preparations for an
all-out attempt on the frontier as soon as the blizzard died down. For
the last few days, they had not been expecting to have to try it,
because when they looked up towards the loom of the mountains
through the wildly driving snow, it was incredible that up there, away
beyond the very top of Kjerringdal, there could be a man still living.
But the fact that he had survived so far made it seem all the more
worth while to try to save him. The preparations were rather grim.
They knew they were running a big risk of never coming back, either
because of some disaster on the plateau or through getting lost or
interned in Sweden. But if a sick man could exist on the plateau, it
would have been a disgrace to admit that four fit men could not try
to move him across it to safety.

The plan for getting the Lapps to help had fallen through, at least
for the time being. The ski-runner who had gone out from Kaafjord
to look for them had come back, just missing the worst of the blizzard, but the news he had brought was discouraging. The reindeer
were still much farther away than they usually were at that time of year. He had followed their migration track back across the plateau to
the south-east for over fifty miles before he sighted the vast herds,
halted and digging for the moss beneath the snow. The Lapps he was
looking for were camped among them in their deerskin tents.

He was criticised afterwards for not having made allowance for
the queer psychology of Lapps. He had broached the subject of Jan
and the journey to the frontier while he was sitting with the Lapps in
a tent which was full of women and children; and the Lapps had simply refused to say yes or no. They were friendly, as Lapps always are,
but they would not give the least sign of whether they might be willing, or even whether they really understood what they were being
asked to do. People who knew the Lapps well, being wise after the
event, said they would never commit themselves to any decision
while their families were listening.

Certainly the mental processes of Lapps are very strange. They do
not seem to grasp the idea of expressing an opinion. On a matter of
fact which is within their own experience they will be quite dogmatic
and clear-headed; but their minds do not work in terms of probabilities, and if they are asked whether something is likely to happen,
they are genuinely puzzled and think the question is foolish. People
tell the story of a Norwegian tourist who wanted to fish for salmon
and asked a Lapp if he thought he would be able to get one in a particular local river; and the Lapp, who knew him well, shook his head
with a sign, and answered: "Really, I sometimes think you
Norwegians are crazy. How could I answer a question like that? Of
course there are plenty of salmon in the river, but why should you
think I can tell if you can catch them?"

This curious limitation naturally makes it difficult for a Lapp to
make up his mind what he is going to do. When there is a question
of immediate action, provided it is something to do with reindeer or
the technique of wresting a living from the arctic, he may be a
shrewder man than anyone; and he can think ahead in terms of the unalterable cycles of nature, the rising and setting of the sun, the seasons and the movements of the deer. But in other matters, he is no
good at all at planning things far ahead.

So the question which was put to the Kaafjord Lapps was one
which they were probably incapable of answering. The ski-runner
did not ask them to come at once, because he knew they could not
leave their reindeer, and the herds could not be hurried. The question
was whether they would help Jan when they arrived with the herds at
Kaafjord, and this was too far ahead for them to contemplate. It
probably bogged their minds in impossible speculations. Endless
imponderable ideas would have upset them and confused them: their
reindeer might be sick, the weather might be bad, they might be sick
themselves: anything might happen. Nobody, in fact, could have
promised more at that moment than that he would do his best when
the time came, and a Lapp either cannot think in such vague terms
or cannot express them in language. His answer must be precise and
literal. A Lapp could only say, quite definitely: "When I get to
Kaafjord, I will take a man to Sweden"; and to say a thing like that
would be absurd. After all, a Lapp would reason, by that time the
man might be dead; and then, if he had said he was going to take him
to Sweden, he would look ridiculous.