We Die Alone: A WWII Epic of Escape and Endurance (30 page)

The Lapps were still talking. He shut his mind to that blinding
blaze of hope, and tried to attend to them. They picked up handfuls
of sodden snow and squeezed it so that the water ran down, pointed
again to the lake and shook their heads. That was it: they were trying
to tell him that the thaw had gone too far and the ice of the lake was
rotten and unsafe. He looked down at the lake again, and then he saw
here and there the greenish translucent patches which showed where
the ice was melting.

He remembered Kilpisjarvi on the map. It was miles long, seven
or eight at least, and the head of it was near the summer road, where
there was sure to be a guard post. At the other end there must be a
river. It came back to him: there was a river, and the frontier ran
down it. But if the lake was melting, the river ice would surely be broken up and the river in spate and uncrossable. They must cross the
lake: they must chance it: he had to make them try. Stop the herd, let
him try it alone on the sledge: one man on skis, one deer and the
sledge. But he could not explain it. He started to say it in Norwegian
but their faces were blank and he stopped in an agony of frustration,
and began again to try to control his impatience and to think of a
way to make it all clear to them by dumb show. If only he had a pencil and paper to draw maps and pictures-

There was a crack, the unmistakable lash of a bullet overhead
and then the report of a rifle. The deer froze where they stood and
raised their heads, scenting danger. The Lapps froze, silent and staring. Jan struggled to raise his head. There were six skiers on the
crest of another hill. One of them was kneeling with a rifle, and in
the split second while Jan glanced at them another shot went over
and he saw three of the men turn down off the crest and come fast
towards the herd.

After seconds of stunned silence the Lapps started talking in shrill
excited voices. Jan found he was shouting, "Get on, Get on! Across
the lake!" The deer moved nervously, running together in groups,
stopping to sniff the wind. The Lapps glanced at him and back at the
patrol, the picture of indecision. The patrol was down off the hill,
racing across the flats. In an access of frenzied strength Jan half raised
his head and shoulders from the sledge, forgetting that words were
useless, shouting, "They're out of range! For God's sake move!
Move!" One of the Lapps shouted back a quick meaningless answer.
The other waved both hands towards the rifleman as if he was begging him not to shoot. In an inspiration Jan fumbled in his jacket and
drew his useless automatic and brandished it at the Lapps. They
stared at it aghast: heaven knows what they thought, whether Jan was
meaning to threaten them or defend them. With a final glance at the
skiers approaching, one jumped to the head of the deer which pulled
the sledge. The other shouted and suddenly, like a flood released, the
herd poured over the edge of the hill and down the steep slope
towards the lake, the sledge rocking and careering down among
them, snow flying from the pounding hoofs, rifle shots whining past
and over, across the frozen beach, out in a mad stampede on to the
slushy groaning ice and away full tilt towards the Swedish shore.

ESCAPE STORIES end when freedom and safety are reached, but this
story can hardly be ended without telling what happened to the people in it after it was all over.

Jan and Marius and the Mandal men had dreamed so long of the
Swedish frontier that they had never thought much about what
would happen on the other side of it. Of course they all knew it was
a very long way from the border to a town or hospital, but to travel
in a country where there were no Germans seemed so absurdly easy
that none of them worried about the distance.

But as it turned out it was quite a long time after the hectic dash
across the lake before Jan was put to bed in a Swedish hospital. Once
the tension was over, his memory went to pieces. He remembers a
day which he spent in a hut with a lot of Lapps, and another day in a
canoe going down a fast river of which one bank was Finland and
therefore controlled by the Germans, and the other Sweden.
Eventually the river led to a telegraph station, where the operator
sent an urgent message to the Swedish Red Cross.

That excellent organisation sent an ambulance seaplane, which
made a perilous landing on a stretch of the river where the ice was
still breaking up. Before the plane could take off again, a squad of
men had to break more of the ice to give it a longer run. The take-off
was the last of the experiences which Jan recollects as having scared him out of his wits. After it, he had a complete blank in his memory
until a doctor told him he had been in hospital for a week.

In hospital, he had the very unusual satisfaction of being asked
what surgeon had amputated his toes, and of saying with a casual air
that he had done it himself; and later he had a satisfaction which was
even greater, when he was told that his operation had saved his feet.
The decision about his feet remained in the balance for a long time.
He very nearly lost them when the doctors first unwrapped them; but
they called in a specialist who decided to try to redeem them, and
after three months' treatment they were declared to be safe.

As soon as he woke up in hospital, he began to try to get a confidential report of what had happened through to London. It was not
very easy. As Sweden was neutral, there were naturally Germans and
German agents around, and if his report had got into the wrong
hands, of course it would have been a death warrant for the people
in Norway who had helped him. He was worried too by the recollection that the Swedes had only let him out of prison three years before
on condition that he left the country, so that they had every right to
put him in again. But some of his story had filtered across the border, and no doubt the Swedes who heard rumours of it felt he had
earned the best treatment they could give him. They let him get in
touch with a secretary in the Norwegian embassy, and to her he dictated all that he could remember of the story.

In England, we already knew, of course, that the expedition had
come to grief, and vague reports had come through of what had happened to the Brattholm. There had been a long, sarcastic and gloating
story in the Deutsche Zeitung about the brave and ever-vigilant
defenders who had won the battle of Toftefjord, and this German view
of the affair had even been quoted in brief in the London papers in
early June, while Jan was still lying unconscious. But Jan's report gave
the first news of the unlucky chance which had betrayed the landing,
and it was also the first indication we had that one of the twelve men
who had sailed from Shetland had survived.

Jan himself flew back to England in the autumn, after being away
from his unit for seven months. In some ways, his return to wartime London must have been a disappointment to him after he had
dreamed of it for so long. When the welcoming drinks and the official compliments were over, there was hardly anyone he wanted to
talk to about what had happened to him. The Linge Company in
which he had been trained was a company of adventurers, and
nobody in it talked much about personal experience: for one thing,
everybody in it was waiting his own call to go to Norway and knew
it was best not to be burdened with other people's secrets. The few
staff officers to whom Jan could talk freely had already seen his
report and were busy with other plans, and anyhow were sated with
stories of desperate adventure. There was nobody who could share
the pictures which were still so vivid in his own mind: pictures of
endless snow, the cold, the glaring nights, the procession of faces of
people who had offered their lives for his and whose names he had
never known, the sound and smells of the northern wastelands, the
solitude and hopelessness and pain. In the busy, grey autumnal
streets of London, these things began to seem like a private dream:
a dream which was overcast and darkened by anxiety, because he did
not know what had happened in those desolate valleys after he got
away, so that he was haunted, for the whole of the rest of the war, by
the thought that his own life might have been bought at the cost of
appalling reprisals. To help himself to live with this burden of worry,
he threw all his energy into the routine of army life, and into training himself to walk and run without losing his balance, and getting
himself fit again in the hope that he would be allowed to go back
to Norway.

But if nobody in England could share in Jan's anxiety, it had its
counterpart in arctic Norway. For month after month, in Furuflaten
and Lyngseidet and Mandal, Kaafjord and Tromso and the islands, all
the people who had helped to save him went about their daily business in the constant fear that something would still be found out which would give them away to the Germans. But time passed and
nothing disastrous happened, and the fear very slowly faded; and in
fact the Germans never discovered anything, and nobody was ever
punished for Jan's escape. Furuflaten and Lyngseidet survived the
war intact, but Mandal, on the other side of the fjord, was the very
last of the places which the Germans destroyed in a futile "scorched
earth" policy when their retreat began. The people were driven out
and every house was burnt to the ground. For a long time the valley
was deserted. But now, it has spacious new houses and its people
have returned. The valley is still as remote as ever: it still has no road:
but its placid life has begun again, and Herr Nordnes has a new generation of pupils in a new school, the sons and daughters of the men
who went up to the plateau.

As I write, the midwife of Ringvassoy is still at work; the same
people live in the cottage in Toftefjord; and old Bernhard Sorensen,
who rowed Jan across the sound among the searchlights, still thinks
nothing of getting his feet wet at 82. But his son Einar died some
years ago, and the two grandsons who made Jan tell them a story are
grown up and have gone to work in town, so that Bjorneskar is a
lonely place for the old man and his wife.

The village of Furuflaten is very prosperous. Marius has formed
a partnership with three other local men, one of whom is Alvin
Larsen, who was with him that awful night when they dragged the
sledge up Revdal. They are building contractors, and they have also
put up a factory in the village, just by the place where they hauled
Jan across the road below the schoolhouse. In the factory they make
concrete blocks, and a special kind of arctic prefabricated house,
and, most unexpectedly, ready-made trousers. The business is growing: they are starting on jackets to match the trousers, and there is
no end to their plans.

Marius, I am glad to say, married Agnethe Lanes, whom he
treated so roughly on the night they climbed up to the plateau. They
are bringing up a family in a new house they have built beside the log cabin where Jan stumbled in at the door. Marius is beginning to
worry about his figure, but he still has his quiet irresistible chuckle,
and I think he always will have.

As for Jan, he got his own way in the end and was sent over again
to Norway as an agent, sailing once more from the base in the
Shetland Islands. So it happened that he was on active service there
when the capitulation came. In the midst of the national rejoicing
and the hectic work of accepting the surrender of the Germans, he
picked up the telephone and asked for his father's number, and heard
at last that his family was safe and well. When he was free to go to
Oslo to meet them, his schoolgirl sister, Bitten, for whom he had
worried so long, astonished him by being twenty and having grown
up very well, as he saw at a glance, without the benefit of his brotherly hand to guide her.

Jan is a married man now. Hi wife Evie is American. Jan and his
father work together again, importing mathematical and surveying
instruments from abroad. To meet Jan, absorbed in theodolites and
his family affairs, in his house in the pinewoods in the outskirts of
Oslo, you would never guess the story which he remembers. But you
would see for yourself that it has a happy ending.