We Die Alone: A WWII Epic of Escape and Endurance (28 page)

This idea only came to him slowly, in the course of about ten
lonely days after the last abortive journey. It took him a long time to come to a firm conclusion, because by nature he had such a very
strong instinct to live. But inevitably the time came, in the end,
when he unwillingly saw one duty left before him. His own life was
not of any overriding value to anyone but himself; and to himself,
life only meant a few more weeks of suffering and a hideous death,
or at best, he believed, a future as a more or less useless cripple. The
life of any one of his many helpers, healthy and perhaps the focus
and support of a family, outweighed it in the balance. He saw quite
clearly that he ought not to let them run any more risks for him, and
he knew there was only one way he could possibly stop them. His
last duty was to die.

To decide to commit suicide when one's instinct is utterly against
it argues great strength of mind. Jan's mind was still active and clear,
but his decision had come too late. By the time he reached it, his
body was too weak to carry it out. He still had his loaded pistol. Lying
alone in his sleeping-bag among the wastes of snow, he dragged it out
of its holster and held it in his hands. He had used it to save his life
already, and he meant to use it again to end it. Until the last week he
had always looked after it with the love he had always had for fine
mechanism, but lately he had begun to neglect it, and it grieved him
to find it was rusty. He held it in the old familiar grip, to cock it for a
final shot, but it was stiff and his fingers were very weak. He struggled feebly with the simple action he had been trained to do in a fraction of a second, but it was not the slightest use. He no longer had the
strength in his hands to pull back against the spring. He felt a friend
had failed him.

Afterwards he tried to think of other ways of doing away with
himself. If he could have got out of the sleeping-bag and crawled
away into the snow, he could have let the frost finish the work it had
begun. But it was a long time then, over a week, since he had had
enough strength to disentangle himself from the blankets or move
his body more than an inch or two. He thought of his knife too, and
tried its edge; but it had not been sharp when he cut off his toes, and now it was rustier and blunter, and the thought of trying to saw at
his own throat or the arteries in his wrists was so horrible that his
resolution wavered, and he feebly relaxed and tried to make up his
mind anew.

It was absurd really. He felt he had made a fool of himself. He had
struggled so long to preserve his own life that now he had not
enough strength in his fingers to kill himself. If he had not felt
ashamed, he would have laughed.

WHEN JAN came to this mental crisis, the men who came up to see
him noticed the difference. Up to then, he had always seemed cheerful, and none of them knew what this appearance had sometimes
cost him. But now there was no humour left in him, and he would
hardly speak to them. In fact, up to then the occasional visits of
strangers had been all he had had to look forward to, but now he was
almost resentful when he heard "Hallo, gentleman," because it meant
that he had to make an effort when he wanted to lie in peace. He did
not tell them till later about the conclusion he had come to. It simply
seemed to them that he had lost heart. They went down and told
Herr Nordnes that he was dying at last.

It had never occurred to them, as it had to Jan, that what they
were doing might not be worth the risk, and if he had died up there
on the plateau, after all the effort they had put into trying to save
him, they would have been very much disappointed and almost
angry with him. But they were certainly right in their fears. The
weeks of exposure had really worn him down to the point when his
life might quietly end without any further warning. Only one course
was left to them, since they never considered just letting him die in
peace. They would have to carry him down to the valley again, and
try to fatten him up and build up his strength till he was fit for
another attempt on Sweden.

There were the Germans to think of. No house in the place was
free of the risk of a sudden search. At night, by that time, there was
no darkness left at all, and it would have been taking too much of a
chance to have carried him all the way down to the inhabited part of
the valley in broad daylight. But the valley extends for ten miles
beyond the last of the houses, and all of it is more sheltered than the
open plateau, and a few degrees warmer. Somebody remembered a
cave right up at the head of the valley. There was a meeting in the
schoolhouse, and it was agreed that the only hope of spinning out his
life was to cut their losses, bring him down and install him in the
cave, and begin all over again.

This was a hard decision for them all, and especially for Jan when
they told him what they thought. It meant going back to the stage of
the journey he had reached when he was first carried into the hut at
Revdal nearly six weeks before. It meant that everything he had suffered since then had been wasted. And it also meant, above all, that
before he could ever hope to reach Sweden he would have to go
through the ordeal of being hauled up the mountain again.

However, he was too far gone to care, and the Mandal men
assured him there was nothing else for it; so he let himself be pulled
out of the paper tent and lashed yet again to the sledge. Six men
lowered him laboriously down to the bed of the valley, throwing
away the height and the distance which the past weeks had so
painfully won.

While this party was bringing him down, another was preparing
the cave, by laying a bed of birch branches and grass inside it. When
they got him there and pushed him inside and finally left him, he was
in a state of luxury which he had not enjoyed since Marius's barn.
They had taken him off the sledge, and after its wooden slats the
birch bed was wonderfully soft. He slowly got dry, for the first time
in a month; and when his clothes had dried out even began to get
warm, a sensation which seemed an entirely novel experience; and
when he was warm he fell at long last into a dreamless sleep.

He lay in the cave for four days, sleeping most of the time. When
he did wake he lay staring at the roof which was only a couple of feet
above his head, enjoying the gloom after the snow-glare of the
plateau. The roof was damp, and there were sometimes drips on it.
He found them fascinating to watch and study. When one of them
was just about to fall, he would draw a trail with his finger on the
slimy rock so that the drop slid down it and fell clear of his body.
When he rolled a cigarette he prepared for it by laying trails for all the
ripening drops which he could see, so that he could be sure to have
his smoke in peace. During those days, he discovered anew the pleasures of the very simplest things; the delight of sleep, the joy of anticipating eating, the unutterable luxury of yawning.

The mouth of the cave was often darkened as a visitor crawled in
beside him to feed him with the best Mandal could afford and to
attend so far as possible to any wish that he expressed. The visitors
sat and gossiped when he was awake, and left him alone when he was
sleepy. One day, they brought him news that one of the German soldiers in their garrison had run away to Sweden, which gave them all
a quite disproportionate happiness. Every day, whoever had come to
him talked about the Lapps, who were now arriving in great numbers
in Kaafjord and the other neighbouring valleys and were being
coaxed and offered rewards by the local members of the organisation
in the hope that sooner or later one of them would make up his mind
to help. But Jan had stopped pinning much faith in Lapps. The only
plan he had was to sleep till he really felt he had slept enough. By
then, he thought, he would be stronger, and that would be soon
enough to think about the future. Then he would decide whether to
go on leaning on the kindness of the Mandal folk still longer, right
through the summer perhaps, or whether to put an end to it all as
soon as his fingers could cock the pistol.

But suddenly, on his fourth or fifth day in the cave, a whole deputation arrived in excitement, to say that at last a Lapp had made a firm
promise. He had demanded brandy, blankets, coffee and tobacco, which were all the most difficult and expensive things to get, but the
organisation was sure to be able to find enough to satisfy him, and
people who knew him said he was a reliable character who would not
change his mind. But his reindeer were still up on the plateau, and he
did not want to bring them down and then have to take them up
again. So to make sure of not missing the chance, Jan would have to
be moved straight away and hauled up to the plateau to meet the Lapp
and his herd.

Jan was not really ready to leave the comfortable cave. A little
more rest would have made him fitter to start the struggle again. But
he could not refuse to fall in with a plan which had raised the hopes
of the Mandal men so high; and although he had been disappointed
too often, it did seem that this might be the opportunity they had all
been waiting for. He tried to show more enthusiasm than he felt, and
they pulled him out into the glaring daylight and tied him down to
the familiar slats of the sledge again.

A large party of men assembled for the climb out of the valley.
Eight actually took part in it. In many ways this ascent was less arduous, at least for Jan, than the earlier one from Revdal. There were
twice as many men to handle the sledge; and by then Jan was much
less of a load to carry. His weight ultimately fell to 78 pounds, which
was less than half what he weighed when he left the Shetland Islands.

The eight men were therefore able to carry him bodily for a lot of
the way, and he was not so often left hanging feet downwards or
upside down. But the ascent lasted no less than thirteen hours, and
by the time they got him to the top Jan was exhausted, and the good
effect of his rest in the cave had been undone. After these hours of
rough handling, he got angry for the first time in all those weeks, and
in his weakness he forgot that he owed absolutely everything to the
men who were carrying him. One of them had promised to bring
tobacco for him, and in the excitement it had been forgotten. When
Jan heard of this, it seemed for some reason the last straw. The
prospect of even a day or two on the plateau without a cigarette was too much for him, and he snapped irritably: "You would go and forget the most important thing of the lot." It was an absurdly ungrateful thing to say, especially when tobacco was so rare and expensive
that almost everyone in Mandal had had to give up smoking. But
none of them took any notice, because they could see he had been
pushed almost beyond endurance and was not really aware any more
of what he was saying.

As a matter of fact, the organisation in Mandal and Kaafjord was
being remarkably thoughtful and efficient, as it had been throughout
the operation. When the climbing party got Jan to the new rendezvous on the plateau where he was to meet the Lapp, two men
from Kaafjord had already arrived there. They had been detailed to
relieve the climbers by taking over Jan and looking after him until the
Lapp arrived, and they had been chosen as Lapp interpreters. The
Lappish language is said to have no relation to any other language in
the world except Hungarian, and there are very few people except the
Lapps who understand it. Most of the Lapps themselves can also
speak one or another of the languages of the countries they live in,
either Swedish, Norwegian or Finnish, but the man who was
expected that night was Finnish Lapp, and so he and Jan would not
have a single word in common.

The men who had brought him up were tired out when they got
to the meeting place, so they handed Jan over to the Kaafjord men
and retreated to the valley without any further delay. These two
stayed with him to keep him company all through the following
night. But events began to take a course which was terribly familiar.
Jan lay passively on the sledge while the chill of the night froze the
dampness of the day in his clothes. The men who were guarding him
watched the snow-bound horizon patiently hour by hour. But no
sign of the Lapp was seen, and nothing stirred. In the early morning,
the men had to go down to their daily work, and Jan was abandoned
again to his solitude.

The vigil began again with all its rigour and discomfort and the
same hopeless dreariness. He was in a different place on the plateau,
but it looked almost exactly the same. There was no rock with icicles
to fill his cup, and there was no snow wall or paper tent. The snow
immediately round him was clean and fresh, and not stained and
foul by weeks of improvised existence. But the low hills and the dead
shallow valleys within his vision could hardly be distinguished from
any others, and the familiar numbing cold, the snow-glare and the
silence made the days in the cave appear like a half-remembered
dream which had done nothing but give a fleeting glimpse of comfort and so emphasise the misery of the plateau. He lay dazed, floating into and out of coma, and he began to listen again. The thin wind
sighed on a distant hill, and stirred the loose snow in feeble eddies
with an infinitesimal rustle, and died to silence again. In his
moments of clarity he knew these soft sibilant sounds threatened
another blizzard. When his mind lost its grip on reality, he heard the
wolves again padding secretively round him. He began once more the
start into wakefulness when he imagined voices or the hiss of skis.

The next night two more interpreters came to stand by him. One
speaks of night and day, but by then the midnight sun was up. It was
broad daylight all the time, and night only meant that the shadows
on the plateau were longer and that when they lengthened the air
became more chill. Throughout this brilliant, glaring, frosty night
the men watched over him. But nobody came. Jan had made up his
mind that the Lapp would never come. The sun passed across the
north horizon and climbed again in the east. The men had to give up
waiting, and went away, and left him to face another glaring day.