We Die Alone: A WWII Epic of Escape and Endurance (26 page)

So for the present this scheme was at a standstill. The people in
Kaafjord still hoped that when the first Lapps actually arrived there,
they would be able to persuade them to do the job. But the migration
was late already, and the blizzard would hole it up still further. None
of the herds would get there for three or four days, at least, after the
weather improved. The Mandal people thought this was too long to
wait, especially on the mere chance that any Lapps would agree.

The blizzard, in fact, began to moderate on the day after Marius
and Agnethe made their expedition, and on the following night a
third party of volunteers made the ascent of Kjerringdal. They took
with them everything they could muster for a long journey, but
nobody in Mandal possessed the proper equipment for a winter encampment on the plateau. The Lapps, primitive though they are,
would have been far more suitably fitted out, with tents of hide, and
clothes of reindeer skin with the hair left on, and with centuries of
experience of going to ground when the arctic weather was at its
worst. In fact, the most elaborate civilised camping outfit would be
less suited to those arctic uplands than the Lapps' equipment, which
is entirely home-made of various parts of reindeer; and the best
which could be found in Mandal was far from elaborate. Nobody
even had a tent, or a stove which would burn in a wind, because
nobody in living memory had ever needed to make such a winter
journey. But in a place like Mandal, people never waste time in wishing for things which they have not got; they make do with what
comes to hand. They could only hope the weather would not be bad.

As soon as they got within sight of the meeting-place that night,
they saw the flag. They hurried down towards it on their skis, shouting the password, "Hallo, gentleman!" For the first time, Jan heard
this joyful and comic greeting, and he shouted "Hallo, there!" in
reply; and in a minute his solitary grave was surrounded by helpful
strangers who hacked away its walls and dragged him bodily out on
the sledge to the world which he had not seen for a week and had not
expected ever to see again.

Those of the men who had been there on either of the earlier
climbs were amazed that they had not found him. They thought they
had actually skied over the top of him while he was buried there; and
this is not impossible, even though he never heard them, because
four feet of snow absorbs a lot of sound, and his senses were probably not so acute as he may have thought they were.

Without wasting more time than it took to explain to him what
they were doing, they lashed him to the sledge again and started off
on their desperate bid to cross the plateau on the way to the Swedish
border. When they climbed out of the valley, their hopes were high,
because they had found him without the delay of searching. Even
Jan, who had learnt not to hope for much, was cautiously happy to be on the move again, and could not help thinking how few were the
miles between himself and Sweden.

But from the beginning, their progress was very slow. The plateau
is much more difficult ground for man-hauling a sledge than the flat
ice-fields of the Arctic and Antarctic. None of the plateau is flat. It is
covered all over with miniature hills and valleys. Hardly any of the
hills are more than one or two hundred feet above the valleys, but
one is always going either uphill or down. This is no obstacle to a
skier, because the time which he loses in climbing is made up on the
free runs down. But the sledge could never be allowed to run.
Hauling it up the hills was slow, and going down again it always had
to be checked so that it did not get out of control. Both were equally
tiring. Once, the sledge did get away on a downward slope, and Jan
careered madly down the hill, feet first, lashed down and helpless.
But luckily the slope was smooth and the sledge did not overturn, but
came to rest on a level snowfield at the bottom, with the breathless
skiers chasing close behind it.

The maze of little hills, jumbled together without any form or
pattern, also destroys any sense of direction. It is impossible to keep
a straight compass course. Probably the best way to steer is by the
sun, but when the sky is heavily overcast, as it was on that day, one
has to stop every few minutes to take bearings. In normally open
country, one can take a bearing of a landmark two or three miles
away, and then make towards it. But on the plateau, one can seldom
see far ahead and there are seldom any recognisable landmarks. If
one happens from one hilltop to sight a conspicuous rock on a distant skyline, one loses it again in the valleys, and before one has
reached it it seems to have disappeared. There is only one way to
avoid making useless deviations, and that is to stop at the top of each
tiny hill or ridge and take a bearing of some stone or fold in the snow
on the next, which may be only a hundred yards away. It takes time,
and a lot of patience.

As the four men, with Jan's helpless body dragging through the
snow, crept farther and farther into this wilderness, steering south
towards Sweden, the endless hills which were still ahead of them,
with their endless petty checks and obstacles, began to seem like an
impenetrable web. In forcing a way through them, they were not limited by the mountaineer's usual worry of being benighted. There was
still a fortnight before the sun would actually be above the horizon
night and day, but it was quite light enough for the party to keep
moving through the night. The only limit to the journey was their
own endurance. A time would come when they would have to try to
sleep, and they were so poorly equipped that they could not expect
to sleep soundly enough to restore their strength to normal. After a
sleep, the second stage would be slower and shorter than the first;
and the first was being so desperately slow that a new danger began
to loom ahead: the danger of reaching the point of exhaustion before
they came to Sweden, and after they had gone too far to be able to get
home again.

So as they went on, their hopeful spirit faded, and gave way to a
growing fear that they were trying something entirely beyond their
powers. None of them wanted to be the first to admit defeat, and
they went on a long way after it was hopeless. What finally turned
the doubt into despair was the weather. During the morning the
wind had sprung up again, and the snowclouds began to pile up and
darken the southern sky. It looked as if the improvement in the
night had only been a lull, and as if the blizzard was going to start
again, as furiously as ever. They halted on top of a hill. They had
been hauling the sledge for six hours then, apart from the four
hours' climb up Kjerringdal. None of them knew how far they had
come, but there was certainly a long way still to go. It was the sort of
unwelcome decision which nobody needs to discuss. With hardly a
word between them, they turned the sledge round and started back
towards Mandal.

During the long weary hopeless journey back, the blizzard did
come on again in earnest, and proved the decision was right. Going
back, the wind was almost behind them; they could never have made
any progress going south against it.

When at last they got back to the steep edge of Mandal, they
found they were some distance farther up the valley than the point
they had started from. This was simply due to the difficulty of setting
a course on the plateau, but it had some advantages. To climb
straight down into the valley from where they were would avoid
Kjerringdal, which was certain to avalanche at any minute. There was
no point in going all the way back to the place where Jan had been
lying when they found him.

The question arose again of what to do with Jan. Remembering
the experience of being hauled up the mountain, he was still very
reluctant to go down again. Apart from the pain of it, it would have
been such a depressing step in the wrong direction. Besides, he could
see that the Mandal men were dog-tired. They had been at full stretch
for something like sixteen hours, and for tired men to try to lower
him down to the valley in the blizzard had obvious risks for them all.
They themselves thought that if he could face another few days on
the plateau, he would really be safer there. He decided to stay.

They found him another rock which would serve as a landmark,
and dragged him to the foot of it. They untied him from the sledge,
and stowed their spare food beside him, and then they built a low
wall of snow to shelter him from the wind. This was all they could do
for him, and in fact it was all he wanted. When it was finished, and
they had promised to come up again, they turned downhill for home,
and all vanished into the mist of snow, and left him alone again. For
all the day's journeying, he was about two miles nearer Sweden than
when he started.

HE LAY between the snow wall and the rock for nearly three weeks.
In some ways it was better than the grave: he could see rather more
of the sky, although he could not see round him beyond the wall; and
there was enough room to move about so far as he was able. But in
other ways it was worse: it was more exposed to the wind and
weather, and it was much more affected by the change in temperature between night and day. In the grave, it had always been a bit
below freezing point. In the open, whenever the sun broke through
the clouds it melted his sleeping-bag and the snow around him till he
was soaked; and when the sun dipped down at night towards the
north horizon, his blankets and clothes froze solid. But although this
was extremely uncomfortable it never made him ill. In conditions
which were more than enough to give a man pneumonia, he never
even caught a cold, because there are no germs of such human diseases on the plateau.

He was well stocked with food when they left him there, and different parties of men came up from the valley every three or four
days to keep him supplied. None of it struck him as very nice to eat,
especially after it had been thawed and frozen several times, and he
had nothing to cook with. But still, one can live without such refinements as cookery and he was grateful for it. There was dried fish, and
cod liver oil, and bread. It was a question whether the bread was worse to eat when it was wet or when it was frozen. There was also
some powdered milk which had to be mixed with water. It occupied
him for long hours to melt the snow between his hands so that it
dripped into the cup he had been given, and then to stir the powder
into it. Later on, when the thaw began in earnest, an icicle on the rock
beside him began to drip. At the full stretch of his arm, he could just
reach out to put the cup under the drip, and then he would lie and
watch it, counting the slow drops as they fell, and waiting in suspense
as each one trembled glistening on the tip. Sometimes when the cup
had a little water in the bottom, the drops splashed out and half of
each one was lost. When he was feeling weak, this seemed a disaster,
and he would swear feebly to himself in vexation. But in the end he
invented the idea of putting a lump of snow on top of the cup, so that
the drops fell through it without splashing. It took hours to fill the
cup. The end result, with the milk powder mixed in it cold, was a horrible drink, but it helped to keep his strength up, and he drank it as
a duty.

Sometimes in those solitary days, between the chores which
always kept him busy, he still had the strength of mind to laugh at the
contrast between himself as he used to be and his present state of elementary existence. Looking back, his life before the war, and even in
the army, seemed prim and over-fastidious. There was a certain kind
of humour in the thought that he had once taken some pride in his
appearance, chosen ties as if they were important, pressed his
trousers, kept his hair cut, and even manicured his nails. Grubbing
about in the snow for a crust of bread reminded him of a time he had
had to complain in an Oslo restaurant because there was a coffee
stain on the tablecloth, and of how apologetic the waiter had been
when he changed it for a clean one. It had seemed important; in fact,
it had been important to him as he was in those days. If the man he
had then been could have seen the man he was now, the sight would
have made him sick. He had not washed or shaved or combed his
hair for weeks, or taken off his clothes. He had reached that stage of filth when one's clothes seem to be part of one's body, and he smelt.
But, luckily, what had happened to him in the last few weeks had
changed him, and he did not mind his dirt. It had changed him more
fundamentally than merely by making him dirty and ill and emaciated and crippling his legs. It had changed him so that it was quite
difficult for him to recognise the spark of life which still lingered
inside that feeble disgusting body as himself. He knew already that if
he lived through it all he would never be the same person again. He
would have lost his feet, he supposed, but he would have grown in
experience. He felt he would never dare to be impatient again, that he
would always be placid and tolerant, and that none of the irritations
of civilised life would have the power to annoy him any more. Travel
broadens the mind, he thought, and laughed out loud because the
plateau was so damnably silent.

When he fell into a doze during those days, he often dreamed of
wolves. This was a fear he had been spared during his first week on
the plateau, because nobody had told him there were wolves up
there; but there are. They sometimes attack the reindeer herds, and
the Lapps on skis fight running battles with them. They seldom, if
ever, attack a man, even if he is alone; but nobody could say for certain whether they would attack a helpless man if they were hungry,
as they often are in the time of the early spring. The Mandal men
had taken the danger seriously enough to warn Jan about it and give
him a stick to defend himself. Later, when they realised that a stick
was no good because he had not enough strength to beat off a rabbit with it, they brought up brushwood and paraffin so that he could
fire it if the wolves closed in on him. Of course he had a pistol; but
it only had three rounds left in it, and he said he wanted to keep
them for bigger game than wolves. Jan felt it was silly to be afraid of
an animal, or even a pack of them, which had never actually been
known to kill a man, so far as anyone could tell him. Yet the thought
of it worked on his nerves. Until he was told of the wolves, he had
only the inanimate forces of the plateau to contend with. He had relied on his solitude, feeling as safe from a sudden intrusion as he
would in a house with the doors and windows locked. With all the
dangers that surrounded him, at least he had not had to keep alert
for any sudden crisis. But now, as he lay behind his wall of snow,
unable to see what was happening on the snowfield around him,
helplessly wrapped in his sleeping-bag, he knew he might see the
sharp teeth and the pointed muzzle at any moment within a yard of
him, or feel the hot breath on his face when he was sleeping, or hear
the baying and know they were watching him and waiting. This,
more than anything, made him feel his loneliness.