We Die Alone: A WWII Epic of Escape and Endurance (8 page)

It looked simple. He remembered it pretty clearly from the map,
and during his training it would have been an easy day. He knew that
maps of mountains are often misleading, because even the best of
them do not show whether a hill can be climbed or not; but he was
not prepared for quite such a misleading map as the one of that part
of Norway. In the normal course of events, nobody ever walks far in
the northern islands. The natural route from one place to another is
by sea. The sea charts are therefore perfect; but the most detailed land
map which existed then was on a scale of about a quarter of an inch
to a mile, and it made Ringvassoy look green and smoothly rounded.
No heights were marked on it. There were contours, but they had a vague appearance, as if there had been more hope than science in
their drawing. One might have deduced something from the facts that
the only houses shown were clustered along the shores, and that there
was no sign of a single road; but nothing on the map suggested one
tenth of the difficulty of walking across the island in the winter.

Jan had arrived there in the dark, and if he had ever seen the
island at all, it was only in that momentary glimpse when he had
come over the hill from Toftefjord with the Germans close behind
him. So he set off full of optimism in his rubber boots; but it took
him four days to cover thirty miles.

He was never in any immediate danger during that walk. The
only dangers were the sort that a competent mountaineer can overcome. Once he had disappeared into the trackless interior of the
island he was perfectly safe from the Germans until he emerged
again. But it was an exasperating journey. It had new discomfort and
frustration in every mile, and the most annoying things about it were
the boots. Jan was a good skier; like most Norwegians, he had been
used to skiing ever since he could walk: and to cross Ringvassoy on
skis might have been a pleasure. Certainly it would have been quick
and easy. But of course his skis had been blown to pieces like everything else; and there can hardly be anything less suitable for deep
snow than rubber boots.

He had started with the idea of following the shore, where the
snow would be shallower and harder and he would have the alternative of going along the beach below the tidemark. But on the very
morning he found it was not so easy as it looked. He soon came to a
place where a ridge ran out and ended in a cliff. He tried the beach
below the cliff, but it got narrower and narrower until he scrambled
round a rock and saw that the cliff face ahead of him fell sheer into
the sea. He had to go back a mile and climb the ridge. It was not very
steep, but it gave him a hint of what he had undertaken. The wet
rubber slipped at every step. Sometimes, where the snow was hard,
the climb would have been simple if he could have kicked steps; but the boots were soft, and to kick with his right foot was too painful for
his toe. He had to creep up slowly, one foot foremost, like a child
going upstairs. But when the snow was soft and he sank in it up to his
middle, the boots got full of it, and came off, and he had to grovel
and scrape with his hands to find them.

At the top of the right, when he paused to take his breath, he
could see far ahead along the coastline to the eastward; and there was
ridge after ridge, each like the one he was on, and each ending in a
cliff too steep to climb.

He started to go down the other side, and even that was painful
and tedious. Down slopes which would have been a glorious run on
skis, he plodded slowly, stubbing his toe against the end of the boot,
and sometimes falling when the pain of it made him wince and lose
his balance.

But still, all these things were no more than annoyances, and it
would have been absurd to have felt annoyed, whatever happened, so
long as he was free. He felt it would have been disloyal, too. He
though a lot about his friends as he floundered on, especially of Per
and Eskeland. He missed them terribly. Of course he had been
trained to look after himself, and make up his own mind what to do.
In theory he could stand on his own feet and was not dependent on
a leader to make decisions for him. But that was not the same thing
as suddenly losing Eskeland, whom he admired tremendously and
had always regarded as a bit wiser and more capable than himself,
someone he could always rely on for good advice and understanding.
And still less, in a way, did his training take the place of Per, who had
shared everything with him so long. Jan knew his job, but all the
same it was awful not to have anyone to talk it over with. As for what
was happening to his friends, he could not bear to think about it. He
would have welcomed more suffering to bring himself nearer to
them in spirit.

In this mood, he forced himself on to make marches of great
duration: 24 hours, 13 hours, 28 hours without rest. But the distances he covered were very short, because he so often found himself faced
with impassable rocks and had to go back on his tracks, and because
of the weather.

The weather changed from one moment to another. When the
nights were clear, the aurora glimmered and danced in the sky above
the sea. By day in sunshine, the sea was blue and the sky had a milky
radiance, and the gleaming peaks of other islands seemed light and
insubstantial and unearthly. The sun was warm, and the glitter of
snow and water hurt his eyes, though the shadows of the hills were
dark and cold. Then suddenly the skyline to his right would lose its
clarity as a flurry of snow came over it, and in a minute or two the
light faded and the warmth was gone and the sea below went grey.
Gusts of wind came whipping down the slopes, and clouds streamed
across the summits; and then snow began to fall, and frozen mist
came down, in grey columns which eddied in the squalls and stung
his face and hands and soaked him through, and blotted out the sea
and sky so that the world which he could see contracted to a few feet
of whirling whiteness in which his own body and his own tracks were
the only things of substance.

In the daytime, he kept going in these storms, not so much for the
sake of making progress as to keep himself warm; but when they
struck him at night, there was no question of keeping a sense of
direction, and one night he turned back to take shelter in a cowshed
which he had passed four hours before.

He stopped at two houses along the north shore of the island, and
was taken in and allowed to sleep; and oddly enough it was the
wounded toe that served him as a passport to people's help and trust.
Rumours had gone before him all the way. It was being said that the
Germans had started a new search of every house, looking for radio
sets, which nobody was allowed to own. Everyone had already
guessed that this search had something to do with what they had
heard about Toftefjord, and as soon as they learned that Jan was a
fugitive, they jumped to the conclusion that the Germans were searching for him. And indeed, if the search was a fact and not only
a rumour, they were probably right. This made some of them nervous at first. Like the shopkeeper, they were frightened of agents
provocateurs, and Jan's uniform did not reassure them; it was only to
be expected that a German agent would be dressed for his part. But
the toe was different. The Germans were thorough, but their agents
would not go so far as to shoot off their toes. When he took off his
boot and his sock and showed them his toe, it convinced them; and
he slept soundly between his marches, protected by men who set
faithful watches to warn him if Germans were coming.

Always they asked who had sent him to them, and some of them
were suspicious when he would not tell them. But he insisted,
because he was haunted by the thought of leaving a traceable series
of links which the Germans might "roll up" if they found even one of
the people who helped him. Such things had happened before, and
men on the run had left trails of disaster behind them. To prevent
that was only a matter of care. He never told anyone where he had
come from, and when he asked people to recommend others for later
stages of his journey, he made sure that they gave him a number of
names, and did not tell them which one he had chosen. Thus
nobody could ever tell, because nobody knew, where he had come
from or where he was going.

The last stretch of the journey was the longest. Everyone he had
met had mentioned the name of Einar Sorensen, who ran the telephone exchange at a place called Bjorneskar on the south side of the
island. All of them knew him, as everybody knows the telephone
operator in a country district, and they all spoke of him with respect.
Bjorneskar is opposite the mainland, and if anyone could get Jan out
of the island, Einar Sorensen seemed the most likely man. But if he
refused, on the other hand, or if he was not at home, it would be
more than awkward, because the south end of the island was infested
with Germans, in coastal batteries and searchlight positions and
patrol boat bases, defending the entrance to Tromso, Bjorneskar was a kind of cul-de-sac. The shore on each side of it was well populated
and defended, and Jan could only reach it by striking inland and
going over the mountains. It would be a long walk, and there was no
house or shelter of any kind that way; if there was no help when he
got to the other end, it was very unlikely that he could get back again.
But some risks are attractive, and he like the idea of descending from
desolate mountains into the heart of the enemy's defences.

It was this stretch of the march which cost him twenty-eight hours
of continuous struggle against the wind and snow. Up till then, he had
never been far from the coast, and he had never been able to see more
than the foothills of the island. The sea had always been there on his
left to guide him. But now he entered a long deep valley, into the barren wilderness of peaks which the map had dismissed so glibly. Above
him, especially on the right, there were hanging valleys and glimpses of
couloirs, inscrutable and dark and silent, and of snow cornices on their
crests. To the left was the range of crags called Soltinder, among which
he somehow had to find the col which would lead him to Bjorneskar.

Into these grim surroundings he advanced slowly and painfully.
Here and there in the valley bottom were frozen lakes where the
going was hard and smooth; but between them the snow lay very
deep, and it covered a mass of boulders, and there he could not tell
as he took each step whether his foot would fall upon rock or ice, or
a snow crust which would support him, or whether it would plunge
down hip deep into the crevices below. Sometimes a single yard of
progress was an exhausting effort in itself, and he would have to
pause and rest for a minute after dragging himself out of a hidden
hole, and look back at the ridiculously little distance he had won.
When he paused, he was aware of his solitude. The whole valley was
utterly deserted. For mile upon mile there was no trace of life whatever, no sign that a man had ever been there before him, no track of
animals, no movement or sound of birds.

Through this solemn and awful place he walked for the whole of
a night and the whole of a day, and at dusk on the third of April he came to the top of the col in the Soltinder, four days after Toftefjord.
Below him he saw three houses, which he knew must be Bjorneskar,
and beyond them the final sound; and on the other side, at last, the
mainland. He staggered down the final slope to throw himself on the
kindness of Einar Sorensen.

He need never have had any doubt of his reception. Einar and his
wife and his two little boys all made him welcome, as if he were an
old friend and an honoured guest. Their slender rations were
brought out and laid before him, and it was not till he had eaten all
he could that Einar took him aside to another room to talk.

To Einar's inevitable question, Jan answered without thinking
that he had heard of his name in England, though he had really only
heard it the day before. At this, Einar said with excitement, "Did they
really get through to England?" Jan knew then that this was not the
first time escapers had been to that house. He said he did not know
whether they had reached England or only got to Sweden, but at least
their report had got through.

After this, there was no limit to what Einar was willing to do. Jan
felt ashamed, when he came to think of it later, to have deceived this
man on even so small a point. But the fact is that a secret agent's existence, whenever he is at work, is a lie from beginning to end; whatever he says is said as a means to an end, and the truth is a thing he
can seldom tell. The better the agent is, the more thorough are his
lies. He is trained with such care to shut away truth in a dark corner
of his mind that he loses his natural instinct to tell the truth, for its
own sake, on the few occasions when it can do no harm. Yet when,
through habit, he had told an unnecessary lie to a friend, it would
often involve impossible explanations to put the thing right. So Jan
left Einar with the belief that whoever it was he had helped had got
somewhere through to safety.

They sat for an hour that night and talked things over. Einar
thought Jan should move at once. He house was the telegraph office
as well as the telephone exchange, and people were in and out of it all day; and there were German camps within a mile in two directions.
As for crossing the sound, there was no time better than the present.
It was a dirty night, which was all to the good. The patrol boats ran
for shelter whenever the weather was bad, and falling snow played
havoc with the searchlights. The wind was rising, and it might be
worse before morning.

About midnight, Einar went to fetch his old father who lived in
the house next door; he thought it would take two of them to row
over the sound that night. Before he went out, he took Jan to the
kitchen to wait. The two boys were still there with their mother,
though they should surely have been in bed. They asked Jan to tell
them a story, and he sat down by the fire and the younger one
climbed on his knee. He was deadly tired, and he was sick at heart
because the boys' father had just told him the terrible story of what
had happened to Per and Eskeland and all his other companions. He
put out of his mind this story of murder and treachery, and put his
arm round the boy to support him, and tried to think back to his
own childhood.