We Die Alone: A WWII Epic of Escape and Endurance (17 page)

The two boys were a further worry. To send them to school every
day when they knew what they did was a heavy responsibility to put
upon children. Some children often can play a secretive role in a matter of life and death as well as anyone older; but to go on doing it for
long will wear them down.

Jan lay for nearly a week in the barn. For four days he was never
more than semi-conscious; and that was just as well, because he could
not have moved in any case, and when he did rise out of his drugged sleep the pain of his feet and hands and his blinded eyes was bad. But
he was certainly getting better. Towards the end of the week his eyesight was coming back. He began to see the light of the barn door
when it was opened, and then to recognize the faces of the people who
came to feed him. By that time, also, it looked as if his feet would
recover in the end, though he was still a long way from being able to
stand on them or walk. Most important of all, his brain had got over
the concussion, and his power of thought and his sense of humour
had come back: he was himself again. He and Marius began to find
they had a lot in common. Their experience and background could
hardly have been more different within a single nation: one the arctic
farmer and country-bred philosopher, the other the town technician;
one cut off from the war, the other entirely immersed in military
training. But Jan's sense of comedy was never far away, and Marius,
though he was a serious-minded man, was irrepressible when he was
amused. He listened to Jan's stories of England and the war with the
greed of a starving man who has an unexpected feast spread out in
front of him, and when Jan told him about the many ridiculous
aspects of army life, it made him laugh. When Marius laughed, it was
as if he would never stop. It was an odd infectious falsetto laugh which
started Jan laughing too; and then Marius, squatting beside him in the
hay in the darkened barn, would rock with renewed merriment and
wipe away the tears which poured down his cheeks, and they had to
remind each other to be quiet, in case anyone heard the noise outside.

But although there were these moments when Marius enjoyed
Jan's company, he remained a most serious danger as long as he
stayed on the farm. There was an alarm every time someone was
sighted climbing the hill from the village, and every time the
Germans in the schoolhouse made some slightly unusual move. He
had to be taken away from there as soon as he was fit enough to go,
and Marius had thought of a place to put him.

The opposite shore of Lyngenfjord is steep-to and uninhabited.
There had once been a farm over there: just one in a stretch of eight miles. But it had been burnt down a long time before, and never
rebuilt. One small log cabin had escaped the fire and was still standing. It was four miles from the nearest house, either along the shore
or across the water, and so far as Marius knew, nobody ever went
there. If any safe place could be found for Jan, that seemed the most
likely. The name of the farm had been Revdal.

To get Jan across there was more than Marius could manage with
only the help of his sisters, because he would have to be carried all
the way down to a boat and out of it again at the other side; and so
at this stage he began to bring in other members of the organization
from the village. He chose them on the principle that no two men
from one family should be mixed up in the affair, in case something
happened and another family besides his own was entirely broken
up. In the end, he let three of his friends into his secret: Alvin Larsen,
Amandus Lillevoll and Olaf Lanes. All of them had known one
another since they were children. When he told them about it, one by
one, they all offered eagerly to help.

They agreed to make the move on the night of the 12th of April.
In the fortnight since Toftefjord, the nights had got quite a lot
shorter: uncomfortably short for anything illegal. To avoid disaster,
the first part of the journey would have to be planned with care and
carried out without the least delay. This was the half-mile from
Marius's barn to the shore.

Marius had lived there all his life, but it was a new experience for
him, as it would be for most law-abiding people, to plan a way out of
his own home which he could use without being seen. It was extraordinarily difficult. Jan would have to be carried on a stretcher, and the
two sides of the valley set limits to the routes which could be used,
because they were both too steep to climb. On the other hand, the triangle of gently sloping ground between them was in full view of the
houses, and the paths which crossed it led from door to door. There
were two principal dangers, the German garrison in the school and
the sentry who patrolled the road. But what worried Marius almost more than these was the thought of meeting a series of neighbours
and having to stop to give endless explanations. To carry a man on a
stretcher through one's village in secret at dead of night is a thing one
cannot explain away in a casual word or two.

Marius made a reconnaissance, looking at his home from this
unfamiliar point of view. There turned out to be only one possible
route, and that was the river bed. The river, which is called
Lyngdalselven after the valley, runs down through the middle of the
village and under the road by a bridge about two hundred yards from
the shore. It has a double channel, one about fifty feet wide which
carries the normal summer flow, and another much wider flood
channel which only fills up during the thaw in spring. That midApril, the thaw had not yet begun, and the whole of the river was still
frozen. The flood channel has banks about fifteen feet high, and
Marius found that close below them, on the dry bed of the river, one
was fairly well hidden from view. There was one snag about it. The
nearest of all the houses to the channel was the schoolhouse where
the Germans lived. It stands within three or four paces of the top of
the bank. But even so, it still seemed that this was the only way.
Looking out of the schoolhouse windows the troops could see almost
every inch of the valley mouth. The only place they could not see was
the foot of the bank immediately below their windows.

When dusk began on the night which they had chosen, they all
assembled in the barn. Two men were to go with Marius and the
stretcher. His sister Ingeborg had volunteered to go ahead of it to see
that the way was clear. Another man was to climb to the top of a high
moraine on the other side of the river, where he could watch the sentry on the road. A rowing-boat with a sail had already been hauled
up on the beach at the river mouth. Jan had been wrapped in blankets and tied to a home-made stretcher, and they had a rucksack full
of food and a paraffin cooker to leave with him in Revdal. They
waited nervously for the long twilight to deepen till it was dark
enough to go. It was after eleven when Marius gave the word.

It was a breathless journey. For once, they could not use their skis.
To ski with a stretcher down steep slopes among bushes in the dark
could only end in disaster, at least for the man on the stretcher. But
to carry his weight on foot in the deep snow was exhausting work,
even for such a short distance. They started by climbing straight
down to the river, and when they got to the bottom of the bank without any alarm they put Jan down in the snow for a few minutes and
rested. The lookout left them to cross the river and go up to his point
of vantage, and Ingeborg went ahead to see what was happening at
the school, and to tread out a path in the snow. It was very quiet, but
there was a light southerly breeze which hummed in the telephone
wires and stirred the bare twigs of the bushes; it was not much, but
it helped to cover the sound of their movements. When they had got
their breath they bent down and picked up the stretcher and set off
down the channel towards the school.

It soon came in sight. There were lights in some of the windows
which cast yellowish beams on the trodden snow outside it. One of
them shone out across the river channel, but close in, right under
the wall of the building, the steep bank cast a shadow which looked
like a tunnel of darkness. The stretcher bearers approached it,
crouching as low as they could with their burden, keeping their
eyes on Ingeborg's footsteps in front of them in case they should
stumble, and resisting the impulse to look up at the lights above
them. When they came to the fence of the playground, they crept
closer in under the bank. In an upward glance they could see the
edge of the roof on their right, and the beam of light lit up some
little bushes on their left, but it passed a foot or two over the tops
of their heads. The troops in the school were not making a sound,
and the men were acutely conscious of the faint squeak and crunch
of the snow beneath their tread. The silence seemed sinister. It
made the thought of an ambush come into their minds. But in
thirty seconds they passed the school: and there was the road, fifty
paces ahead of them.

This was the place they had feared. With the school behind them
and the road ahead, there was nowhere for four men to hide themselves. It all depended on luck: how long they would have to wait for
the sentry, and whether a car came past with headlights. But Ingeborg
was there, behind a bush at the side of the road, where she had been
lying to watch the sentry, and she came back towards them and
pointed to the right, away from the river bridge. That was the way they
wanted the sentry to go, the longest leg of his beat. At the same
moment, there was a tiny spark of light on the top of the moraine; the
watcher there had struck a match, and that was the signal that the sentry was nearly at the far end of the beat and would soon be turning
round. It was now or never: they had to go on without a pause. They
scrambled up on to the road. For a few seconds they were visible, dark
shadows against the snow, from the school and the whole of the beat
and a score of houses. Then they were down on the other side, among
bushes which gave them cover as far as the shore. The worst of the
journey was over.

When they had hauled the boat down the beach and bundled Jan
on board it, they rowed off quietly for a couple of hundred yards, and
then set the lugsail and got under way, with the breeze on the starboard beam and a course towards the distant loom of the mountains
across the fjord, under which was the cabin of Revdal.

WHAT JAN came to know as the Savoy Hotel, Revdal, was not very
commodious, but the first two days he spent there were the happiest
and most peaceful of the whole of his journey, a short fool's paradise:
if one can use the word happy about his state of mind, or the word
paradise about a place like Revdal. The hut was ten feet long and seven
feet wide, and you could stand upright under the ridge of the roof. It
was built of logs, and it had a door but no window. The only light
inside it when the door was shut came through chinks in the wall and
the roof, which was covered with growing turf. On one side, it had a
wooden bunk, and the rest of the space in it was filled with odds and
ends which seemed to have been salvaged, long before, from the ruins
of the burnt-out farm. There was a small, roughly hewn table, and
some pieces of a wooden plough, and some other wooden instruments which Jan could not imagine any use for, and an elaborate
carved picture frame without any glass or picture. Everything was
made of wood, unpainted, even the latch and hinges on the door, and
it was all worn with years of use, and white and brittle with age.

As they carried him up there from the boat, he had had a glimpse
of its surroundings. It stands about ten yards back from the shore, in
a small clearing which slopes up to the forest of little twisted trees
which clings to the side of the mountain. He had seen posts and wires
in the clearing, which looked as if someone still came there to cut and dry the crop of hay, which is a precious harvest in the north. But
there was no sign that anyone had been there for the past eight
months of winter, and it was very unlikely that anyone would come
for another three months, until July. Under the towering masses of
snow and rock the solitary deserted little hut looked insignificant and
forlorn, and even smaller than it really was. From a distance one
would have taken it for a boulder, three-quarters covered by snow.
There was no landing-place to draw attention to it, only the lonely
beach. A stranger might have sailed along the fjord ten times and
never seen it.

They put Jan in the bunk, and put the food and the paraffin stove
on the table within his reach. Marius hesitated a little while, as if
there should have been something else he could do for Jan, but there
was nothing. He promised to come back two or three nights later to
see him, and Jan thanked him, and then he went out and shut the
door and left Jan alone there in the dark. For a few minutes Jan listened, hoping to hear the crunch of the boat on the beach as they
pushed it off; but inside the hut it was absolutely silent. When he was
sure they had gone away, he spread out his meagre belongings round
him, and settled down on the hard boards of the ancient bunk. He
was as contented as he could be. He had everything he wanted: time,
and a little food, and solitude. He could lie there as long as he liked,
not much of a burden to anyone, until his feet got all right again.
Very soon he drifted off to sleep.

He had had a capacity for sleep, ever since the avalanche, which
seemed to have no limit, and there was nothing to wake for in Revdal
except to eat. Sometimes when hunger did wake him there was daylight shining through the holes in the roof: sometimes there was not,
and he groped for his matches and ate by the dim blue gleam of the
paraffin cooker. But whether it was day or night outside no longer
had any interest for him.

When he was awake, he daydreamed, about Oslo before the war,
his family, his football club at home where he had been president, the adventures which he had packed into the three years since he left
home, and about his friends in the training camp in Scotland, and
about his own ambitions and hopes for the time when the war was
over. It had been a long journey and a very strange one all the way
from his home and his father's instrument makers' workshop to this
bunk and this hut and this desolate arctic shore; but he never
thought then that it would end there. Some time, he would get up
and go out of the door and begin all over again. And meanwhile, time
was passing, and that was all that mattered; because time, he
believed, was the only thing which could cure his feet and give him
the strength to tackle the last twenty-five miles to Sweden.